The compilation above, (Part I from last week), and many others of maybe lesser relevance which could be included in this writing, are the major signs and symptoms observable at all levels in a nation or society in the grips of its own erosion. Each one of them identified herein can obviously be isolated for dissective analysis. Fed to an algorithm, for example, it would be able to establish their whole branching and ramifications, allowing us to understand their exact relation and implications to the whole history of the nation or society in which they are identified. A computer simulation based on these signs and symptoms could yield statistical pictures of the future of a nation or society for which they are true, and could in theory pinpoint the date in which the final collapse, of say, the US of A, will take place.
In any case, those who follow the history of the nations and societies of the West from its ancient beginnings, will notice that I have herein comprised the most consequential signs and symptoms, as emphasized the ways the western nations felt and reacted to in their own time, as they were experiencing decline all around them, as their civilization was getting eclipsed. Proceeding as I have done throughout is warranted by the historical fact that the signage of coming collapse is more or less the same to very diverse places, regardless geography, historic times, particular history, and political systems. Which imposes the conclusion that even when they differ on specifics, and after specificities are discursively accounted for, all complex systems go down following one single template, as it were. After all, social systems are put together and run by humans.
Thus, at least in the western world, the rush toward the end began with ancient Greece around 430 BC. After it struggled in vain to recover from the pandemic Plague and the debacles of the Peloponnesian War, and as it succumbed to the many excesses of its imperialist democracy. Like the western societies of today (the US of A, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the rest) in its own Greece too experienced comparable social and psychological upheavals in its society which, together with the most shocking philosophical and pseudo-philosophical claims suffused with cynical triumphalism, it also experienced the dissolution of old family ties and of the family itself. Their old cultural traditions and religious beliefs not less so than their artistic practices and expressions, lost their depth, and everything in its life became uninteresting and boring, and in one word, shallow.
There, alongside serious efforts by some to find a way out of the marasmic condition of public and private life, the most far-fetched and unwarranted propositions concerning for example sex and sexuality became the daily bread of society. In the same way that in our time, which Foucauldian philosophy is paramount of, homosexuality started to be proposed and celebrated by the philosophers and the Greek elites, and it became for them the center of all philosophical reflections and of commerce between men. Understandably, pedophilia and boy-love were declared supreme virtues, while the traditional espousal relationship between men and women was relegated as something that stood in the way of "authentically" loving. Alas, in what would retrospectively be a reminiscence of what is going on in our own day, as Thucydides makes us aware of, even the Greek language suffered. It became politicized, and thoroughly ideologic and sophistic in accordance with a decaying morality.
Once the most elementary, primordial institutions, relations, and practices physical or social or both retreated, everything else could easily be turned on its head.
However, it was Rome that (forward from the second century of the empire), gave legitimacy and imprimatur to this overturning of the Greek traditional "old ways," as the most decadent traits of the already decayed Greek society were assimilated and adopted by several of the Emperors themselves, and some among the nobility— including of course the cult of homosexuality, pederasty, and public prostitution, out of reverence and admiration for all things Greek, which ironically had by then fallen under Roman tutelage.
As regard France, England, Germany and the other centers of the western civilization— they too, each in its own time, had gone through the tribulations and agonies that visit societies and nations in the confounding thralls of their dissolution. It does not matter if that happened as the loss of an empire (England); as a terrorizing, bloodily equalitarian revolution (France); or whether the collapse and eclipse happened in form of as the throw-down of aristocracy and the most opulent classes by maybe the most vile and extreme form of political evil (Germany).
As for Spain: exceptionally, even as it lost its empire, Spanish traditions, culture, traditional family unity, identity, and the overall functionality of its societal institutions were preserved from total collapse through its Catholicism, noxious as it was in many other ways. Yet, it is in the present time that the Spanish society has finally become the modern version of Greece, as it decayed and finally collapsed. Only now that its Catholicism has lost its grip on society. Only now that the decadence prevailing in the vassal empire known as the “European Union” has replaced its old Christianity, has Spain progressed the farthest into total disarray as it rejects, repulses, or moves away from practically every principle, belief system, and ways of life on which it was founded and prospered for a long time, and which brought to it glories in the past centuries, until the US of A stood on its path.
In each one of the above instances of decay, decline and actual and/or potential collapse, the same similar signs and symptoms, or their equivalent in each case, can be identified. Yet, because the events and the generalized states of manyfold confusion, apathy, lethargy, self-doubting, and the self-contradictoriness and feverish over-excitement that precede a collapse already in progress, can hardly be accessed and timely evaluated. Thus, for a while that which is taking definitive shape is appears only as signs and symptoms. It bears insisting on: when a society or nation is reaching its unrevealing few are the things that present themselves as they really are, and few too those that appear under their corresponding names.
And even worse: since everybody goes about as if it's all business as usual in the social and political systems (which are appraised as suffering only minor and therefore inconsequential hiccups), the very signs and symptoms that announce a collapse in the making are themselves not known under these names. It seems that, to the extent that they still can at all, nations experiencing decline are prevented by their respective decaying processes from straightforwardly accessing the causes of their fast-approaching fall. They fail to see the writing on the wall, as it were. But then, that is the main reason that the fulfillment of a collapse can only be punctually analyzed post-factum, not while it is being experienced. Then, historians will come who will give the final account on them, as post-mortem.
It is legendary that (contravening Augustus’ death-bed wisdom), in extending their empire all the way toward the East, the Romans of latter days convinced themselves that their power was getting strengthened as it continued to get enlarged and gaining more influence and control over the world. Indeed, as the posterity has come to see, the empire was only getting thinner while weakening itself, and was thus moving with all its erstwhile might toward its downfall. Societies and nations about to meet their downfall first deceive themselves concerning their own reality, and then they consequently fashion policies as if to purposely place their own self-delusions at the base. That is the short version of the closing chapter of the history of the US of A
The Brink on which the US of A Now Stands.
As if though a belated historical iteration of the past, the present US of A checks all the boxes above. For starters and to get this out of the way: like the Roman Empire in its days, the US of A has for over three decades now been pushing the boundaries of its dominions as far East in Europe as it has been possible, and as boldly as it has been allowed, so far. It has been doing so in the misguided assumption that the farthest it reaches into the East, toward Russia, the strongest it becomes. It continues unreflectingly to do so even though any political and philosophic wisdom that it would have inherited from two of the largest western empires that ever were, the Romans and the Spaniards, would council them not to. Controlling ever more territories away from home does not make an empire stronger; all to the contrary.
That historical truth is being reasserted itself today in Ukraine. And so, the US of A weakens itself, like Rome did, while getting repulsed by the Russians.
But on the other hand, like decaying Greece did in its time, the US of A too goes around imposing its preconceived model of "democracy" (oligarcracy by another name) on they who cannot resist its might. Then it uses them as tools against what it misconceives as a present-day Sparta — that is, Russia. Moreover, in tandem with that, like Greece also did, the US of A internally weakens its societal institutions as it does away with the philosophical principles on which it was founded. The US of A waters down its own founding principles to continually accommodate all the marginal groups which get fabricated or simultaneously self-fashioned by its egalitarian, oligarcratic model ("democratic" by another name).
The ongoing discussion would have so far made transparent one or two things. Namely, that the farther from its seat of power the US of A tries to extend its might; the more effort it devotes to suchlike strategy; the more resources in the form of time, moneys, personals, agents, allies, or troops it dedicates to its geopolitics, the more unmistakable the signs and symptoms of its approaching collapse become. If it is the case that the Greek democratic imperialism went down driven by the materialization in history of the contradiction in terms embodied in the futility of conjugating "democracy" with "imperialism," the Romans and the Spaniards were brought down by their own respective weights, which became heavier the thinner the echelon of their power, and the weakest the grasp of their claws. It’s only too bad that the US of A has met in Russia an opponent as mighty as itself, and mightier than Sparta was to Greece. There are here acerbic conclusions to be drawn.