A brilliant, yet chilling thread by history podcaster and writer Patrick Wyman, considering the state of things. Sounds familiar? It indeed should...
First published in March 2020.
I spent the better part of a decade thinking about the end of the Roman Empire and what it felt like to live through that, in all its various manifestations – the collapse of political authority, spreading pandemics, economic crises – and now it all makes a lot more sense.
Processes of breakdown happen very slowly and imperceptibly. They are mostly aggregates small things: taxes not getting collected here, bridges not getting repaired there, things like that.
Then, in a moment of crisis, the sheer level of decay becomes clear. You see the aggregate.
A key administrative official was replaced by a feckless political appointee. That official didn’t push to collect tax revenues.
When a drought struck and famine ensued, they didn’t have the funds to import grain. And so on.
Nobody requisitions funds to repair a road. An aqueduct breaks and nobody fixes it. A port silts up and nobody builds new docks. Nobody updates the tax registers.
All of the sudden, your capacity to deal with any sort of major problem – your resilience – is gone.
Every state and society faces problems and challenges, both natural and man-made. The key thing is the capacity for dealing with them.
We don’t have that capacity right now.
Tweets posted on 12 March 2020 by @Patrick_Wyman.
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