Empires

Jimmy Carr had a really interesting take on empires while he was talking to Joe Rogan.

The idea is that empires don’t collapse, they just transform with the power and wealth they have gathered.

This idea keeps sticking in my head, and it seems that they don’t just fall, the empires provided a perspective shift that changes how our society works.

As empires transform, power often consolidates in the hands of a few, weakening the empire’s control as society evolves.

With the Roman Empire, the change was a moral law that became religion and helped larger numbers of people get along with less war, bigger and bigger populations could live side by side due to this perspective.

With the British Empire, the change was fiat currency representing effort and power, this became the central banks and helped free markets and exchange and specialization of skills flourished because your contribution could be stored in representative wealth.

My next thought is… what will the empire of the United States provide to human culture, and therefor what is it going to transform into when it ‘falls?’

I think it is a combination of communication and automation, which lead to the telephones, entertainment, internet, marketing, social media, and now blockchain and artificial intelligence.

With this framework of thinking, the only way to avoid a fall from dominance is to resist the power of communication and automation to fall into the hands of a few.

As long as we can innovate and change, we can shift with the improvement of human civilization.