Empires fall because they go rotten in an economic and financial sense. Not because they are overtaken militarily.
I think you are on the right track.
Empires fail because they go rotten.
Emperors become arrogant. They get drunk with power. They get addicted to power. Right or wrong, good and evil, no longer has meaning. It is about maintaining power and exercising power. The benefits of getting what you want from exercising power is too addictive. You can't live without it. In that kind of environment, conditions are ripe for evil to get a foothold and find a home.
When evil takes hold, that is when the empire starts to fail. Evil inevitably destroys itself.
You can more easily see this in individuals. When evil takes over a person, they inevitably destroy themselves. It gets complicated when someone is not completely evil.
As far as nations go, Stalinist Russia is a good example. Stalin, if there ever was one, was an evil person. Ostensibly, Communist Russia was about the common person. The reality was that it was about Stalin and maintaining power. To maintain power over a large country, Stalin had to share some of that power with others. The fewer the better. Evil could more easily take hold in that environment.
Of course evil destroys itself. It has to. Soviet Russia became a joke. People pretended to work and the state pretended to pay them. It had to collapse.
Normally however, people know that evil is bad and that it does not work - but secretly, they think they can get away with a little bit of it.
It's when that little bit takes over, that's when things start to fall apart.
Life however, is complex. What you see is often not what you get, but over the long term things kind of work out.
Too bad sometimes it takes more than a life time to even things out - and things do even out - there are no doubts about that. |
