Every Civilization Believes This Before It Collapses (Michael Button)

Every civilization believes it will last. Rome, Imperial China, Britain and the Soviet Union all thought the old rules of history no longer applied to them.

But civilizations repeatedly ignore the same warning signs before they collapse...

Are we making the same mistake?



The video makes a good point about civilisation which likens it to building a house and adding rooms. But once you have a lot of rooms you need to maintain it, and with an added bureaucracy the ability to maintain things fails, especially when those that planned and built the house in the first place are no longer around. A bureaucracy typically ends up existing to preserve itself, and those leeching off the system, rather than serving the interests of the people and infrastructure. And the loss of those who acted dynamically in the past, those who carefully built an existing system that operated within certain limits, means that disruptions to the original plans are often not properly addressed or countered. Failure and chaos results. 

[Posted at the SpookyWeather2 blog, October 19, 2026.]