There are, very generally speaking, five broad phases in the decline and fall of a civilization. I know it’s customary in historical literature to find nice dull labels for such things, but I’m in a contrary mood as I write this, so I’ll give them unfashionably colorful names: the eras of pretense, impact, response, breakdown, and dissolution. Each of these is complex enough that it’ll need a discussion of its own; this week, we’ll talk about the era of pretense, which is the one we’re in right now.

Eras of pretense are by no means limited to the decline and fall of civilizations. They occur whenever political, economic, or social arrangements no longer work, but the immediate costs of admitting that those arrangements don’t work loom considerably larger in the collective imagination than the future costs of leaving those arrangements in place. It’s a curious but consistent wrinkle of human psychology that this happens even if those future costs soar right off the scale of frightfulness and lethality; if the people who would have to pay the immediate costs don’t want to do so, in fact, they will reliably and cheerfully pursue policies that lead straight to their own total bankruptcy or violent extermination, and never let themselves notice where they’re headed.

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That’s the bitter irony of eras of pretense. Under most circumstances, they’re the last period when it would be possible to do anything constructive on the large scale about the crisis looming immediately ahead, but the mass evasion of reality that frames the collective thinking of the time stands squarely in the way of any such constructive action. In the era of pretense before a speculative bust, people who could have quietly cashed in their positions and pocketed their gains double down on their investments, and guarantee that they’ll be ruined once the market stops being liquid. In the era of pretense before a revolution, in the same way, those people and classes that have the most to lose reliably take exactly those actions that ensure that they will in fact lose everything. If history has a sense of humor, this is one of the places that it appears in its most savage form.

From 395, when Theodosius died and the Empire was split between his sons for the last time, to 1204, when the Empire was shattered by the Fourth Crusade, was the 800-year empire. The remnant that came back in 1261 was really more a collection of principalities than anything else.

Of course the problem looks different when one looks at it as a matter of the level of civilization attained at any specific time. The dismantling of the Roman Empire in the west was accompanied by a vast retreat of civilization, first in Britannia but eventually in Gaul, in Noricum, and in Italy itself after the Gothic Wars, as overexploited northern Africa steadily shrunk to nothing after the Vandals lost it. The Roman Empire in the west was by the 5th century an under-defended agricultural province of a larger Roman Empire which possessed the hubs of civilization: growing Constantinople, the big city, Athens, the fount of history (and of philosophy, before Justinian ruined that), Egypt, where the papyrus was grown, and Palestine, the religious center.

The Empire in the east was ruined by bad political decisionmaking and overpowered by two competing civilizations: the feudal empire of the Franks, and the early modern empire of the Turks. Its big city was absorbed and its backwater overrun.

Unlike either of those Roman empires, the US empire is the culmination of European capitalist empire-building, achieving its destiny after World War II exhausted Europe proper. When the US empire collapses its problem will be the maintenance of civilization itself.

http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/PublicationsCopyRighted/Cities%20Timing.html

Some time in the 2040s much of the terrain of the US will become incompatible with agriculture. People die and civilizations disappear. It will be a long time before anything recovers.

My take, as a casual student of the Roman Republic, is that the Roman Empire was always in decline: it was an authoritarian military state whose primary purpose was to protect the wealth and privileges of the elite while mollifying the masses to prevent mass uprising in the overburdened city of Rome.

As a polity that aimed to serve the welfare of its citizens, the Roman Republic effectively died in the first century BC, when it proved unable to cope with the destruction of its yeoman farmer class. That class, once the most numerous of Rome's citizens, had been hollowed out and destroyed by years of imperial wars (because of course, like us, Rome was an empire in fact even as it called itself a Republic). Ownership of the land was concentrated in the hands of the patrician class and the new men (equites) who served them (like Cicero). Members of the Senate were openly corrupt, stealing public assets for themselves and bullying and assassinating their enemies, while braying patriotically about their allegiance to the grand old constitution of the Republic.

I take this argument from Sheldon Wolin and Michael Parenti. Wolin is particularly good on the political meaning of the Roman imperial state (he views it as a Machtstaat); Parenti tells in succinct prose the "economic" grounds of the Republic's decline (in The Assassination of Julius Caesar). This is an argument that fits well into the Archdruid's schema (though Archdruid himself seems to think the much later era of the Vandal invasion marks the start of the fall?) - with the last century of the Republic being the Era of Pretense. And of course, that fits also with Hudson's argument; and it makes Hedges' rant all the more compelling, I am afraid.

US "foreign" policy has for over a century now been all about the management of a neo-colonial empire. Increasingly, US "domestic" policy has been the same.

Astronomically, we have ended the period where the energies of Pisces are dominant. While the concept of spiritual energies are left out of discussions of world events, it does not negate their effect on human activities.

While Pisces saw the rise of individualism from herd mentality, idealism - both for better and worse (fanaticism), mass education (one of the great achievements of the last 2000 years), and an unprecedented level of bloodthirstiness, selfishness and individual greed over the common good; the energies of Aquarius tend towards synthesis, interdependence and the end of the concept of separation.

The Aquarian age and its tendency to bring what is termed ceremonial order (the anchoring of great ideals as fact in the structures we build) is just starting. The ideas and structures built under the influence of Pisces are still attempting to control the world but do no longer have either the energy or the consent of the people to do so. In popular culture you see interest in zombies particularly among younger people as they are an apt analogy of the lifeless direction which past momentums are carrying us.

The future is not doom and gloom but instead a future which is waiting the collapse of the old so that a new, brilliant civilization which respects and nourishes all life on the planet is built. Within the young there is a vast army for good which inwardly know this and are biding their time until the baby boomer generation's death grip on the wheel driving world affairs is broken, likely like all things boomer, in spectacular fashion. Then a more sane generation particularly suited to deal with the challenges of our times will finally have the capacity to create the fair and just world they already envision within.

I thought the censoring was being legislated right now, alongside an "investigation" into Russian influence in our elections, and the quashing of treasonous websites. Under an Obama Administration.

although it has been the subject of hot debate just how influential that was to the fall of The Empire

The Roman Empire collapsed in the east in 1204. The empire that came back in 1261 was a collection of principalities with the name "Roman Empire" attached to it. Also as I pointed out above the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west in the 5th century was accompanied by the collapse of a civilization in some of the areas abandoned by the Empire that was real enough to the residents.