'Degeneracy' and civilisational collapse

Need your honest opinion, Veeky Forums. Do civilisations collapse because of 'degeneracy' (defined vaguely as anti-traditional behaviour)?

What does Veeky Forums think of the work of John Glubb, specifically 'The Fate of Empires'? Will post a couple of images of it, but it breaks down to:

>Assyria
>Persia
>Greece
>Roman Republic
>Roman Empire
>Arab empire
>Ottoman empire
>Spain

>The average age of each of those civilisations was 250 years. Each followed the exact same pattern of growth, decadence and then decline, quite often with analogous social movements and whims.

What are the accepted models of civilisational collapse and/or some required reading on the subject?

Serious answers only please. /pol/shit not welcome in this thread.

1/2

2/2

Civilizations collapse because they cannot afford their military or can not afford enough to defeat outside forces.

Most of the time this has nothing to do with degeneracy, but rather over extension of the forces.

Really, the Romans fell but the Byzantines did fine until 1453.

It was because the west failed militarily while the East kept up their might.

>most of the time

degeneration of the monetary supply

t any ANY civilisation in any part of history any part of space and time BAR NONE
we're at the same process again

Scarcity leads to Tribalism, Tribalism leads to expansion, expansion leads to prosperity, prosperity leads to materialism, materialism leads nihilism, nihilism leads to hedonism, hedonism leads to subversion, subversion leads to decay, decay leads to death.

Then the civilization fractures, becomes smaller separate entities/tribes, and the process restarts again.

Degeneracy is more of a symptom of a dying civilization than a cause.

That part about Baghdad is pretty interesting.

Sir John Glubb lived a very interesting life and i've always wanted to read that book.

THIS!!So sick of the alt-right and redpillers blamming liberalazation for the fall of empires...

Enviornmental factors, outside factors and inner political turmoil are far more offen the reasons for collapse

Genetics and natural selection.

What even is degeneracy? Just "new things I don't like"?

Cultures evolve and change always. To think that a society's culture never progressed beyond their tradition until shortly before their decline is ridiculous. A civilization's culture usually has the highest amount of divergence from its tradition roots when it declines and collapses because decline and collapse happens at the end of their life.

For an analogy, imagine a group of several people are each served a glass of cold water in a warm room. Overtime the water will both be drunk and be warm. The water will have reached it's warmest point just before it has been fully drunk. It's not that warmer water is more palatable and thus people drink it when it's warm, it's that the water gets warmer over time just as people drink water over time. You can also imagine a study of men's hair throughout their adulthood. Men slowly lose their hair throughout their life until they eventually go bald or die. It's not that going bald makes a man more likely to die, it's that baldness and death are both things that happen over time and a man will usually be at his baldest at death.

they collapse because men become lanklets and talk too much

"muh degeneracy" is just the usual tears from scared conservatives, the less you listen to them the better.

Those numbers for assyria are pulled out of somebody's ass. while the end, 612 BCE, might be right, it startet in about 2400 BCE. also, the empire fell because their main source of income was conquering and enslaving new peoples. when they were done with all the easy ones, their empire declined because they were too big to be sustainable. that and several very bad political decisions caused everybody else to dogpile them in 612.

while rome also was an empire, the fall and society are completely incomparable, especially when you consider Caesar's appointment as the end of the republic.


tl;dr: those numbers are ridiculous.

No, it collapses due to stagnation, which is the complete opposite in most situations.
People become contempt with status quo and for self interest purposes don't change for the better until the old laws they exploited break down completely.

All of these civilizations were brought down by a variety of poor foreign policy decisions, with the exception of Persia and the Roman Empire - which I'll explain.

Assyria - brutalized neighboring peoples and were generally asshats to everyone they conquered; their savagery was legendary.

Persia - combination of poor fiscal policy and internal succession disputes. There were rebellions in Egypt and Babylon, led by local satraps.

Greece - defeated by internal rivalry, poor coordination and the fact that Philip of Macedon was very good at fighting wars and managing his army. The diadochi suffered the same relative problem, except for Mithridates of Pontus, who successfully harassed the Romans for years.

Roman Republic - social problems related to citizenship, land usage and a general lack of cohesion among the patrician class contributed more to its downfall than anything else, alongside the rising glory of the army and its leadership. It's a classic example of perception being power.

Roman Empire - the Roman empire suffered from all of the above problems in a general sense and was able to survive for several centuries. The fact it was able to keep it together so long at all is actually its greatest achievement.

Arab Empire - fell apart to political/theological in-fighting as it was never a truly cohesive project or political entity.

Ottoman Empire - a polyglot amalgam of the Balkans, Mesopotamia and the Levant replete with rebellious pashas, incompetent leadership, religious fundamentalists and numerous external threats. After the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, went into a downhill political death spiral. As much of a clusterfuck as it was, it survived until WW1.

Spain - an accidental power.

tl;dr - leadership and political decisions matter more than culture

Also this.

I believe this process happens, including inside civilizations.

See the United States, for example. It was founded and ruled through it's first centuries by WASPs. But as this elite became comfortable in it's power, they were replaced by other peoples who were more aggressive and relentless in it's pursuit of status, specially the Jews. Now we already see the Jewish elite exhibiting traits of decline, both in it's "will to rule" and also an intellectual decline. Then they will be replaced by someone else, probably Indians and Chinese, who will strive hard to reach the top, spend a few generations at it and then just retreat into popular culture and entertainment once they are done.

>A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and softens the nature of things, and gives men courage to bear pain and hardship patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them perish, until they do. Even then a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it. If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows; the life of the body gives way, in the dominant classes, to the life of the senses and the mind; toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude. At last men begin to doubt the gods; they mourn the tragedy of knowledge, and seek refuge in every passing delight. Achilles is at the beginning, Epicurus at the end. After David comes Job, and after Job, Ecclesiastes.

Will Durant, Story of Civilization

No. This idea was destroyed within decades of Gibbon publishing his Decline and Fall in the late 18th century.

It is more common to see families collapse due to degeneracy.

If you look at Chinese history, you have the energetic first Emperors of dynasties. And then, after many generations, you have Emperors that are too busy in feasts and with their harems to actually do any governing. Then, eventually they are replaced by other Emperors that are energetic, smart, etc. And so on.

This happened in the west with the Merovingians.

In a way, this destroyed the Capets in France, as well, with the later Bourbons.

>gay sex
>moral degeneracy
>decline
>civilisation collapse
This is a cyclical vision of society développement based on the idea of a "natural harmony" which could be perturbed by anti-social behaviors. This mechanical vision of the universe was common in the XVIII th century after Newton exposed his theory. It has been abandonned à long time ago by serious academic researchers. (but I guess they are degenerates, for your criterias)
Do you really think your 2016 US protestant fundamentalist morals are the gold standart for judging the morality of other societies?

As opposed to the linear vision of moral progress?

Look at the frizz on that bleach blonde hair. Not my pure Aryan waifu

Linear evolution of societies along à songle path is also an old meme, user...
Evolutionism theorized by Lewis Morgan in XIX th century died long time ago thanks to the anthopologist Franz Boas. (early XXth)

>'degeneracy' (defined vaguely as anti-traditional behaviour)

this is exactly why I hate it when people spout this meme. Degeneracy almost always just happens to mean 'anything I don't like' ie them nasty black people and icky homosexuals (or more recently the Globalism bogeyman), ignoring things like the fact that many people in 18th century Britain thought that industrialisation and urbanisation were 'degeneracy' because shock horror people like manufactured goods and not living in yurts

That guy was the military advisor of Jordania's king, and sucked ass in the war against Israel. Why should I take his thesis seriously again? For fuck's sake, Spain lasted as an empire for ~400 years.
Spengler's rants are better than this.

>implying industrialization and urbanization aren't also degeneracy today

It also happened in Spain. Philip IV prefered whoring and delegating power to the Count-Duke of Olivares than actually governing.
But as someone pointed before, degeneracy is the symptom, not the cause.
And it could be extrapolated to today's world. Look at the muslim immigrant. They want to conquer, their nature is tribal, and they have found Europe in its death-bed.
We are living in interesting times, and maybe dark times are ahead us.

Leadership and political decisions are a product of culture though.
A degenerate culture will produce degenerate leaders who make degenerate political decisions.

Yes, but what caused degeneracy on the first place?

Jews.

It was the lead pipes you fools

Go back to your cows, Cletus.

>tl;dr - leadership and political decisions matter more than culture
Lenin, Stalin and the bolsheviks are an example of this. They reshaped Russian culture to meet their ends. The Chinese are even a bolder example of this. After the Chinese revolution, they reshaped the Chinese social fabric. I agree with your statement, leadership and political decisions matter more than culture.

Trickle-down economy, qualitiative easing, and so on. In the end, Soros, the Rothschilds, Greenspan, Brezezinski, Kissinger, all the top-dogs who influence and make the political decisions, directly or indirectly, they are all Jews.

>Trickle-down economy

America has trickle-up economy, the labour of the lowest returns as a profit of increasing magnitude as it goes higher in the chain. While the profit of the highest is recycled between the rich, stashed away or hidden from tax with loops.

Similar to old system of taxation that happened in say, Spain and France, the people who are least capable of paying the taxes are burdened most by it.

...

Thank God liberals are so outspoken about the need for a strong military and the defense of national borders

Look as /pol/ would say liberals are too "cucked" in terms of border security and defense,but on the other hand redpillers,with whom I also agree in many things btw,can be incredibly idiotic when they present feminism and LGBTism as the END of western civilazation.

In other words I believe in a middle ground between those two philosophies and defining that middle ground is a tiring thing

I'd say that it's more of a symptom than a cause.

>>The average age of each of those civilisations was 250 years
But that's wrong.

>tl;dr - leadership and political decisions matter more than culture
Makes you think. People like to pretend they are not free, so that they won't be held responsible for anything they do. They like to blame culture or society

>BCE

Fucking kill yourself my man.

Complete and utter bullshit. The extent to which this 'theory' is taken as doctrine on multiple Veeky Forums boards is confounding. It necessitates stretching, morphing, of the definitions of 'civilization,' 'growth,' 'decadence,' and 'decline' to essentially force the evidence to conform to the theory. The dates are chosen completely arbitrarily and the authors idea of what constitute cultural efflorescence and the collapse of order change case-by-case to fit the pre-designated mold. Furthermore it completely disregards any case which cannot conceivably be so fit: China, India, Japan, Korea, Egypt, all of Persian history after the Achaemenids, France, Germany, the Mongols, the Maya, the Inca, all of SE Asia.

Not one credible historian believes this claptrap. This is the work of a pseudo-intellectual, a moralist fear-monger who couldn't deal with the fact that the rest of the world had no interest in living the lifestyle he did in the Army.

There is already a term for what you described in your second paragraph, my ESL man.
It's called "correlation does not equal causation"

>its the Jews fault

I swear you're as bad as the SJWs whining about the patriarchy.

Nice boogeyman you faggot

This

>The average age of each of those civilisations was 250 years.
>Ottoman Empire

Choose you own flavor.

>Spain
>civilization collapse

U wot m8? It lost most of its overseas holdings, but the nation continued to exist.

I'd choose apathy, if I cared.

>Celebrated historian provides proofs and historical commentary of the contemporaries of that age.
>shitposter in Veeky Forums denies it due to his discomfort with factually backed opinion.

This nigga still thinks reality is like a paradox game.

Lol Mongolia continues to exist and you don't see any steppes hordes rampaging across the planet. So does Germany and France and England and China and Finland the remnants of the Hwan empire.

Paradox Games developed around proved historical models that is why there is no Degeneracy Slider.

What you smoking? If the Western Romans had an army to defeat the Goths from sacking Rome, then there would still be a Roman Empire for a little longer.

It doesn't matter if everyone is butt fucking each other in the ass and bukkaking in each others faces.

Really. Historians say civilizations fall because there armies went to shit.

There is no denying this.

> civilizations fall because there armies went to shit
Don't forget internal struggle when one part of the elite got against other and shit.

SAUCE?

Also... Don't forget about Justinian of Byzantium. Fucker was degenerate as fuck. Made a prostitute Empress.

Still BTFO all of his rivals and military enemies.

>Roman Republic
Wouldn't the later Roman Empire society be less "decadent" than the earlier one.

I suppose so. Unless you think early Christians of the Late Roman Empire were more degenerate than their pagan ancestors.

>if you look at Chinese history
It only shows the empire suffering if the emperor fucks up. Not the people

Liberalization is one of the symptoms of moral degeneracy... not the cause of it.

Might sound weird, but after reading a lot of Conan the barbarian short stories it kind of makes sense.

Robert E Howard (author of those novels) had lived in Texas. He saw the consequences of oil booms on towns. The quick rise and the steady decline until the town is a shadow of its former self. Even though these are not of historical significance I think he did have a point that civilization made men week and feminine. The civilization gets complacent, the government gets corrupt, and outsiders move in and subjugate the formerly civilized populous.

>It only shows the empire suffering if the emperor fucks up. Not the people

What? More often than not, the Empire suffering leads to the people suffering.

Pagans were not necessarily degenerate.
Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus were Pagans.