Why didn't the Roman Empire harness electricity, invent computers, and have an internet?

But even random poor American Civil War soldiers wrote much better than we do today when making personal letters to their families that they probably didn't know were going to be read by people in the future as historical documents.

Well if you were writing home from the front you'd hardly be spouting memes, would you?

I don't think most people today would be capable of writing that proficiently even if they were in a serious life or death situation and writing to loved ones. People today seem dumber, not smarter than people of past times.

>All data aside from your opinion plainly states that IQ is up.

That's because the people who make the iq tests are dumber today too.

All data aside from your opinion plainly states that IQ is up. Access to information is obviously. The sheer complexity of day to day life is obviously up.

But sure, we don't write letters in the same manner as someone from the 1800s, so we must be less intelligent.

Interesting hypothesis.

We should break out their letters to compare them with civil war correspondences to test that.

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000470

This article says we're down 14 IQ points since the Victorian era.

They actually could have become much more technologically advanced, but when you have a slave/welfare state there is no real need for innovation

Slaves

I can confirm that I could not build a toaster

because they miscegenated and genetically degraded mating with surrounding inferior races (and slaves) quicker then they could technologically advance.

as the west is doing now, and nearly all other civilizations who've fallen.

Reminder that there is no reason for the Phonograph being invented so late. The Romans could have easily made recording devices if they had the idea.

Because

>"Nero played Farmville while Rome burned"

Wouldn't really fit the history books now would it?

>Farmville
lmoa pleb

IQ tests were solely prescribed on rich or at worst upper-middle metropolitan members of society, whereas the overwhelming majority of people back then were working class

This. If you have a massive pool of people to choose good archers from, there's no need to harness better weapons. This is also why the Ottomans and late Chinese failed

>This is also why the Ottomans and late Chinese failed

That's fucking nonsense kid.

>Why didn't the Roman Empire harness electricity, invent computers, and have an internet?
Because the Apollonian mindset did not allow for it. They were a mostly illiterate, brutally hierarchical agrarian slave-empire which glorified homicide as the noblest task that a man could accomplish and kept its blighted citizens complacent with free hand outs and the most horrific and tawdry bloodsport imaginable, while the moneyed elite shamelessly rigged the economy in their favor and blew their vast fortunes playing power politics with each other

Their mindset did not glorify the search for the truth, it did not reward introspection or strive towards any ethical or societal ideal. Their way of thinking was that if you were strong, it was because the gods favored you and if you were weak it was because you lacked piety and needed to pray more, and that's the way things have always been and the way things will always be. The Roman stoic ideal was "life is shit, get used to it and don't complain"

Their culture finally choked after years of grinding internecine warfare, from fabulously wealthy power brokers living out the Apollonian dream of slaughtering their own countrymen in repeated wars for glory and profit, which left the empire utterly helpless in the face of mass migration from the Eurasian steppe. And maybe their culture and way of thinking might have simply transformed the way that Chinese and Indian culture prevailed, but they just had to shit all over the Germans that they depended on for military might, treating them like 2nd class citizens and giving them nothing but good reasons to hate everything that was Rome, and as soon as they could turned on them like mad dogs

No Italian wanted to be a legionary because life in the army had become a game of Russian roulette, depending on how much of an egotistical prick your general was. And life actually got better under the Ostrogoths until the Byzantines burned it all to the ground trying to reconquer it.

They were heading in that direction until the crisis of the third century and the barbarian invasions destroyed the empire.

It was a pre industrial society...

They did,we just haven't told you about it.

>they didn't have the technology because they didn't have the technology

Why did the Roman Empire fall?

>pseudo intellectuals talking about IQ
IQ tests are designed to follow a gaussian curve with an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.

>Because the Apollonian mindset did not allow for it.
As opposed to the Dionysian??

Kemal Ataturk decided being the heir to the longest continuous empire in history just wasn't good enough.

The average changes over time and comparisons have been made between different time periods you pseud.

Is the iq test design to analyze temporal aberrations? I thot not.

>As opposed to the Dionysian??
No, I did not use the term "Apollonian" in the Nietzschean sense that it stands for rational, logical thinking which contrasts with passionate, emotional "Dionysian" thinking.

I meant it in the Spenglerian sense of being a term for classical Greco-Roman culture. Spengler named it after the light bringer due to that culture's appreciation of the human body (symbolized by Apollo, the epitome of youthful male beauty and masculinity) and its emphasis on the here-and-now as opposed to the abstract.

>texts people have kept around for 2000 years are pretty good

No shit. Somehow nobody thought

>R O M A
>O L I M
>M I L O
>A M O R

was worth making the monks copy a zillion times

You only ever see the exceptional letters.

lolno
pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti from Pompeii.htm

So why don't you just say "Roman" instead of Greco-Roman or Apollonian? Clearly an aquaduct has abstract implications, as here-and-now results will not be immediate, so there is no point in saying Apollonian.

We all take offense to your use of big words.

>So why don't you just say "Roman" instead of Greco-Roman or Apollonian?
For the same reason Spengler didn't. It's too broad a term to be meaningful for the point I was making.

>We all take offense to your use of big words.
Nonsense. Veeky Forums loves Spengler

>Clearly an aquaduct has abstract implications,
Indeed, and it would have been the protracted period of peace which caused their culture to gradually come to terms with these implications, and the small hypocrisies of their society grew into cascading system failures and it gradually decentralized.

What emerged was a totally new perception of reality based around universal monotheism, and what would eventually go on to become western civilization