# Serious Questions About the Collapse of Civilization

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/serious-questions-about-the-collapse-of-civilization/995512>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [January 2, 2024, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/serious-questions-about-the-collapse-of-civilization/995512 "2024-01-02T19:43:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 42

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**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\
**Post date:** [January 3, 2024, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/serious-questions-about-the-collapse-of-civilization/995512/42 "2024-01-03T15:49:41Z")

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> [@Alessan](#):
>
> Except that Rome never fell. First of all, only the western half collapsed. And second of all, it didn’t  
> so much collapse as transition to a number of smaller political entities. The first King of Franc=]  
> [rowned just 5 years after the death of the last Western Roman Emperor. Politics became less centralized, education levels dropped, and trade was definitely harmed, but all in all, Western Europe survived. The so-called “fall of Rome” has been greatly overstated by historians.

Rome absolutely fell and it was an absolute apocalypse in a lot of places for a lot of people. True it\ looked very different to people in different locations and in different bits of society, and at different times, but to say it “never fell” is a massive _under_statement.

Almost universally for the Elon Musks of the late Western Roman empire (who are the people who wrote the histories, or they were written for at least) the fall was absolutely the end of the world. Everything they considered important ended (including for many of them their lives). All the preping the ultra-rich are doing (as discussed in the article posted [above](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/accelerationismand-the-four-turnings-absolute-horseshit/994644/39)) has strong “Romano British elites paying the Saxons to fight for them after the legions left” vibes to me.

For everyone else while they there was no universal experience, a lot of places it was just as bad for them. The Roman empire had a sophisticated economy, where the all of society was dependent on long distant trade for staples (not just the elites for luxuries). This economy was centered on the legions, this meant in the regions (like Britain and Northern Gaul, where a large percentage of the empires population were based) where the majority of the legions were based, when the legions left this economy disappeared and the result was catastrophic for everyone. There were some regions where the roman economy did not have deep roots (either because you just had a tiny roman-ified elite and everyone else carried on as they had before the romans came, or because the economy was based on Mediterranean trade that pre-dated the romans) and were not so affected (or even benefited from the collapse in the short term) that was the exception not the rule.

And as a historical analogy modern global society is _alot_ more similar to the former (with the whole population dependent on long distant trade for everything the need to survive) that the latter (rural peasantry working the land without caring whether the rich guy in the big house speaks latin or german)

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