We in the West are end-of-empire people. That social-cultural fact barely rates a mention in analysis. End of…

We in the West are end-of-empire people. That social-cultural fact barely rates a mention in analysis. End of empire cultures are so habituated to things in life just working out for them, that they can’t adjust. Food just arrives every day. Nobody invades their homes. Etc. /1

Peace, prosperity and health seem the natural order of things. They’re ’let them eat cake’ cultures. So successful at mobilising the vast engine room of material provision for their societies, mostly with origins in brutal conquering violence, that few notice it’s there. /2

In other nations with chronic problems of poverty and disease and war, they condescendingly say those problems are ‘endemic’ there i.e. they wash their hands of them. Many of those problems derive from the earlier days of the empire, pillaging those same nations. /3

Mostly end-of-empire cultures just play games. Actual team sports, the more gladiatorial the better, but also games of identity. Enriching the number of different ways to be. They celebrate the ‘diversity’ of these status (identity) games, like some great innovation. /4

Really they’re just rich. Their material needs are mostly looked after, freeing them up to turn life into a lifestyle, a stage production with an always growing number of players. So they’re brutally blindsided when the material underpinnings of these lifestyle lives fail. /5

Most of the population has very little idea of or even participation in the material realties of their societies, in these cultures. So when the shit hits the fan, as it’s doing now in the West, they have no clue what to do. /6

It sparks an even more intense identity-based culture, performing its diverse granularity of self-obsession in the growing ruins of its material well-being. Most end-of-empire cultures don’t recover. The chasm between lifestyles and realities is too vast. /7

Too many precious identities need to shift to shift the status quo. No culture willingly does that. It’s like love, I think it was Proust who said we don’t fall out of love, we fall in love with somebody else. /8

Significant social change comes only from catastrophic disruption. Mostly it means the old status quo disappears entirely, dead through age and/or conquest. Look around at us living inside our social media bubbles now in the West. Tell me this isn’t us. /9

Nothing but endless performative games, for status and identity. Nothing celebrated except the diversity of these games, which produce nothing in a material sense. /end