Guest Post by Doug Casey
Like the Romans, we’re supposedly ruled by laws, not by men. In Rome, the law started with the 12 Tablets in 451 BCE, with few dictates and simple enough to be inscribed on bronze for all to see. A separate body of common law developed from trials, held sometimes in the Forum, sometimes in the Senate.
When the law was short and simple, the saying “Ignorantia juris non excusat” (ignorance of the law is no excuse) made sense. But as the government and its legislation became more ponderous, the saying became increasingly ridiculous. Eventually, under Diocletian, law became completely arbitrary, with everything done by the emperor’s decrees—we call them Executive Orders today.
I’ve mentioned Diocletian several times already. It’s true that his draconian measures held the Empire together, but it was a matter of destroying Rome in order to save it. As in the U.S., in Rome statute and common law gradually devolved into a maze of bureaucratic rules.
The trend accelerated under Constantine, the first Christian emperor, because Christianity is a top-down religion, reflecting a hierarchy where rulers were seen as licensed by God. The old Roman religion never tried to capture men’s minds this way. Before Christianity, violating the emperor’s laws wasn’t seen as also violating God’s laws.
The devolution is similar in the U.S. You’ll recall that only three crimes are mentioned in the U.S. Constitution—treason, counterfeiting, and piracy. Now you can read Harvey Silverglate’s book, Three Felonies a Day, which argues that the average modern-day American, mostly unwittingly, is running his own personal crime wave—because federal law has criminalized over 5,000 different acts.
Rome became more and more corrupt as time went on, as has the U.S. Tacitus (56-117 AD) understood why: “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the nation.”
Social
Along with political and legal problems come social problems. The Roman government began offering useless mouths free bread, and later circuses, in the late Republic, after the three Punic Wars (264-146 BCE). Bread and circuses were mostly limited to the capital itself. They were extremely destructive, of course, but were provided strictly for a practical reason: to keep the mob under control.
And it was a big mob. At its peak, Rome had about a million inhabitants, and at least 30% were on the dole. It’s worth noting that the dole lasted over 500 years and became part of the fabric of Roman life—ending only when wheat shipments from Egypt and North Africa were cut off by the Vandals at the beginning of the 5th century.
In the U.S., there now are more recipients of state benefits than there are workers. Programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and numerous other welfare programs absorb over 50% of the U.S. budget, and they’re going to grow rapidly for a while longer, although I predict they’ll come to an end or be radically reformed within the next 20 years. I recognize that’s a daring prediction, given the longevity of the dole in Rome.
Demographics
The Empire appears to have suffered a demographic collapse late in the 2nd century, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, at least in part because of a plague that killed on the order of 10% of the population. Ancient plagues are poorly documented, perhaps because they were viewed as normal happenings. But there may be other, subtler reasons for the drop in population. Perhaps people weren’t just dying, they also weren’t reproducing, which is much more serious. The rising Christian religion was puritanical and encouraged celibacy. Especially among the Gnostic strains of early Christianity, celibacy was part of the formula for perfection and knowledge of God. But of course, if Christianity had been effective in encouraging celibacy, it would have died out.
The same thing is now happening throughout the developed world—especially in Europe and Japan, but also in the U.S. and China. After WW II, American women averaged 3.7 children. Now it’s 1.8; in parts of Europe, it’s 1.3. Part of that is due to urbanization and part to an understanding of birth control, but a growing part is that they just can’t afford it; it’s very expensive to have a kid today. And I believe another major element is a new religious movement, Greenism, which is analogous to early Christianity in many ways. It’s now considered antisocial to reproduce, since having kids raises your carbon footprint.
Intellectual
The essential anti-rationality of early Christianity poisoned the intellectual atmosphere of the classical world. This is true of not just religions in general, but the desert religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in particular—each more extreme than its predecessor.
In late antiquity, there was a battle between the faith of the Fathers of the Church and the reason of the philosophers. Christianity halted the progress of reason, which had been growing in the Greco-Roman world since the days of the Ionian rationalists Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and others, right up to Aristotle, Archimedes, and Pliny. Knowledge of how the world worked was compounding, albeit slowly—then came to a stop with the triumph of superstition in the 4th century. And went into reverse during the Dark Ages, starting in the 6th century.
Christianity used to hold that anything that seems at odds with revealed truth or even with the extrapolations of revealed truth is anathema, the way much of Islam does today. The church drew generations of men away from intellectual and scientific pursuits and toward otherworldly pursuits—which didn’t help the Roman cause. It can be argued that, if not for Christianity, the ancient world might have made a leap to an industrial revolution. It’s impossible to make scientific progress if the reigning meme holds that if it’s not the word of a god, it’s not worth knowing.
For nearly 1,000 years, revealed beliefs displaced science and reason. This started to change only in the 13th century with Thomas Aquinas, an anomaly in that he cleverly integrated the rational thinking of the ancient philosophers—Aristotle in particular—into Catholicism. Aquinas was lucky he wasn’t condemned as a heretic instead of being turned into a saint. His thought had some unintended consequences, however, which led to the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and today’s world. At least until Aquinas, Christianity slowed the ascent of man and the rise of rationalism and science by centuries, in addition to its complicity in the fall of Rome.
As the importance of science has grown, however, religion—or superstition, as Gibbon referred to it—has taken a back seat. Over the last 100, even the last 50 years, Christianity has fallen to the status of a back story for Santa Claus and quaint, albeit poetic, folk wisdom tales.
The Apostles of Beria
I’ll be honest, I’m not patriotic to the United States of America. I’m patriotic to the concept of individual rights and freedoms. When the United States of America was a vessel to carry those rights and freedoms to every American, I was patriotic to it. When it became hostile to those rights and freedoms, I stopped being patriotic to it…
No surprise, because the United States Constitution has been overthrown. This is not a theory, it’s a fact. While some judges and some courts might still entertain the concepts of the Constitution in their rulings, it is most often performative and a way to continue the ruse that there has been no coup. But there has.
You are living in a foreign nation. This fact is driven home by the unabated invasion of the world’s population through the southern border. The absence of borders is a capitulation to the world of a non-nation. America is a an open playground for pedophiles and drug dealers. Fentynal is killing almost as many young people as the vaxx. Yet, there is no backlash, no investigation, no criminal charges, just a lot of people dying at the hands of an overactive or underactive police state.
This is the point, they prosecute the people who expose the truth and refuse to prosecute the people who are committing the crimes. A nation can be no more compromised than that.
https://tldavis.substack.com/p/the-apostles-of-beria
Exhibit A:
The Republic of the united States of America.
Exhibit B:
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Dunn & Bradstreet.
Spot the difference?
Act accordingly.
DESTROYING MONSTERS
A lot of the people who comment on this blog seem to me to be patriotic Americans. And, it’s clear, if you read the comments, that many of them – probably the majority – want Russia to win the war. This is not because they like Putin or Russia particularly, and certainly not because they’re on the “Putin payroll”. Not at all. These people understand what is really at stake…
An America of war all the time everywhere, of tent cities and full jails, of open borders, disappeared manufacturing, opiates, misery, poverty, corruption. An America with endless money to spend abroad but none to spend at home. (The hundred billion dollars dumped into Ukraine would give a $200,000 house to every one of the estimated half million homeless in the USA!) An America failing, no longer the American they loved, served and believed in. The Twitter revelations show some of the activities of this enemy embedded in the American polity. It’s very late and many fear that it is too late.
How to get this leech off America’s back? Voting can’t make much difference if both parties are manipulated. Is the voting system itself corrupted? Can the judicial system be trusted? Special counsels who report when it’s too late to matter? The managed media? Some may still believe in these things but the people I’m talking about don’t any more.
They can only see one way that the power of this internal enemy can be broken – complete and utter defeat. Defeat that cannot be ignored, cannot be explained away, defeat too big and too obvious for the obedient mass media to bury.
And that is why these people want Russia to win. They don’t necessarily like Russia or Putin or dislike Ukraine – it has little to do with either. It’s because they see this as the opportunity for the humiliating defeat that will shatter the power of the internal enemy.
Who’s he talking to?
The choir.
Starts out with a load of BS and continues building on that. The ‘Church” and Christianity being responsible for backward traditions and no science, the Dark Ages. Total and utter rubbish.
The overwhelming Fathers of Science were all Christians and most wrote a lot about God and theological things. The ‘Church” oppositions came from the Catholic church during the ‘Dark Ages’ which declared support for evolution. The ‘church’ , the supposedly infallible Pope, an institution that places a man above all spiritual matters and Gods word, does not represent God, but man.
The real fall of Rome was due not just to a corrupt legal system, as we have today, but of no moral compass. Hedonism, sadistic bread and circus, sexual promiscuity, any and all pursuits of pleasures and new ideas as the Apostle Paul encountered and spoke with in Athens. Acts 17.
What drew men away from scientific pursuits wasn’t the Church or Christianity, it was man centered materialistic pursuits that produced nothing be degradations. It was men of God, pursuing Gods thoughts on how things work is what kept the fires of scientific inquiry alive while ungodly men tried to tamp out those fires.
So round two is going to be more complete BS, guaranteed.
Doug Casey is stupid.
AP recruited you from Stormfront to come type that?
Shlomo or shabbos goy?
Is that some kind of JIDF talking point, Hasbrat?
Newton probably put more time into trying to figure out when The Second Coming would be (2040 was his guess IIRC) than he put into developing calculus.
My thoughts exactly. Well said.
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/pentagon-forced-tap-unreported-ammo-stockpile-israel-support-ukraine
Anybody thought maybe the ones running the USA with all the talk of war with China actually want someone to conquer the US.
Sort of off topic but watched CBS news last night for the first time in years, think actually ‘whats the frequency, Kenneth?’ was the host the last time , but they had this old guy out in Ukraine with some tankers, all of which were grey headed, talking about how much they needed nato tanks to turn the tide. Some artillery started landing way off and that old guy jumped in his car and took off down the road, leaving these other old guys standing around their tanks hidden up in some bushes, like that would keep a drone from seeing them. Imagine those old tankers are probably dead by now.
Traitors deliberately left the gates of Babylon open for invaders.
Kind of like leaving one’s border open?
_____________
Read a lot about Diocletian years ago:
“After the death of Alexander Severus in 235 CE, the last member of the Syrian dynasty, there was an economic and political crisis. It was known as the “Third Century Crisis” and lasted until Diocletian came to rule in 284 CE. At that time, the Roman Empire, constantly destabilized by internal struggles for power, had to defend its borders against attacks by neighbouring peoples and states. The need to defend the borders against the invasions of the Germanic tribes and the Persian army forced the emperors to over-expand their army, the cost of which increased and the Roman economy was unable to bear them.”
“Emperor Diocletian learned from the experience of previous decades and carried out a thorough reform of the Roman state. By focusing first on political stabilization, he realized that one person…….”
There are many correlations to the political world of Diocletian to the politics of today.
Definitely a worthy read along with the theme of this article.
Funny how an article or comment can bring up entire subjects that I had read before.
Source:
I wonder if the descendants of those ‘Babylonian’ traitors opened the gates of Constantinople.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-aug-09-et-book9-story.html
And if Emanual Cellar, of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, is counted among them, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Celler
Explain?
Musta said something bad about Hitler.
What….you don’t want to vault your PM’s in some unnamed country outside the US and move to Patagonia?
Great article!
AND
Had Doug Casey (and Gibbons) written “Roman Catholicism” in each place the word “Christianity” appeared, the article would be more precise.
Read it a couple days ago, and while I still have qubbles about some of the slant (such as classifying the population as useless eaters, which is an huge oversimplification), it is better than the first part. 3rd part was sent today by him, but have as yet to read.
The inevitable conclusion of pattern recognition.