Eventuality

2004:

The people responsible for great empires have always thought they were God’s chosen people. I come from a country with that sort of mind-set, from a group of conceited oafs in fact. The knowledge that we are superior gives us our sense of dominance, almost a right to be superior, a right to rule. When I was young we never thought about it, being tops - we thought it was something that would last forever … so we grew up proud, the nasty side of proud, and we contracted hubris and megalomania.

Each empire fails and its central weaknesses show up in the endgame, when they collapse. Even when they fail horribly, the people of the empire can’t (for long) remember why it failed. They career downwards, pretending nothing has happened.

Humans who’ve ‘made it’ don’t learn from their past mistakes, or so it says in recorded history.

In this way, the empire-people are very stupid, always having to make the same mistakes over and over again, in order to find out what should have been obvious in the first place.

Our lives, so they say, are awash with delusion and false justification for what we do. We think we can only learn by re-experiencing the whole cycle of ‘succeeding then failing’. So, we go through the same lessons, lifetime after lifetime, until eventually we learn. Eventually.