Eventualities

The people responsible for the great empires of the world have always thought they were God’s chosen people. I come from such a group of conceited oafs. The knowledge of being superior people gave us our sense of dominance, almost as a right to be superior, a right to rule. We never thought about it. We thought it was something that would last forever. Up grew pride, hubris and megalomania.
Each empire fails and it’s central weakness shows up in the endgame when they collapse. Even when they fail horribly, the people of the empire can’t for long remember why. They career downwards, pretending nothing has happened.
Humans who’ve ‘made it’ don’t learn from past mistakes recorded by history. In this way the empire-people are very stupid, always having to make the same mistakes in order to find out first hand what should be obvious without creating the pain in order to ‘see’ the mistake. The story in the ‘history’ is a cycle of forgetting and then remembering-too-late. 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’. We go through the same lessons, lifetime after lifetime, until eventually we learn. But only eventually.