If America is like the Roman Republic, will generations of feudalism be our future?

It’s hard not to feel pretty darn lucky these days. 2005 and Barry Bonds getting juiced doesn’t seem so bad right now. Some things feel like they are in a delicate balance, the free world being one of them. If I had to compare the achievements of today, both technological and cultural, to a time period in history, it would have to be the early Roman state. The Music! The Poetry! The Politics! Clean water to every city! Gas for every car! The roads damnit the roads.

But what spooks me out is that after the explosion of thought and innovation going on, lets be crude, and say 1st BCE and the 1st CE, Rome fell to the impulse towards Empire. Power becomes more concentrated, more stagnate and consolidated, there’s more sustained foreign involvement, more complications. Rome gets a little more twisted, a little more petty. Entertainment takes precedent, whatever, things are still okay.

And they are, for a couple hundred more years Rome keeps running. But then it stops. Around the 5th century CE the western half gets sacked and split off from the east. The Roman Empire “had no effective control over the scattered Western domains that could still be described as Roman. Barbarian kingdoms had established their own power in much of the area of the Western Empire.” (Wikipedia)

This is an act of imagination but I think those times are abstractedly depicted in television shows like The Walking Dead. Grueling times. Bloody times. Atilla the Hun shows up. He dies. More war. Frankly times that make you just want a roof over your head, fire in the hearth, and bread in your belly. Stability in so many words.

Feudalism, little fifedoms of a large household or two, provide protection from people like the Huns, in exchange for a percent of the work that people do on the land, a large percent of that work it seems. Its Mafia stuff, they say you pay them for “protection” but really your paying them so they protect you from themselves.

People trade their autonomy for consistency and have to spend all their time working, having to go to church, rising their effing kids and thinking about how much better things were in the ancient past, Eden and Rome, for 1000+ years. So next time you get down about this country just know the past is envious of us, and the future will be. Where does that leave us? In a golden age so shut up and soak it in.