I’ve often wondered about the collapse of great empires in history, of civilizations that reached a peak, then eventually declined. I still like my ‘time’ theory of things– when it’s your time, you just get lucky– to a great extent, I believe this explains things overall, if you are willing to hold such a mindset.
However, today, a thought occurred to me. The thought being that not only civilizations, but people, and hence, all entities deriving from them, have stages where things are at risk of going wrong, where you could steer completely out of track and risk getting lost. When you are struggling to get better, when you have a goal in mind, as long as you don’t believe in your own infallibility, you are, to the best of your own ability, able to detect when things are going wrong, and to steer yourself in the right direction again, with some struggle of course, but that’s what you know is the price of greatness.
As you stay successful for a longer period of time, you perhaps forget how it is not to be so. Success becomes your birthright, in your own mind. You forget the effort you spent on getting there, and you underestimate the need to stay alert and to fix things if you go off track. You might even notice problems, but the effort you need to spend may seem too menial, too much beneath you. And then, gradually, your success, your empire, crumbles.
The root of this observation being: one of the primary downfalls of a civilization (and people) is perhaps false pride. Do you agree?
