What is a collapse?

There's no point talking about something if we can't agree what it is

The Queen acquired a pile of treasure last month.

She probably isn’t even aware. She gets them all the time. That’s because, in Britain, any hoard of historical coins which is found becomes Liz’s personal stash.

The Huntingdon hoard, discovered in 2018 and consisting of 10,000 Roman coins, dates from the third century AD. The start of that century kicked off a little like the 2020s have for us. It was the beginning of the end for a Mediterranean world which had only known safety, prosperity and stability for centuries.

Sure, there had been wars and occasional famines. But on the whole, life had been very good for a very long time. Especially if you were a bona fides Roman. Just like for a bona fides Westerner today.

As that safe and stable world began to collapse, people began to behave differently. They started to do weird things. Like bury coins.

Hands up if you’ve buried some silver coins in the backyard. Hands up if you’ve thought about it. We won’t judge you.

There are pretty much no coin hoards from around the time of Jesus up to the third century from the Roman world. That’s because people were too busy spending those coins on soothing backrubs from a slave at the local bathhouse rather than burying them under a trapdoor in the shed. Whatever coins we do have from before the third century are worn away from use. Because people spent them instead of hoarding them.

Why become a prepper when you can just get backrubs, right?

As brevity is the soul of wit, I’ll get to the point. The experience of the Romans from the third century anno Domini onward, and the factors which caused the beginning of the collapse of their sophisticated and degenerate civilisation, are repeating in our time. And this time, it’s gonna be Biblical. The four horsemen are riding and the writing is on the wall.

Weak and corrupt elites? Check. Weak and corrupt plebs? Check. Arrogant and unnecessary imperial wars? Check. A disconnect with reality leading to an inability to perceive internal and external threats? Check. Currency debasement to maintain unsustainable military and welfare spending? Check. Dilution of identity and family bonds? Check. A widespread mentality of entitlement and greed? Check. Too many backrubs? Check.

And above and beyond it all, a cyclical downturn in the energy output of the sun, causing increased volcanoes, earthquakes, famine and plague? Check.

It’s all happened before and it will all happen again. The whole good times make weak men make bad times make strong men thing, but on a centuries-long scale.

This blog will be an exploration of historical collapses with an emphasis on what we can learn from them. It’s not intended to be doom porn, but we’re definitely going to look doom right in the face and get its measure.

Another interesting point to note is that the Crisis of the Third Century really got going during the reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. That’s the Dumbledore guy from Gladiator. It began with the Antonine Plague of 165-180 AD, which killed up to 10 million people. It was probably smallpox.

That’s right. The collapse of the Roman world began with a pandemic.