http://www.truthdig.com/...e_to_the_asylum_20120430/

Here is the opening paragraph for those of you who do not have time to read the article:

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17844315

Welcome To The Land Of Delusion...

A nice article, but it has nothing to do with this thread.

maybe the civilizations start to die because the people become mentally deficient because there aren't enough challenges for them in their nice peaceful civilization.

Dude, just because the USA is going insane doesn`t mean the rest of the world is going to the same place. :P

The article is referencing the United States... but I suppose that was your point!

to support your point:
http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/260.html

there are tons of articles written by law professors and ecomists claiming that the roman empire or other civilizations fell due to government interference and the lack of adoption of free enterprise. In fact that's pure ignorance at best, and self serving manipulation of the facts at worst.

People obsess over the fall of the roman empire as an example but the fact that it failed is not a historic suprise, what makes it unique (and the exeption) is that it took 200 years to fail. The moment that no one could re-establish an empire to take its place is what marks a divergent point between western europe and the rest of eurasia.
The most convincing theory I've read regarding why civilizations fails is the law of diminshing returns as civilizations get more complex. When you start from scratch (midevil europe, 19th century US, china multiple times) you get very large returns from cooperating and building something up. The more built up things are, the more successful you are, the less and less things can "get better" to the point where trying to improve things slowly makes things worse. Every human civilization/power structure goes through the same cycle. The question is, do you fade out gracefully like the venetians, or do you create all holy havoc like the chinese (and kill 80% of your population in the process). Do you deplete all your resources and cause wide scale devestation and abandonment like the Romans did, or do you simply move elsewhere like the Mayans.

Other signs of decline:
1) abandonment of cities/infrastructure.
2) concentration of wealth
3) loss of cheap resources

@aponic: bread and circuses it is..

A very nice addition to the original post martian. Thanks mate.

Yeah, sorry. It was almost like schadenfreude. :D

And yet, the point still stands.

While the USA and Europe are in the middle of an economic crisis, the emerging markets (and therefore civilization) are doing ok and the arab primavera means that their population is having more of a say about their countries future (not necessarily good for us, btw).

The USA and Europe, long term, won`t fall. They will just be less important than they are today, that is all.

So, I just don`t get this fall of civilization talk. Maybe the writer went too deep into metaphor.

This is what Alliance talk was like back in the old days!

keep it up everyone!

I never thought this music video would be so fitting... LOL

http://www.youtube.com/...v=YV4oYkIeGJc&ob=av2n

Kill 80% of the population <--- #1

We need to get used to a close to zero growth some time in the near future...

What a bunch of fluff. You're the crazy one dude.

They made a movie about once, its called Idiocracy.

I think if the United States turned fascist that would constitute an end of civilization as it applies within their territories. The Dominionist movement now controls over 180 seats in congress.

I can agree with you there, though I doubt how big this fall would be with an interconnected world like we have now.

This.