I spent the better part of a decade thinking about the end of the Roman Empire and what it felt like to live through that, in all its various manifestations - the collapse of political authority, spreading pandemics, economic crises - and now it all makes a lot more sense.
Processes of breakdown happen very slowly and imperceptibly. They're mostly aggregates small things: taxes not getting collected here, bridges not getting repaired there, things like that. Then, in a moment of crisis, the sheer level of decay becomes clear. You see the aggregate.
A key administrative official was replaced by a feckless political appointee. That official didn't push to collect tax revenues. When a drought struck and famine ensued, they didn't have the funds to import grain. And so on.
Nobody requisitions funds to repair a road. An aqueduct breaks and nobody fixes it. A port silts up and nobody builds new docks. Nobody updates the tax registers. All of the sudden, your capacity to deal with any sort of major problem - your resilience - is gone.
Every state and society faces problems and challenges, both natural and man-made. The key thing is the capacity for dealing with them. We don’t have that capacity right now.
