The Rise and Fall of Society: A Brief Summary
by Shadow88
Since mankind evolved into its present day form, and the Earth became kind enough to cultivate, it has always been Mans instinct to form communities and societies based on law and order with some form of hierarchy.
Occasionally the conditions around such as group will be favorable, and the size and power of the said group will increase dramatically until it becomes a significant, if not totalitarian presence over all the other present groups within traveling range.
However, the conditions ensuring the survival and domination of such a prosperous culture will never last indefinitely.
Whether by external or internal, man-made or natural causes a society or civilization will ALWAYS fall.
As the Romans and the Mayans, the Greeks and the Mongolians all taught us, power and brief and ever fleeting.
The modern day world is totally interconnected, in many cases information travels just below the speed of light. Thus it could be considered a giant community, and as a community it will one day fall into a Second Dark Age.
The causes (or causes) for such a fall have many possible candidates which I will not discuss here, because they are simply irrelevant.
The only fact or inevitability is that civilization will collapse, whether it be in the next ten years, or the next ten hundred years.
Many people have tried to distance us from the civilizations of old, saying that with our modern technologies we shall not, nay, cannot fall. No matter what the level of technology a society possesses, as long as there are humans behind the technology. Even an entire colonized galaxy has the potential to fall into chaos.
Humans will always continue to lie, cheat, steal, and desire power as long as they remain human. It is what defines us, as a species and as the dominant form of life on this planet, or even in the known universe.
We should not fear such a collapse. Instead we should prepare for it, should even embrace it and try to make it easier for the next generation to endure and survive such a collapse easier.
The best thing we can do is not try to futilely safeguard from it or try to put it off, but to prepare volumes of both practical and impractical knowledge and ways to decode such knowledge, so that our future descendants will be able to rise out of the ashes and create a new society stronger than the one before it in a far quicker timespan.
A new society based on better ideas, and after a period of renaissance and rediscovery eventually better technology too.
Just as there will be a Second Dark Age, there will also be a Second Renaissance, and that is why we should not despair that what we know now will end.
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