There was a fascinating dynamic involved in the eventual decline and collapse of the reconstituted Roman Empire that I wanted to touch on, which has pretty apparent parallels to current dynamics playing out in the modern industrial world. I do want to clarify that I'm not trying to locate some sort of precise temporal parallel, where Rome was in this stage in relation to some sort of lifespan, in relation to our civilization's stage in turn, and thus attempt some sort of prediction in terms of timeframes. No, this is mainly to illustrate general principles of connected systems. In so many words, this collapse took quite a while, after some really death-defying reconstitutions no less; this stuff is difficult to suss out.
We've touched on the nature of oscillating forces before in the context of increasingly unstable systems: the short of it in this context is that as things get to moving and moving faster, and that movement has a large enough mass, it becomes an overwhelming force of thermodynamic redistribution in its own right, overpowering the prevailing forces of thermodynamic organization as embodied in the association of individual humans navigating a specifically constituted society, itself navigating the environment it is ensconced in.
Those overwhelming forces could very well be made up of other human beings themselves, though the force and velocity of those forces leads to the experience of a sort of desperation and loss of control, and is experienced as an external and determining influence outside of any individual or group's machinations.
In the Roman case, the dynamic I had in mind was the oscillating arising out of both a weakening and contracting imperial system and its relation to the turbulent forces set in motion by the advancing of its weakening and its concurrent turbulence inflicted on its environment, as well as the concomitant strengthening of its rivals. Comparing now the dim memory of the faltering Republic, a sort of centrifuge got going in which the Empire started to tear itself apart with each rotation of its daily cycle of reproduction.
What did this actually look like? In the the course of the third century CE, a weakening Roman empire got into deeper and deeper trouble as it became trapped within the contracting structure of its commitments. The now highly centralized military dictatorship it had become had entered into its own cycle of decay and civil war, as various aspiring military talents rose and fell in civil wars, often carried along the whims of Praetorian machinations and other military organizations along the lines of pay and associated loyalty. The crass cynicism of the mass of legionaries and the Praetorian Guard, willing to concentrate their efforts on purely monetary matters, and their capriciousness in backing the highest paying parties, was reflective of serious social, cultural, and economic problems itself, but I'll leave that for now.
Additionally, legionary forces and farm labor were thoroughly chewed up by the Antonine (possibly smallpox or measles) and the Cyprian (several possibilities) plagues, themselves circulated by the cycles of military expansion and social reproduction, putting a sizable dent in the functionality of military administration and economic functions.
The actual timeline and corresponding chains of causation are difficult to pin down, due in part to the chaos of the third century and then in part to conflicting and unreliable historical sources due to said chaos, but a general oscillating dynamic arose that can be described as follows (as described by Mike Duncan in his excellent History of Rome podcast):
Civil wars, plague, and economic and social/political dysfunction interacted at a time when Rome's boundaries were near their peak - waxing under Trajan and then waning under Hadrian and then waxing again during the Severan Dynasty - and there were growing pressures on the frontiers from the growing and unifying German confederations (like the Franks) in the West and the Sassanian Persians in the East, who were emerging newly confident from the collapsed Parthian empire, pressures which were encouraged by previous Roman military conquests.
You had a centralized power that was called into motion by these disturbances: an emperor and the strongest imperial army - kept closest to the emperor out of distrust of rivals - moving to and fro across the empire to put out the various fires set by a given invasion or uprising. Some regional general may score a victory with his army against an invading force, and they'd declare him Emperor because no one else was dealing with the issue at the moment, and short term thinking and action prevailed, and then the reigning incumbent Emperor would have to proceed to take out that rival, and so on.
This dynamic encouraged subsequent invasions: word would spread that the Romans were weak and infighting and foreign powers would strike to exploit some weak and undefended point, prompting movement of imperial forces and the opening of a vacuum and a weak point at some other location. The subsequent invasions then further strained economic, social, and political conditions, manpower was drained, discontent would spread, and further uprisings would spring up as short term problems were solved and another localized power claimed the throne, begetting further invasions, and so on.
The emperor would then speed up this motion by developing a mobile cavalry force, but eventually the empire would break into three autonomous regions, temporarily stabilizing those oscillating forces. Amazingly, Aurelian would reach back out and reunite and stabilize the empire militarily, with Diocletian eventually coming along to completely restructure the empire and further stabilize the system with the Tetrarchy, following formally the informal principle of the empire temporarily breaking into three pieces, this time with the coordinated rule of four emperors. Though this recovery was quite a remarkable event, the empire's continuity was to remain strained and that temporary stability would begin to unwind again.
So let's take a minute to attempt to abstract some system behaviors from this mess. What we see here is an increasingly kinetic expression of moving energy, that picks up steam and gains velocity and augments as it sets stored and potential energy free as it moves through and antagonizes its containing system. And this moving energy places ever more strain on the bounded environment it circulates in, a bounded environment meant to keep it contained in the first place, which eventually, has its continuity shattered, and having so much of that energy freed up, is able to be unified and stabilized again, a stabilization that was nevertheless tenuous and would soon unwind again in its weakened state.
That bounded environment, at the peak of its strength, was able to concentrate energy and then direct it in service of the greater bounded system itself, but as it weakened, it was still concentrating energy but in a chaotic and runaway fashion which tore apart the system itself: at this point the system had to be broken to be fixed again, and then in its globally weakened state, would proceed in a downward spiral to more complete collapse.
A heaving bridge comes to mind: a bridge connecting several disparate pieces of land may begin to flex and warp as it is put under pressure, whether by wind or water or too much weight set upon it, or a combination of these things. What is left is to stabilize the bridge by adding resources to it - when it is not moving of course - or to have the bridge break down altogether into smaller pieces, so that the energy can dissipate more locally, and then the bridge is reconstituted after the ensuing calm.
Either way, it is difficult to do too much work on a moving bridge, as muscle power and brain power is put into navigating its changing forms, all the more so the more the bridge is heaving, until no amount of energy can be put into navigating the violence of its chaotic movement. Indeed, depending on the mass doing work on the bridge, such activity could add positive feedback to the movement and make the movement itself worse.
Anyway, I'm not doing anyone any favors by delving deeper into convoluted metaphors. I just want to keep general dynamics like these in mind as we continue to proceed. Conceptually I've made a bit of a mess here, I know, but for a minute we could tease out what this means in terms of contemporary global economic dynamics.
If you squint into the growing global chaos, you can see this dynamic at work underneath everything: the hegemonic and bounded global economic system, attempting to contain and concentrate energy for itself, constantly expanding outward and squeezing inward its rivals, dumping waste and producing agitation and antagonisms that are growing in breadth and velocity, and we are seeing the cleavages form in real time in which the system will first bifurcate, and then possibly break down further. And then we will see the re-unifiers come out and attempt to put things back together with a religious fervor of their own after things stabilize. But that is in the face of an ever-growing ecological turbulence, so long as the smoke stacks continue to run.
