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I don't disagree. But I have a unique take on the fall of empires and the evil inherent in humans.

Imo, evil is a byproduct of human selfishness. Taking without empathy towards where it's coming from. Money, power, property, and even life itself.

There are people that do this because of their isolated environment. (Raised to think anyone that doesn't look like them isn't human, and therefore it's alright to exploited them for gain.)

And there are those that do it because they are sociopaths.

While Sociopathic diagnoses isn't an easy thing we can pin down. In a world where our social behaviors can be dramatically affected by our genetics (autism) it's not hard to assume sociopathy is just another manifestation of something like autism. Just a more extreme one - where a person literally is incapable of understanding others as human with emotions like them.

These people are born incapable of understanding that other people have feelings at all. So they don't contribute to communities, they don't help others, they just lie and pretend to be like others to exploit for their own gain. They lie to appear social and kind (towards some), as that attracts others in that group they can easily take from.

You know the uncanny valley? The unsettling feeling we get when we see CG that looks human, but doesn't quite move or act like a real human?

imo that's an evolutionary response to our habit of breeding sociopaths. They pretend VERY hard to be human, but lack the natural primate communal instinct everyone else is born with. They look human, but don't act like it compared to the rest of the community.

In smaller groups, like towns or families, these people can be kicked out and otherwise ostracized to protect the smaller community from being exploited.

But in larger communities, it's an all you can exploit buffet. In larger communities, sociopaths thrive because there is an endless amount of trusting people they can exploit. If they fail, they just move on to the next group of suckers.

If they manage to extract enough power, then all they have to do is keep lying to maintain it. But always, and eventually, at the cost of the larger community itself. There is a finite limit of exploitation that once reached, no longer serves to preserve the larger community, just the power of the sociopaths in it. The community collapses, as it's support mechanisms have been diverted to the sociopaths, and the sociopaths are then unable to lie any longer and usually blamed / killed / ostracized for their bullshit now that it's obvious.

So while sociopaths are thankfully not the norm when it comes to humans, just a few in a group can take down our largest efforts to civilize.

This is why smaller human cultural groups tend to have much longer histories than massive empires. (Bushido and martial arts still exist, but the Shogunate does not). We are always going to breed sociopaths, and in turn they will make sure we never get too big for our own good.

Problems arise when the world itself is now fairly united, and sociopaths have no where left to run and hide.

If we want our biggest countries and empires to persist longer than 250 years, then we needs laws that prevent sociopaths from doing their thing.

I'm a big fan of wealth caps. Because it's non intrusive on a person's genetics, and the only people that complain about having 800 mil to spend instead of 1 billion, are sociopaths.

Anyway. That's my way of saying:

• We are not all evil, mostly it's sociopaths (and the wealthy brought up inhumane bubbles.)

• Sociopaths are the reason every human empire has fallen.

• There's a lot of powerful sociopaths running the world because we spent decades collecting all our best resources together in large shiny empires that called the worst of us like a moth to flame for their exploitation.