From Winter Is Coming, and No Election Can Stop It

A dying civilisation does throw up its strong man, Spengler granted. The chaos becomes unbearable, and somebody grips the wheel.

But that man may not be the cure. He’s perhaps the last symptom of the rot.

Spengler called it Caesarism, after the men who finished the Roman Republic. It makes sense because Caesar does break the rule of money, and he does bring a kind of order, but he is ordering a people who have already forgotten how to be a people, and the old crowns and titles he puts on are fancy dress over a corpse.

To distinguish between a strongman holding the steering wheel of a collapsing civilisation and a people’s rebirth through a strongman, you can read the symptoms.

Tacitus left the plainest gauge ever written: the more corrupt the state, the more laws it keeps.

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” —Tacitus, Annals 3.27

One might add: a people that trusts itself needs few rules; a people that trusts nothing needs a rule for everything.

Watch the free bread and the free spectacle: the poet who coined “bread and circuses” spat the words, at a public that had once handed out armies and now asked only to be fed and amused. And watch the money go thin: over two centuries, the Roman silver coin was clipped and watered by one emperor after another until it was a copper slug under a bright wash of silver, a lie you could hold in your hand.

We are not the first people to stand here.

We are only the latest to assume we are the exception.