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How Concrete Contributed To the Downfall of the Roman Empire
concertina226 (2447056) writes "The real reason behind the downfall of the Roman Empire might not have been lead contaminating in the water, which is the most popular theory, but the use of concrete as a building material. Dr Penelope Davies, a historian with the University of Texas believes that the rise of concrete as a building material may have weakened ancient Rome's entire political system as Pompey and Julius Caesar began 'thinking like kings'. Concrete was used to build many of Rome's finest monuments, such as the Pantheon, the Colosseum and the Tabularium, which have lasted the test of time and are still standing today."
The Romans found out that when you build a society on the assumption of permanent growth, when you stop growing... you stop existing. And today's business leaders, who don't pay attention to history unless it makes them money, are repeating the same mistake.
For some reason people are obsessed with finding a single reason for the disintegration of the Roman empire but the truth is that there were many causes: the incompetence of emperors, the decline of the Roman military, the increasing military sophistication of the barbarian tribes, separatism among those barbarians that were absorbed, the fact that the influx of barbarians became to great for the empire to absorb, pandemics and warfare that destroyed the tax base which in turn magnified the military problems and it also caused governmental organizations and institutions to collapse, the list goes on and on. Another point is that much of the Roman world never really disappeared, it just came under new management. Although you saw urban decline in many parts of what used to be the empire a lot of Roman culture survived. A whole lot of stuff went up in flames but many of the barbarian kings that took over the various parts of the western empire often went out of their way to make sure to preserve as much as possible of the Roman governmental bureaucracy, industry, trade and educational institutions as they could. The more archaeologists research the 'dark ages' the more clear it becomes that they weren't actually as dark as we used to be taught in school.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
And the individuals bugaboos. Everyone wants to see the empire's fall as due to their own personal dislikes. Ask the libertarians, they'll blame overregulation. Ask the conservatives, they'll blame socialism. Ask the liberals, they'll blame polluted water or corruption.
You can see it in a more recent event too - the early troubles at the Jamestown colony. It's recent enough to be very well documented, but already we are seeing a number of disparate accounts circulating in popular awareness, one of which (Originating in a Fox column, now persisting as a circular email and blog post) claims that the colony was founded on a system of collective ownership and farmers didn't see any point in farming if the rest of the community would just steal their crop, so they starved to death until a panicked switch to a private-property system and free market economy brought about greatly increased production and prosperity. It's a bunch of lies with a hint of truth mixed in, Dan Brown style, and any real historian would laugh at it - but it still persists, because the myth tells people what they want to hear: A good morality tale, supporting their own particular morality.