生于忧患，死于安乐

I recently watched a show about Alexander the Great on the History Channel. The guy took the throne at 20 years of age, and died when he was only 32. I guess it was not bad for someone lived 2300 years ago. But he managed to conquer most of the known world to the Greek using only 40,000 troops, along the way, destroy the glorious Persian empire. How? Macedonians were some backward villagers, constantly fighting and dying in battles against other Greeks. But the Persians, lived in luxurious palaces, people are more educated, cultured, not to mention better fed.

一个国家的衰败可以有多个原因，但一个国家的成功只有一个原因。Just like what Leo Tolstoy said famously: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Throughout history, the failure of a civilization can be categorized in three sets. 一，人性自身的弱点。 People wants to live in peace, want to enjoy luxury, want to lead better lives. But peace means inertia, luxury means corruption, and better lives means arrogance. It's dangerous because it's contagious. A good example is the Roman Empire.

二，人与人之间的矛盾。In a peaceful environment, law and order are in place to protect people from themselves. That means you have to follow a certain established norm to get to the top. This process is slow, and to follow this process made people docile. The change in social status becomes ever slower as the top positions in the social ladder become occupied and monopolized. Lack of opportunities and lack of selections means in the long enough time scale, the possibility of inferior minds becoming socially dominant converges to one. The breakout of internal turmoil becomes inevitable. A good example is the Han dynasty of China. Soviet Union was another good example. The power struggle at the top level among so few people totally ignored the economic incentives of the people.

三，Technology Inferiority. How this inferiority might arrive in the first place could be due to the first two reasons, like China in the late 19th century, or it could be due to the natural resource limitations, like the Incas. But the results are catastrophic. Temples burnt to the ground, people enslaved, civilization destroyed.

And there is only one reason why a civilization succeed, at least in the short run, outside threats, “无敌国外患者，国恒亡”。Under the outside threat, there is no peace, no luxury, people live with shortage of everything. There is no temptation to be corrupted, and are forced to work hard to repel outside threat, and therefore are able to have a cool head and clear mind where the civilization should lead. People are able to put aside their petty differences, the most able people are selected to the top, and a society can quickly adopt to the changing environment and absorb new technology. The Macedonian empire was a good example of that; the waring states of China was a good example of that; the Mongolian empire was a good example of that; the Renaissance Europe was a good example of that; the founding of the United States was a good example of that; even the much hated the empire of Japan was like that. And a rather fragile China in the 70's was a good example, constantly under the threat of the soviets and the western powers, finally decided to change and adopt.

Now to think about it, in WWII, Japan's surrender was not due to moral justifications like the politicians wanted us to believe, but due to the natural limitation of Japan itself, it's just too damn small. But I am not worried about a big nation follows the same path as Japan. Once a nation becomes large, the people start to have a sense of security and peace, the threat of outside power, whether real or not, becomes less relevant, so the decline of a big nation is almost the only certain thing in human history.

Today the dominance of US and Europe are mainly due to advance technology. People are falling increasingly into the first two categories of failures. People feel secure, they don't want change; people have a sense of superiority, and they are arrogant to the world changing beside them; a class of elites are monopolizing power, fewer and fewer poor bright people are likely to take leadership positions; political bickering are more and more about seizing power per se, rather than achieving some social change for the good. But remember that the technology dominance is never long lived.

In a totally politically incorrect sense, maybe bin Laden and the terrorists are really helping the US. Ever since 9-11, American are on edge, people started to rethink their arrogance towards the rest of the world, people were putting their differences aside and coming together. Then it comes along the Bush administration, which exactly fell into the failure of elites category, saw this reemergence of national unity as an opportunity to capitalize their hold on power. How do they do it? Start another war, attempt to control the rich oil fields of the mid-east, therefore more profits for the elite group, therefore longer hold onto power, therefore more terrorists, therefore more war......

It's amazing why they say history is politics. How did I get from talking about Alexander the Great to the Bush administration is beyond me. But now it comes to the biggest dilemma of human race. All things people really enjoy are the same things that destroy people, and somethings people really hate are what make people succeed.

by Chichi