Asklemmy

43340 readers

2067 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

226

Seriously, though. How often do you think of the Roman Empire? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

118 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I know this is a joke/meme, but I sincerely think of the Roman Empire a surprising amount of times. I find myself obsessing over how Roman citizens were living just as complex lives as we are today, or about Marcus Aurelius' life and philosophy, or about how the Republic fell and became a totalitarian state.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Often because I always had an interest in their history.

As a kid I was fascinated by the fact they existed, were so successful and then disappeared.

As an adult reading more details about their society and civilization, it amazes and terrifies me how we are following the same path and mentality. Which means we may very well be on the same path of self destruction. When they were in their glory, they were never aware that they would die out. We are feeling the same way today with total confidence.

2,000 years from now our decedants may see us in the same way we see the Romans today.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's definitely how I think about them. In comparison to housing policies or rent issues and what their outcome was.... and deep horror at what it means for our potential future.

To be fair history rhymes not repeats but that mostly seems to come from us having better tech and therefore better conditions but the human actions and ideas seem to be annoyingly on repeat.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The only thing that seems to progress is our technology

We are capable of improving and making our technology very very efficient within a short period of time.

However, our mentality, our logic and our behaviours will take many more thousands of years to evolve ... the imbalance is like watching a monkey with a machine gun or a grenade.

And evolution, change and the future doesn't mean things will be rosy either ... evolution doesn't mean better from your perspective or some other person's perspective .. evolution just means change.

We could evolve our civilization into a socially minded mutually beneficial shared utopia ... or into a totalitarian model where we divide the species into the powerful served by the weaker ones ... or into something more equitable .. or something far more terrifying ... or we just completely and utterly destroy ourselves and leave no trace of our species or our descendants on the planet.