[Off Topic History] The Fall of Civilizations
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You'll have to excuse the random, off topic linksharing. History-posting on tenuous justification has been a fine (well, not that fine) tradition of KiA2 since it's early days, so I thought I'd share my discovery of the week.
It's a youtube channel featuring video-versions of a series of podcasts themed around the topic of the end of various grand civilizations, with the focus being on how the civiizations got where they were, what might have caused the fall and what it must have been to be a citizen at such a time and witness the fall of your known world.
I could claim that there are potential lessons for our culture here, common themes that could be witnessed amongst the rubble. I could pretend that one or more of those collapses have warnings for us hidden in there.
The truth is, I wouldn't be smart enough to spot them if they are there. But I've encountered all manner of smart people on KiA2 since the start, and a lot of people with wildly differing views but a lot of whom had a keen interest in history.
Personally, I think these videos are fascinating, provide intriguing glimpses into history and are generally top draw stuff. It's possible that there are warnings or lessons in some of these stories for where we are, but it's certain that these are videos that I personally would strongly recommend, despite only being a handful of episodes in so far.
Make of this what you will, and feel free to rant about the fall of our civilizations in the comments here. I don't mind, as I don't use .win nearly as much right now as it deserves.
Never apologize for posting good history content. Unless you're a history PhD you probably don't know nearly enough world history. I certainly don't, and I'm not sure I trust what I do "know".
History focuses a lot of the "fall" of civilizations for obvious reasons. I wish it accompanied this discussion with an analysis of attributes which correlate to failing civilizations and attempted to find civilizations that had some/all of those attributes but managed to not fail. It's all well and good to say why a civilization failed, but it would seem that the most important reason for studying failed civilizations would be to prevent yours from failing; so having examples where you could say "90% of civilizations with these attributes failed within 100 years; this civilization had all of them, but after they did X, Y, and Z they no longer had attributes A, B, and C; and survived another 500 years" would be extremely useful.
Maybe this is studied, but it's not nearly as publicized as "failures".
The risk with that kind of search is that people tend to find what they set out to find, and it's very hard to eliminate that kind of bias and pattern seeking altogether.
Collapse by Jared Diamond is about this very subject.
Europe: Since Its Origins is a pretty based history podcast from back in the dawn of casting. There's a couple of episodes on YouTube but i can't track down tbe test, i think the author might be passed. Red pilled on Islam in a scholarly way
Yes, this is a good podcast series. I follow it on Spotify.
I also recommend "How It Began" and "Context", both by a guy named Brad Harris. Looking for others.
(Oh, also "History of Rome". Going to start "History of Byzantium" for listening to over the winter.)
Thanks bro, I'll check them out later. Do you have any favorites you'd recommend?
It depends what you're interested in really. I particularly enjoyed the one about the Khmer because it's a civilization I knew so little about before listening.
I've only discovered the channel this week and I'm a sucker for doing things in order, so I've not even got half way yet. Of the ones I've watched, there's really none I wouldn't recommend, different as they've been so far.
You basically can't miss. Pick out the cultures you're interested in, or slowly go through episode by episode like I'm doing. :)