🏛️ How Republics Unravel

Lessons from Edward Gibbon and his history of Rome's collapse. Decline, as Gibbon tells it, isn't just geopolitical but psychological, even spiritual — a civilisation continuing outwardly while 'a pervasive nihilism can incapacitate a people from within'. Not doom-saying so much as pattern recognition: an invitation to notice the inner climates in which collapse becomes imaginable.