So basically, youre struggling next to the much larger, richer Persian empire, so you are forced to make war into a discipline and train formations of physically conditioned, well-drilled hoplites while everyone else is just screaming ODIN!!!!!!? and charging wildly, you then get to the resources first, grab lots of slaves who perish in your silver mines thus buying you the time to allow a middle class to emerge and potter around having ideas and improving your technology, philosophy, legal and social systems, then you move to Rome and start full-on conquering territory which is almost trivial because no one else has a standing army so they have to go home to plant or harvest their fields halfway through the campaign, you learn to control the poor first locally and then colonially by giving them free food (ok cheers for that), propagandistic entertainment and apart from the elite schools generally bullshit education and narrow prospects so they only have very limited experiences, then use their designed ignorance as proof of your superiority, employ pet-food grade quack-quack wind-up pseudoscientists to prove that your superiority is inherent, and call non-ruling class people plebs or... other words if theyre foreign, eventually you get so powerful and insulated from reality that you start doing clearly unstable shit like putting weird pyramid symbols on your promissory notes, you steal everyones gold and make your currency metaphysical and necessary for energy purchases because all the other currencies are unstable after you keep organising violent coups in their states, and also because since Nixon your military underwrites OPEC nations so they agreed to only accept dollars, you thus are able to print dollars like 10 PRINT DOLLAR 20 GOTO LINE 10, use half of it to buy guns and make Iron Man and sit on the rest of it cackling in an oddly subdued manner, then get cocky and invent the internet because youre toying with the idea of nuking all the poor people and starting again and you need to keep your communications structure functional, decide nah because youd miss Tuscany and shooting polar bears, so instead ordinary people take the tech and make it into a global information dissemination and debate network, the poor folks start working stuff out for themselves and side-stepping your bullshit education so it becomes more and more difficult to maintain your bullshit empire so you have to spend more and more of your resources liberating them to keep them off balance until you overreach, end up seriously in debt to the point that your currency is mostly a metaphor for your military, print so much money that oil becomes more expensive for everyone else and your bonds depreciate, they get pissed off and start a BRICS world bank thingy and have lots of futile meetings where they throw their hands in the air and say I know, theyre mental! But also ruthless :( , then... then... hopefully it all gets resolved peacefully and we can build space colonies and arkologies and hydroponics farms and renewable energy and all the cool stuff no ones even thought of yet. Hopefully.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 17:56:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015