There’s this British general named Sir John Glubb who spent his life studying empires. Not just reading about them. Actually living in them. Jordan, Iraq, places where you could still smell the dust of fallen civilizations if you paid attention. In 1976, he wrote an essay called “The Fate of Empires” that nobody wanted to hear then and nobody wants to hear now.
His conclusion? Every empire lasts about 250 years. Ten generations. Doesn’t matter if they’re Assyrian, Persian, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, Spanish, or British. Doesn’t matter if they worship Zeus, Allah, or the almighty dollar. Same timeline. Same pattern. Same end.
America declared independence in 1776. Do the math.
We are 250 years in. Exactly. Not 248, not 252. Exactly 250. If Glubb is right, and 3,000 years of history suggests he is, we’re not approaching the deadline. We’re at it. The alarm isn’t about to go off. It’s ringing right now. We’re just hitting snooze and pretending we’ve got more time.
Except the thing coming is the total collapse of everything you thought was permanent.
A Note from the Outpost
I’m writing this from Norway. Not America. We’re what you’d call an outpost of the American empire. The way Gaul was to Rome. The way India was to Britain. We share some of the lifestyle, some of the prosperity, certainly the Protestant work ethic and the consumer culture. But we’re not the empire itself. We’re satellites. Client states. We benefit when they rise. We get dragged down when they fall.
This gives us a particular vantage point. We’re close enough to see what’s happening. Far enough away that we’re not completely delusional about it. Americans still think they’re exceptional, that the rules don’t apply to them. From here in Oslo, watching American soft power dissolve in real time, the delusion is obvious.
Every empire has its outposts. Rome had Gaul, Britannia, Hispania. When Rome fell, those provinces didn’t just keep being Roman. They became something else. Usually something worse. Usually something more chaotic. The infrastructure crumbled. The roads stopped being maintained. The aqueducts fell apart. And the locals who’d gotten used to Roman peace and Roman trade had to figure out how to survive without either.
That’s us. That’s Norway, Germany, Japan, South Korea, all the developed countries living under the American security umbrella and trading in American dollars. When this goes, we don’t get to keep the parts we liked. We get the aftermath.
So when I talk about empire collapse, I’m not talking about “us” in the sense of Americans. I’m talking about watching the ship sink from one of the lifeboats that’s still tethered to it.
The Six Stages of Going to Hell
Glubb identified six stages every empire goes through. Not five. Not seven. Six. Like clockwork. Like the seasons. Like your hairline.
Stage One: The Age of Pioneers (Outburst)
Some small, hungry nation decides it’s done being ignored. Macedon was nothing. Then Philip and Alexander showed up and 36 years later the Persian Empire was a memory. America was thirteen colonies bitching about tea taxes. Then Washington, Jefferson, Franklin. Suddenly the British Empire is getting its ass kicked by farmers.
Pioneers are lean, mean, and have nothing to lose. They work 16-hour days because the alternative is dying. No welfare state. No safety net. Just dirt, sweat, and the absolute certainty that you build something or you starve.
Stage Two: The Age of Conquests
Now you’ve got momentum. You’re not just surviving. You’re winning. You’re taking territory. You’re spreading your system. You’re making other people learn your language and salute your flag.
This is America from the Louisiana Purchase through World War Two. Manifest destiny, Spanish-American War, kicking ass in two World Wars. Nobody could touch them. They were the biggest, baddest thing on the planet.
Stage Three: The Age of Commerce
You’ve conquered enough. Now it’s time to get rich. Trade routes, shipping lanes, currency dominance. The military is still there, but it exists to protect business interests, not expand territory.
America after World War Two. Bretton Woods. The dollar becomes the world reserve currency. Bases everywhere, but not conquering. Making money. Lots of money. Manufacturing, innovation, patents, intellectual property. They built things and the world bought them.
From the outposts, this looked good. Norway got Marshall Plan money. We got access to American markets. We got to rebuild after the war using American loans. The empire was generous when it was ascendant. That’s how empires work. They spread the wealth around to keep everyone loyal.
Stage Four: The Age of Affluence (High Noon)
This is the peak. Maximum wealth. Maximum power. Maximum confidence. You look around and everything is yours. Your cars are bigger. Your houses are bigger. Your military is bigger. You’re convinced you’re different. You’re special. The rules that applied to all those other empires don’t apply to you.
America in the 1950s through maybe the 1990s. Post-war boom. Suburbs. Two cars. College degrees. Middle class prosperity. They actually believed their own bullshit. They thought they’d figured out how to make it permanent.
The outposts got a taste of this too. Norway struck oil in the North Sea. Suddenly we had money. Welfare state, universal healthcare, free education. We thought we’d built something sustainable. But it was all downstream from American hegemony. Our prosperity required their security umbrella, their markets, their currency dominance.
Stage Five: The Age of Intellect
Wealth creates universities. Universities create intellectuals. Intellectuals ask questions. Philosophy, science, arts, literature all flourish. This should be good, right? More knowledge, more culture, more sophistication.
Except here’s the problem: intellectualism replaces action. Debate replaces decision. Theory replaces practice. You’ve got 47 gender studies professors arguing about microaggressions while the bridges your grandparents built are literally crumbling.
Rome had this phase. The historian and satirist Juvenal, writing around 100-130 CE, captured it perfectly. He watched Roman culture shift from martial virtue to grotesque consumption. His Satires are a sustained scream of rage at what his civilization had become.
Juvenal described how the Roman government screeched to a halt over a giant fish. Emperor Domitian and his entire executive council devoted hours to debating what to do with an unusually large turbot. Not border defense. Not economic policy. A fish. This, to Juvenal, epitomized late Roman culture: obscene materialism, gluttony as status symbol, complete disconnection from anything that mattered.
He also noted how the conquered provinces got infected. Initially, provincials from Armenia and other newly acquired territories were disgusted by Roman decadence. But exposure was corrosive. Within a generation, Armenian youth were carrying Roman degeneracy back to their own capital cities, spreading the cultural rot that would eventually hollow out the empire.
Sound familiar? American cultural exports aren’t just movies and music anymore. They’re exporting gender ideology, therapeutic culture, victim Olympics, all the Stage Five intellectual masturbation that replaces the capacity to actually govern or build or defend.
Stage Six: The Age of Decadence (Midnight)
This is the end. Not the dramatic cinematic end. The slow, pathetic, undeniable end.
Let’s look at three examples separated by a thousand years:
Baghdad, 10th Century CE:
Glubb’s description of the Abbasid Caliphate’s decline: “Contemporary historians deeply deplored the degeneracy of the times in which they lived, emphasizing particularly the indifference to religion, the increasing materialism and the laxity of sexual morals. They lamented also the corruption of the officials of the government and the fact that politicians always seemed to amass large fortunes while they were in office.”
That was written about events from 1,000 years ago. Read it again. It’s indistinguishable from a description of Washington D.C. today.
Rome, 1st-2nd Century CE:
Juvenal again. He documented the shift from citizen virtue to mob dependency. By his time, the Roman populace had been reduced to what he called “bread and circuses.” The government distributed free grain and staged elaborate gladiatorial games to keep people politically compliant.
The people, Juvenal wrote, “curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only: bread and circuses.” They’d traded citizenship for consumption. They no longer cared about governance, about the empire, about anything except their next meal and their next entertainment.
By the late Roman Empire, wealth inequality had exploded. Where patricians in the Roman Republic had 10 or 20 times the wealth of average citizens, late Empire elites possessed up to 200,000 times the wealth of common Romans. The middle collapsed. You were either oligarch or dependent. No in-between.
Universal Basic Income is the modern bread. Netflix is the modern circus. Same trap. Different era.
Ottoman Empire, 16th-18th Century:
After Suleiman the Magnificent died in 1566, the Ottoman Empire entered terminal decline. The sultans stopped governing. They spent their time in harems while viziers and court factions tore the empire apart.
Selim II, who succeeded Suleiman, was known as “Selim the Sot.” He loved wine. One of his first acts as sultan was to conquer Cyprus specifically to gain access to his favorite Cypriot wines. He was described as ugly and rude, surrounded by a bodyguard of 100 dwarfs in gold cloth carrying tiny scimitars.
His successor Murat III wasn’t interested in political affairs at all. Meanwhile, corruption consumed the government. Nepotism replaced meritocracy. The once-elite Janissary corps became a political faction that murdered sultans and installed puppets. Local pashas ruled like warlords while the central authority decayed.
The Ottoman elite assumed their superiority was permanent. They saw no need to adopt European innovations because they believed Ottoman practice was inherently superior. This worked in the 16th century when it was arguably true. By the 18th century, when European powers had industrialized and modernized their militaries, the Ottomans were still operating on assumptions from 200 years prior.
They became the “Sick Man of Europe.” By the 19th century, they were kept alive only because European powers couldn’t agree on how to divide the corpse.
The Pattern:
Decadence doesn’t mean orgies and debauchery, though there’s plenty of that. It means the complete inversion of values. Weakness becomes strength. Discipline becomes oppression. Excellence becomes privilege. Victimhood becomes currency. Consumption replaces production. Feelings replace facts. The system rewards exactly the behaviors that destroy the system.
You’re living in Stage Six. Right now. Today. Whether you’re American, Norwegian, German, Japanese. We’re all in the same collapsing structure. Some of us are just closer to the exits.
Ray Dalio’s Math Problem
If you think Glubb sounds grim, wait until you read Ray Dalio. Guy ran the biggest hedge fund in the world. Made billions predicting patterns other people couldn’t see. In 2021, he wrote “The Changing World Order” after studying 500 years of empire cycles.
His conclusion? The math doesn’t work. And when the math doesn’t work, nothing else matters.
Dalio identified three big cycles that determine whether your empire lives or dies:
The Long-Term Debt Cycle (roughly 100 years)
Empires rise by being productive. They fall by printing money to cover debts they can’t pay. It’s not complicated. You borrow, you print, your currency becomes worthless, your empire collapses.
Rome did it. They debased their silver denarii so many times that by the late Empire, coins that were supposed to be silver were 90% copper. Weimar Germany did it. Every single empire that ever fell did it.
America’s national debt is $34 trillion. That’s more than their entire GDP. They’re not paying that back. They’re not even pretending to pay it back. They’re just printing more money and hoping nobody notices that each dollar is worth less than the last one.
Dalio’s principle: When central banks print a lot of money, buy stocks, gold, and commodities because their value will rise and the value of paper money will fall.
Translation: Your dollars are dying. Act accordingly.
The Internal Order and Disorder Cycle
Societies oscillate between unity and fragmentation. When things are good, people unite around shared values. When things decline, they splinter into factions that hate each other more than they hate external enemies.
Check American Twitter. Half the country thinks the other half is literally evil. Not wrong. Not misguided. Evil. Irredeemable. Subhuman. They’re more divided now than any time since the Civil War.
That’s not hyperbole. That’s data. Political polarization is at historic highs. Trust in institutions is at historic lows. They don’t share a common reality anymore, let alone common values.
From the outposts, we watch this with morbid fascination. Norway still has relatively high social trust. Our political parties disagree but they’re not calling each other fascists and communists daily. But we’re downstream from American culture. Give it five years. The rot spreads.
The External Order and Disorder Cycle
When your empire is strong, you make the rules. When it weakens, someone else does. Right now, China is rising. The dollar’s dominance is slipping. American military is stretched thin. Manufacturing is gone. Infrastructure is third-world.
They’re not the hegemon anymore. They’re the former hegemon desperately pretending they still run the show while everyone else is quietly preparing for the transition.
Dalio studied the Dutch Empire (peaked 1600s), British Empire (peaked 1800s), and American Empire (peaked… when, exactly?). Every single one followed the same arc. Rise, peak, decline, fall. The timeline is shockingly consistent.
The American empire is where Britain was in 1945. Still convinced it’s in charge. Still acting like the empire. But the money, the power, the dominance are already gone. They just haven’t admitted it yet.
From Norway’s perspective, this is terrifying. When Britain fell, their colonies and client states had to scramble. India got independence and immediately partitioned into three countries with millions dead. Other colonies descended into civil wars that lasted decades.
What happens to Norway when America can’t maintain NATO? When the dollar isn’t the reserve currency? When our oil exports get priced in yuan instead of dollars? We’ve built our entire welfare state on the assumption of American hegemony. That assumption has an expiration date.
The Evola Option: Ride the Tiger
So what do you do when the math says your civilization is finished?
Julius Evola, Italian philosopher and arguably history’s most hardcore pessimist, wrote “Ride the Tiger” in 1961. His answer is not what you expect.
Evola believed we’re living in the Kali Yuga, the Hindu concept of the Dark Age. The age of dissolution, where everything traditional, hierarchical, and meaningful collapses into chaos. All the forces previously held in check by higher law and order are now free. And they’re winning.
His point: You cannot stop it. You cannot reverse it. The current is too strong. If you try to fight modernity head-on, you will be overwhelmed and destroyed.
So what’s left?
Ride the tiger.
The metaphor comes from an Eastern story. When a tiger is in a rage, it will destroy everything in its path. You cannot defeat it. But you can climb on its back, hold on tight, and wait until it exhausts itself. Then, when the chaos has burned itself out, you dismount and walk away intact.
Applied to civilization: You cannot restore the traditional order. The structures that supported it are gone. Conservative attempts to “go back” are futile. The 1950s aren’t coming back. Neither are the 1850s. Or the 1250s. That world is dead.
But you can maintain your inner sovereignty while the outer world disintegrates. You can live in modernity without being of modernity. You can engage the chaos without being consumed by it. You preserve the transcendent within while everything external burns.
Evola’s prescription for the “differentiated man” (his term for someone who hasn’t been homogenized by mass culture):
- Maintain inner distance: Don’t identify with the prevailing values. When everyone around you is celebrating decadence, you observe it with detachment. You’re in the system but not of the system.
- Discipline without dogma: You don’t retreat to monasteries or compounds. You live in the modern world. You use its tools. But you do so with absolute self-mastery and zero attachment to its outcomes.
- Apoliteia: Political disengagement. Not because politics doesn’t matter, but because the political realm in a decadent society is irredeemably corrupt. Voting won’t save you. Neither will activism. The structures are already dead.
This sounds bleak. It’s supposed to. Evola wasn’t selling hope. He was offering a survival manual for the end times.
The Clarey Response: Enjoy the Decline
Aaron Clarey took Evola’s philosophy and made it practical. “Enjoy the Decline” (2013) is what happens when an economist looks at the collapse data and decides: fuck it, might as well have fun.
His thesis is simple: America is over. The math doesn’t work. The debt is unpayable. The political system is broken. The culture is degenerate. Decline is inevitable.
Your choice is whether you spend your remaining time miserable about it or whether you adapt and enjoy yourself.
Clarey’s practical advice:
1. Minimize your tax burden
Why work yourself to death funding a system that’s going to collapse anyway? Earn less. Live on less. Give the parasitic government as little as possible. You’re funding your own enslavement. Stop.
2. Embrace minimalism
The system wants you to chase the big house, the luxury car, the consumer lifestyle. That’s the trap. That’s what keeps you on the treadmill. Live small. Live cheap. Own nothing you don’t need. Freedom comes from not needing the system.
3. Work for yourself, not The Man
Corporate America is a soul-destroying machine designed to extract maximum productivity for minimum pay while making you think you’re building something. You’re not. You’re enriching shareholders while your life evaporates. Get out.
Build your own thing. Consulting, freelancing, micro-business. Something where you own your time and your income isn’t capped by some middle manager’s decision about your “market rate.”
4. Don’t marry, don’t have kids (controversial, but he’s being coldly logical)
Marriage in a feminist, divorce-court, family-law system is financial suicide for men. Kids are expensive. The education system will indoctrinate them. The economy won’t provide them jobs. Why would you bring children into the terminal stage of a dying empire?
(I’ll note: I have a kid and I’m fighting to protect that relationship. Clarey’s advice doesn’t apply universally. Context matters. But his point stands: don’t make major life commitments that chain you to a sinking ship unless you’re willing to pay that price.)
5. Enjoy the decline
Go to the bar. Take the motorcycle trip. Dance. Fuck. Travel. Read. Do all the things you’re supposed to do “later” after you’ve “made it.” Later isn’t coming. “Made it” won’t happen. The system is dying. You get one life. Live it now.
Bukowski would’ve understood this completely. He spent 40 years working shit jobs, drinking cheap wine, and writing about how everyone is trapped in the same machine. His escape wasn’t grand revolution. It was just refusing to take the trap seriously. Work your shit job. Get drunk. Write your stories. Laugh at the absurdity. Die on your own terms.
Clarey’s doing the same thing, just with economic data instead of poetry.
Where We Are on the Clock
Let’s map where America sits in both frameworks:
Glubb’s stages:
- Age of Pioneers: 1776-1820 (they built it)
- Age of Conquests: 1820-1945 (they expanded it)
- Age of Commerce: 1945-1990 (they monetized it)
- Age of Affluence: 1950-2000 (they peaked)
- Age of Intellect: 1990-2020 (they theorized while it crumbled)
- Age of Decadence: 2020-? (we’re all watching it die)
Dalio’s cycles:
- Long-term debt: Terminal phase. $34 trillion debt, endless printing, inflation rising.
- Internal disorder: Accelerating. Political violence, institutional collapse, competing realities.
- External disorder: Active. China rising, dollar dominance fading, military overstretch.
We’re not “heading toward” collapse. We’re in it. The fact that you still have electricity and Netflix doesn’t change the underlying math. Rome didn’t fall in a day. It decayed over generations while people living through it kept thinking things would stabilize.
They didn’t.
What To Actually Do
You have three options:
Option 1: Denial (What Most People Choose)
Keep going to work. Keep voting. Keep believing the system will fix itself. Keep playing by rules that are already dead. Maximize your 401k. Plan for retirement. Act like the future will resemble the past.
This is the default. This is what the system wants. Compliant, productive consumers who don’t ask questions.
It will not end well.
Option 2: Evola (For the Philosophically Inclined)
Maintain your inner world while the outer world burns. Discipline, detachment, transcendence. You’re in the chaos but not of the chaos. You observe the decline with the calm of someone who knows the cycle is inevitable and your job is to preserve whatever can be preserved within yourself.
This requires serious mental discipline. Most people aren’t wired for it. But if you are, it’s the way to maintain sanity and dignity while everything else collapses.
Option 3: Clarey (For the Practically Minded)
Minimize your exposure to the dying system. Reduce expenses. Become self-employed. Pay as little tax as legally possible. Own your time. Enjoy your life. Let the empire die around you while you extract as much personal happiness as possible from the remaining time.
This is the most accessible option for normal people. You don’t need to be a philosopher. You just need to do the math and act accordingly.
The Real Question
The empires die. That’s non-negotiable. 250 years, give or take. Glubb studied 11 of them. Dalio studied five centuries. The pattern holds.
The real question isn’t whether America falls. It’s whether you fall with it.
You can spend the next 20 years grinding away in a cubicle, saving for a retirement that probably won’t happen, playing a game where the rules are rigged against you, believing that your hard work will be rewarded by a system that’s already dead.
Or you can look at the math, accept the reality, and decide that your one finite life is more valuable than loyalty to a civilization that peaked before you were born.
Glubb, Dalio, Evola, and Clarey all arrive at the same place from different angles: The party is over. The lights are coming on. The bill is coming due. You can sit there pretending tomorrow will look like yesterday, or you can walk out the door while you still can.
The tiger is already raging. The question is whether you climb on or get trampled.
Personally? I’m buying gold, building skills, minimizing overhead, and planning to be insufferably smug when everyone who called me a pessimist realizes I was just early.
Because here’s the thing about empire collapse: the people who see it coming and prepare accordingly end up fine. Sometimes better than fine. They’re the ones who understand that the chaos is temporary but the skills and assets you build are portable.
The people who don’t see it coming, or worse, who see it and ignore it? They’re the ones standing in bread lines wondering how it all went to shit.
We’re 250 years in. Exactly on schedule. Maybe we’ve got 10 years left. Maybe we’re already in freefall and just haven’t hit the ground yet.
Doesn’t matter. The math is the math. The pattern is the pattern. The empire dies.
Your move is deciding what you do with that information.
Bukowski would’ve raised a glass, written a poem about it, and fucked someone inappropriate. Clarey would’ve calculated his tax savings and booked a flight somewhere warm. Evola would’ve maintained his inner sovereignty while watching it burn.
Me? I’m doing all three.
The boats are burning anyway. Might as well enjoy the warmth.
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