An Oligarch's Lost Letters: The Age of Decadence
An Oligarch's Perspective on Decadence and Decline.
What follows examines how societies are undone and destroyed from a satirical, reductionist point of view inside the ruling class. The perspective is that of an oligarch shaped by wealth, insulation, and long time horizons, who believes his actions are moral. The concern is not justice or cultural health, but stability, efficiency, and maximum advantage for the oligarch. Nothing described requires malice, cruelty, or conspiracy. These are predictable outcomes of power when it optimizes itself. This is not instruction. It is a frame most people have never considered.
“History is often told as though decadence is the result of a declining empire. I would argue that it is not. It is a natural stage in how the masses think and act. As conditions improve, the masses grow more degenerate, and the ruling class is often blamed for their behavior. In reality, we react to the masses; we do not supply or steer their corruption. We simply respond to their behavior to benefit ourselves. The claim that oligarchs are always at fault, repeated throughout history, is one of the simplest forms of blame obfuscation.
In practice, the populace grows more decadent regardless of what is done. Safety, comfort, and security weaken even the strongest elements of a population, and that weakness compounds across generations. At first, it is subtle, but after three or four generations it becomes visible. These later generations have never known the toil or instability faced by those before them. The most obvious expression of this inherited weakness is decadence and degeneracy. Security is no longer valued because it is assumed. Comfort is no longer appreciated because difficulty is unfamiliar. This loss of the memory of hardship accelerates their own decline. The masses themselves initiate the irreversible decline of their empire. Entitlement expands with each generation, and the signs of weakness become increasingly visible.
For instance, the masses no longer have the discipline to endure discomfort, so discomfort becomes intolerable, which further compounds weakness. As entitlement continues to grow, because they cannot understand the sacrifice required to create such prosperity, they begin to see the necessary actions to correct their society as evil. They regard these actions as so evil that they will allow their civilization to fall and perish rather than change their behavior.
Now these symptoms have been acknowledged by the masses, and yet they still find ways to avoid accountability. We are blamed for their own behaviors. We are blamed for their decadence because we recognize their demands for it. We are blamed for their inability to face discomfort because we provide a safe society. We are blamed for their inability to reason because we supply the history books and shape their education to benefit the masses. We build institutions to improve their minds and teach them reason, yet they still decide to remain ignorant. They constantly decry us while not putting in any effort to improve society.
It is not our fault that the masses misuse our kindness and gifts to create a morally decadent and unstable society. The reality is that they cannot reason. They require guidance from those who can see the future, not just the present. We offer them the means to learn how to reason and provide them with guidance, yet they remain ungrateful and shortsighted. We provide them with so much, and still they blame us for their own shortcomings.
They call us immoral, profit-hungry monsters, when in reality we are simply supplying their own demands while actively attempting to improve them. It makes one wonder whether they do not wish to be improved at all, preferring instead to remain ignorant, angry, and perpetually committed to shifting blame onto everyone but themselves.
We do not force decadence or decline onto societies; we simply follow the demands of the masses. If they wanted an improved society, they would create an improved society, but as history teaches, discomfort is not tolerated once enough time has passed. When that point arrives, we simply supply what is demanded by the populace. We even give them the ability to be guided by our institutions and to see beyond the present. We instill in them the capacity to improve their society. Yet the masses continue to blame us, the ruling class, for issues that are self-inflicted. A society that refuses responsibility will exhaust those willing to manage it. When that happens, it is the society that pays the price.”
This is not a defense of power or oligarchs, nor a dismissal of the responsibility of people within a society. It is a record of how justification and blame shifting exist at every level of human organization, not only in the halls of power or the crowds of democracy. What emerges is not collapse as failure, but collapse as a consequence that no group will claim.