Social Issues: Can Civilization Collapse?

The average schoolchild in the Western world, at some point in the curriculum, learns about the fall of the Roman Empire. It was a civilization the like of which the world had never seen--of immense power and geographic spread, unconquerable, all-encompassing. Yet the time came when it collapsed and was no more.

The image of a once invincible empire disintegrating into dust is one that unnerves us when we think in terms of our own sophisticated ascendant Western culture and the social issues that go along with our intricate civilization. After all, we are told that democracy and the capitalist system have triumphed and that the evolution of economics has reached its pinnacle.

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