Transcription
What's up guys? John from Medieval Mindset here. Hope you enjoy this video, and if you want more history content, make sure to go check out my channel and subscribe. Everywhere you look right now, it seems like everyone is just completely freaking out. I mean, all you have to do is scroll through your feed, and it's just this non-stop barrage of existential dread. You've got World War III allegedly on the horizon, a seemingly unavoidable AI apocalypse is going to steal your job, climate change is cooking us all. Basically, the general vibe is that we're living in the absolute end times, and all you can do is hold on for dear life.
I'm not sure if you remember, but during the height of COVID, it felt like every single commercial from every major corporation had to reference these unprecedented times. It was like this mandatory phrase that you heard constantly for at least the entirety of 2020. But once you actually start studying history, you realize something that at least to me is kind of therapeutic. These times aren't unprecedented at all. They're actually pretty precedented. To understand why, I think it would be useful to look at history not as this straight line that's moving towards a cliff, but instead as a massive, heavy, ever-turning wheel.
When the wheel of history inevitably rotates downwards, societies experience what we call a collapse. And to be fair, when you're standing on the spoke that's hurtling down, it genuinely does feel like the end of the world. Believe me, this is not a new phenomenon. People have felt this way pretty often. How many times recently have you heard someone claim that we're living in the new fall of Rome? Sometimes they mean the American empire's collapsing. I've heard other people using the comparison to say that Western civilization as a whole is done for, but basically it all falls under this exact same category. That the unthinkable is actually happening, and everything is falling apart, and we're about to be tossed back into some new dark age. But history actually shows us that the wheel has survived much worse crashes.
Take the late Bronze Age collapse, which happened about 3200 years ago. If you're trying to visualize this on the historical timeline in your head, this was before Sparta or Athens, before ancient Rome. It's around biblical times. Think of like VeggieTales or The Prince of Egypt. With the late Bronze Age, entire empires, and I mean like massive, wealthy, deeply established civilizations that the people of the time thought would last forever, pretty much disappeared overnight. Because this happened so long ago, modern scholars do still argue about the exact sequence of events, but the general consensus is that it was a perfect storm of drought, famine, and systemic economic failure. To make matters worse, it perfectly coincided with violent invasions across the Mediterranean by a mysterious group of raiders known only to history as the Sea Peoples. Because if things aren't already bad enough, you can always count on someone to show up and make them even worse. If you could take a time machine back to 1200 BC and ask an ordinary citizen in the middle of all this what was happening, they would probably tell you with absolute certainty that this was the apocalypse. And yet, if we zoom out and watch the wheel keep turning, we see that out of this seemingly total darkness came the Iron Age, Classical Greece, and the very foundations of our modern world. So, in a way, it was really just a transformation, and a transformation can be extremely scary when you're right in the eye of the storm.
Fast forward about 1700 years to the 5th century AD, and the wheel turns downward again for the one event that looms largest in our collective consciousness, at least in the West: the fall of Rome. In modern movies and just generally in pop culture, we tend to imagine the fall of Rome like a giant light switch being flipped off. For the fellas, we think about the Roman Empire at least five times a day, so this is an especially sore subject. The way we tend to think of it, it's like on Monday Rome was all powerful and glorious, then on Tuesday a barbarian smashed a gate, and then on Wednesday the entire continent was plunged into pitch black misery that took centuries to fix. But history is messy and complicated, and of course it wasn't like that at all. The fall of Rome was actually a remarkably slow, centuries-long shift. A massive, bloated, over-centralized empire gradually dissolved into localized, self-sustaining communities. I know I'm simplifying things a bit here, but that is essentially what happened. Over time, through the Middle Ages, these communities mixed classic Roman civic ideals with a burgeoning Christian humanism, quietly laying the structural groundwork for the modern European nations we live in today. The only reason we historically label this era the Dark Ages is simply because of a lack of surviving paperwork and written documentation from the period, not because there was a lack of human ingenuity, love, or life. So, if you think that we're heading back to the Dark Ages, I'm here to tell you that there are worse places to be.
Deep down, humanity possesses this irrepressible, almost biological urge to organize things and create things and find meaning in the world around us. Yes, AI is everywhere. Yes, your Instagram algorithm is probably half slop. And yes, it is a little scary that ChatGPT can fill out a spreadsheet faster than I can. But, it's not like we're going to stop being who we are. Our core human drive isn't going to magically vanish today or even tomorrow just because things are changing so quickly and everyone is jaded from social media. Of course, you can never predict anything with 100% certainty, but if you look at the historical track record, every single time the wheel hits the bottom of a so-called dark period, there is an inevitable rubber band snapback.
When you hear the word Renaissance, you probably automatically think of the Italian Renaissance, mainly the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles guys: Leonardo, Michelangelo, those rare geniuses who just happened to live in a very specific time and place. But, the truth is, there have been tons of Renaissances throughout history. Actually, it kind of turns out that cultural rebirths are an irresistible human phenomenon. Take the Carolingian Renaissance in the 8th and 9th centuries, right smack dab in the middle of what people mistakenly think of as the bleakest part of the Dark Ages. Led by Charlemagne, everybody's favorite tall, handsome medieval Chad, this was a massive, sweeping revival of literature, art, and architecture, a solid 600 years before DaVinci or Michelangelo. Fun fact: throughout the entire history of the Roman Empire, Latin was always written in these awkward, rigid, blocky capital letters you can still see carved into old stone ruins. It was actually the supposedly backwards Dark Age monks who realized that this was incredibly inefficient. They sat down and invented lowercase letters, spaces between words, and a universally legible writing style that we still use every time we type an email today.
At the same time that the so-called Dark Ages were happening in Europe, the wheel was on the up and up further east with the Islamic Golden Age. I know the internet has made the world feel weirdly small, like we're all experiencing the same things at the same time, everywhere, all at once. But, if you just look back a little, you can see the wheel of history doesn't work this way at all. So, you've got Western Europe in the middle of this messy process of decentralizing. Meanwhile, Baghdad is operating as the intellectual powerhouse of the planet. Muslim scholars at the famous House of Wisdom were locked in compiling the world's collective knowledge. These guys pioneered algebra, they revolutionized medicine, they even carefully preserved the classical Greek philosophy that would eventually travel back to Europe and spark the Italian Renaissance we talked about earlier. Let me just sum it all up simply as an Instagram caption: pressure creates diamonds. These chaotic, terrifying historical periods that feel so insane when you're in the eye of the storm are actually the exact structural mechanisms that clear out the dead weight and fertilize the soil for something new. And the cool part is that something new is usually vibrant, unprecedented intellectual growth.
All right, so now we know that the big wheel in the sky is going to keep on turning. But, I don't know if that's always the most comforting thought, especially when you're lying in bed at night staring at the ceiling thinking about AI and drone warfare and every embarrassing thing you've ever said or done. So, what about those anxieties? Right now, one of the biggest, most alarming stories in the news is the global trend of declining birth rates. You constantly see talking heads and economists warning us about a looming demographic collapse. It's kind of the perfect headline to get clicks. There's at least a dozen articles coming out every day, and every one of them is so clickable because this idea takes the wheel and makes it human. It's like the be-all end-all of our collective apocalyptic anxiety. It makes you want to throw your hands up in the air and say, "Okay, great. Not only are the AI robot overlords taking our jobs, and not only is the climate ruined, but now humanity itself is literally going extinct."
If you think this is a unique modern crisis, I have great news for you. It's a rerun. That's right, the human herd has thinned out plenty of times throughout history. Basically, whenever a civilization hits a peak of wealth and luxury and technological advancement and urbanization, their birth rates almost always plummet. We can travel back over 2,000 years to ancient Greece to see the exact same thing play out. Contemporary thinkers looked around and came to the same sudden realization that modern demographic experts are having today, which is, uh, "Hey, is anybody else noticing that there are way less kids running around?" The Greek historian Polybius wrote about this cultural phenomenon in the 2nd century BC, and his words sound pretty much identical to these modern demographic crisis op-eds. He wrote, "In our time, the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and in general decrease of the population. For as men have fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry."
So, to Polybius thousands of years ago, he's seeing the same problem we're seeing now, and the conclusion he comes to is that it's because people have gotten too soft. Modern experts are kind of saying something similar. They tend to blame low birth rates on smartphones, toxic individual culture, or sometimes moral decay. But, the reality then was the same as it is now. In highly developed, expensive urban environments, people realize that children cost a fortune, and having fewer of them allows parents to maintain a higher standard of living. Rent is expensive, groceries are expensive, taking a trip to Disneyland isn't as affordable as it used to be. Companies give less time off to new parents, daycare is expensive. These things all add up. If you stop a young person on the street of pretty much any major city in the world today and ask them why they aren't having kids, I would bet anything that the very first reason they will give you is purely financial.
Obviously, there are big systemic issues that have to be fixed here, but there have been big systemic issues before and they've been fixed. The historical wheel has spun this way many times and society didn't end. Oh, and by the way, you should know that history shows us that sometimes there's a massive silver lining to population decline. Whenever populations level off or decrease, we tend to enter what historians call the golden age individual. That's not to say we shouldn't care about declining birth rates or that there aren't factors here that are worth being alarmed about, but it's worth stepping back to see the full picture.
Think about the Black Death in late medieval Europe, which you probably remember from high school history class or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A massive portion of the population died within a pretty condensed window of time. It was traumatic, to say the least, but immediately afterward, Europe was left with vast fields of crops and a severe shortage of peasants to harvest them. Suddenly, the surviving peasants held all the leverage. No longer were they these interchangeable, disposable cogs in some feudal machine. The nobility desperately needed them, which meant the peasants could roll out a whole list of demands, basically summed up as more rights for the peasantry. The ruling class fought back tooth and nail, of course, but the economic reality couldn't be stopped. It broke the back of feudalism and fundamentally elevated the economic value of a single human life.
Now, I know what you're probably thinking: that's not going to happen this time because as our population declines, AI and automation will just step in to replace the missing human workers. And honestly, yeah, probably. But historically, whenever labor gets expensive and scarce, society is forced to innovate. What that innovation ultimately looks like depends entirely on the value we choose to place on human expression and human dignity. It actually kind of sounds less like an apocalypse and more like the catalyst for a brand new renaissance. Statistically, I think there's a decent chance that someone watching this could be the next Da Vinci, so get that sketch pad out.
Anyway, if history is just this continuous cycle of ups and downs, why are we so completely obsessed with the idea that our generation is going to see it all fall apart once and for all? It's because deep down there is a strange narcissistic comfort in believing that we are important enough to witness the end of the world. Every generation secretly wants to be the main character of history, and this hasn't changed much throughout our ancestral past. Let's just look at the year 1000 AD. In the decades leading up to the turn of the millennium, Western Europe was gripped by an absolute apocalyptic terror that sounds weirdly similar to what you'll see if you scroll Tik Tok for long enough now. People were completely convinced that Jesus was returning and the world would end on January 1st, 1000. To be fair, this did kind of make sense. There had been biblical and non-biblical prophecies about the millennial reign of Christ, plus it was a big year. You can't really blame them for thinking this way. People abandoned their farms, they gave away their life savings, some of them fled into the mountains to pray. It's important to note here that not everyone did this, or even the majority. It was more like a loud minority, which again is exactly what you're seeing on Tik Tok or Instagram. Most of the world was too busy with the concerns of day-to-day life to be worried about the apocalypse, although you can imagine that if a bunch of guys from your village were freaking out about it, maybe you would start to get a little bit concerned. Even the most highly educated church leaders of the era basically just shrugged and said, "Yeah, this might be the end. We have no clue. Good luck." Then January 1st, 1001 came, the sun rose, and everyone awkwardly had to hike back down the mountain and go back to work.
This isn't just a Western phenomenon, either. It's deeply embedded in human psychology across the globe. Take the Aztecs. Every 52 years, their calendar completed a full cycle, and they believed that if they didn't perform the proper rituals, the sun would literally never rise again, and the world would be consumed by eternal darkness. So, every 52 years, an entire empire would completely extinguish every single fire, smash all of their household pottery, destroy their personal belongings, and wait in silence for the dawn. And then, the sun would rise, and everyone had to awkwardly clean up their smashed kitchens and go right back to work.
So, I think at this point we can safely conclude that apocalyptic anxiety is a permanent feature of human software, not an objective reflection of external reality. So, the next time you're doom scrolling at 2:00 a.m. and reading a bunch of headlines about this crisis or that crisis, maybe just take a deep breath and remember the wheel. This has all happened before. The world has survived 100% of its predicted apocalypses so far. The planet is going to keep spinning, and chances are catastrophically high that you are still going to have to awkwardly go to work tomorrow. But, realizing the world isn't actually ending shouldn't make us passive or cynical. In fact, I think it means the exact opposite. If the world isn't going to conveniently blow up and bail us out of our problems, it means we actually have to take our problems seriously. It means we have to stick around and do the hard work of building a better future. The wheel is going to keep turning no matter what. But, a society that can change its perspective is a society that can grab the wheel and steer it towards something better.
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