In the year 861, caliph Mutawakkil was murdered by his own bodyguards.
His assassins were Turkish mercenaries—soldiers the empire had hired to protect it, but who worked out somewhere along the way that they were stronger than the guy paying them.
They installed a military dictatorship that lasted about thirty years, and by the time it was done, the empire had cracked apart. The caliphate that had ruled from Spain to the edge of India shrank until it barely controlled the city of Baghdad.
Baghdad, up till then, had been the greatest city on earth.
Less than a century earlier, it had opened the world's first free public hospitals. Its libraries and universities were the envy of every civilization that knew about them. Persians and Turks and Arabs and Greeks and Africans passed each other in its streets. It was rich, cosmopolitan, and brilliant, and it had been that way for so long that nobody living there could remember it being anything else.
We know what its last decades felt like because the people who lived through them wrote it down, and thankfully many of their journals survive.
They complained, mostly, about the culture. About who their society had decided to worship. The biggest celebrities in Baghdad were pop musicians—singers who played a stringed instrument that resembled a guitar and performed songs that kept getting more explicit, until language that would've been unthinkable a generation earlier was just ordinary. The historians noted the enormous power these entertainers had over the young especially. The caliphs occasionally banned them from the city, but they always returned.
Back, as they say, by popular demand.
The same writers complained that people had stopped caring much about religion, and that everyone seemed obsessed with money. They complained, bitterly and repeatedly, about the politicians. Men, they said, who went into government and came out rich so reliably and so openly that after a while it wasn't even a scandal anymore.
That was Baghdad, around the year 950, writing its own obituary without even knowing it.
Those journals sat mostly undisturbed for a thousand years, until a British army officer named Sir John Glubb went looking for them.
Glubb had spent his career in the Middle East, and spent his retirement on a strange project. He studied dead empires—Assyria, Persia, Rome, the Arab caliphate, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, and even his own British Empire. He read what their citizens wrote in the final chapters. He was hunting for one specific thing: whether the great powers of history had anything in common at the moment they began to die.
They did.
The complaints in those Baghdad journals—the celebrity worship, the money-obsession, the cynicism about leaders who all seemed to be on the take—Glubb found the same notes, almost word for word, in the twilight of one empire after another, across three thousand years and every religion and form of government you can name. An age of pioneers hardens into an age of conquest, then softens into an age of commerce, then of affluence, then of intellect, and finally decadence. The people at the end are always comfortable, always distracted, always a little contemptuous of the very thing that made them comfortable in the first place.
Basically the “hard times, strong men” circle.
Glubb measured how long the whole arc took, start to finish, for each empire he studied.
The average worked out to about 250 years. Roughly ten generations. He ran it across the whole span of recorded history and the figure held so steadily it unnerved him. He wrote that he wasn't trying to prove anything, only reporting what the record showed. And what it showed was 250 years.
The United States declared independence in 1776.
I suspect you don’t need access to anyone’s journal to know what a lot of people are probably writing about.
But there's a fact in Glubb's research that changes the whole picture, and almost nobody who quotes the scary 250-year number ever mentions it.
The empires didn't die from the outside.
We tend to imagine collapse as an army at the gates—barbarians, invaders, some stronger enemy—but that was almost always the final scene, not the cause. Mutawakkil's mercenaries didn't build a hollow empire; they just moved into one that was already hollow. Over and over, Glubb found the same sequence: the civilization quit on itself first, from the inside, and then the outside threat simply walked through a door that was already standing open.
And when he looked at what rotted first, it was never the army or the treasury. It was the memory.
Each of these societies gradually lost the ability to explain itself to the people who were about to inherit it. The founders knew what they'd built and what it cost because they'd paid the bill personally. Ten comfortable generations later, their descendants were living inside the achievement with no real idea how it got there, and worse, why it was worth keeping. Nobody conquered the knowledge out of them, it just didn't get handed down for so many generations that eventually there was no one left who could say why any of it mattered.
Recently, someone asked a large sample of Americans what the 250th anniversary actually commemorates. Almost half couldn't say. Among the youngest adults—the ones who'll be running the country at its 300th birthday (if we get there) more than six in ten couldn't answer. A big share of that same group now says it would prefer socialism to the free enterprise that built essentially everything they own.
A prosperous people who inherited something extraordinary, worshipping their entertainers, sour on their institutions, and increasingly unable to say what their own civilization is or why it's worth defending.
It’s deja vu in the worst way.
The historians of Baghdad saw it happening in real time, but it didn't save them because observing the problem, even writing it down, doesn’t do any good. If the history and meaning aren’t being actively handed down, then eventually there’s no one left to teach because there’s no audience who cares to listen.
The United States just reached the age at which the story usually ends.
But I don't believe the number is fate, and Glubb didn't either.
The empires that beat the odds were the ones that noticed the pattern early enough to do the one thing all the others didn’t: sit their children down and tell them, before it was too late, exactly what they'd been given and exactly what it was worth.
The good news is that we don’t need anyone else to do that for us. That work is done on long car rides and around kitchen tables by parents just like you.
We’ve spent the last decade creating resources to make your civilization-saving work a little easier.
Thanks for letting us help.
— Connor
