There’s a lesson in ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’.

The mark of greatness is not how long a civilization endures but how well it passes on its best qualities to the societies that come after. The great constant of history, he believed, was self-delusion: 

The willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape. 

The decline, has begun….