When we link temperament (character) which is precisely what the Judeo-Christian traditions worked to reinforce as powerful cultural technologies, with "intelligence", needed to navigate increasing complexity, the West, spearheaded by late-stage Rome, jettisoned its faith and in doing so, unleashed enormous commercial and creative forces, but at the same time, we left ourselves dangerously vulnerable.

Prosperity and dense urbanisation, all combine to undermine generational temperament needed to maintain civ. Rome's fall actually began long before it was sacked, can be detected hundreds of years earlier. Like a delayed fuse on a bomb, we tend to focus on the explosion rather than the fuse lit centuries earlier. We probably have one or two more generations before it's lights out modern West.

Technology in the form of computers or other machines, can't save us because this tech creates the wealth that's undermining civilised traits, far more than in the case of Rome which never reached the same ind-tech-info economic heights that we did. In the late Republic, mobs rioted when the high price of bread left them hungry. In the modern West, one of the greatest problems of the poor is obesity.

So not only must Western economies collapse, but the collapse is likely to be much faster than was the case for Rome. There will also be political changes. Democratic gov't depends on loyalty to impersonal institutions such as parliaments, rule of law and electoral systems. All of these in turn, rest on how children particularly are raised (or primed epigenetically), which is plunging fast.

The Trump era is an ominous sign of things to come. Trump was brought to power at least in part, by an angry underclass, their economic prospects shrinking and despised by an educated and wealthy "luxury-class" elite. For many of them support for a person like Trump, had higher value than support for the principles of liberal democracy. That is why most Republican voters have come to believe that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ and many approved the march on Congress in early 2021. Though at an early stage in 21st century America, it is the same change that led to the collapse of the Roman Republic in the first century BC. America has very few options remaining but to turn inwards to do battle as it decays. Externally, it's going to come up against combining might of Russia/China et al. No way to go but down.

Events move much faster today than they did in the past.