I was struggling with insomnia when I had a thought about why empires end, historically.

What drives great nations, the driving force of empires is the power of new ideas. The energy it gives the populace. This is a massive generalization but I like it; it feels true. You think about the Roman Empire, or the British Raj, and there were powerful ideas and concepts that worked underneath the great power politics. Ideas that fueled the imaginations and pushed the citizens to conquer, to strive. To export their kind of world out onto the world. They belonged to something bigger than themselves, something that mattered, that was making the world better.

But inevitably, it seems, great powers succumb to the lure of ruthlessness in managing their kingdoms, their empires. They grow jaded and crush insurrections. They fight colonial wars. The Romans massacred tribes, the British fought wars to sell Opium to the Chinese and massacred nonviolent Indians, we use drone strikes and bombs that cost more than a soldier makes in a lifetime to kill people we really don’t even know, exactly, who they are. We are willing to kill for our ideals, but not die for them, and that is the slippery slope that ends in the graveyard of empires.

Ruthlessness is the destroyer–not of our enemies, but of ourselves. It destroys that energy, because you can’t wholeheartedly support something you wonder might be in the wrong. Something that kills innocents. Ruthlessness destroys our own energies, our own initiative and drive, and thus decays the empire from the inside.