I am unconvinced, both by the comparison of the modern social order to a bicycle and by historical comparisons to Rome.<p>In the first place, economic growth slows down and reverses from time to time. Society doesn't collapse. People paint the Great Depression as having been "saved" by WW2, not as a sequence of events that all fed into each other. In other words, if the Great Depression and subsequent world war <i>wasn't</i> a perfect example of the worst that could possibly happen, I dare you to point out a <i>plausible</i> worse scenario.<p>No, nuclear war doesn't count, even the worst nuclear war imaginable won't be as bad as WW2 was. Nuclear winter is a myth, the particles fall out of the air too quickly, and the inverse square law greatly limits direct damage. Most civilian population centers won't get hit, unless we start another arms race, so we're looking at a few decades at most of economic disruption in the worst possible case.<p>Finally, the Roman Empire was in no way comparable to the current global regime. The political systems seen by Rome were downright primitive compared to our representative democracies, multi-state unions, and trade federations. The Anglosphere is in no way vulnerable to dictatorship, and while Europe was once capable of fascism in the past, the days where a would-be Hitler or Mussolini could whip populations into a murderous frenzy are long gone. The worst that can happen is sovereign devolution AKA Brexit, Grexit, Scottish independence <i>et al</i>.<p>The might of Western hegemony is going to slowly fade away and new regional orders will slowly gain strength. The EU will slowly evolve along those orders and the world will stumble towards a new, multi-polar equilibrium, out of which a new global governing body will emerge, fail, then emerge again.<p>Rome "collapsed" by spreading across Europe, Western civilization will "collapse" by spreading across the globe.