Puff the Magic Dragon and the Holy Roman Empire
Time-warps
'Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honahlee'
Along the winding road to Hana, on Maui, there once lived an encampment of time-warp hippies. The eternally adolescent girls wore long flowing dresses and flowers in their hair, the boys long flowing hair and paisley shirts. For decades they endeavored to live exactly as they had done in the 1960s, sharing everything communally, singing the same songs, selling beads and knicknacks to passing tourists, and pretty much ignoring everything that came afterward. It was not a bad choice, given what followed.
Bryce's History of the Holy Roman Empire tells the story of a Europe that lived off the fading dream of antiquity for a thousand years. Even after the Protestant Reformation ended the Universal Church -- a huge earthquake of belief -- the Empire continued nominating and electing Emperors, and so circumscribing their authority that they were reduced to empty vessels with a palatial residence and a coat of arms. This arrangement held for several hundred years after the congruence of the earthly and spiritual realms, which was the basis of dual Papal and Imperial governance, had split apart. But like (to take a later New-World example) Wile E Coyote who, chasing the road runner, had run off a cliff but didn't realize it, mere belief kept the Empire afloat with no material means of support -- no army, no common religion, no administrative apparatus, no legitimacy. The lack of an alternative, the certain knowledge by the nobility that chaos would ensue from any change, or rather recognition of the change that had in fact long since occurred, and lacking the wit or imagination to devise a new system of allegiance -- this is what kept the Holy Roman Empire going long past its decline and well into its doddering old age, until it finally collapsed into the chaos of world war.
Europe today is still seeking the sequel. Having failed with the League of Nations, it acquiesced in an ancient purification ritual with modern techniques adapted to the slaughter of millions, emerging from this self-destructive orgy to found a new empire on -- money. Only in the lunatic fantasies of economic determinists could an international order based on nothing more than a common currency generate the loyalty and attachment of its subjects. The European Community launched with such fanfare in part to counter American influence ran aground on the American-led real-estate scam which imploded in 2007, and the disastrous open-borders immigration flows that EU leaders believed would support their welfare states. The EC, like the Holy Roman Empire, persists on blind faith that it has conquered nationalism. In fact, it was internationalist Reich-expansion, not nationalism, that caused World War II. Yet the EC in its mindless quest for legitimacy forswears any procedure for popular consent while expunging nationality, culture, religion, and human nature itself from its monstrous experiment. Act One of the predictable sequel occurred with the departure of the United Kingdom.
Given enough time, the experiences of one's youth form the myths of the next several generations. A Holy Roman Empire-like tendency to live off the squeezed-out symbols of the past pervades today's officialdom. Thus Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkin referred to that city's riots, arson, and downtown-blockade in 2020 as 'a summer of love'. Durkin, born in 1958, would have been nine years old during the convergence of hippie 'flower children' on once-beautiful San Francisco in the summer of 1967. While such a tender age was then too young to have experienced it directly, Durkin apparently absorbed enough of the ethos to consider it a New-Age touchstone. That the 'summer of love' featured violence, destruction of local businesses, and attacks on courthouses and police stations did not appear to bother Ms Durkin at all. It was enough for her to connect that storied event from her pre-pubescent past to the 2020 riots to sanctify them for the masses.
The extraordinary longevity of the Holy Roman Empire shows that societies can live off their past glory long past the time that tradition has become dysfunctional. Present-day examples abound: Keynesian economics, globalism, international aid programs, free trade, open-borders, democratization, racial quotas and preferences, with proliferating sexual identities as add-ons, psycho-analysis, feminism, renewable energy, universal college education,... the list goes on. These failed ideologies persist each with its own entrenched bureaucracy and lock on taxes, barricaded against all evidence and discussion of their defects. Witnessing these reveals how a millennium of Holy Roman Emperors evoked Caesar and Constantine, Christ and Saint Peter, to continue their progressively diminished succession.
In Bryce's History, it appears that the Holy Roman Empire collapsed from its own de-legitimization of its ruling idea. When the Church over-stepped its remit and extended its hegemony from the Spiritual to the Temporal realm, both the Universal Church and the Holy Roman Empire lost their reason for being -- so they ceased to exist as such. (This took about 400 years, from the 11th to the 15th century -- things were slower then.) Soviet Communism, similarly, collapsed when its ideology was revealed as nothing but self-serving State domination.
The current self-serving State claims legitimacy on the basis of Globalism and expertise superior to that of common-sense judgment. The Globalist ideology deprecates national culture, seeks unfettered trade and cheap labor, asserts that where in the world things are made doesn't matter, and posits an urgent need for planetary management. Evidence is offered in the form of black-box computer models unintelligible to ordinary people, which conclusions are pronounced superior to independent judgment. All of these claims and assertions have been discredited.
Like the late-stage Holy Roman Empire, a State that has no basis for its existence can only collapse. It is not only to save their own careers, and stay out of jail, that the denizens of the self-serving State have put themselves above public consent. They also believe they have a 'higher calling' than free choice exercised through constitutional electoral procedure.