An Empire of Dreams
An Empire of Dreams John Michael Greer There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people. Popular though this notion is, it’s quite mistaken. What history shows, rather, is that the future is always born on the irrational fringes of society, bursting forth among outcasts, dreamers, saints, and fools. It then sweeps inward from there, brushing aside the daydreams of those who thought they could make the world do as they pleased. Not something Rome’s bureaucrats anticipated. Consider the Roman Empire in the days of its power. While its politicians and bureaucrats laid their plans and built their careers on the presupposition that their empire would endure for all imaginable time, a prisoner on a Mediterranean island—exiled for his membership in a despised religious cult—saw the empire racked with wars, famines, and plagues, ravaged by h