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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Thanks reaganaut1. It really is rooted in classical civilization -- which is why the leftwads work so hard to bash the products of classical civilization. Having a history of building nation-states (generally not by holding a summit meeting and reaching a consensus) with a central authority (of various kinds) and ensuring a uniform legal code (of various kinds), domestic tranquility (of various kinds), and -- going back to the great riverine civs of very ancient times -- huge food surpluses, has been the path from way way back beyond the beginning of known literacy to right now. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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Thanks for the ping. There are so many intelligent and plausible theories put forth here that I am sort of hesitant to say anything, but here goes.

In antiquity, the fundamentals of wealth would be first, lots of arable land with a water source, thus the riverine civilizations of antiquity. But the Greeks showed a counter-example to this. Name a river in Greece. Or the Minoan civilization. It seems both borrowed a lot of knowledge from Egypt, which had run its course as a great power.

Thus, land and food = leisure time for education and study, leading to knowledge, a permanent asset in exploiting nature. After knowledge reaches a critical point, the civs of the Nile, Tigris/Euphrates and Indus rivers lost their special advantage.

These older civs ran on slave labor. But when a civ uses knowledge as its primary tool, a lot of individual freedom is needed. Technology, of course, is the offspring of knowledge. Thus, the free Greeks defeated the hordes of Persia again and again, both because they were free, and wished to stay that way, and because their military technology was far advanced.

In order to keep freedom alive, it must be codified. The Romans and the Chinese were good at this, and it avoided a lot of conflict. Rome grew too big to defend it own borders, and the public spirit which enlivened it became degenerate hedonism. Mercenary Germanic troops rebeled and helped divide the empire, while huge migrations from central Asia finally took down both the Western and the Eastern Empire. That is what is starting to happen to us today.

So I have first, surplus food, leading to leisure, leading to knowledge, leading to technology. What brings otherwise successful civilizations down? Internal dissoluteness and external invasion. What could prevent this fate, for the US or any advanced tech civilization? A unifying, unyielding ethos and rational laws justly applied. The Founders provided us the basics for this, but warned that such a government was meant only for a moral people.

OK, there's my history in a nutshell.