We live in a society right now in which the slavery to materialism and sin is overwhelming. A natural corrective force will likely never come. The State is the best tool we have to return society to its proper course. People need discipline and it's not coming from family, Church, State, community, or nature right now. What will fill the void? I would prefer the Church and State to return to their old functions, but we can't wait around for that to happen on its own. Souls are damned and society slips more and more every second we wait for the Deus Ex Machina to come and save us.

Ergo, authoritarianism.

Stoicism is Greek

Rome hardly developed philosophy actually

By comparison at least

Whoops lol

I've undermined my ethos. Disregard all that I've said.

Lol

I mean it's not like some established concept of Greek vs Roman freedom, just a general idea of how Greeks and Romans viewed freedom when we look at their culture

TFW you learn Rome was actually shit compared to Greece.

pagan rome, that is

Not necessarily

They were better at some things and worse at others

Better at banding people together into an identity, better at war, better at Mass governance and management

Worse at philosophy, worse at morality,

Not very good on the eros vs agape distinction tho

Which is arguably one of the reasons why the fell, and one of the reasons why modern society is following suit

Worse at technology too

Yea

A lot worse actually

They were excellent architects and builders

And good at producing solid goods

But not great at innovation

They just piggybacked off the Greeks

There is good reason though for this

They didn't have incentive

The top members of society owned masses of slaves, particularly cities used slave labor on farms to provide food for them

Innovation would make them lose those assets

So the rich wouldn't put the money into that

They actually knew about steam engines

Didn't use them cause they had slaves instead

lel

talk about lack of

foresight

Would steam engines even be possible to produce on such a scale that they could compete with slave labor at the time, though?

Idk. Probably for boats yeah

Like warboats. They were already short on people

@Quarantine_Zone yeah but the Aeolipile was treated as just a novelty

It didn't really have a practical use

Although there was a Spaniard who used the aeolipile to create a sidewheel steam engine design for ship propulsion

Yeah, I'm not sure how well known the engine was, but if they were interested in innovation, no doubt they would have looked more into such ideas. We can tell they weren't that interested in general based on their lack of large technological improvements over the course of their history, when compared to Greece.