What Are Empires Advantageous Or Powerful?

1616 Words4 Pages

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -Unknown” In order to answer the question of whether empires have been advantageous or disadvantageous to those who lived in them, it’s important to understand that this question is a product of another question, which is if stability is worth sacrificing freedom. While empires provided, in most cases, great stability through their city planning, safety, and warriors, at a certain point its people lost personal freedoms through imperial intermediaries, intersections, and repertoires of power, and this structure and power was ultimately, in my opinion, more disadvantageous to the people living in the empire.
Empires provided great stability for its people and …show more content…

Empires can, and did, take this stability and use it toward their advantage, having full power over the people to make a utopian society and essentially entrap them. Imperial intermediaries were the “middle men” and agents of the state who had the power to maintain order and ensure the cooperation of the people within each city. They could be the IRS, government, or local agents such as elites, marginal people, transplanted people, etc. There was the idea that “we build things that build us” and a constant policing of each other, as citizens, to keep social norms and the status quo under wraps. Different empires were governed in different ways, but each empire had an abuse of power, a way to make the people think that there was no reason to leave the city and keep them essentially brainwashed and unable to revolt. The Roman Empire had identical, precise city lines at 90 degree angles, but these parameters almost boxed them into their own inescapable future and prevented them from “needing” to go beyond the city lines. The Mongol Empire, by contrast, was tolerant of many religions, of this there is no doubt. But this can not be attributed as a benefit to their leadership because this type of view had been in place for centuries (and even millennia, depending on how far back you wish to go) before the Mongols were ever conceived of. The reason for this, is that unlike most Western religions which, were monotheistic in nature (after paganism began to fall apart in the Roman empire), the predominant Eastern religions since the beginnings were always polytheistic, pantheistic or agnostic. Monotheistic religions maintained the status of minorities even after they travelled to the East, and so because no religions explicitly contradicted each other, but rather complimented each other, they lived fairly peacefully (with but a few exceptions) together. This was the culture of tolerance the

Open Document