Ibn Khaldun was a treacherous man. He spent most of his life in the dusk of the Islamic golden age in North Africa in the 14th century.
He spent four years living with the Bedouin in the desert. That’s where he learned the concept of Asabiyyah — group feeling. This tribal organization was the norm. No one can exist in the desert without it. It gave the Bedouins virtue. No man earned more than any other man. Their life was simple unlike the cities, where group feeling was elusive because ask individuals sought luxury.
The desert conditions made this social cohesion possible. Much like the difficult social milieu in the Soviet Union made for very strong friendships. And like suffering in general brings people together. Manufactured suffering for resilience, antifragility and happiness
In Khalduns telling, this Asabbiyah is quite fragile, and is strongest in tribes wandering the desert. As soon as a tribe successfully conquers a city, it has only five generations to survive before its collapse. Here is the generational sequence:
- First ruler is tough hardy man from the desert. The patriarch establishes or conquers a new city
- The son sets up the bureaucracy
- The grandson begins to enjoy the luxury and stops paying attention to politics, distancing himself from the group. Courtiers tell him what he wants to hear.
- The rulers abandon themselves to luxury and lose touch completely.
- The dynasty collapses, pushed out by a new group that is full of Assabiyah.
One failure mode here is cargo culting, where the successor blindly copies what worked before without truly understanding (see Cargo cults - don't copy blindly).
Khaldun observed this pattern in North Africa throughout his time. (This pattern reminds me a lot of Dune by Frank Herbert)
This is a moralistic and pious version of history, far from the chaos of much of reality, which may be better captured by Greek tragedy (see Simon Critchley on Greek Tragedy)
Khaldun ideas are well summarized by a much later formulation: