We just saw how renormalised communication clusters scale from family to empire. Rome provides history’s cleanest test-case of that scaling logic, because its infrastructure, military, and religion each tried to keep internal information flow faster than external shocks. What follows threads every Roman episode back to that single information-processing premise.

5.1 Why Rome? — Nature vs Nurture

Prior to the industrialisation of Europe Rome was the richest civilisation to ever exist. All of this done without an engine. One of the great question of the history of the world—How?

From an information-theoretic perspective, Rome had a more independent processing system than their rivals, which made it such a unique society. They produced remarkable individuals. While Carthage could only produce one Hannibal, Rome’s democratic system allowed for the rise of many concurrent great people, giving it a superior edge in information processing. “Independent processing system” means the Senate, assemblies, and legions could compute problems in parallel—multiple generals, jurists, engineers all iterating at once—whereas monarchic Carthage bottlenecked through a narrower decision channel.

We often debate “nature vs nurture” because, within a given society, most of us share the same nurture; what varies is our individual nature (genes). Across history, however, civilisations rise and fall in different places and times, showing that culture (collective nurture) dominates genetics. If raw genes ruled, the same peoples would always lead. Rome’s ascent, therefore, is best explained by its adaptive civic culture—not some superior DNA.

5.2 Stoic values — To despise fortune

Roman culture is unique in the history of the world. The fundamental collective unit of society within the Roman system was the family, and the fundamental unit of that group is the individual. In Rome, people were known by their family name and had to act according to the behavior associated with their names. Brutus murdered Caesar because, once upon a time, his ancestor was the one who killed Rome’s last tyrant. The Romans, like many previous people, had an ancestor room which dictated the actions that a family member had to adhere to.

Family cults kept memory-loops tight, making reputation an inter-generational checksum on behaviour—an information safeguard against drift.

The competition between people was a competition between their gods. Wernher von Braun, the head of NASA and a former Nazi, was instrumental in the human journey to space. By contrast, the Rastafarians were never going to launch such an endeavor. Why go anywhere when you’re already high? The disciples of Haile Selassie (Jah Rasta Farheigh) were also less likely to commit a holocaust.

Stoicism, fundamentally, is a pagan ideology. While Roman mythology paralleled Greek mythology, the emphasis on fortune is fundamentally a Roman concept. Fortune represents your location in the realm of possibilities: where you are out of all the places you could possibly be. To despise fortune is to despise variance or randomness because what fortune gives you, it can also take away. Deus Ex Machina, in information-theoretic terms, the intervention by the gods is the explanation given to the unpredictable. If the unpredictable turns in your favor, it’s considered fortune. If not, it’s deemed misfortune.Despising fortune equals minimising variance; Rome’s engineering obsession (straight roads, aqueduct gradients) is a physical analogue of that cultural risk-aversion.

5.3 Anarcho-Capitalism — Theory of the firm

Following Mises’ work, Hayek tried to shift the symbolic system used by economics onto cybernetics. However, the difference between cybernetics and the rest of information theory comes down to theory versus practice. Cybernetics is applied information theory, the application of an information system onto robotics. Nonetheless, Hayek introduced the idea of the firm as an information processor.

Capitalism dominates other forms of social organisations. Due to the information processing of the price system allows for a decentralisation of human action onto a local scale. Thereby outperforming other top down forms of information processing.

Roman villa-estates, shipping partnerships, and publicani tax-farming companies were early ‘firms’ whose local optimisation out-performed central decree—an empirical preview of Hayek’s later theory.

5.4 Das Adam Smith Problem | Division of Labour

The division of labor, from a complex system perspective, is akin to that of any organism. The specialization of information processing clusters at one scale allows for greater complexity on the next. Firms are just a subset of this greater general class of system.

A firm is a dedicated network of people (information processors) capable of transforming resources into economic products valued by people over an economic field. The main growth parameter is the difference in cost between the configuration of bits in and out (cost of materials versus selling price) over how many products are sold. Costs depend on how efficiently nature is transformed.

The scale of the firm depends on the level of value generated and the network over which that value is being generated (common market). Both are functions of the level of propagation of physical and symbolizable information. As the cost of transmitting physical information decreases, so does the cost of coordinating human action at a distance.

5.5 Cantillon and Spatial Economics — What is a firm?

As an information processing system, the firm tries to symbolize, transport, and transmit different information at different scales over time. Cantillon’s contribution to economics is the idea of having a unit of land with an information system to process over.

The scale of a firm is dependent on the level of value generated and the network over which that value is generated. As costs per unit mass become equalized across geographical distances, there are more returns to scale, reducing the advantage of local monopolies and resulting in a winner-take-all effect.

5.6 On communicating physical information (its) — Roman roads

All roads lead to Rome because the Romans built them. The difference between the Persian Empire, the Greek Empire, and the Roman Empire has to do with Roman engineering. This is the same reason why Roman capitalism proved so successful. Internal communications were so effective that a common market was possible, thanks to the infrastructure that allowed the transport of goods and services.

The ability to transmit physical information (objects) depends on the ability to transport mass over a specific distance and over a specific time (speed). The relevant stressors to this process are mass and time. Therefore, the ability to transport unit masses over different geography is the relevant technology.

The determinant of this technology is the ability to reduce the friction reality with wheels/roads/boats/railways/airplanes. The ability to overcome inertia and maintain motion of a certain unit mass, is dependent on the ability of humans to create and control force through wind/animals/human body/spontaneous combustion engine/waterwheel/steam-engine/nuclear reactor.

Chapter 7 will show steam and telegraph compressing these same ‘its’ and ‘bits’ to nation-state speed.

5.7 Death to the Republic, Rise of Empire

By the time Rome came into existence, technology had developed to the point where different peoples found themselves within the same sphere of influence. Rome fought a war with a local superpower, Carthage, which ironically, had risen to prominence as traders. Carthage was a colony of the great seafaring Phoenicians. It was through conquering Carthage that Rome began to develop a taste for empire. In nearly a lifetime, Rome rose from a regional power to a hegemonic cluster with their destruction of Carthage. Initially, Rome mobilized its military, as they would argue, “in self-defense”. But as their founding fathers noted, war has a habit of undermining free societies.

5.8 The Roman Military-Industrial Complex

Firstly, Rome’s army was constituted of conscripted landholders. This only allowed for minor conquests. Once Rome hit a certain scale, the rules which defined an agrarian democracy seemed outdated for a world hegemon. The defense of the empire was ill-suited to the nature of the Roman armed forces, which required members to be land-owning farmers. However, as campaigns grew longer, many small farms fell into disrepair and agglomerated into larger estates, thereby depriving Rome of its military.

A Roman general, Gaius Marius, chose to solve the problem not by limiting the size of the estates of wealthy Romans but by doing away with the rule requiring Romans to own land altogether (Lex Agraria 107 BC). Roman soldiers, upon successful conquest, would even be awarded land. This marked the official birth of the Roman military-industrial complex.

Now, the only limit as to how powerful one could be was how much one could conquer. Roman generals could recruit non-land-owning males. This allowed any one individual to accumulate more soldiers than the rest of Rome. This then caused friction with the rest of the Roman Senate. The threat of tyranny was taken seriously in Rome.

By shifting recruitment rules, Marius rewired the army’s feedback loops—loyalty flowed to generals, not to the Senate—an internal-communication coup.

5.9 Roman Political Economy

The political economy of Rome reflected the birth of the military-industrial complex, with large debts incurred by candidates on behalf of their political careers. These political debts would then have to be repaid through wars of aggression once in office. These wars of aggression could then be used as a means of punishing political rivals. Roman politicians, being excluded from prosecution whilst in office, were forced to try to remain in office for as long as possible, thereby perverting the political process. In Rome’s case, Caesar’s refusal to be tried for war crimes led to a civil war, led by Cato the Younger, that would ultimately destroy the republic.

5.10 Human Action under Tyranny

The transition of Rome from republic to empire is also the death of the pure capitalism era of Rome. As when Mises and Rothbard disagreed on whether people under tyranny could engage in human action. Rothbard slightly misunderstood Mises’ theory of human action. Under tyranny, one cannot engage in true human action as they must act fundamentally in accordance with the Emperor.

5.11 Death of empire — Jesus Christ, Enemy of Caesar

The greatest arsonist in the history of the world, and enemy of Caesar, was Jesus of Nazareth. This point is worth repeating, as otherwise, the history of the world does not make sense. Jesus Christ was an enemy of Caesar Augustus, emperor of Rome. He was the greatest threat Rome had ever seen, which is why they killed him.

Jesus destroyed the old gods, except one – the god of his native people, the Jewish God, Yahweh. It is important to understand that Yahweh’s contemporaries were gods like Zeus, Odin, and the like. He’s the lone survivor and the founder of his own type of religion – the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), which are considered as one. These religions are, by far and away, the most populous on earth. The reason why other pagan ideologies still exist is because the Abrahamic religions are limited by a Eurasian sphere of information communication.

From a complex-system perspective, unlike Paganism, Christianity is an expansive religion. In Paganism, the potential nodes do not affect growth, as pagan ideologies are concerned with conserving relevant information through shared myths. The more roads, the more connections between different people, and the more connections to help grow an expansive religion. Christianity could only have arisen in a network Empire such as Rome, where common travel safety was essential for preachers. Additionally, the political infrastructure of the Roman Empire contributed to the propagation of Christianity. Buddhism, too, spread via empire-scale trade routes, but without the monotheistic exclusivity that let Christianity erase pagan gods.

Christianity still had to be based on a sound ideology (Judaism) to propagate through time. However, Christianity was also concerned with expanding itself. What Nietzsche laments as Christian meekness stems from the fact that it needed to be as appealing to as many people as possible. What is the difference between the old and the new gods? Good and evil are their names. It is important to understand that it was the Christians who lost Rome. The more Christian the Empire became, the more its borders shrank. The Christians were the hippies of antiquity.

As Christianity re-wires Europe’s information graph, the Roman road network that once unified an empire collapse.