Gaul Atreides (@gaulatreides)

Glubb lamented this very question about humans avoiding the cycle of empire birth-life-death. He believed as you wrote, that the answer would need to be, first, knowledge of the empire life cycle, and then a willing renunciation of power by the elites. A "drawing-down" of empire into more human-scaled and virtue-encouraging, ethnically homogeneous sub-states. He concluded his paper on the fate of empires with a dopey kumbaya entreaty to love one another. The answer, somehow, would be found in love. I interpret that as him raising the white flag of surrender, because he knew that human nature precluded any possibility of the empire's rulers giving up their power, or of the subjects of the empire willingly giving up their entitlement expectations or their striving for status. We are doomed to repeat the cycle for all time, because we are doomed to be human.