When Time Becomes Drift (5000 years of what?)
Baghdad was once the capital of reason.
During the Abbasid period, it hosted the House of Wisdom—a city-wide laboratory of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy.
Algebra, algorithms, and much of what later powered Western science came from that exchange.
Then the flow stopped.
Ideas that had been open to testing and debate became subject to decree.
Mathematics was recast as a threat; curiosity, as heresy.
In the span of a few generations, the same culture that invented algebra decided that numbers were the devil’s work.
Choice, Not Just Circumstance
It’s easy to explain decline as the fault of invaders or colonizers, but history shows another layer:
societal choices that narrow the range of possibility.
Japan nearly froze its own development when it outlawed firearms to preserve the samurai order.
China closed itself off from the world’s trade routes in the 1500s to protect imperial control.
Baghdad’s scholars were silenced in the name of purity.
In each case, the limitation wasn’t resources; it was ideology.
When a culture prioritizes stability over curiosity, time stops compounding.
It becomes drift.
Even today, the same dynamic repeats.
Civilizations that cling to doctrine—religious, political, or economic—slow themselves under the weight of their own certainty.
They forfeit the first-mover advantage that once made them great.
Yes, exploitation and colonization matter.
But so do the decisions made after contact:
whether to adapt or to retreat,
to rebuild or to blame.
History rewards systems that stay open to correction.
It punishes those that fear revision.
The Lesson of Drift
If time truly compounded by itself, the oldest civilizations would be the most advanced.
They’re not.
Only a handful of ancient institutions (listed companies) survive, and most are remembered as legacy, not frontier.
Progress isn’t age—it’s alignment with time’s direction.
Those who move with it advance.
Those who resist it, drift.