Millenniums, if not centuries, from now, the history will find the past present resembling the lives of people long gone, if there is any surviving civilization at all.

History of human civilizations, unfortunately, was mostly accounts of confrontations and conflicts. Herodotus, the renowned father of history, left us with the narratives of the lives of the ancient Athenians, and the Peloponnesian War.

The great territorial empire of Persia, under the leadership of Xerxes, burnt down Athens but failed to conquer the Greek city-states. Nevertheless, the conquest ended the golden age of Greece.

Hong Kong, at this very moment, feels like it is at the eve of the Peloponnesian War, at the edge of the fatal end. But unlike Athens, Hong Kong does not have any military strength, nor the people of Hong Kong have any plot to overthrow any powers.

Hong Kong, however, is a center of gravity of struggles between two major ideological forces. Communist China wants to totally transform the city into an example of how central planning can complement a highly sophisticated economy. Communist China believes it can defy the “End of History” hypothesis, put forward by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the great 74 year Soviet’s social experiment.

Liberal democracies, on the other hand, want Hong Kong to be an example of how Chinese can live prosperously as a free society. Communist China’s centralized model and the liberal democracies’ vision of peacefully coexisting sovereigns are incompatible. Only one shall prevail at the end.

There are too many accounts of how civilizations regress into barbaric states, and raw power dictates who get what and how much. We have forgotten how fragile civilizations are and how rare it is for peace to prevail for so long.

We came all the way from the earliest form of humanoid existence, evolving into city dwellers, and finally, we are looking into interstellar migration. Civilization progresses when a small minority of dissenting voices even only in the heads of misfits that stray from the status quo can whisper. Progress stops when there are no more contrarians. Contrarians cease to exist when a society allows only one voice to be heard.

Totalitarian regimes control the general populace by terror. The fear does not reside only in the minds of a few oppositions, but is also shared by the whole. Superfluous people who cease thinking for themselves pave the way for total centralized thought control.

We live in a progressing free society and the cost we pay is to tolerate different ideologies. Machiavellians see the differences as opportunities for divide and rule. But history shows us institutions can only transcend time and space when it can reconcile differences amongst its members by leaving the individuals to sort out the differences peacefully.

“Government is best which governs least,” as the famous quote from Henry David Thoreau goes. A government is not absent when it refrains from using its powers. On the contrary, there are only very few things on which a government should focus. At different levels of governments, there are different visions, hence consensus, of how a society should be structured. A government powerful enough to give anything to anyone is also powerful enough to take away everything from everyone.

Power corrupts when there is an absence of checks and balances. An asymmetrically powerful centralized government will inevitably resort to use of force to quell dissenting voices. Oftentimes, dissenting voices might simply be the majority of disjointed interests. The resources put in place to solidify the control are wastage. The burden of control will eventually bring down institutions, no matter how powerful they were.

The decline of the Greek city-states, the Achaemenid Empire, the Macedonian Kingdom, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire, and many more that emerged and vanished in the path of history, shared one common theme – power overreaching. Downfall of any political institution always begins with arrogance and envy, hence cult of power worshippers. The lust for powers will end up with the fractures, and bring down an empire from within.

The greatness of a nation is not measured by how much land, how many people or wealth it once commanded, for all these shall pass.

Even if history does not have a definite end, great nations progress by conquering calamities of the nature, not other free people. A nation can never rise to greatness by thought manipulations and controls of free people and putting them in terror. A nation cannot be great if its people are not free, resilient, and sometimes rebellious to the status quo.


We are standing at the crossroad of history. One path will lead us to a world where powers are unchecked, corruptions are rampant, and the end is certain. As to the other one, although it does not promise to move heaven and earth, it shall let us, the free people, to discover the way forward. Either way, we are the people who write the history, even though we do not write the law. In the end, the legacy of any nation shall be told by the people, the many voices that recount their lives, failures, and accomplishments.

(Simon Lee is a Hong Kong-based columnist for Apple Daily.)

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