by Jason Michael McCann Twitter @Jeggit

Back in the day, the Engineering students at Trinity College had an interestingly named textbook on their reading list, Salvadori and Levy’s Why Buildings Fall Down (1992). The basic mechanics of structural failure and collapse – as I took from the relevant chapters – are quite simple, even Newtonian in their elegance.

Essentially, manmade constructions stand in defiance of gravity; the downward forces of their mass, coupled with the pull of the earth’s gravity, act to keep good structures sound and standing. Their successful defiance of the law of universal gravitation – or, as the case may be, their successful use of it – depends on a complex relationship of balanced forces spread across the supporting elements of the building. While some parts of a building may be stripped away without causing serious damage, there are key supporting features in every structure without which the integrity of the whole is compromised; leading to weakness, strain, and eventual failure – the collapse of the building. This isn’t rocket science. It’s Engineering.

When these are damaged or removed, other parts of the structure are compelled to bear their weight

Empires, nation states, regimes, and ideologies, while not built with steel, bricks, and mortar, are human structures which follow the same laws. Social engineering and state architecture, like London Bridge or the Tower of Babel, can be modified. They can be changed by the removal of certain aesthetic components and by the addition of others, but beneath and behind the superstructure there are indispensable parts of the foundations and the framework or skeleton that cannot be removed without compromising the integrity of the entire edifice. When these are damaged or removed, other parts of the structure are compelled to bear their weight – leading to them exceeding the tolerance levels for which they were designed, leading to weakness, strain, and, without remedial action, to their eventual catastrophic failure.