That said, all societies rise and all appear to eventually fall. It’s equally reasonable to consider that the US/Western Civilization/humanity might actually be nearing a fall.
Do we think that there is going to be a major break from that?
The scariest ingredient as I see it is AI. Overproduction of elites is always a destabilizing factor, and much of the well educated workforce may now turn out to be overproduction.
Let me put the question to you: what metrics do you use to verify whether elite overproduction is happening or not?
Civilizational collapse occurs when society runs afoul of its basic contract and cannot provide its foundational services anymore. That can mean starvation, it also is given e.g. in the situation of elites running low on trust. Leading to social unrest spinning out of control, or former allies refusing to play along with political shenanigans.
In order to evade catastrophic civilizational collapse, you need viable and timely avenues for course-correction or adaptation. Those are presently being blocked by the very elites profiting from the system they bleed dry.
People who lack enough of those req will actively get in the way.
Things like building a house for little Jimmy in it self isn't hard at all. You can also give him some [digital] textbooks, answer his questions and create a position as an apprentice wizard. There is nothing hard about doing that.
Sure, some people will try to get in the way but one unmotivated saboteur vs an army of millions isn't going to change anything.
Sometimes constructive is to preserve and protect. Don't argue with those trying to stop sensible efforts and don't pay them to get out of the way. You put them in cages or otherwise ruin their everything until they get out of the way.
But if you fail to do that and their numbers grow there is no alternative but to wait until they've destroyed enough of the good stuff for them to become miserable enough to change sides. It might take a thousand years but we will build a new glorious civilization and it will sit there waiting for people to stop caring again.
We are of course far over that hill already but destroying everything takes quite a bit of time.
If society decides that it doesn't want science, disease control, or software engineering, and gets rid of the jobs those people were doing up until two years ago, and then calls them "overproduced elites" and tells them to get "real jobs" (when many of their jobs weren't even automated, just abandoned at the cost of their output), that is a political decision.
But not necessarily an explicit one. It may turn out to be the natural path forward and the political decision is then to not do anything to prevent it.
Not as much of a parallel as people tend to think, but the Roman empire fell apart partly because it was based on the theory of constant outward expansion. If your model, say economic, is based on infinite expansion in a finite arena you'll have trouble.
Other Roman influences on the USA include Christianity and to a lesser extent Judaism (since the major US versions come out of post-Roman Judaism.)
The European Renaissance and the Enlightenment both used Roman and Greek ideas as inspiration. You can see this in early US architecture, and the models for some institutions such as the Senate. Some of this was ironically as a revolt against English institutions (even though England and Wales were successors of a Roman province).
The early USA's language(s) and Judaeo-Christian heritage are partly products of the Roman Empire. (Spanish most definitely is, and French is. English is heavily influenced by French and Latin.)
By this logic, Turkey is a continuation of the Roman Empire too. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_claim_to_Roman_success...
At what point does something stop being a continuation of something else?
Byzantium was certainly a continuation of Rome and its subjects called themselves Romans. It all depends on whether you consider the Ottoman Empire to be a continuation of Byzantium or not (there are arguments both ways).
Taking a semi-opinionated swag, the core went from Rome to Constantinople, then Venice, then London.
Looking from a Finnish perspective, Sweden and Estonia are culturally closest to us, but Russia is also pretty close. Britain and France already feel less familiar, not to speak of something like Italy or the US.
It's also true that as the scope of power humanity has over itself and its environment, it equally manages to create ever larger crises, and it seems like we truly are reaching the ecological and environmental limits of what the planet's life support systems can give us before breaking down.
Fires majorly destructive for example. Humans did a lot of environmental damage with that over the years
Present levels of environmental degradation due to human actions far exceed Earth's capacity to self-heal.
People struggle with judging that, after all, at best you get a bunch of numbers and the claim, they would show this (or not). Without actual scientific background, what are you supposed to do?
Human society is based on trust. You depend on "experts" on a given subject to give truthful accounts of things. When you don't have that, society breaks down sooner or later: nobody adapts anymore to reality.
That's where we're at.
What is interesting or valuable about that? I don't think it's even true, but at best, you offer "perhaps". Great. Perhaps, perhaps not.
It's reasonable to consider that you are simply complacent.