In 1999, the share of global production consumed by the West reached its highest point ever recorded: one-sixth of the planet's population consumed four-fifths of all the planet's goods and services, which is outrageous. Just a decade after reaching the historic peak, the global financial crisis of 2008 erupted and this spectacular consumption percentage was reduced by a quarter: from devouring 80% of the world's gross product, Westerners went down to 60%. Naturally, this dizzying decline has led us to delve into our ideas about the tragic cycles of history. And it turns out that these narratives have a pattern extremely influenced by the fall of the Roman Empire as narrated by Edward Gibbons in the legendary History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, an interpretation that has taken hold so much in the collective imagination that it returns again and again, from Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, through Samuel Huntington's theory of the Clash of Civilizations, to the rhetoric of Make America great again. With the war in Iran, which many commentators see as the umpteenth example of the West shooting itself in the foot and fostering the inexorable rise of China, the wheels of the decline narrative are turning again.Broadly speaking, the history of the fall of the West has two fundamental premises: that we have corrupted the moral and cultural essences that led us to rise, and that this corruption implodes with the invasion of barbarian peoples. It is a strange mixture of "it is all our fault" and "it is all the fault of others", which works very well to simultaneously obtain the benefits of criticizing the establishment and criticizing foreigners, and which always ends with the same antidote against decline: controlling the borders and tightening our belts in order to recover the martial purity that led us to the original golden age.