I don’t think Charles I was indecisive . I think he was driven by the “kings are little gods” belief and took exception of the fact he had to go cap in hand in parliament to fund his international religious wars.

His summary judgements of successive parliament dibandments by way or Royal decrees in conjuntion which not being in touch with true political reality (as opposed to “disconnection from” his “subjects” as you can argue that was the case for all monarchs of his time) lead to his downfall.

Just invent a half-pithy saying, and attribute it to him. And he’s even a little less verbose than Sir Paarfi.

I mainly work with Aztec and earlier materials going back to around 500 B.C. Teotihuacan itself was a city of about 100,000 people c. 300 A.D.; by the time the Aztecs showed up, it had been so long abandoned that they thought gods had once lived there.

Wasn’t that sentence said by Marie Antoinette’s sister?
One of the israeli ministers said this year(and she was totally serious about it):”If there is no sugar, make jam”.

That was very interesting Nezahualcoyotl. Now to find a high class that fell in a different way.

Much as in pre-revolution France, elite position was sustained by costly prestige-oriented display and staffs of retainers. When the crop yields which sustained this status competition occasionally declined, the priority of Maya nobles probably was ensuring the supply of goods which allowed them to be competitive within their world. More land would be put under cultivation. Sometimes this land should have been left fallow, and over the centuries the food supply shrank — which caused the nobility to push more land prematurely into cultivation — creating a feedback cycle which contributed to the collapse between 800-925 A.D.

Of course, this is only an explanatory model based on the interpretation of archaeological evidence. I offer it here to illustrate how decision-making contexts and self-interest can have a fairly broad effect. While the Classic Maya are known as a “civilization”, they were mainly 40+ independent city-states in which power was too decentralized for any single personality to dominate events on more than a local level.

Admittedly, as an archaeologist I tend to be biased against explanations based in personality since my research subjects are fairly dead.

Thing is, it seems that the decription fits more rulers than not. It only becomes a problem when there is a (perceived) need for government intervention as a positive force in the lives of the mass of the population. Sure, many of them have grand plans that they believe will “benefit” the people, ranging anywhere from cultural reform (Peter the Great, Mao, most post-1989 French governments) or great measures of defense (The Great Wall, the Interstate Highway system) to wars of aggression (too many to even pick a few exemplary cases). At best, such efforts make it more possible for families to provide for themselves and live in security, but more often than not they have at best a net-neutral effect. But there are more than a few of the indolent who simply enjoy their positions and have no great drive — though we tend to only remember folks like Nero, Nicholas II and Hoover.

Not a few statesmen of revolutionary generations seem to be aware of this tendency. Hence statements like Jefferson’s, that the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyants.