Foundation Update

Now with the entire first book of Foundation finished, and the second one started, I think I now see the deep meaning that I just couldn't find in the middle of the first book. I've decided that instead of just being a science fiction knock off of Gibbon's Fall of the Roman Empire. Instead of just being a boring and monotonous history lesson, I think that it is instead a story about human nature and the idea that humanity has a tendency to follow several types of often self destructive paths. In the book a group of historians use some sort of psychoanalytic technique to predict that the current Galactic Empire would collapse soon and that it would lead to a period of 30,000 years of barbarism and warfare. In order to prevent this, they build a foundation, a place where human knowledge and culture are kept safe. However things begin to go badly once the foundation is set up. Their idealistic goals are floundered and their small society that began as a hope to stave off barbarism and despotism begins to show just the same signs of corruption and degredation that the original scientists and historians had seen in the empire, the same ones that had prompted them to make the foundation in the first place. I think that what the book is trying to say is that no one is above corruption and that human nature is indeed human nature.