Societal collapse

It’s been a long series of depressing articles with me writing about war and AI replacing us humans in most white collar tasks. So I thought, I’ll cheer you up at the end of the week. Last week, I wrote about how the ancient Maya dealt with a lack of rainfall to keep people happy when food was scarce. Of course, eventually, the Maya civilisation collapsed, which was the result of both environmental change and external shocks from disease and invading Spanish soldiers. Which got me thinking about societal collapse in general.

I have no clue about the research on societal collapse, so take everything I write today with a big grain of salt, but I thought, I’d brighten your weekend by sharing what I learned from reading a great review article by Danilo Brozovic.

What fascinated me the most were the theories that were developed on how societies collapse. These theories are informed by the collapse of ancient societies but also some more modern civilisations and countries.

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that there never is one single reason that leads to societal collapse. Rather, a society must be exposed to several factors at once to be overwhelmed by challenges.

Jared Diamond’s book Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive provides the template for one influential theory. He identified five crucial factors that can cause societal collapse: Environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, friendly trade partners (or lack thereof) and – apparently the most important factor – the ability of a society to react and tackle these challenges.

In that vein, another influential theory was the complexity theory developed by Joseph Tainter. He stated, and this has since been corroborated by more sophisticated studies, that societies react to challenges by developing ever more complex solutions. If a civilisation can increase the complexity of its society and technology, it can solve increasingly difficult and complex challenges and continue to survive.

The problem, however, seems to be that there are diminishing returns to increasing complexity and there might be a tipping point where challenges become so complex that it becomes impossible for a society to tackle these issues with the limited resources available.

Similarly, society needs to retain some flexibility because a solution that may have worked in the past may sometimes have to be abandoned in favour of a seemingly less complex and sophisticated technology that is better able to deal with new challenges. This seemingly less complex technology can then be developed further to tackle ever more complex problems. It is like climbing down one branch of a tree to climb up another branch that reaches higher up into the sky.

This begs the question of when a society becomes so inflexible that it is no longer able to adequately respond to existential challenges. And here is the uplifting sentence I found in the paper of Brozovic: “…two features appear across collapsed societies: the stretching of resources due to ecological strain, and the economic stratification of society” [i.e. increasing inequality within a society].

So, all is well then. If the most threatening combination of factors that can lead to the downfall of a civilisation is ecological strain paired with high inequality which leads to a disintegration of trust and a lack of cooperation among individuals, then we have absolutely nothing to worry about. I told you I’d cheer you up before the weekend.