Civilizational Collapse

All 88 human civilizations/societies throughout human history documented and studied by Joseph Tainter eventually collapsed. The average time frame culminating in collapse was 250-500 years. All of these were regional or local in scope. Even though the reason for collapse is known for some of the societies, many of them left no traces of the exact reason why they collapsed. Among reasons history has left untold for collapse vary from Overshoot of natural resources, political or ruling hardships which led the people to rise up and/or flee, natural disasters (drought, catastrophic floods, mistreating the soil and water, blight, etc.) which left communities and/or nations incapable of biological recovery, lost wars, conquest from militarily stronger societies who wanted either slaves for labor and/or stored energy surpluses (in the form of food) or both. But Tainter’s main deduction for the reason of collapse of societies is the inability of the society’s members to understand the working complexities and symbiotic interrelations of their natural surroundings leading to an Overshoot or a weakened state whose complexity succumbed to a tipping point like that of a natural disaster. Sounds like today, doesn’t it.

For around 600 years now, we’ve grown a global civilization. The complexity of the current human civilization is beyond humanity’s ability to understand and control, so complex that not even AI can’t figure it out: techbros want AGI/ASI to save the day; rather, it’ll just kills us. The stage is set for a collapse of global industrial and consumer civilization (GICC). Perpetual growth on a biologically finite planet is impossible.

Those aware of GICC’s demise call it by different names: The Great Simplification, The Great Change, The Great Decent, The Great Correction, The Coming Spiritual Age, etc. A change is already underway: most of mankind just refuses to acknowledge the maladies of the global civilization we’ve built, preferring to be satiated with the GICC status quo and business-as-usual. Or possibly, humanity knows subconsciously that there is no cure for the polycrisis we’ve grown; we’re just rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, future generations be damned. The truth is that humanity is the most adaptable specie that ever existed, but from now on any adaptation that does not put the wellness of our biological planet first – exactly what we have NOT done in all human evolved civilizations – is unsustainable and will eventually lead to GICC collapse. If, like Einstein said, we try and use our current mind to solve the problem it created, humanity will fail; humanity must self-evolve to a higher level of knowledge beyond the mind.

As long as Draco II et al is in power in America, there is NO hope of sustainable biological adaptation, of putting the correct focus on the future, that humanity will forego its hubris and evolve into a mature specie ready to work with and steward Nature’s ways of sustainability. Draco II et al is a wake-up call: we start prioritizing Nature, or go extinct. Democrats, are you listening?

Bob Bates Tullahoma