This is How Civilisations Collapse

"Conservative author claims modernity is sign of civilization on the brink." Truly a dog bites man story.

The argument "globalism didn't stop WWI" fails to examine the counterfactual, would WWI have happened without globalism. Did globalism tamper the forces of war, albeit failing to hold them back completely in the end?

The Bronze age collapse, so far as anyone knows, was due to invasion by "sea people". An invasion that they are documented fending off but struggling against for many years leading up to the collapse.

I could go on. The whole thing is just really unconvincing if you're not already predisposed to his conclusions.

He does have a point regarding dependency on stuff made elsewhere. Should europe head towards total war, it would barely manage to source oil and gas for the metal processing industry and for fuel. Where would countries like the uk or hungary or others get their much need resources for building tanks and warships? Not to mention the much needed electronics. In my view a good chunk of manufacturing needs to return to allied nations so that even at short notice we can redirect efforts from consumer goods to defence. Imagine china stops sending us pcbs while saudi arabia stops sending oil. We’re bust and we’ve signed our own demise one outsourcing contract at a time.

That and we need critical thinking by better education. Else all it takes is facebook ads to influence our elections and we collapse from the inside.

There are things like the Webb telescope, which happen because of all of advanced civilization across the globe collaborating. We need that, and it's an inspiring and beautiful thing to see that collaboration come together and advance us a species.

But — whatever problems one might have with this article — it seems pretty obvious that we're experiencing an extreme lack of resiliency in our system.

It occurred to me back in early 2020: resiliency begins in the home. Do you have enough to take care of your family in a disaster? If you do, that helps take the load off first responders, so they can help the most vulnerable. Is your local community strong and self-sufficient? That's another buffer. And so on.

It seems that we've sacrificed buffers at all levels, seeing opportunities instead to maximize profit wherever possible. At the same time we've woven a breathtakingly complex web, making everything correlated with everything else. Anyone who's ever spent time thinking about complex systems should be concerned.

The right has walked a very long way to end up referring to Friedman as a neoliberal ideologue. This article is a badly written and badly researched piece of nonsense held together by enough name-dropping to look like a half-decent junior high school essay.

> Instead of one economy failing, a shock in one corner of the world can place great and sudden stress on economic and political systems thousands of miles away.

The economies of all countries all over the world were stopped at the same time by their governments, it wasn’t a shock in just one corner that stopped the global supply chains.

> The theorist of collapse John Michael Greer dates the beginning of the collapse of our own society in the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which drove deindustrialisation in both the United States and Britain and initiated the erosion of state capacity in search of ever-harder to accumulate profits, hoarded by oligarchs even as it destroyed the tax base.

The theorist of collapse John Michael Greer, or the author of this article, may have not realised that profits, tax receipts and the capacity of the state to do whatever it wants (such as lockdowns or mass surveillance or raise taxes every 3 months) have all increased significantly since the alleged beginning of this fantasy collapse.

> Neither Rome nor the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean were brought down by one single cause. It took the combination of climate change, elite rivalry, military disaster and migratory pressures, combined with the extreme fragility engendered by economic specialisation and tightly-knit international trading networks, to ensure that when collapse came, it was total.

So it took 30 things all happening at the same time to destroy the Roman Empire. Any single one of these thing would have destroyed any less sophisticated civilization and that’s proof of fragility? Does the author know that from the end of the second Punic war to the fall of the western empire (which is in no way an immediate catastrophic collapse) passed more than 600 years? Is it unstable and fragile compared to a British government that can’t keep national insurance stable for more than 3 weeks?

> The belated efforts of governments across the world to secure fragile supply chains and enhance food security are the refutation, in action, of the fable of the pencil.

No, they aren’t, and anybody with half a brain knows that food security doesn’t mean food autarchy. What happens in Unheard’s Lalaland when there’s a drought?

What is more interesting is whether we can identify cases where clear civilisational collapse was arrested or reversed by change of strategy by the leadership of that civilisation. Perhaps Komnenian restoration in 11th century Byzantium or maybe Tang dynasty China

Yes, we do have a fragile supply chain especially since many producers have gotten more lean with just in time practices.

But our supply chain did not inject an unprecedented amount of fiat currency into the global system.

Our supply chain did not lockdown production for an extended time.

It is not the supply chain that created our predicament.

Is anyone else reminded of coupling in software design? Seems to be essentially the same arguments for reducing coupling of supply chain elements. Having multiple suppliers is only beneficial if they are independent/de-coupled themselves. Im imagining companies with two suppliers who are both dependant on a mineral provider in the same region etc.

Supply chain driven inflation coupled with seriously bad policies took Sri Lanka’s social fabric earlier this year. While an extreme case, it serves as a modern day example to contemporary leaders… not sure if they’re looking, though. Maybe they’ll start when El Salvador fails in the next 12 months, but then, Venezuela did and not much happened.

"International trade is bad actually because something happening on the other side of the world could cause a car shortage" ignores the benefit that a car factory in the US blowing up would just mean we temporarily buy more cars from elsewhere until capacity is restored. It can go both ways.

Nice take.

But plz finish every doomsday article with at least one proposal how to fix this mess/solution/that believers of Chicago sekt of economics produced.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Buckminster Fuller

This is not a particularly good article on collapse, as other comments suggest. However, is no one else here worried that it feels we are much closer to it than in the past decades at least? The global economy is wobbly in unprecedented ways, we have a proxy war in Europe between two major nuclear powers, and there is a rise of political extremists in every country.

Even an absurd system can exist, for a while.

Than either mankind learns or goes extinct.