Thoughts on civilization collapse

Stuart_Armstrong

LESSWRONG
LW

Thoughts on civilization collapse — LessWrong

30 Thoughts on civilization collapse

by Stuart_Armstrong

4th May 2017

1 min read

30

Epistemic status: an idea I believe moderately strongly, based on extensive reading but not rigorous analysis.

We may have a dramatically wrong idea of civilization collapse, mainly inspired by movies that obsess over dramatic tales of individual heroism.

Traditional view:

In a collapse, anarchy will break out, and it will be a war of all against all or small groups against small groups. Individual weaponry (including heavy weapons) and basic food production will become paramount; traditional political skills, not so much. Government collapse is long term. Towns and cities will suffer more than the countryside. The best course of action is to have a cache of weapons and food, and to run for the hills.

Alternative view:

In a collapse, people will cling to their identified tribe for protection. Large groups will have no difficulty suppressing or taking over individuals and small groups within their areas of influence. Individual weaponry may be important (given less of a police force), but heavy weaponry will be almost irrelevant as no small group will survive alone. Food production will be controlled by the large groups. Though the formal "government" may fall, and countries may splinter into more local groups, government will continue under the control of warlords, tribal elders, or local variants. Cities, with their large and varied-skill workforce, will suffer less than the countryside. The best course of action is to have a stash of minor luxury goods (solar-powered calculators, comic books, pornography, batteries, antiseptics) and to make contacts with those likely to become powerful after a collapse (army officers, police chiefs, religious leaders, influential families).

Possible sources to back up this alternative view:

The book Sapiens argues that governments and markets are the ultimate enablers of individualism, with extended-family-based tribalism as the "natural" state of humanity.
The history of Somalia demonstrates that laws and enforcement continue even after a government collapse, by going back to more traditional structures.
During China's period of anarchy, large groups remained powerful: the nationalists, the communists, the Japanese invaders. The other sections of the country were generally under the control of local warlords.
Rational Wiki argues that examples of collapse go against the individualism narrative.

Personal Blog

30

New Comment

79 comments, sorted by

top scoring

Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 10:25 PM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

[-]lmn9y160

Cities, with their large and varied-skill workforce, will suffer less than the countryside.

I agree with your post except for this. Based on reading post-WWII accounts of Germany and Japan, when the economic/trade system breaks down, it becomes hard to get food if you don't live where it's being grown.

2Stuart_Armstrong9y

Good examples.

[-]Lumifer9y70

Traditional view

You mean "convenient for story-telling", right?

In a collapse, people will cling to their identified tribe for protection. Large groups will have no difficulty suppressing or taking over individuals and small groups within their areas of influence. Individual weaponry may be important (given less of a police force), but heavy weaponry will be almost irrelevant as no small group will survive alone. Food production will be controlled by the large groups.

As far as I can see you are just describing typical human political arrang... (read more)

3Stuart_Armstrong9y

Indeed. After the collapse, things will be... typical, in many ways.

0Lumifer9y

So we are talking about the collapse of what?

1Stuart_Armstrong9y

States, systems of government, current technological civilizations, those kind of things.

3Lumifer9y

You are not making much sense. "Those kind of things" are very different. States collapse (historically) often -- e.g. Somalia. Systems of government collapse occasionally -- e.g. USSR. None of these events are usually described as a "civilization collapse". I don't know of any case of the collapse of a technological civilization. If you want to stretch the definition of "technological" you can find something in the BC eras, but that isn't very relevant. And you still haven't answered the question: what exactly will collapse? "Civilization" is a very handwavy answer.

4lmn9y

So what's your definition of a "technological civilization"? Can you give another example of one? Otherwise this sounds like your arguing that you are immortal because no one exactly like you has ever died. For example, lead and copper production create characteristic types of atmospheric pollution so we can get estimates for historical world production levels from Greenland ice cores. The resulting graph for lead shows two peaks, corresponding to ancient Rome and modern civilization. The graph for copper shows three peaks, the two for lead and also Song dynasty China. The peaks are surrounded by troughs, eg, world lead production wouldn't return to Roman levels until the 18th century, so in that sense we can objectively say that technological civilizations have collapsed in the past.

0Lumifer9y

For the purposes of this discussion I'll define it as a civilization sufficiently advanced to be become global. The relevant point is that no local calamity will extinguish it, you need a planet-wide adverse event to collapse it. I think XVII century and later would count as such. Dying out of local societies, cultures, cities, states, etc. has, of course, been a very common occurrence throughout history.

0lmn9y

The problem is that the global nature of civilization can also cause calamities to become global. The Roman Empire was more global than its predecessors but was still fallen mainly by internally generated calamities.

1Lumifer9y

Life is not static. All empires fall eventually.

0Stuart_Armstrong9y

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Examples_of_civilizations_and_societies_that_have_collapsed

0Lumifer9y

There is that sentence in the post you're replying to:

0Stuart_Armstrong9y

I'm not sure what you are arguing here. I think there's a large but vague concept of societal/civilization/technological collapse that people have in mind; something involving a dramatic reduction in living standards, technological regression, more simplified society, civil wars, etc... There's also a bunch of partial examples, the older ones in that link, and more recent ones like China in the 1930s, Somalia more recently, Japan and Germany at the end of WW2, and a few others. I'm pointing out that some common ideas about the features of these collapse seem to be wrong. Now, if you want to give the idea a more thorough analysis, please do so! If you're saying the concept is unclear, I agree. If you say it covers examples that don't belong in the same category, then separate them. If you're arguing that actually civilizations don't/won't collapse the way they used to - then that's a view I have partial sympathy with, and would love to see proved or disproved. Go ahead and un-wave my hand at this answer.

1Lumifer9y

I'm arguing that you're thinking about fiction plots and, moreover, doing so in a fuzzy and not terribly coherent way. People do have a vague concept of a civilization collapse, but they also have vague concepts of aliens in flying saucers abducting humans and livestock. None of your recent examples is called a collapse of a civilization and they do not match your "vague concept" anyway. You're vaguely waving your hand in the direction of a certain genre of fiction and declare that those people got it wrong. That seems silly on its face to me. Genre tropes are not "correct" or "wrong". If you are critiquing real analyses of potential aftermath scenarios, please link to them. I don't see any idea other than that you find dystopian tropes, ahem, unrealistic. You could talk, instead, about much more specific scenarios. For example, defeat in a war (Germany, Japan). Or failure of the political structures (USSR). Or inability to maintain any sort of a centralized control (Somalia). They do not fit your "vague concept", but they have a big advantage of having actually happened.

0Dagon9y

I'll take a shot at it. What may collapse is the ability of any significant group of humans (say 100K+) to coordinate and to feel secure enough that they can specialize deeply enough to make digital watches.

0Lumifer9y

That's a consequence. What is the cause?

0username29y

Asteroid impact on scale of dinosaur killer. Super volcanic eruption. Regular eruption under Antarctic ice sheets or the middle of Greenland raise water levels by 10m. Total nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. I'm all of these cases actual societal collapse would be caused by sudden worldwide famine, not the disaster itself. I do think you can find examples of societal breakdown in the recent past if you narrow yourself to consider local regions, such as various failed colonies, New Orleans in the days following Katrina, or Somalia or parts of Iraq.

0Lumifer9y

As an aside, one of these is not like the others :-D But sure, let's consider an dinosaur killer. So what will happen? A lot of places will lose much of their population, either directly or because of famine. A great deal of land will become nearly empty of humans. But once the nuclear winter is over and the population stabilizes, humans will rebuild. It might take a while to get back to microprocessor fabs, but the knowledge of e.g. how to make steel and electricity will not be lost. So what if the humanity will be thrown back to the tech level of Victorian England? That was merely a century and a bit ago. Of course, we're now in movie-plot land.

0Dagon9y

There are lots of potential proximal causes. Root cause likely to be that humans aren't well-suited for the level of peace and scale of cooperation that we've seen for the last few hundred years.

1Lumifer9y

I was trying to get to something less handwavy. "Humans aren't well-suited" isn't it. And anyway, your line of argument leads to the conclusion that we are just living constantly and permanently in the "post-collapse" state. Past the Golden Age, kicked out of the Garden of Eden, etc. etc.

0Dagon9y

Yeah, I can't predict more concretely than that - the obvious paths are somewhat preventable/recoverable. My intended argument is that we're not past the golden age, we're in a golden age. It may be so golden that it's the last one, or it may be just one of an very long series.

0Lumifer9y

Does that imply a coming collapse? Or can the ages get more and more golden?

[-]Larks9y50

Cities, with their large and varied-skill workforce, will suffer less than the countryside.

Cities have a large and varied workforce, but many of their skills lie in things that rely on civilisation remaining intact. Tax lawyers, bartenders, yoga instructors, investment bankers etc. all seem like they would be more of a liability than an asset in such a scenario. Whereas the countryside has skills more focused around food production, and a lower population density reduces the risks of food riots.

0Stuart_Armstrong9y

It would be interesting to test this. Scratch that, it would be interesting to look at natural experiments that test these theories; setting up a deliberate test would be a terrible idea. It's not so much the tax lawyers and yoga instructors, but the population of skilled and flexible people from among which some have become tax lawyers and yoga instructors. These could become cheap accountants and work crew leaders, for instance. Bartenders would still be needed, to dispense drinks to the population; I'm pretty sure there were still bartenders in Berlin, just before it fell to the Red Army. If I'd reading the Argentine situation correctly, cities fare much better under minor collapses, which makes sense seeing how little agriculture represents in GDP. And, everything being interconnected, this means that the countryside is dependent on the city for tools, fuel, maintenance, knowledge. It may be different for a larger collapse, but a country will still need an industry, transport, maintenance, a functioning economy (which means ways of allocating resources, including some forms of banking), etc... these things are much more likely to be designed and adapted in cities than in the countryside. It is possible, thinking about it, that both cities and countryside could suffer immensely, as the cities starve and the countryside is deprived of resources (and then starve for lack of modern agriculture). And there may be a short term vs long term issue; food reserves are practically non-existent for the moment, which is a huge vulnerability.

0MrMind9y

Katrina?

0Lumifer9y

You need larger scale. Something like Russia in 1917-1920 or one of the Chinese famines.

[-]DanB9y40

Most of the pessimistic people I talk to don't think the government will collapse. It will just get increasingly stagnant, oppressive and incompetent, and that incompetence will make it impossible for individual or corporate innovators to do anything worthwhile. Think European-style tax rates, with American-style low quality of public services.

There will also be a blurring of the line between the government and big corporations. Corporations will essentially become extensions of the bureaucracy. Because of this they will never go out of business and they will also never innovate. Think of a world where all corporations are about as competent as AmTrak.

-5tukabel9y

[-]SquirrelInHell9y30

I don't think many people would support the "traditional view" in a direct comparison, but it's probably the case that it persists as some kind of a media illusion. There's always the danger of acting on unendorsed cached thoughts. Good catch.

[-]TheAncientGeek9y20

Nitpick: cash for cache,.

0Stuart_Armstrong9y

How much are you offering, for how large a cache? ;-) Cheers!

[-]hg009y20

Another data point: the existence of prison gangs (typically organized along racial lines).

6Stuart_Armstrong9y

I'm not sure that's a very relevant data point. Prison is very structured, and all the physical needs of the prisoners are guaranteed, and anarchy and fighting is punished, at least to some extent.

0hg009y

Hm. I think there is a quote in this podcast about how prisoners form prison gangs as a bulwark against anarchy: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/03/david_skarbek_o.html

[-]jh499y20

avega.org/dgr.pdf might give you some insight into what Orlov and others say about collapse and various scenarios of collapse. not very detailed but well put in social and ecological context.

[-]RedMan9y00

Assertion: Statement about heavy weapons in OP is incorrect.

In collapse scenarios any entity capable of bringing modern military technology with the attached organizational requirements to bear can and will dominate organizations which cannot.

In many collapse scenarios, political wrangling over who controls the institutions capable of managing that force becomes the dominant struggle. In Venezuela of today, for example, the government is incapable of guaranteeing security or access to reaources for the population at large, but is capable of staying in ... (read more)

0ChristianKl9y

Individuals like Julian Assange or Snowden manage to hit sizable blows against nation states. That's not a good description of the system. Flint made a bad decision that resulted in increased lead in the water but the the amount of children with elevated levels of lead was still lower than it was a decade ago.

0RedMan9y

They certainly swung. I'm not certain that they successfully imposed their will on the activities of the nation states they attacked. Neither of them are comparable to Alaric, one is comparable to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Délicieux who despite making a big scene, had no immediate or meaningful impact on the institution he rebelled against. Do you have a better, easier example of what I've described, or do you disagree with the broad statement in addition to the specific example of Flint?

0bogus9y

Not sure what your point is here - early iron-smelting cultures were not "uncivilized" in any real sense, they're just understudied! We've even discovered entire sets of royal archives near Hattusa - the Hatti or Hittites being perhaps the most prominent early-iron-age civilization. Indeed, the Iron age itself may have enabled the formation of large, internally-peaceful 'empires' in the longer run - clearly a significant advancement in social organization!

0RedMan9y

Thank you for clarifying, in the long run, there was stability and we do not fully understand it...I believe that my assertion about the transition being messy and involving the collapse of bronze age civilizations rather than their persistence still stands though. My point is that new developments upended the old social order, and cleared the way for the eventual rise of alternatives. Today, similar levels of destruction will be challenging to recover from, because infrastructure, once trashed, leads to things like the birth defect rate in Fallujah, not just empty space where new things can be built, and battlefields which yiels bumper crops.

[-]Dagon9y00

Agree with the initial statement - the most accessible picture of collapse is unlikely. I'm less sure about the probability of your alternate - the space of possibilities is large. Also, timeframe matters. Anarchic collapse may be followed by small-group/warlord dominance.

Moderation Log