Holy shit, *this* is what civilisational collapse looks like...
Holy shit, *this* is what civilisational collapse looks like...
This is part 1 of chapter 4: Collapse, in my Book Serialisation. I've broken this chapter into three parts...'cos it's a lot.
This is the next section from my book about how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world. If you’re new here, you can start at the beginning, dive into this post straight up, or go and check out the rest of the book using this Table of Contents.
Quick recap: We have accepted we have to let go of hope, this creates a profound sense of cognitive relief in many of us, and we realise we must face truth, nobly, like dead-set adults. Over the next few posts, things get heavy. Stick with me; it’s a vital part of this journey we’re on.
As we start to get into the guts of things, most of the chapters will only be available to the paid subscriber community. Although I’ll provide previews for everyone.
PS I’ll also be running the Writers Notes and Audio Version at the bottom from now on. And I will join you in the comments to further discuss my tricks and how I navigated various quandaries. I happily invite discussion and personal thoughts and ideas, too. But to protect my integrity, I will be discerning in what I respond to and absorb. You can probably imagine that a soul could go mental writing a book with tens of thousands of in-real-time reviewers!
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COLLAPSE (part 1)
"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A very brutal truth we need to get alive to is that much of the world is currently going through collapse. We are in what we were warned about.
In the past 5,000 years there have existed dozens of complex civilisations. Think: the Roman and Mayan Empires, the Xia and Han Dynasties, the Minoan civilisation.
Every one of them collapsed1.
And every one of them collapsed because they become too complex.
Over a few hundred years they grew from simple societies into much bigger, more complex and more prosperous civilisations, adding on layers of wonderfully interconnected systems and technologies. Their structures of governance, trade and social engagement became more and more sophisticated, but also interdependent, cross-pollinating and knotted.
Things expanded happily for some time. It was all upward trajectories and optimistic growth-speak. But at a certain point a calamity would strike - a famine, a flood, a war. It might not even be a particularly large or threatening calamity. But the very complexity that saw these societies become prosperous and powerful prevented them from coping with said calamity. Too many committees! Too many competing interests! Too many contingencies with consequences and vested interests and unresolvable intricacies. Debts deepened and spats blew out between leaders and power-brokers as the impossibility of the situation sent populations spiralling cognitively and emotionally.
Soon enough, these once magnificent civilisations buckled under all the gnarled layers and chaos – like houses of cards that can no longer hold all the lean-tos and Cape-cod extensions. They collapsed via a slow-at-first-then-rapid decline of population, identity and socio-economic order. (This is, in essence, the definition of civilisational collapse.) People died of starvation or killed each other, or fled.
We can take bro’ TikTok favourite the Roman empire as an example. As Rome conquered and pillaged and generally dominated with its aqueducts and domes, it had to build more capitals further and further afield. This required a larger and harder-to-manage army. Which, in turn required more taxes and, thus, more food production to fund the taxes. Over-production soon saw farmers go bust, the land deteriorate, and, thusly, taxes decline. Social disorder followed, citizens stopped procreating, Emperors turned authoritarian and over-indulged elites became decadent and distracted. There are many theories (just ask TikTok) as to exactly what stressor finally toppled Rome (a volcano? corruption? invasion? too many orgies?). But it ultimately collapsed because it had become too precariously complex to deal with any stressor.
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In his essay The Fate of Empires, written in 1976, British historian Sir John Glubb posited that a civilisation’s rise-and-rise-and-inevitable-implosion happened over six stages2, with the first few stages seeing a society or civilisation progressively innovate, conquer and become prosperous. In the mid-stages, as affluence builds, the dominating discourse switches from morals and values to knowledge and discourse. A society will start to become secular, and fixated on rights over collective needs. Academic and political infighting tends to become rife by stage five, “the age of intellect”.
By the sixth and final stage, the “age of decadence”, all this growth, success and intellectual infighting begins to turn in on itself. Like all species that get too big for their petri dish, human civilisations can wind up eating themselves up from the inside, or by destroying their own defences. The Byzantines, for instance, spent the last 50 years of their empire in repeated civil wars until the Ottomans popped by and were able to finish them off.
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According to William Ophuls, who wrote Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, the dangerously decadent “sixth” stage is characterised by behaviours and vibes that you might find frighteningly familiar as a person wandering around the planet today. Take a look at his list:
“Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses; they worship celebrities instead of divinities…. throw off social and moral restraints — especially sexuality; shirk duties but insist on entitlements.”
Oh boy.
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I now add this: The lifespan of a complex civilisation is, on average, 336 years. Broadly, our sophisticated, complex society - which we might henceforth refer to as the post-industrial civilisation3 - is roughly 270 years old.
READERS: I’m trying to work out what name to call “our civilisation”. I need to establish it upfront as we’ll reference it throughout. I don’t want it too clever. This space is rife with people inventing and claiming dominion over clever jargon (that ultimately alienates). I’m thinking, “modernity”. Or maybe just “post-industrial” works? Thoughts?
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I don’t think I have to join dots for you here. A picture forms, right?
I do feel, however, I need to flag something that often gets overlooked in some of the commentary. Unlike previous collapsing civilisations, which were reasonably isolated and could thus be fled or subsumed into another nearby society, ours is global. All the trade routes, supply chains, energy markets, misinformation networks, and our shared atmosphere and biodiversity, are interdependent and they extend in an intricate web around the planet. Should one system collapse in one corner of the planet (should butterflies stop flapping their wings in the Amazon), well…
I’m not too sure how to finish that sentence.
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Now, I’ll be honest with you. I agonised over whether to even include this very long chapter [which will run over three posts here on Substack].
For almost two years I have researched and conducted interviews and read esoteric science and spiritual papers about collapse. I’ve amassed 163,000 words of data, theories and links on the subject. I got horribly confused by the competing theories and bad-faith selective data-picking. I’ll get to this down the track but, seriously, this realm is rife with powerful, materialist operators (terrified of losing their supremacy) claiming to “know” our fate, wanting a stake in the end of the world. It took me a long time to sift their vested interests and fears.
But one late Autumn afternoon I finally sat down to start writing. I looked at all my notes, a crazed dumping spread across notebooks, spilling out over my desk, and in open tabs and blue folders scattered across my laptop screen. My breath shortened. And I spun out into a royal spiky panic.
I’d spoken to the collapse theorist and elder Meg Wheatley4 the day before and she had warned me that “understanding collapse is not for everyone”. It’s a phrase a number of people in this space use. The sense is that not everyone has the psychological capacity for the brutal details, and to impose the information upon them is irresponsible - it could induce mass panic and the kind of moral injury our collective emotional maturity does not have capacity for. Meg cautioned against wading into the bamboozling, non-linear complexity of collapse theory and endeavouring to map out all the different ways that we’re fucked. She suggested, instead, that I go straight to the more inviting psychological and spiritual insights that we’ll need for living in a radically altered world.
Below is my podcast episode with Meg. We also recorded a second, even more brutally truthful episode for Substack subscribers here.
I’d also been getting messages from friends and peers in the climate space, expressing concern, albeit not for me per se but for something they weren’t really able to articulate. One friend rang to tell me, “I just don’t like what you’re writing and talking about at the moment, Sarah”.
It’s a quandary I wrestled with for a long time, and still do every day.
Collapse is not like the climate challenge where we were obliged to educate and mobilise everyone (the motivating ra-ra sweetened with lashings of “hope”). As we covered in the Hope chapter, with the climate struggle we needed everyone’s onboarding (whether they were ready for it or not) to save the situation. What’s more, there was (at least initially) something of a “fix”, a happy ending to shoot for - reaching those IPCC targets! With collapse, there is no such potential happy arrival point. Once started, collapse is not stoppable and so there is no fix, no obvious agency to cling to. My friend Kate asked me at a dinner party where we were talking about this book, to make sure it “included lots of actionables, things busy people like me can do straight away”. But what if there aren’t any, I replied, immediately aware of how obnoxious I sounded.
So, I guess the question was this: Is there any point digging down into the dire details of collapse? And is it irresponsible to?
For me, one doubt generally leads to all the doubts. And that afternoon at my desk a multi-decade backlog of them piled on in. Have I just let a bunch of cognitive biases wreak havoc with my thinking? What if I was just a deluded or, worse, indulgent, doomist5? Humans are programmed to think the worst, to be vigilant to threats; hadn’t humans always thought end times loomed? Was I just being sucked down a self-fulfilling spiral? Who am I to embark on this crazy project?Could I hold it all - the “facts”, the fears, the non-linear complexity, the emotional and spiritual fallout - responsibly?
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Earlier, I’d been for a run in the not-quite-Winter sunshine to shake off the top layer of my mounting freak out. It barely made a dint as I tried to face the tangle of notes and tabs on my computer once again. They mirrored back to me my messy self-doubt and not-knowingness. I lit a cigarette a friend had rolled for me. I’m not a smoker. But I’ve taken to using smoking - or more specifically, the novice smokers’ headspin - as a device to dislodge layers and move beyond old framings. The wrongness of it throws cats among my cognitive pigeons. I told Meg that this was one of my strategies when we spoke. “Bravo, Sarah for knowing how to get to that place,” she said. “Do what you have to do.” (And, kids, do not do this at home.)
I sat at the door to my balcony, the sun streamed in low and turned the misty rain that pinged off the rosemary bush into sparklets. The smoke curled. My focus turned surreal. And I dropped out of my head into a broad, fully felt experience.
And I wailed.
And I wailed some more.
I cried out the bigness, my fear, my overwhelm and self-doubt, and the beauty of the world, for almost two hours.
Until something lifted.
Oh, the clarity was brilliant! It hit me thus: Embracing the brutal truth is certainly not for everybody. But for those of us feeling the dissonance, whose souls know the centre can no longer hold, who are losing friends and feeling awkward at barbeques, we absolutely need to understand what’s happening. We need the framing. We need to find our coordinates to see where our agency, our beingness, our humanity fits in. We need to pull apart what’s going on, even if “understanding” and neat maps and descriptors are part of the materialist (post-industrial, modernist) mindset that landed us in this mess in the first place (and will need to be replaced by a far more systems-orientated, spiritual vibe in due course).
I feel - and tell me if you feel differently - that we need to really play around with this surreal “certainty that something here makes sense” as, Vaclav Havel wrote. We need to really feel into this “hunch that we are onto something important about being human”, per the philosopher Jonathan Lear6.
Which, of course, will require wading uncomfortably in some chaotic inelegance and through some godawful vested interests together. None of us are perfectly equipped or qualified to embark on this. I trust no one who says they are. So we might as well give it a crack.
I also think a lot of us here need to know that collapse is actually a thing. That it’s not some fringe conspiracy, but a phenomenon that is being studied and tracked in universities and institutes around the world. At least in these early stages of comprehending. We need to see evidence of scientific, economic and philosophical theories and respected and bestselling books on the subject (not the kind that get downloaded via Reddit channels). I know I felt an odd reassurance to learn that in France “collapsology” is a regular topic on morning TV, and that the Canadian government is actively discussing the nation’s future in terms of collapsing systems, that the University of Chicago runs a course called Are We Doomed? with lecturers from the Existential Risk Laboratory (also at the University) who discuss Ursula K. Le Guin and the Fermi paradox.
I share this self-conscious pre-amble, in part because I want you to know I question myself and my approach robustly and constantly. But also because I figure many of you are doubting your own sanity as the truth increasingly takes the place of hope, and you might like to know you’re not alone nor making this shit up.
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@Cameron: “I wouldn’t want my doctor to keep a terminal diagnosis from me. I’d rather know what is going on, how long I’ve got, so I can prioritise my life.”
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OK, so since we’re doing this crazy thing (we are, right?) a few words before we do.
Collapse is not linear; it loops and intersects. And there are arguably many collapses happening that tip each other, like so many runs of dominos. Collapses beget other collapses. It’s all very, very…complex.
As I say, there are a lot of exclusive (and, frankly, wanky) terms and theories, as well as vested interests, embedded in the discourse that often make things even more complex and difficult to access and fathom. I got bogged down by most of them and will endeavour to save you from the same.
As we’ll get to, no one theory or explainer can possibly hold it all, so don’t feel you have to. Nor does anyone really know when, how or to what extent collapse will occur. As I’ll argue shortly, these kinds of certitudes are exactly not the point.
What follows is an attempt to herd those 163,000 words into a helpful picture, chronicled in “real time” as I processed all the layers and emotions, vested interests and implications myself. I include terms that are useful. Broad patterns that help. Debates to be on top of. Nuances to sit in. Kindnesses to be had.
I dump a fair bit on the page in a meandering collage. There is no other way to capture things. Collapse is systemic, it’s complex, it meanders. We have to be in it to get it.
Dear readers, get the gist, allow a felt response – your felt response. We’ll meet at the end and move onwards together.
Next post we continue the collapse explainer, with more detail…
Sarah xx