The End Is Nigh — What Is Collapse?
Part 1: A Drastic And Persistent Change For The Worse
I was born in the 80’s, in one of the richest and happiest countries in the world. I have never worried about whether I’d ever starve, lose my home, or not get the healthcare I need.
The only world I’ve known is one that has gotten better. Then, I came across intellectuals and scientists arguing that modern society is dying and that it’ll all be over in a few decades. Even without the effects of climate change, the argument goes, I will experience the end of life as we know it in my lifetime.
Yikes.
In this series I explore the collapse of modern civilization.
- What is collapse? [you are here]
- Why collapse is inevitable
- When will society collapse?
- How society will collapse
- Can collapse be avoided?
- What to do in the face of collapse?
- Summary
- Appendix: Bonus content and links
“Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems. Humans cannot.” — Early draft of 2021 IPCC report on climate
I know there are clouds on the horizon. But climate change, I thought, wouldn’t be that big of an issue the next 20 or 30 years. At least not in my neck of the woods.
I didn’t realize climate change was already here and getting nasty. This summer has already proved that.
I also didn’t realize that climate change would bring about the fall of modern society.
What’s more, even if we did manage to draw down enough CO2 and stabilize our climate again, we’d still be fucked.
But what does collapse mean? How fucked are we? Should we dig bunkers under our houses, invest in BDSM outfits and petrol, or are we talking a slow but boring burn like the fall of the Roman Empire?
Collapse Definition
2020 started like 2019 and 2018 and 2017, except for Trump’s shenanigans in Iran, Australia burning, and rumors of some virus in China. Little did we know that we’d spend the year staring at people through computer screens.
Almost overnight, quality of life dropped for most of us as governments around the world locked society down.
Toilet paper quickly ran out as people emptied the shelves, anxiety levels shot through the roof, and businesses all over had to shut their doors.
In other words, 2020 was an apéritif of what we have in store.
To avoid the worst financial effects of the pandemic, governments borrowed from the future by printing money and lowering rents.
Luckily, the gamble payed off. Several vaccines were produced in record time and we avoided crashing the global economy completely. Today, things are more or less back to normal, besides the series of once in a century level weather events experienced this summer.
That is what separates collapse from a recession or depression: collapse is a tunnel with no light at the other end.
When most think of collapse they think of Armageddon in the form of nuclear holocaust, super Ebola, zombies, asteroid impact, and other scenarios fit for a Hollywood screenplay.
While such scenarios certainly qualify as collapse what we’re discussing here is a far more boring and drawn out kind. Unless war breaks out, as it tends to do when times get tough.
Imagine if we ran out of oil. Farmers all over the world would no longer be able to operate at scale. Miners likewise. Forget about flying to Marbella or shipping avocados for your avocado toast.
Just think about the chaos that would ensue.
Running out of oil would have drastic consequences unless we can wean ourselves of it completely. If it happened now we’d be forced to take a step down the collapse ladder. An irreversible step. The one thing that characterizes such a step is a reduction in societal complexity.
Joseph Tainter, an anthropologist studying the fall of ancient empires, argues that collapse is a drastic and persistent simplification of society. That means, from people having highly specialized roles, complex social hierarchies, and intertwined systems and infrastructure, to people becoming generalists, simple social relations, and local subsistence systems without strong institutions such as police and education.
A drastic simplification also removes efficiencies of scale and efficiencies of specialization. Both together would lead to a massive population reduction if the population is far above the sustainable carrying capacity. Jared Diamond, author of the bestselling book ‘Collapse’, thus suggests that collapse is a drastic and persistent involuntary reduction in population level.
How drastic? Well, some numbers thrown around suggest our carrying capacity without modern infrastructure, technology, and most important of all, fertilizer, is less than a billion. Then factor in what we’ve done to our environment.
One could however imagine a massive population reduction or a radical simplification without seeing it as collapse. Therefore, I suggest two additional qualifiers: collapse is a drastic and persistent reduction in quality of life, for most, and collapse is a drastic and persistent reduction in technological capacity.
However, given our interconnected world, collapse won’t ride into town alone.
Parameters Of The Collapse
When talking about collapse, it’s easy to point out the window and say “people are throwing garbage in the streets now, society has collapsed I tell you”.
Sure enough, collapse can happen fast or slow, small or big, a bit or all at once. An individual becoming permanently ill, and thus unable to work and earn money, would suffer a collapse. Likewise for a company town in which the local mine closes down.
Whole countries can collapse due to civil war, drought, famine, bankruptcy, and such, as seen recently in Syria, Lebanon, and Venezuela. Local collapses such as these happen in a sea of relative stability and the consequences might be eased (or amplified) by other countries. A global collapse, on the other hand, would see no such help offered.
Collapse could also happen at an agonizing crawl and only visible in retrospect. The fall of the Roman Empire took about 100 years (376–476 AD), though its peak was about 200 years earlier than that (~180 AD). A citizen in Rome would perhaps not notice much from one year to the next, except when the city got sacked or a new emperor decided to clean house, but the rich would perhaps see smoke in the distance. But, when looking back, I’m sure someone who lived under the rule of Theodosius (379 AD) could see that the empire was not what it once was.
For the Aztecs, however, collapse was swift and brutal as Hernán Cortés conquered them in 1521 with a mix of superior technology, alliances with enemies of the Aztecs, and smallpox.
The faster the decline, the worse it’ll be. Imagine waking up tomorrow and all the stores are empty of food. Perhaps you’d play it cool for a day or two, at least until you realize the food is gone and won’t come back. What would you do? How far would you go? Now imagine a whole city going through the same. At the other end of the scale is a slow burn. Prices creeping up, products disappearing from the shelves, infrastructure slowly crumbling, riots spreading from far away to a city you’ve been to.
“It’ll get better next year as they sort out the supply issues,” you might think. Except it won’t.
Perhaps we have to do away with some luxuries, like avocado toast, summer vacation in Spain, and cheap electronics from China. Perhaps we’ll live like in the 80s, or 60s, or the raging 20s. Or perhaps we’ll have to become farmers and smiths and tailors as we succumb to a new ‘dark ages’.
Next Stop, Neo-lithicum
The taller the man the heavier the fall, and western civilization has grown to the skies. Is a post-apocalyptic Neo-lithicum the next stop?
The general consensus among ‘collapseniks’ is that western society will most likely have collapsed by 2050, 2100 at the latest. Depending on the path down the hill, we might end up in a range of different scenarios, but in general, we won’t be as many, society won’t be as complex, and it’s going to suck for most of us.
Armageddon
“The end of the world occurred pretty much as we had predicted. Too many humans, not enough space or resources to go around. The details are trivial and pointless, the reasons, as always, purely human ones. The earth was nearly wiped clean of life. A great cleansing, an atomic spark struck by human hands, quickly raged out of control.” — Fallout 2 Opening Monologue
The next great war might be the last one. From one moment to the next, life as we know it will be over. Nuclear holocaust would be global, fast, and society would collapse to a few remnants struggling to survive.
Severe climate change, something from the depth of space, or a disease not imagined yet, could all cause a sort of Armageddon. However, only climate change can be predicted in advance. If the ‘hothouse Earth’ scenario comes to fruition (Earth turning to Venus), we might as well nuke ourselves first so that life has a chance in the distant future.
Low tech future
Be it a lack of resources, a crumbling of the state, or a loss of technological capacity and scientific knowledge, the world might slowly (or abruptly) descend into a pre-industrial society. Metal ore would be hard to come by, oil would be buried too deep do be extracted, and many other materials would only be available through scrap. Whether we bottom out in the dark ages or tumble all the way to neolithic tribal life is anyone’s guess.
In this scenario, the global population would be reduced to less than a billion and we would again be at the mercy of pathogens, storms, rat infestations, and everything else we struggled with back then. However, if the fall is slow, knowledge of hygiene, medicine, physics, and other sciences, might stick around. Given enough time, we might claw ourselves back up again. All in all, not the worst of futures.
Cyberpunk Dystopia
“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” — William Gibson
Recognizing that our inevitable fall will occur at different speeds in different places, some nations or regions might benefit, perhaps even manage to maintain technological advantage. Like in the movie Elysium or Blade Runner. Expect vast swathes of the population to live at the mercy of the rich and powerful. While technology and science might not be lost, and even further developed, the divide between rich and poor will increase to astronomical levels.
Retrotopia
Armed with modern science, we can build for the oncoming collapse. Low tech but deeply adapted communities could thrive by using our current knowledge of how to build passive cooling structures, how to grow edible plants even in the desert, how to tap into the earth’s heat, and so on. While modern technology would be largely gone, our understanding of physics and biology could stay. This scenario requires preparation, and a cooperatively controlled decline. However, 8 billion humans cannot live like this.
Summary
Societal collapse can be understood as a drastic and long-term decrease in available energy, population level, average quality of life, or technological advancement. It’s, however, likely that it’ll be a reduction of all of them.
Collapse can be characterized by how far and how fast we fall, and the geographical scale. Depending on these parameters, different scenarios are likely. From a fast crash to zero (Armageddon) to a slow tumble to pre-industrial times (low-tech future).
In between are the partial collapses, such as cyberpunk dystopia and retrotopia.
Or we could get our shit together and aim for the moon. Fusion and asteroid mining would solve our resource and energy issues. We could then cleanse the atmosphere, build resilient and sustainable cities, and so on. Who knows, perhaps we reach the promised land of Star Trek.
Sadly, the evidence doesn’t point in this direction.
I’ve now painted a rather bleak future, but is collapse likely, or even guaranteed? Continue to part 2: Why Collapse Is Inevitable.
