Two from Palladium.
Usually it's drought. A couple times it was a drought by-product, dust. More after the jump.*
And why, wary yet inquisitive reader may be wondering, are we going on about this stuff?
Because
you don't want to be taken by surprise. Live one's life, take care of
one's business, be aware of what's possible, roll with the changes.
From Palladium Magazine's (we are fans) The Palladium Letter, March 8:
Why Civilizations Collapse
We have to evaluate the perceptions that mint facts and theory, not merely peruse the body of theories handed down to us.
This article by Samo Burja from the philosophical journal The Side View was republished on Palladium Magazine on March 8, 2024.
Why
do civilizations collapse? This question bears not only on safeguarding
our society’s future but also makes sense of our present. The answer
relies on some of the same technē
that humanity needed to build civilization in the first place: we have
to evaluate the perceptions that mint facts and theory, not merely
peruse the body of theories handed down to us.
Institutional failure comes as a surprise
because organizations try to hide their shortcomings. They lean on
other, more functional organizations in order to keep up appearances.
During civilizational collapse, no organization can properly hide its
own inadequacy, since the whole interdependent ecosystem of institutions
is caving in on itself. States, religions, material technologies, and
ways of life that once seemed self-sustaining turn out to have been
dependent on the invisible subsidy of just a few key institutions. The
environment of societal collapse reveals much of the otherwise obscured
inner workings of crucial social technologies. After all, to analyze
something is to break it apart!
Despite being an
excellent epistemic opportunity, civilizational collapse seldom inspires
introspection among thinkers living through it. Mayan or Roman thinkers
don’t seem to have reflected on their ongoing collapse. As institutions
turn to cannibalizing each other, there is little patronage or
emotional energy going towards accurately describing the wider process.
The notable exception that proves the rule of civilizational delusion is
the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China. It is an encouraging example, since
it shows a societal failure arrested and reversed by an intellectual golden age called the Hundred Schools of Thought. Confucianism, Legalism, and Taoism could only come into being with this kind of epistemic opportunity.
In the West today, we operate under the influence of our own key philosophy, which we can call scientism:
the tendency to rely on scientific claims to describe the functioning
of society, even when there is no empirical reason to assume that they
apply. We act as if we are already living in a scientifically-planned
society, immune to collapse on a time scale that any of us have to worry
about. This is very far from the truth. We are certainly living in
socially-engineered societies, but they are not scientifically planned
in any straightforward way. Our organs of economic management do not
secretly know how the economy really works. Our systems of political
regulation are operating on the fumes of their institutional inheritance
from two or three generations ago—the last spurt of institutional
growth in Western societies happened roughly during the 1970s. At this
time in the United States, new federal bodies such as the Department of
Energy and Education were created and organizations such as NASA reached
their modern form. Concurrently, the United Kingdom dispensed with
organized labor as a political force in favor of an expanded
administrative apparatus, and France saw the resignation of Charles de
Gaulle, the architect of the Fifth Republic; neither country’s political
economy has evolved much since.
Civilizational
collapse always looms on the horizon. Though we usually think of
collapse as a slow process, it can in fact happen very quickly, as was
the case with the Late Bronze Age collapse.
The old dictum “gradually, then suddenly” is cliché, but accurate. To
ascertain whether or not we are headed for collapse, we must first
analyze the functionality of our own society and pinpoint where things
go wrong.
Mechanisms of Collapse
Our society is
dominated by large bureaucracies. These bureaucracies break down the
processing of physical goods and information into discrete tasks, such
as how a factory worker puts doors on a car, or a stock trader buys
futures contracts. These tasks are shorn of their context and executed
in a systematized environment whose constraints are quite narrow: put
the car door in, increase the portfolio value. Our society is thoroughly
compartmentalized. This compartmentalization isn’t driven by the
division of labor, but rather by the need to make use of misaligned
talent without empowering it. By radically limiting employees’ scope of
action, you make office politics more predictable. By fragmenting
available knowledge, you can leverage information asymmetries to the
intellectual or material advantage of the center. Some of this is
necessary for scaling organizations beyond what socially connected
networks can manage—but move too far towards compartmentalization, and
it becomes impossible to accomplish the original mission of the
organization.Such large bureaucratic systems do not emerge organically; they require design
and implementation. Empirically, we can know this simply by examining
the intent of the original founders of these systems. If you want to
know, say, why the FBI exists, you can find the answer in the documents
of its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. You could do the same for the IRS, or
for Amazon, or for any other number of institutions.
It is
very difficult, though, to apply this analysis to the construction of
society. No matter how large or how small, institutions always coexist
in a symbiotic relationship with other institutions. There is no Amazon
without the United States government, no U.S. government without—at
least—some parts of the U.S. economy. Each of these institutions depends
on the others in an intricate mesh. Society is not a single
institution, after all, but an ecosystem of interdependent institutions.
In addition to this complexity, non-functional institutions are the rule.
Our institutions today rarely function in accordance with their stated
purpose. Individuals within a given society are often very bad at
judging institutional functionality. Some people spend their entire
lives ruthlessly profiting from the misery of others, or greatly
contributing to the prosperity of others, without even knowing that they
are doing so. People who try to effect change are most often
frustrated. Countless people spend their lives wrestling with a societal
problem, slaving over papers for publication in academia or the
nonprofit world. They act as if there is some sort of metaphorical wall
which they throw their papers over, with some responsible person on the
other side taking the output of their disinterested scientific study and
translating it into policy, medical practice, or industrial production.
More often than not, there is nobody on the other side of that wall.
Since society is so deeply compartmentalized, it rarely functions as a
whole with a single purpose. Note that dysfunctionality is not a
normative distinction; it often boils down to the simple reality of
whether or not anyone ever follows up on key actions within the
institution. It is also a question of whether or not there is a
multiplier—be it individual, bureaucratic, oligarchic—behind that
metaphorical wall.
Institutions often become non-functional due to the loss of key knowledge at critical junctures. Take, for example, the recent failure of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to reproduce a niche classified material known as FOGBANK
that is necessary for manufacturing nuclear weapons. It took the NNSA
ten years and millions of dollars to re-engineer a material that their
staff in the 1980s knew how to make. That knowledge never should have
been lost in the first place, but in a dysfunctional society, such loss
of knowledge becomes the rule. Attempts at reverse engineering do not
always succeed, if they are even made.
Civilizational
collapse, then, looks like this dynamic at the scale of an entire
civilization: a low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and
knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that
eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society. There might be a
sudden point where the superstructure gives way dramatically, such as
occurred during the Bronze Age Collapse, or there might be slow
accommodation to this convergence to zero, as with the Byzantine Empire.....
....MUCH MORE
If interested, see also: "Let's Face It, When You Reap The Rewards Of Money And Power, You Want To Keep The Money And Power Flowing".
Drought and civilization:
Dust:
An Empire Brought Down By Dust
These folks were pretty sharp. From recognizing the problem to working out and implementing a solution, wow, just wow.
From Palladium Magazine, July 10, 2020:
When archaeologists discover a sophisticated artifact like the Greek Antikythera mechanism,
we conclude that some ancient societies may have been more advanced
than previously believed. When we think of advanced civilizations, the
image is usually one of advanced technology. Our civilization is
advanced because we have rockets and nuclear power. Technology is the
systematic application of knowledge, achieving goals that would
otherwise be impossible. But not all technologies are material. The
ability to organize human relationships, actions, and groups in
organized and effective ways is itself a specialized form of knowledge
called social technology.
Like material technologies, people can develop social technologies to
facilitate the flourishing of society and its people. One might
naturally wonder whether great social technology has ever been lost.
Just as material technologies like the Antikythera mechanism can be
forgotten or destroyed, are some social technologies lost to history?
Ancient China may be one such case—specifically the Shang and Early
Zhou dynasties, from roughly 1600 BC to 800 BC. That era met its end as
relevant knowledge on how to govern the country was corrupted and lost
during the Later Zhou dynasty. With the knowledge fragmented and
missing, societal decay ensued. The Warring States Period,
which extended from the 5th century to the 3rd century BC, was a
chaotic era which resulted from the disrepair and malfunction of this
social technology. This spurred the era’s leading thinkers to recognize
what was happening, albeit quite late in the process, when it was too
late in many ways.
However, that these thinkers recognized what was happening at all is
important and noteworthy. The blatant decline of the late Roman Empire
did not lead its great thinkers to do the same. The insights and debates
of the Later Zhou dynasty about the social technologies behind
civilization are worth studying to apply to our own era
What to Do When Civilization Is Breaking Down
The major figures of China’s intellectual renewal came to define the famous Hundred Schools of Thought.
China was unusually sophisticated when compared to the other great
powers of the era. Archaeological evidence from the period documents
impressive bronze works, superior to anything fashioned in the Middle East. The Zhou inherited the use of beautiful, ornamented bronze vessels called ding
from earlier dynasties, using them both in sacred rituals and to
symbolize temporal wealth and power. The Early Zhou dynasty spent as
much bronze on these vessels as they did on their all-important bronze
weaponry. This confounds modern assumptions that ancient societies did
not have the material surplus to invest in “non-essentials,” often given
as a reason why they appeared to remain in stasis, with little
development. In fact, this period in history saw important thinkers
even argue against unproductive use of wealth, a stance which would be
meaningless unless that kind of investment was normal and prominent.The assumption that these vessels represent mere luxury is unfounded.
Western cathedrals are, on their face, an unproductive use of
resources. But in fact, they played a central role in the social order
as vehicles of coordination, ritual, legitimacy for power, and social
assistance. The willingness of the Zhou rulers to invest huge resources
in bronze ding implies that they played a crucial role in the
social technology of the day—if one which was lost over time. The value
of Zhou social technology can literally be measured in the weight of the
precious bronze alloy, and was at least as important as their weaponry.
Even the period’s monumental construction suggests great skill at
coordinating experts. Archaeological remains indicate palace buildings
and towers of rammed earth and timber. Zhou-era art depicts two-story
buildings, possibly for ritual purposes. The decay of these structures
makes it difficult to know whether this era, seen by later periods as a
golden age, made even greater accomplishments. When Lao Tzu blithely
references a nine-story tower in one of the Tao Te Ching’s
meditations, is this fantastical musing, or a reference to a real
achievement—or at least an attempt? Written sources from the time point
to a sophisticated feudalistic society. Reading them today reminds one
of medieval Japan two thousand years later, in ways the imperial and
bureaucratic China of later eras—that more obviously influenced Japan as
we know it—does not.
When confronted with remarkable achievements from the past,
archaeologists have been at a loss as to how to explain them. Sometimes,
people will fill the gaps with fantastical theories—hence the beliefs
about aliens or telepaths building the Egyptian pyramids. A more likely
scenario is that either we have lost the memory of certain material
technologies or of social technologies which could compensate for them.
Which social technologies allowed China to achieve its feats?
Reverse-Engineering Civilization
Confucius,
who died just a few years before the Warring States period, has a
popular reputation among Westerners today for the wise sayings
attributed to him. But his true project was to discover and restore the
practices which had made the Zhou dynasty great. By doing so, he
believed a ruler could renew an entire society....
....MUCH MORE
Sadly, all we have on offer here at Climateer Investing is the material. Last touted December 31, 2023 in: The Economist: "When civilisation collapses, will you be ready?"
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before striking, not all civilizations thrive, good luck.