9 ms·

I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that ev

I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built. I really wish we had a lot more rigorous research into this subject. Here’s an interesting presentation from Marc Jancovici https://youtu.be/Vjkq8V5rVy0 https://youtu.be/Vjkq8V5rVy0 It’s two hours long and you may not agree with some of the alarming conclusions but they have clearly put in a lot of work into their thesis. More people should be aware of these possibilities.

Swizec 5y ago
We are almost certainly plummeting towards the next collapse of the roman empire. This time "western civilization". But it's not that bad! Rome's collapse took around 100 years, from 376 - 476[1]. If you consider Byzantine as a continuation of Rome, the final collapse didn't happen until 1453 [2]. So it took a full 1077 years for Rome to fall. Plenty of time for our lifetimes to pass in relative comfort. We're, what, 10 years, maybe 20 years, into the process of our civilization collapsing? I think what we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2 [3]. We've lived our whole lives in a time of rapid economic growth. Just because that's regressing to the mean doesn't mean the ride's over. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi... [2] https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine-empire https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine... [3] slowing growth after "catching up" from WW2 is the core thesis of Capital in the 21st Century
- elevenoh 5y ago
  Casual 'almost certainly'... I don't think so. Anyone know the name of the longstanding psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe they're living through an inordinately pivotal inflection point in history, when in reality: they're 'almost certainly' incorrect?
  - Swizec 5y ago
    I edited to add more context.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  Civilizational collapse is not a change of borders. It’s when knowledge becomes lost, social networks get disrupted and people’s welfare goes down.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    That is supposedly what happened with Rome. A very modern society (by our standards) was replaced by barbarians (by our standards). Those barbarians eventually developed a lot of the same social and political structures as Rome. It was a regression from a unified pan-continent society to isolated tribes. How advanced those tribes were is hard to say because most didn’t write things down. As far as I know what followed Rome was a period of unrest and lessened commerce. From that aspect at least it was “worse”.
    - username90 5y ago
      And it took over a thousand years for a city larger than Rome to appear again anywhere in the world. Sometimes things just crash and nothing replaces it.
- asah 5y ago
  Unless things happen faster nowadays...
- DesiLurker 5y ago
  Well rome didnt see a meteoric rise of technology in 100 or so years before collapse. also modern weaponry could make collapse a lot more interesting than we imagine. I dont agree with a lot of r/collapse but have to accommodate that post ww2 prosperity has brought in a lot of 'global optimizations'. take that away and access to cheap plentiful energy & things could get bad fast.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Rome didn't collapse overnight, it took literally hundreds of years. It was a "collapse" in the sense that the standard of living and technology fell from the previous peak in some regions, but even then, not much of one because Constantinople endured and other empires were untouched (e.g. China). The only sudden collapse that's possible is the result of a full-scale nuclear exchange that kills most of the major cities on Earth - but the risk of that has steadily decreased sine it's peak around the 60s-70s. A long, slow multi-generational decline however is quite possible for a place like the US though: the US has an ideological bent that allows it to decide to sacrifice it's own citizens, and that's been growing stronger. Increasing rates of crises due to climate change could definitely lead to some new generational poverty, but that's the point: that's a "collapse" in the true Roman sense, and definitely not in the "I'm going to survive it in my fortified bunker" sense. It's more Americans losing their houses and discovering what it's like to be poor when the bailout money is "efficiently" managed.
  - forz877 5y ago
    No nuclear weapons either, which, if countries are suffering from major drought and famine, may tip the scales in favor of using them.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2 We grow more in a few days than the world did at the height of Rome's power. We're also richer almost everywhere on the planet than we were at the peak of the post-WWII boom. These ghost stories are a cheap way of defending complacency. If everything is going to shit in 2040, why bother acting now to better yourself, your community, your country or the world?
  - Swizec 5y ago
    > If everything is going to shit in 2040, why bother acting now to better yourself, your community, your country or the world? If you might get hit by a car tomorrow, why bother with anything at all? We assume the best and keep going. Make contingency plans.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  It seems to me that a certain amount of growth comes from further specialization. At one end of the scale, you have a few people in the clan or tribe specialize in turning rocks into spear points, and others specialize in hunting, and the whole group eats better. At the other end of the scale, you have a globally-integrated supply chain. At the other end of the scale. That is, there's no further to go. All the benefits that can be reaped from this process, we've already reaped. There is no further growth to gain from this approach. (Or not much. It is possible for the supply chain to further globalize and specialize, but not orders of magnitude more. And, as we regard China as an enemy, and look at what happened with Covid, we may even pull back from the amount that we already have.)
sillysaurusx 5y ago
I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile. As the pandemic showed, social norms are flexible when they are required to be. EDIT: I’ll listen to this presentation, maybe, but the first minute is already looking pretty bad. It’s a guy on stage telling a ghost story. He even opens up with “you’re young, so the tendency is to say ‘doesn’t scare me! Doesn’t scare me!’” Let’s see what his conclusions are.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- XorNot 5y ago
  That's making a rather broad claim from a rather specific one, even if the adherents have a lot of ideological overlap. Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > but it hasn't happened yet To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February: > In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes. [0] https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-production-1846248229 https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-produ...
    - schimmy_changa 5y ago
overscore 5y ago
I was an infantry soldier and learnt very fast how fragile the logistics of necessities can be in the modern world. I don't believe that world civilisation will collapse (at least not in any way that can be prepared for), but I have moved out of the city, begun to farm organically, and have a plan to cook and live without mains power or fuel for months on end. I know people think I'm a nutjob, but I've also seen first-hand whole cities who thought that progress was a one-way street end up in terrible circumstances. That said, I'm not an alarmist. I am a founder, put a sizeable amount of my wealth into the global stock market, drive cars, fly (outside of COVID-19) to various places, and - most riskily of all, IMO - live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  > live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea. Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear. Otherwise your life sounds pretty desirable. I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways). I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)
  - overscore 5y ago
    > Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear. It is actually the only thing that keeps me up at night. I am crew on a lifeboat and need to live within a certain distance from the boathouse, otherwise I would move tomorrow. The RNLI is too important a part of my life to leave behind otherwise. I may be able to afford some land higher up (60m+ in the future). > I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways). I am definitely not self-sufficient (especially not socially)! I could maybe take care of my family for one calendar year (one growing season and one winter), but it's a maybe. If we're talking about a situation where people are physically (violently) competing for resources, then I'd be in the same boat as everyone else (by design, I'd add - I have no desire to be the lone survivor behind a fence or whatever while other families starve). > I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :) Thanks! It actually happened because I gave up on living in a city. Certainly, there's a lot of people I knew in SF/Bay Area, London, and Dublin who could do what I did overnight (probably even as a side project), but don't, so I don't think funding is the limiting factor for most. I hope things work out for you. I know it's trite to say online, but if you decide to do it, it's certainly a path you can take. It will involve sacrificing other paths not taken, though - the bill for opportunity cost escapes no-one.
falcolas 5y ago
A relatively simple lockdown was enough to drastically impact our “just in time” supply and manufacturing system. We’re still recovering from that, and likely will be for months, if not years. Even mere rumors of TP shortage caused such a shortage to actually occur through mostly social interactions. Larger scale disasters will definitely screw things up for us all.
- tablespoonsruby 5y ago
  There actually was a shortage--of residential TP, due to people spending more time at home instead of at work, where commercial TP is used.
  - tamaharbor 5y ago
    Luckily, diarrhea is/was not a Covid symptom, else things could have been a lot worse.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    There wasn't really much of a shortage though - at any given time there were warehouses full of residential toilet paper, what their wasn't was capacity to keep supermarket shelves stocked when regular customers all suddenly doubled their purchasing pattern. A supermarket stocks maybe 150 packs but sees well over that in foot traffic per day: if a relatively small number of people simultaneously think "hmm, I might need more this week" then it's pretty easy to empty the shelves. This of course gets compounded by the group of craven **holes who decided "this is my time to get rich!" and also realized it's not that expensive to buy out every pack in a store because toilet paper is not expensive. The well managed supermarkets reacted to this by doing per customer day by day rationing, which smoothed shelf stock levels out a lot almost immediately: if there was a problem, it's that we don't have enough automated systems to detect and level this off: it's pretty reasonable in fact to have basic prohibitions against single purchasers buying "wholesale" level quantities out from supermarkets, and directing them to the regular supply chain system when they try.
    - elihu 5y ago
titzer 5y ago
I've followed r/collapse for at least 4 years. In the beginning, it all sounded completely crazy. There were a lot of different theories about how it would all come apart, most of them nutty, some legit. The more legit theories have been sifted to the top as world events like COVID, massive recessions, shortages, local natural disasters, and global climate change have come to the fore. Couple that with the political instability over the Trump years and that insane media atmosphere, and collapse has basically gone mainstream. At first it was articles that would be on r/collapse starting to show up on r/worldnews and r/politics. Then they started showing up on hackernews and now on the New York Times. Collapse is happening. But it's not showy or sudden, but more like watching a corpse rot. Big systems fail slowly, grinding down their parts. A giant spaceship in freefall is pretty slow due to the scale. We're not in freefall yet, but all the moorings of modern life are coming undone. Buckle up!
- wussboy 5y ago
  But surely this is precisely how people begin to believe in any conspiracy theory? How many flat earthers would tell exactly the same story? How many anti-vax? Clearly humans begin to believe the evidence for something when they are exposed to it a lot. And this is what the Internet provides for every conceivable theory from Pizza Gate to Global Warming. “I found the evidence compelling” isn’t sufficient for finding the truth, unfortunately. This is The genius of the scientific method is that it automatically does not trust itself.
  - another_story 5y ago
    But in the case of systems collapsing due to climate change, it's the scientific community with mountains of evidence saying our topsoil is disappearing, coastal cities will start to flood, typhoons and droughts will become more frequent, and food supplies are at risk.
whall6 5y ago
Try Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
elihu 5y ago
Along with environmental and economic collapse, I'm worried about political collapse. Basically, I worry that democracies will either cease being democracies, or become so mired in their own bureaucratic processes that it's impossible to decisively act when an emergency arises. We can say that the latter has already happened in the U.S., but it could always be worse and the emergencies we have to deal with can get worse too. We need to be able to deal the problems facing the next few generations by making rational decisions based on long-range planning. It doesn't seem to be happening, and when people get frustrated with the political process they don't just give up on their leaders, they give up on the whole democratic system and turn to strong-man leaders who can "get things done". The decline in public regard for democracy has been going on world-wide for awhile now.
iammisc 5y ago
The part that I don't get about this is it rests on the narrative that such drastic societal collapse has happened on a grand scale. While small civilizations here and there have collapsed and political orders have gone away and been replaced by others at no point do we see humans descend into mass anarchy only to have to rebuild civilization. Many doomsayers point to the fall of Rome as a supposed example of a major power falling and descending people into some kind of 'dark age'. There are two problems with this. Firstly, the Romans didn't feel like they had actually fallen. As far as the people of the empire were concerned they were Roman even after the old roman imperial system went away. Instead of one exact 'date' of the fall of the empire, the empire slowly faded, and didn't really completely end until 1354 AD. By some people's imaginings, it still hasn't ended (namely the Hapsburgs who still claim to be the Holy Roman Emperor). Secondly, the dark ages as we imagine it didn't exist. The dark ages were not a time of sudden societal collapse. Rather they were a time of major growth. Lots of things happened during the 'dark ages'. Lots of discoveries made. Lots of voyages undertaken. Lots of empires arose and fell (but the people didn't really notice much). The idea that suddenly everything we know is going to go away and we're all going to have to huddle inside is, in my opinion, not founded in reality. It's sure fun to LARP though.
- minikites 5y ago
  >at no point do we see humans descend into mass anarchy only to have to rebuild civilization The Bronze Age Collapse is pretty close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
  - iammisc 5y ago
    The key word is 'pretty close'. Firstly, if what I read is correct, it only impacted the mediterranean basin, whereas bronze age civilizations existed in China, India, and the Americas as well. As the article you linked points out, Egyptian and Greek civilizations were affected, but apparently there were other strong civilizations that were doing exceedingly well at the time at the expense of Egypt and Greece. That's my point. Certainly, from any one perspective, societies can collapse, but that's just a localized problem. Never have we seen humanity suddenly thrust wholesale into some fantastical dark age.

Swizec 5y ago

We are almost certainly plummeting towards the next collapse of the roman empire. This time "western civilization". But it's not that bad! Rome's collapse took around 100 years, from 376 - 476[1]. If you consider Byzantine as a continuation of Rome, the final collapse didn't happen until 1453 [2]. So it took a full 1077 years for Rome to fall. Plenty of time for our lifetimes to pass in relative comfort. We're, what, 10 years, maybe 20 years, into the process of our civilization collapsing? I think what we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2 [3]. We've lived our whole lives in a time of rapid economic growth. Just because that's regressing to the mean doesn't mean the ride's over. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi... [2] https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine-empire https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine... [3] slowing growth after "catching up" from WW2 is the core thesis of Capital in the 21st Century

elevenoh 5y ago
Casual 'almost certainly'... I don't think so. Anyone know the name of the longstanding psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe they're living through an inordinately pivotal inflection point in history, when in reality: they're 'almost certainly' incorrect?
- Swizec 5y ago
  I edited to add more context.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
Civilizational collapse is not a change of borders. It’s when knowledge becomes lost, social networks get disrupted and people’s welfare goes down.
- Swizec 5y ago
  That is supposedly what happened with Rome. A very modern society (by our standards) was replaced by barbarians (by our standards). Those barbarians eventually developed a lot of the same social and political structures as Rome. It was a regression from a unified pan-continent society to isolated tribes. How advanced those tribes were is hard to say because most didn’t write things down. As far as I know what followed Rome was a period of unrest and lessened commerce. From that aspect at least it was “worse”.
  - username90 5y ago
    And it took over a thousand years for a city larger than Rome to appear again anywhere in the world. Sometimes things just crash and nothing replaces it.
asah 5y ago
Unless things happen faster nowadays...
DesiLurker 5y ago
Well rome didnt see a meteoric rise of technology in 100 or so years before collapse. also modern weaponry could make collapse a lot more interesting than we imagine. I dont agree with a lot of r/collapse but have to accommodate that post ww2 prosperity has brought in a lot of 'global optimizations'. take that away and access to cheap plentiful energy & things could get bad fast.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Rome didn't collapse overnight, it took literally hundreds of years. It was a "collapse" in the sense that the standard of living and technology fell from the previous peak in some regions, but even then, not much of one because Constantinople endured and other empires were untouched (e.g. China). The only sudden collapse that's possible is the result of a full-scale nuclear exchange that kills most of the major cities on Earth - but the risk of that has steadily decreased sine it's peak around the 60s-70s. A long, slow multi-generational decline however is quite possible for a place like the US though: the US has an ideological bent that allows it to decide to sacrifice it's own citizens, and that's been growing stronger. Increasing rates of crises due to climate change could definitely lead to some new generational poverty, but that's the point: that's a "collapse" in the true Roman sense, and definitely not in the "I'm going to survive it in my fortified bunker" sense. It's more Americans losing their houses and discovering what it's like to be poor when the bailout money is "efficiently" managed.
- forz877 5y ago
  No nuclear weapons either, which, if countries are suffering from major drought and famine, may tip the scales in favor of using them.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2 We grow more in a few days than the world did at the height of Rome's power. We're also richer almost everywhere on the planet than we were at the peak of the post-WWII boom. These ghost stories are a cheap way of defending complacency. If everything is going to shit in 2040, why bother acting now to better yourself, your community, your country or the world?
- Swizec 5y ago
  > If everything is going to shit in 2040, why bother acting now to better yourself, your community, your country or the world? If you might get hit by a car tomorrow, why bother with anything at all? We assume the best and keep going. Make contingency plans.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
It seems to me that a certain amount of growth comes from further specialization. At one end of the scale, you have a few people in the clan or tribe specialize in turning rocks into spear points, and others specialize in hunting, and the whole group eats better. At the other end of the scale, you have a globally-integrated supply chain. At the other end of the scale. That is, there's no further to go. All the benefits that can be reaped from this process, we've already reaped. There is no further growth to gain from this approach. (Or not much. It is possible for the supply chain to further globalize and specialize, but not orders of magnitude more. And, as we regard China as an enemy, and look at what happened with Covid, we may even pull back from the amount that we already have.)

sillysaurusx 5y ago

I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile. As the pandemic showed, social norms are flexible when they are required to be. EDIT: I’ll listen to this presentation, maybe, but the first minute is already looking pretty bad. It’s a guy on stage telling a ghost story. He even opens up with “you’re young, so the tendency is to say ‘doesn’t scare me! Doesn’t scare me!’” Let’s see what his conclusions are.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
XorNot 5y ago
That's making a rather broad claim from a rather specific one, even if the adherents have a lot of ideological overlap. Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > but it hasn't happened yet To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February: > In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes. [0] https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-production-1846248229 https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-produ...
  - schimmy_changa 5y ago

overscore 5y ago

I was an infantry soldier and learnt very fast how fragile the logistics of necessities can be in the modern world. I don't believe that world civilisation will collapse (at least not in any way that can be prepared for), but I have moved out of the city, begun to farm organically, and have a plan to cook and live without mains power or fuel for months on end. I know people think I'm a nutjob, but I've also seen first-hand whole cities who thought that progress was a one-way street end up in terrible circumstances. That said, I'm not an alarmist. I am a founder, put a sizeable amount of my wealth into the global stock market, drive cars, fly (outside of COVID-19) to various places, and - most riskily of all, IMO - live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea.

johnisgood 5y ago
> live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea. Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear. Otherwise your life sounds pretty desirable. I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways). I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)
- overscore 5y ago
  > Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear. It is actually the only thing that keeps me up at night. I am crew on a lifeboat and need to live within a certain distance from the boathouse, otherwise I would move tomorrow. The RNLI is too important a part of my life to leave behind otherwise. I may be able to afford some land higher up (60m+ in the future). > I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways). I am definitely not self-sufficient (especially not socially)! I could maybe take care of my family for one calendar year (one growing season and one winter), but it's a maybe. If we're talking about a situation where people are physically (violently) competing for resources, then I'd be in the same boat as everyone else (by design, I'd add - I have no desire to be the lone survivor behind a fence or whatever while other families starve). > I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :) Thanks! It actually happened because I gave up on living in a city. Certainly, there's a lot of people I knew in SF/Bay Area, London, and Dublin who could do what I did overnight (probably even as a side project), but don't, so I don't think funding is the limiting factor for most. I hope things work out for you. I know it's trite to say online, but if you decide to do it, it's certainly a path you can take. It will involve sacrificing other paths not taken, though - the bill for opportunity cost escapes no-one.

falcolas 5y ago

A relatively simple lockdown was enough to drastically impact our “just in time” supply and manufacturing system. We’re still recovering from that, and likely will be for months, if not years. Even mere rumors of TP shortage caused such a shortage to actually occur through mostly social interactions. Larger scale disasters will definitely screw things up for us all.

tablespoonsruby 5y ago
There actually was a shortage--of residential TP, due to people spending more time at home instead of at work, where commercial TP is used.
- tamaharbor 5y ago
  Luckily, diarrhea is/was not a Covid symptom, else things could have been a lot worse.
- XorNot 5y ago
  There wasn't really much of a shortage though - at any given time there were warehouses full of residential toilet paper, what their wasn't was capacity to keep supermarket shelves stocked when regular customers all suddenly doubled their purchasing pattern. A supermarket stocks maybe 150 packs but sees well over that in foot traffic per day: if a relatively small number of people simultaneously think "hmm, I might need more this week" then it's pretty easy to empty the shelves. This of course gets compounded by the group of craven **holes who decided "this is my time to get rich!" and also realized it's not that expensive to buy out every pack in a store because toilet paper is not expensive. The well managed supermarkets reacted to this by doing per customer day by day rationing, which smoothed shelf stock levels out a lot almost immediately: if there was a problem, it's that we don't have enough automated systems to detect and level this off: it's pretty reasonable in fact to have basic prohibitions against single purchasers buying "wholesale" level quantities out from supermarkets, and directing them to the regular supply chain system when they try.
  - elihu 5y ago

titzer 5y ago

I've followed r/collapse for at least 4 years. In the beginning, it all sounded completely crazy. There were a lot of different theories about how it would all come apart, most of them nutty, some legit. The more legit theories have been sifted to the top as world events like COVID, massive recessions, shortages, local natural disasters, and global climate change have come to the fore. Couple that with the political instability over the Trump years and that insane media atmosphere, and collapse has basically gone mainstream. At first it was articles that would be on r/collapse starting to show up on r/worldnews and r/politics. Then they started showing up on hackernews and now on the New York Times. Collapse is happening. But it's not showy or sudden, but more like watching a corpse rot. Big systems fail slowly, grinding down their parts. A giant spaceship in freefall is pretty slow due to the scale. We're not in freefall yet, but all the moorings of modern life are coming undone. Buckle up!

wussboy 5y ago
But surely this is precisely how people begin to believe in any conspiracy theory? How many flat earthers would tell exactly the same story? How many anti-vax? Clearly humans begin to believe the evidence for something when they are exposed to it a lot. And this is what the Internet provides for every conceivable theory from Pizza Gate to Global Warming. “I found the evidence compelling” isn’t sufficient for finding the truth, unfortunately. This is The genius of the scientific method is that it automatically does not trust itself.
- another_story 5y ago
  But in the case of systems collapsing due to climate change, it's the scientific community with mountains of evidence saying our topsoil is disappearing, coastal cities will start to flood, typhoons and droughts will become more frequent, and food supplies are at risk.

whall6 5y ago

Try Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

elihu 5y ago

Along with environmental and economic collapse, I'm worried about political collapse. Basically, I worry that democracies will either cease being democracies, or become so mired in their own bureaucratic processes that it's impossible to decisively act when an emergency arises. We can say that the latter has already happened in the U.S., but it could always be worse and the emergencies we have to deal with can get worse too. We need to be able to deal the problems facing the next few generations by making rational decisions based on long-range planning. It doesn't seem to be happening, and when people get frustrated with the political process they don't just give up on their leaders, they give up on the whole democratic system and turn to strong-man leaders who can "get things done". The decline in public regard for democracy has been going on world-wide for awhile now.

iammisc 5y ago

The part that I don't get about this is it rests on the narrative that such drastic societal collapse has happened on a grand scale. While small civilizations here and there have collapsed and political orders have gone away and been replaced by others at no point do we see humans descend into mass anarchy only to have to rebuild civilization. Many doomsayers point to the fall of Rome as a supposed example of a major power falling and descending people into some kind of 'dark age'. There are two problems with this. Firstly, the Romans didn't feel like they had actually fallen. As far as the people of the empire were concerned they were Roman even after the old roman imperial system went away. Instead of one exact 'date' of the fall of the empire, the empire slowly faded, and didn't really completely end until 1354 AD. By some people's imaginings, it still hasn't ended (namely the Hapsburgs who still claim to be the Holy Roman Emperor). Secondly, the dark ages as we imagine it didn't exist. The dark ages were not a time of sudden societal collapse. Rather they were a time of major growth. Lots of things happened during the 'dark ages'. Lots of discoveries made. Lots of voyages undertaken. Lots of empires arose and fell (but the people didn't really notice much). The idea that suddenly everything we know is going to go away and we're all going to have to huddle inside is, in my opinion, not founded in reality. It's sure fun to LARP though.

minikites 5y ago
>at no point do we see humans descend into mass anarchy only to have to rebuild civilization The Bronze Age Collapse is pretty close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
- iammisc 5y ago
  The key word is 'pretty close'. Firstly, if what I read is correct, it only impacted the mediterranean basin, whereas bronze age civilizations existed in China, India, and the Americas as well. As the article you linked points out, Egyptian and Greek civilizations were affected, but apparently there were other strong civilizations that were doing exceedingly well at the time at the expense of Egypt and Greece. That's my point. Certainly, from any one perspective, societies can collapse, but that's just a localized problem. Never have we seen humanity suddenly thrust wholesale into some fantastical dark age.