I think generically people harbor the fear of a collapse of social order however it is caused. What people don't recognize and therefore don't fear, is societal collapse. That is, when the activities of the society produce the conditions which become the very cause of the collapse, like an underground river eroding support for the land above. It's not going too far to say that it is a natural occurrence because the ultimate cause is reducible to natural laws which play out over long stretches of time.
In the world we live in today, this comes in two related forms simultaneously. Climate change and resource depletion, including and especially of energy, both have the potential to cause society to collapse. I only say potential because it has yet to happen, but really it is inevitable due to the "nature" of it. What humanity does as a collective to respond to the collapse matters a lot, but the collapse itself is inevitable. So I'll need to define what I mean and what I don't mean, by collapse.
I've mentioned Joseph Tainter in a past post but I'll expand on what I said. He is an archeologist who wrote "The Collapse of Complex Societies" published in 1987. His definition of collapse is simply a loss or reduction of societal complexity. It's a rather clinical definition, necessarily, because he is generalizing all collapses. But don't be lulled into complacency by this innocent-sounding terminology because societal collapse is a frightening event to experience. If you want to learn more then this here video has most of what you need to know.
Tainter mentions a lot of subjects that should sound familiar to the currently living. Rising taxes, rising debt, rising cost of doing things, and attendant problems that arise from these trends like falling living standards for most people. Complexity is a central theme of this blog and this is where it comes from. It is abstract but that doesn't make it any less real, it just means that it is hard to notice
unless you take a wide view. A simple way to start pulling the threads of what a complex society is to compare the complexity of a small city-state with that of a large empire, say Sparta and the Roman Empire. Rome had many more layers of administration, much wider trade systems, much larger military, and much more infrastructure to maintain than Sparta ever did. Thus, Rome was more expensive to operate and to maintain, and as the complexity increased over the centuries, so did the costs, which weakened its ability to respond to crises, such as German attacks, or bad harvests.
The collapse phase of Rome was centuries long. There's no record I know of that says anybody ever talked about it or understood at the time what was happening. I suspect the Roman peasants, squeezed by tax collectors to fund the growing demands of the elites, had a hunch when they eventually threw in their lot with the Germanic hordes late in the game, but they were illiterate.
The most important tidbit to mentally stow away is that it happens over historical time. The experience of a collapsing society is one of generations, with the inflection point only seen after decades in hindsight.
So how does the experience of Rome apply today? A lot of conflicting views have been advanced as to why Rome collapsed and haven't we learned something in the meantime? To answer the second question first, maybe we have learned, certainly we've learned, but maybe we haven't learned this. The British Empire was the first global empire, and the U.S. took responsibility for it once the British could no longer do so. It's not enough to talk about Britain, though, because there were many maritime global empires which sprang from Western Europe from the 15th century on. So it's more accurate and more complete to say it was a Western Empire, of which the U.S. is the latest and greatest manifestation of a long, singular period of history. All of the European empires have crumbled leaving the U.S. the last one standing.
Now it's possible to talk about inflection points. There are different inflection points for the different empires and all the points are in themselves stretches of time. The British Empire began its decline in the second half of the 19th century. Spain began its decline in the early 17th century. The whole of Western Europe began it's decline at the onset of WWI, after the imperial competition had reached a zero sum situation when the world held no more fruitful lands to conquer. The Great War was about a rising Germany, at the time probably the most powerful country in the world and late to the race for empire, found it would need to take from the other empires in order to fulfill it's ambition. Thus the zero sum game was played.
The U.S., I think, probably reached it's point of diminishing returns in the early 70's. It is when the costs of the entire system of industry, geopolitics, military, and the bread and circuses of social programs rose dramatically. The inflation blowout during that decade was resolved through heavy borrowing and the advent of the petrodollar system that required trade and fiscal deficits to work. The 70's was when the increments of growth began to diminish and the cost of obtaining that growth started to rise. This process is no where better understood that in the debt to GDP ratio, either nationally or globally.
In the wake of the 2008 financial smackdown this process of increasing debt to get diminishing GDP growth has gone into overdrive. Hence my gloominess about the future prospects of growth or even particularly happy times. But it all takes time to unfold. People do respond to slow the process down. As Tainter mentions, this normally involves adding complexity to the system. Of course, that new complexity in time grows to be a bigger burden. Societies pile on more complexity because it adds efficiency to the system, but efficiency itself runs into diminishing returns. So call it a trap, but one that is natural to fall into because people see "problems" they want to "solve". They do not think in terms of predicaments, because doing so means accepting there is no solution that can be applied to get things back to the way they were. Only adapting to new conditions remains, and, though adaptation sounds like a nice word, adapting to conditions constrained by the nature of the predicament means there are only bad and less bad choices available.
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