There’s a belief, particularly among young people, that global warming, an increasingly hostile economy, resource shortages, and countless other crises are combining into a mega crisis that’s going to cause a civilisational collapse within our lifetimes.
For a moment, lets leave aside the discussion of whether this is the case and assume that it is. Let’s assume that we’re approaching The End.
Like playing Jenga, we know that the tower will eventually fall over, but we can’t say with certainty if it’s going to be when we pull this particular block, or the next. We can’t predict the direction. We can’t predict who is going to win.
While attempting to remain as grounded and realistic as possible, I’m going to outline what collapse actually looks like and what it might mean for you.
The phrase ‘civilisational collapse’ evokes images of Mad Max, the Fallout games, Terminator, Dawn Of The Dead and so on.
We imagine the collapse to be instantaneous, recognisable and dramatic: Monday you’re relaxing with your family by the pool. Friday you’re grilling rat skewers over a flaming barrel in the ruins of your city, fending off would-be thieves with a machete.
Is this realistic?
With 100% certainty — Yes.
Also with 100% certainty — No.
For that answer to make sense lets step back for a moment and examine what civillisation is:
What we think of as civillisation is really a ‘supersystem’.
It’s a massive, enormously complex system made up of other complex systems like the oceans, our interlinked national economies, stock markets and global supply chains. All of these systems interact with eachother and together add up to our ‘civillisation’.
Short of a Coronal Mass Ejection, a stray black hole passing through our solar system or other cosmically calamitous events, there aren’t many things that could instantaneously demolish our global civillisation.
But that doesn’t mean that things can’t get very rapidly worse before individuals are capable of reacting. All of our systems are interlinked, and like our bodies being overwhelmed by an illness, a failure in one system can place immense pressure on connected systems that were previously fine.
This means that the collapse that people imagine — the instantaneous dramatic Hollywood style ‘happening’ is a certainty. It might kill you and your entire family. Or you might not even notice. It depends on your position on the gameboard.
If we assume that it’s true we are past ‘Peak Everything’, the most likely scenario for the coming decades is a slow reduction in the complexity of our systems. Population decline, production decline as we pay increased costs to access fewer and fewer resources, living standards across the globe drop, and more and more people are pushed into poverty and starvation.
We can see this happening already — severe food insecurity has been climbing steadily for the past six years, reversing a decades long trend.
Global warming is already reducing crop yields.
Global rice yields are dropping by 0.3% per year. Each degree of warming will drop global corn yields by 7%, a process already well underway. This study showed a reduction of consumable food calories by 1% per year for the top 10 global crops.
If that doesn’t sound like a lot, consider that at present outputs that’s around 35 Trillion calories each year — enough to feed 50 million people with a daily diet of 1800 calories, which is the UN guideline for avoiding deprivation and undernourishment.
If you’re reading this you’re likely an educated westerner of at least middle class income and largely insulated from system failures that are already occurring now in 2022.
You might be reading this and worrying that if the economy collapses your job, your ability to provide shelter and food for yourself and your family will be threatened.
If you ARE worried about these things, I can say with some certainty that you probably don’t live in the rust belt. You probably don’t live in South Africa. You definitely don’t live in Venezuela or Sri Lanka. If you did, you wouldn’t be worried about it because the process is either well underway or has already happened.
The geographic position of your country, its level of integration with the global economy, and its role within that system (NET EXPORT/IMPORT, Food Security etc) mean that the pressures of the coming century are going to affect every single country differently.
As a general rule, the more northern the geography, the more insulated its inhabitants will be due to purchasing power differences and the relatively milder climates.
As prices of food and good necessarily rise, developed nations will suffer (relatively) less decreases in standards of living. The proportion of their income that the average westerner spends on their food and energy will substantially increase, but even with these increases they are still a long way from starvation and will likely be able to remain that way for decades after we see the first societal breakdowns of nations in the global south.
Countries in the global south are much more exposed to climate changes than the milder climates of the north and already unable to compete on purchasing power with other countries.
Consider for a moment — Climate change and The Syrian Civil War.
This is a gross simplification, but from a geopolitical perspective the war was preceded by a drought, an increase food prices and economic migration into the cities as farms failed. The resulting civil unrest caused the government to focus its efforts on maintaining stability within the main urban centers which lead to a reduction in its ability to maintain a security umbrella in the rural regions. The resultant power vacuum meant that insurgents and groups of all kinds were able to seize territory.
The Syrian Civil War might be the first “climate conflict”. Not in the way that we imagined decades ago — direct wars between states over resources. But instead a slow fracturing of the state as resource shortages and supply limitations drain it of its ability to maintain the monopoly on violence.
It’s a variation of a pattern that we will likely see repeated all across the world, with the failure of each system making the failure of related systems more likely.
If conflicts like Syria emerge in other countries the mass movement of people out of these areas and into others, results in a strain on the economies, societies, and governments of neighboring countries, as demonstrated by Lebannon — now seemingly in terminal decline.
Libya and Syria got into a bit of trouble, placing pressure on an already struggling Lebanon, which is now also in trouble. Within economics/Risk analysis these are referred to as ‘Second Order Effects’
Like trying to predict which corner of the room the blocks of our falling Jenga tower are going to end up in, small changes in initial inputs leads to enormous differences in outputs in second and third order outputs.
These second and third order effects are what affect us most directly. Which governments are going to struggle and when? Which economies are going to collapse? Which industries are going to fail and what new industries might emerge?
There are genuinely limitless possible scenarios and answers to these type of questions even further confounded by the fact that dramatically changing circumstances will mean that things that today seem unthinkable will in the future seem not just sensible, but necessary.
For example Coltan — an ore you likely haven’t heard of — is necessary to produce a wide range of personal electronic devices and there are only a handful of places on the planet where it is currently mined. The richest reserves in the world being found in unstable countries like The Democratic Republic of The Congo, Rwanda and Venezuela.
Will richer countries provide direct military aid in order to secure the raw materials that they need to keep functioning? It seems unthinkable that they wouldn’t. One likely scenario is that this work will not be carried out by sovereign militaries but instead by ‘Arm’s-length’ PMC’s and contractors like the Wagner group.
If this sounds farfetched, note that Erik Prince, CEO of blackwater came close to enacting this exact solution for extracting the trillions of resources buried in Afghanistan during the Trump presidency.
Asking our question again, What Does Collapse Look Like?
It depends on who you are.
At a personal level if you’re a western billionaire you likely won’t notice any drop in your relative living standards for decades, possibly even the entire century. If you’re a middle class person located in a mild northern climate, integrated into their local community, living in a country that is (or has the ability to be) self-sufficient in terms of material and agriculture production you’re likely insulated from the mass starvation and conflict that will emerge in the countries most exposed to climate change even if supply chain shocks and global “de-complexification” will mean a noticeable and painful drop in living standards during your lifetime.
If you’re a Congolese child slave being forced to fight and mine coltan for a local warlord, what does the collapse of global supply chains and advanced manufacturing mean for you in practical terms? You might welcome a NATO military intervention.
Depending on where you’re standing, collapse doesn’t mean The End.
The Roman Empire collapsed and the Catholic Church and feudalism thrived in Europe. Then the Bubonic plague arrived, killed hundreds of millions of people and feudal civillisation collapsed in turn, making way for the secular democratic-capitalist new order.
To illustrate this point consider one final thing — The 29th of May, 1453.
The Fall of Constantinople and the final end of the Roman State that had existed for nearly one and a half thousand years.
Except, for the Arabic World Constantinople never ‘fell’, they use a different word:
From the Islamic perspective, Constantinople never fell, like Jerusalem, Egypt and Hispania it was added to their new system, the ummah — the Islamic world.
Our governments and economies — the systems that make up our global civillisation are human constructions, but they are not constructed the way we might construct a bridge, or a house.
They are emergent structures with reactive properties, molded by the conditions in which they were born and shaped by present material conditions just as much as they control them. As those systems collapse, like in Syria, power does not vanish, it changes shape. It is diffused and then centralised elsewhere as a new system emerges to take its place.
This is what the collapse will look like, and it’s already here.
As William Gibson famously said “The future is not evenly distributed.”
We can’t predict how our Jenga tower is going to fall, the best we can do is position ourselves to avoid the falling blocks and wait until it’s over. Then we can collect the bricks, build a new structure and start playing the game again.
