We Knew (02) — Complexity and Denial of Collapse
Civilization is collapsing, whether we like it or not.
[Letter #016]
Good morning, son.
Your mother felt a definite kick the other day. I was lucky enough to be touching her tummy at the same time, so I caught it as well. These sorts of movements are quite rare so far, as mostly she only senses that our Tiny Bear is shifting weight around. This little guy, who we hope to be you, hasn’t been much of a kicker so far, but that’s alright. It’s probably better to go through life as laid back as possible. As things become more and more complicated during this short existence of ours, they’ll tend to cause greater stress and worry. It’s best to avoid that as much as you can.
When I was a kid, and honestly the trend only became more pronounced as I aged, there would be television shows with the premise of showing off the talent of the “average person.” I think it started with shows like Star Search, and occasionally some late-night shows in the 90s like David Letterman, and exploded into American Idol, America’s Got Talent, and all of the rest of them throughout the 2000s and 2010s (there were dozens). They really reminded me of what I had learned about Vaudeville, the collection of stage performances from the early 20th century, before television or widespread use of the radio. Basically a massive “talent show” production, you’d see musical acts, dancers, gymnastic routines, strength exhibitions, circus acts, and pretty much anything that might be a little out of the ordinary. Novelty was the name of the game, both in Vaudeville as well as the ridiculous television of my youth.
An act that I saw more than once on those shows, one that would have certainly fit well within the Vaudeville circuit, was spinning plates. The premise was simple enough to start with. The performer would balance a dinner plate on the point of a long, thin rod fixed vertically and spin it. The centrifugal motion of the spinning plate would keep the balance on the pointed end of the rod. So long as the performer continued to add momentum to the plate, by gently pushing it to increase its speed, he could keep this up indefinitely, so long as nothing else changed.
The fun begins when the performer adds a second plate to a second rod, spinning it as well. He must then keep both plates spinning, otherwise they’ll fall from their rods and smash on the floor. Two plates are only fun for a moment, so he adds another and then another. He’ll keep adding more plates to more rods, running from each to the next, gently spinning up their momentum by hand. A good act can see nearly a dozen or so plates spinning successfully at once while the performer is running laps around the stage to keep things going. The act is concluded when the plates, far too numerous to even watch them all, nevermind continue their spinning or start more in addition, inevitably lose enough momentum and fall. It’s great fun for a short time.
We have, in a manner of speaking, been living in a world for the past ten to twelve millennia that has been setting up and spinning more and more plates. While our access to fossil fuels gave us the keys to a plate-spinning machine, even that’s about to reach its maximum capacity of spinning plates. We’re also running out of fuel for it anyway. The machine is beside the point, as civilization would have reached this point eventually regardless. Each degree of complexity is another plate, and we’re about to lose control of all of them. Crash imminent.
After I mentioned him a few letters back, I decided to take another look at Joseph Tainter and his “Collapse of Complex Societies.” If I haven’t had you read through this one yet, be sure you do so. It’s important. Tainter is an academic, so he spends far too many pages (in my opinion) just agreeing or disagreeing with other academics by name, but his thesis is pretty compelling. In fairness, he lays out his summaries of a tremendous amount of research trying to nail down exactly what causes civilizational collapse, so the length of the tome is justified. He demonstrates far more patience with the subject matter than I ever could. To grossly oversimplify his summary, he argues that societies use civilization as a “problem-solving machine,” and that we solve these problems by adding layers of complexity. When the system becomes too complex, that point being different for each civilization, it will collapse. Spinning plates, you see.
Maybe it’s age, but I can certainly see the benefit of simple living. More and more, I value the idea of staying home, reading books, tending to a garden and some chickens, and just enjoying the days. Perhaps that’s less about my age and more about what I see happening in the world, the ever-increasing tempo of global events, the rapid intensification of paradigm-shifting, cataclysmic occurrences racing alongside vapid, useless trivialities that still manage to make headlines. Knowing the seriousness of our planetary condition and the time (or lack thereof) that we have left in what we consider to be “normal life,” the mere suggestion that I should give a shit about the Oscars or whatever Elon Musk is saying or doing today is certainly enough to make me throw my hands up, shake my head, and long for a cabin in a small village of level-headed and simple, good people. Maybe that’s just me, but somehow I doubt it.
For all of the problems that I have with modern-day “conservatives,” who folks in the past might have referred to more as “reactionaries,” I have to say that I can at least sympathize with them on one point. They wish that life was simpler — the way, as they imagine, that it used to be. Of course, life actually was simpler in the past, purely by way of the complicating effects of civilization over time, but it was not so in the way that they typically believe. There was never a Stepford Wives America with purely white, middle-class suburbs and “family values.” It probably existed in places for a little while, I’m sure, but life is far too messy for the idyllic fantasies of white nostalgia to hold up for long against reality. No, I’m not at all interested in their racist daydreams of some “good ol’ days” that never were, but I can at least see the appeal of living in a less complicated existence. Can’t we all?
To be clear, it isn’t that life just gets so complicated that people give up, or something equally as simple. That’s not what causes collapse. Tainter demonstrates how, in every civilizational collapse to date, complexity causes fragility. People are adaptable and will continue to adjust to ever-increasing complexity. But, these systems are just like house of cards, built higher and higher, becoming more and more susceptible to a breeze that will crash the whole construction — to shift metaphors, too many spinning plates prevents the performer from renewing the spin on each individual plate. Tainter shows how complexity builds cumulatively until a triggering event, which often enough tends to be a drought and/or famine, begins the process that pushes the entire decline and fall of a civilization.
That’s what we’re facing now, by the way. We have several triggering events that are hitting all at once. The sheer coincidence of all of this is honestly bewildering.
Climate change is currently causing massive crop failures around the planet, and more of these are expected every year, as the temperature is supposed to continue climbing, at least until the current El Niño cycle wraps up. That could be next year, or it could be another five years from now. I recently read, for example, about how chocolate crops have been suffering due to either too much rain or too little. For as long as I’ve been around, chocolate has been a fairly cheap commodity, mostly because capitalists have ripped off cacao farmers, but that may not be the case for most of your life. Chocolate is only one crop, but the climate is affecting all of them everywhere. The rain patterns are shifting dramatically, as are these more pronounced temperature swings. Some plants will survive this instability, but not the vast quantity of crops that we need to support the global population.
The part of climate change that pop culture has focused on the most is sea-level rise, and while that’ll definitely be a massive problem soon (you probably already see some coastal towns underwater at high tide when you eventually read this letter), it’s only going to be one of the many pressing issues. Most of that coastal property is going to end up underwater and eventually washed out to sea. I think much of Florida is going to end up becoming an Atlantic shelf by some point in the next century. I grew up in Florida, you know, but you couldn’t pay me enough to move back there now.
I want you to know that I’ve been trying to get your Grandmom to move away from the hurricane-prone Sunshine State for years, so far to no avail. I keep trying to tell her that while economists and politicians are consistently bellowing that everything is fine and the future is bright, the insurance companies know the truth. They know that their entire existence is based on making wise bets that the “worst” won’t happen, or that it won’t happen very often. When you’re running an insurance business in a world with a consistent, dependable climate, it’s not that challenging to come up with some formulae to make serious money. When storms and other natural occurrences virtually always fall within a range of normal parameters, paying for a few outlier situations is a snap.
As you could have guessed though, it’s getting harder and harder to find insurance policies in Florida these days, and that’s exactly because these companies are calculating that it’s become a bad bet. They know they’ll be paying out more and more money to cover these increasingly damaging and expensive climatic events. Once it’s impossible (or virtually impossible due to the exorbitant cost) to get insurance in Florida, no one is going to buy a house there. People will stop moving there, and the values of all properties will bottom out. If that happens, the people who are living there will be stuck there, since they won’t be able to sell their houses for anything but a loss. Meanwhile, those who have moved away before them will have driven up the price of housing everywhere else. That situation would leave Florida just one strong storm away from a humanitarian crisis.
That also means that, on a long enough time line, your Grandmom’s house will only be worth the scrap price, and eventually not even that. I don’t want any sort of inheritance from her, but I suspect she’s counting on not living long enough to see these problems come to a head at all. That isn’t something I’d “bet the farm” on, as she comes from some long-lived ancestors. She’s likely to be around for another 20 years. The writing is on the wall, and these predictions are coming about faster than the so-called experts expected. I think she’s going to run into trouble, ready or not.
We also have the problem of peak oil, regardless of how the bean counters try to obfuscate things by counting non-oil products as if they were interchangeable with oil itself. In the 70s, the US peaked out with “conventional” oil production. That is, the kind that you just drill down and pump up. In 2005, the entire world peaked with conventional oil and began to decline. That then made hydraulic fracturing a profitable venture, so we’ve used it ever since, rapidly depleting those reserves and peaking that production in 2018. This year, we were told that we exceeded the 2018 peak and that we’re producing more now than ever in history. The part that is usually mumbled later is that this new height of production includes an asterisk. This “oil” production is now counting virtually all distilled fractionates and any other sort of liquefiable fuel: natural gas, ethanol, and hell, probably coal. This means they’re throwing absolutely everything we have at the problem, cannibalizing every energy source we have left, in order to keep up with the ever-growing energy demand.
That can’t last much longer.
These problems — food production, climate destruction, economic stress, and energy limits — are all under the umbrella issue of planetary overshoot. We fire apes are demanding far more than what our space rock can provide each year and are drawing down eons of accumulated resources, transforming them into polluting toxins at a rate far faster than nature can accommodate. The parallels to the examples that Tainter describes of older civilizations are, well — stunning. Each of these categories feels like the plate-spinning act. Each is a plate upon which tiny plates are balanced. Each looks to fall any second now, tumbling over each other, and the whole act is going to end with broken pieces everywhere.
Articles pop up on my phone every day by columnists who are perpetually frustrated by whatever our “leaders’’ choose to do or not do, say or not say. I just shake my head at this naivete. They’re leaders in name only. Their positions exist only for them to hold power, not to lead, serve, or problem-solve. I would argue that it’s always been that way, but it’s vividly laid bare these days. The gears of government are rusted together, nothing really gets done anymore except more funding for genocide and billionaires. It amazes me that anyone thinks either Red or Blue teams will actually do anything other than play the game of houses.
The more of us there are, and the more we demand of the planet, the greater the complexity will become within our global civilization. This is the powder keg. The triggering events, each an errant spark, are coming at us faster each year. The question first to my mind is, “What happens next?”
I’ll be honest with you, son, it’s one of the most difficult questions that I’ve ever encountered. On the one hand, everything that has happened in the past few years has been predicted, sometimes well in advance. Things that are predicted for the next five to ten years look pretty likely as well. On the other hand, the critical missing piece of the puzzle is when. When will we have to make dramatic changes in our daily lives? When will the store shelves go empty and never fill up again? When will something like a zucchini cost thirty dollars? When will christo-fascist dominionist militias start kicking in doors to find and punish heretics? I hope that last one especially remains only a ridiculous suggestion. I think it was Twain who said that making predictions is exceptionally difficult, particularly when they concern the future.
I really think it’s going to be up to individuals, families, and communities to look out for themselves and each other. Our old ideas of societal order will break down soon, and we’re going to be more on our own for security and just general livelihood. Our neighbors on our street have just invited us to go out to play bingo or trivia or something this week. I don’t recall what it is exactly, but I don’t care. It’s important that we get to know them, and it doesn’t at all matter what shape that takes. In these next few years, and certainly within a couple of decades, these folks are going to become “our people.” They’ll become the only people we actually know and will be able to trust. They’ll become our “tribe.” As the world moves on into this century, that’ll become more and more true.
We’re going to have to admit to ourselves that the life we have known is ending. This isn’t a “hard patch” to make it through. It’s a transition to a whole new existence for human society. Even if we admit it quietly to ourselves, it’s something that we’re going to have to do soon and perpetually going forward.
Our global civilization is at peak complexity right now, and our decline is rapidly approaching. It likely would only have taken one of the major triggers coming at us to begin the collapse, but we are getting hit by several at once. There’s a motto that circled about in an online forum I used to frequent that went, “Faster than expected.” That’s because nearly every article that was shared there included that phrasing in one form or another. Researchers, scientists, and other wizards were consistently shocked at how fast their “worst-case scenarios” were manifesting in the real world.
After years of this, you just sort of get used to the idea that things are speeding up, and it’s no longer a stretch to think that what was predicted for 2100 will happen by 2050, or maybe even 2030. Predictions that would have once warranted sideways stares are now a simple shrug of the shoulders and a muttered, “Yeah, that tracks.” It’s gotten to the point that the talking heads and columnists who still don’t get it are either obviously clueless or maliciously ignoring clear signs. I imagine there’s a lot of both.
Very likely, a lot of this is “old news” to you, son. You’ll have seen a number of these events play out by the time you read this, I’m sure. I guess that means that this letter isn’t intended to be a warning for you but rather a nod that we knew what was coming. Everyone was reading the articles about ice disappearing from the poles. Everyone saw the invasion in Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine. Everyone complained about the higher prices of food and fuel. I guess most folks just hoped that things would work themselves out — that they would get better in time.
No one really knew anything else to do. They didn’t want to admit that things weren’t ever going to get better. They didn’t want to look like crazy people — Chicken Little, sky-is-falling nutjob prepper types, you know. They thought they could just vote harder and maybe protest a little, and that the system would work things out. Democracy, and all that crap. Things won’t get better though. I know that they won’t, not really. When you read this, you’ll be able to confirm that they didn’t.
This is, I believe, the reason I find the idea of a simple life more comforting these days. The whole world is about to balkanize into factions, and within factions there will be tribes. I expect a great deal of conflict will come with that. I harbor no delusions that I will be able to avoid that conflict, but I wish I could. Just give me that easy village life with a coop full of chickens and a garden, a neighbor with some cows or goats, and maybe a neighbor who likes to sew and bake pies. Something simple like that, and I’m sure we can figure out a way to make a beautiful life.
Well, I can dream about it anyway.
I look forward to meeting you, son. It’s now mid-March, and you’re supposed to be here around the beginning of July, so long as everything continues to go well. There’s a real irony of my son being born around Independence Day that isn’t lost on me. It’s still uncertain whether we’ll try for a second kid after you come along. There are just far too many questions that need answering, having to do both with your mother’s feelings on the matter as well as conditions in the world, before that can be decided. The question of your middle name is yet unsolved as well, but your mother and I both want it to mean something important to us. She’s still rooting for us to use her father’s name, as is traditional in her family, but I’m not sold yet. We’ll see how it goes.
Until next time, I love you very much.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
