How Societies Collapse

Richard Bolstad 2022

What is Collapse?

In this article I want to offer you an overview of how societies emerge and dissolve, taking examples from the large scale (civilizations) and the small scale (professional membership organizations). Why? Because it helps you make sense of the situation we increasingly find ourselves in. Right now, a lot of social theorists know that we live in a “time of change”, of “crisis”. I’m a historian/archaeologist so part of what I study is exactly this. When you dig up artifacts from ancient civilizations, you can’t escape the reality that they all collapsed. For people who do not have access to these ideas, this is a scary time. It can be easier to know what is happening. I’m going to start with Rome, because its kind of dissociated from us, and you already know that it collapsed (so no spoiler alert is needed).

To understand how societies, and organizations, collapse, it is useful to understand what it is that we think is “collapsing”. Archaeologist Joseph Tainter suggested that what collapses is the complexity of the social organization. Early in the life of an organization or society, increasing complexity seems the best way to solve the many problems of life. However, in any social system, after a certain amount of complexity is reached, the increases in complexity deliver less and less actual benefit. At this point, when increases in complexity are made to solve new and unexpected problems, the result may instead be less benefit than before the additional complexity. At this point people increasingly realize that simpler is better, and they abandon the complex organization that seemed to offer so many expanded possibilities. However simple and rational this may sound, it is almost inevitably experienced as rather tragic.

Rome: The Classic Example

For example, in the Roman Empire at its peak say 27 BCE – 200 CE, the empire coordinated 50-75 million people. The city of Rome itself had between one and two million people, partially sustained by a “dole” of free food, and guaranteed safety (the “Pax Romana”), and even entertainment (gladiatorial fights, chariot races etc). Several other centres of empire also provided these goods, and the quality of daily life depended on trade across thousands of kilometres, importing silks from China dyed with purple dye from Syria, wine from Hispania (Spain) in amphorae from Gallia (France), grain from Africa, Iron from India, and marble from Italia. This level of complexity required an Imperial administration itself of immense complexity, and an army of 200,000 men, who all needed to be paid and housed. It required a vast network of well-maintained roads and well-secured trade routes. Complexity requires energy, and in the case of the Roman empire the energy was largely derived from human beings, including a slave population constituting 10-20% of the population (Tainter, 1988).

In the earlier years of the Roman state (753-27 BCE), the continuous expansion of the republic replenished sources of slaves and precious metals used to exchange for goods and services, but by the time of Augustus (the first emperor, 27 BCE – 14 CE) expansion had virtually stopped. Travel, and thus expansion, around the edges of the Mediterranean sea was 100-200 times cheaper than travel and expansion across a land mass such as the Eurasian continent. With the annexation of Egypt/Aegyptus in 30 BCE, the Mediterranean sea was surrounded by Rome. Sources of new labour and revenue began to diminish as a result of the slowing of expansion, and taxation was increasingly used to pay the imperial administration. The cost of new conquests in Parthia, Thracia, and Germania, and even the cost of defending recent conquests in Britannia and Judaea/Palestina, did not justify the increased military activity.

As taxation proved unpopular, the empire moved to debase its coinage until coins that had once been pure silver now had only 5% silver and were essentially worthless tokens. The military numbers needed to control an ever more rebellious peripheral population increased to 650,000 by 300 AD, and that required a vast output of money, as well as draining an increasingly large proportion of workers from Roman farms and industry. The state of course could not survive on its own worthless money tokens, and began to tax farms in kind, so that by 300 AD 30-50% of a farm’s production was taken in tax. Despite a constantly increasing bureaucracy designed to manage this taxation system and organize the luxuries of “civilization” that people in the cities expected, the empire was increasingly unable to deliver. The state now shifted from paying a citizen army, to paying bands of “barbarians” to defend against each other, and of course these barbarians actually did not want to be paid in worthless tokens, but in farmable land. As the crisis intensified, the tendency to blame individual emperors meant that the empire went though up to one emperor per year, as coup after coup attempted to install someone who could fix the system by adding yet one more level of complexity (more army, more tax, more bureaucrats, more bread and circuses). Increasingly, people in the provinces saw that they might indeed be better off opting out of the taxation system themselves and living “free” of imperial bureaucracy. It is certainly true that barbarian migrations were forced by the activity of other tribes pushing them from as far away as China, where the Han empire was expelling the Xiongnu. It is true that devastating pandemics obliterated up to 30% of the population in many areas of the Roman empire. But the reasons why the state was unable to respond to these crises were internal, and systemic. Pressed by taxation, requirements to provide soldiers for military service, and ever-increasing economic and trade failures, people living on the periphery of the empire did not see collapse of the system as an unmitigated disaster so much as a necessary choice for survival. One characteristic of the impending collapse, then, was that the advantages of the empire to its rulers continued as the advantages to its population decreased sharply. This increased inequality of benefits may or may not “cause” a revolutionary collapse of a civilization, but it is always an indicator of impending collapse of some sort.

As trade routes collapsed and people increasingly used their local resources to solve local problems, the cities no longer had supplies to support their populations, and people simply abandoned them. By 550 CE, the population of Rome had dropped to 30,000, and it continued to decline to a medieval level of 17,000. Most of the western empire essentially reverted to agrarian life, and literacy (which had been so widespread in the Roman empire that house-slaves could be left messages in written script) declined to below 20% across Europe. Complexity radically decreased and “states” as such were transitory and partial over the next 400 years (a period previously called “the dark ages” simply because of the paucity of written records from it).

Reset Buttons?

The Romans were not “naïve” about their political situation. In fact, what is interesting about the Roman Empire in the west is not that it fell, but that it lasted for over 1000 years from the founding of the city, and 400 years from the establishment of the imperial system. It did that because Roman leaders were able, at key points, to identify the diminishing returns from the energy put into complexity, and perform a “reset”.

The most famous reset occurred when Octavianus (renamed Augustus) declared the Principate in 27 BCE, bringing to an end a civil war which had begun with Julius Caesar’s death in 44 BCE. While insisting that he was merely “First” or “Princeps” amongst equals, Augustus secured the highest office of Consul as a permanent title, and established his de-facto control over all the legions, making them a permanent army (previously legions had been recruited for specific wars and owed their loyalty most of all to the general or Imperator who paid them). Having just secured Egypt, Augustus essentially declared the age of expansion over. The complex struggle between rival military commanders, which had almost required wars for their self-promotion, came to an end, and while the Senate and assemblies in Rome still officially existed, there was now one commander (Alston, 2017).

As we saw, this end of expansion did stop the civil wars and constant expansion of the empire, but it gradually led to a new form of complexity, through the proliferation of the imperial bureaucracy, for example. Between 235 CE and 284 CE, this led to another prolonged civil war, called the Crisis of the Third Century. In 293 CE, the emperor Diocletian performed the second reset when he created the Tetrarchy. This system divided the empire into two halves, one eventually ruled from Rome and one eventually ruled from Constantinople. Initially each half of the empire had a senior and a junior emperor, with the plan that emperors would then appoint and train their successors in an orderly fashion (hence the name Tetrarchy – rule of four). Diocletian also reformed the economic system, reinstating coins based on the three metals (gold, silver and copper). Although the idea of the Tetrarchy did not last, the simplification of the empire into two halves was a success in that the Eastern Roman empire lasted until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. In that sense, some version of the Roman empire lasted more than 2000 years (Tainter, 1988).

Both these major “resets” were attempts to scale down the complexity of the empire. Tainter argues that there is another type of reset which is possible, and which Rome initiated only minimally, and this is to find a new source of energy to manage the complexity. Examples might be new sources of income and labor (such as the slaves and treasure released by defeat of the Jewish revolt in 66-73 CE), and including inventions that create mechanical labour. Later empires such as the British Empire used this latter source of reset (mechanical labour), tapping into coal reserves to run steam engines, then oil reserves to run combustion engines, and finally into information processing systems (computing) and nuclear and solar power. In terms of complexity, each “revolution” in production (the “industrial revolution” and the “information revolution”) gives more energy to manage the increasing complexity. An example from the early Roman empire was the development of Roman concrete or opus caementicium in the late third century BCE (adding volcanic dust called pozzolana to mortar made of a mixture of brick or rock pieces, lime or gypsum and water created a concrete far more resilient than modern concrete and enabled the rapid creation of public buildings such as the Pantheon, still standing in Rome today).

Our Civilization

Gaya Herrington analyzed predictions from 1972, in the light of statistics up to 2020, and showed that our current global civilization is on track with those predictions for a scenario of declining food and industrial production, leading to civilization collapse in the 2040s. The coming collapse is not, it should be emphasized, due to a global pandemic, war, or economic downturn per se, although our increasing inability to manage those events is characteristic of the actual causes of collapse. Permanent growth is not intrinsically sustainable, and avoiding collapse would require a dramatic new source of energy and/or living space, and/or a dramatic simplification of lifestyle in this civilization (including limits on population expansion). While those things are possible, there is no evidence in the last 50 years of any changes large enough to preserve civilization (Herrington, 2021).

Inequality, in particular is rising, and Kevin MacKay points out that this is a key indicator of impending civilization collapse. Motesharrei et alia argue that the interaction between ruling elites and ruled populations follows the same dynamic as any predator-prey biological system – over time the predators will rise and consume so many of the prey that the prey population collapses, followed by the predator population, and that allows prey numbers to rebuild. It is a gruesome mathematical calculation, that suggests that our civilization is coming to an end. They point out that new technology does not always create a reset, because it may in fact be diverted into increased consumption by the elite itself. This is what we see with the rapid development of space flight and internet technology in our time, feeding an ever smaller group of billionaires. They conclude “Given economic stratification, collapse is very difficult to avoid and requires major policy changes, including major reductions in inequality and population growth rates. Even in the absence of economic stratification, collapse can still occur if depletion per capita is too high. However, collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.” (MacKay, 2017; Motesharrei, 2014).

How dramatic is inequality in modern civilization? “In 2021, billionaires saw the steepest increase in their share of wealth on record, according to The World Inequality Lab’s annual World Inequality Report. The top 0.01% richest individuals—the 520,000 people who have at least $19 million— now hold 11% of the world’s wealth, up a full percentage point from 2020, the report found. Meanwhile, the share of global wealth owned by billionaires has grown from 1% in 1995 to 3% in 2021.” (Goodkind, 2021)

What will this collapse look like? It may run the gamut from simply shifting a lot of what was “civilization” online, to wars between rival warlords, climate-change caused famines and uncontrolled pandemics. It may be anywhere on the continuum from population decline and a “simpler world”, to your worst post-apocalyptic movie scenario. There wasn’t one day when the Roman empire collapsed, either. It slowly changed. You can see it happening around you now. Three years ago it was fairly easy for me to travel as a trainer around the world, teaching in many different countries, not affected by marauding warlords like Vladimir Putin or George Bush, and not worrying about outbreaks of plagues. Those days are gone, and to some extent, people do not want them back. My students increasingly prefer to train from their own home, and they accept that their travel choices are limited. When future historians date the collapse of our civilization, it is a good bet that they will date it, not from some year in the 2040s, but from 2020 CE.

Other Examples: The Bronze Age Collapse, the Classical Maya Collapse, the Egyptian “Intermediate Periods”

It is important to understand that civilization collapse is normal, rather than unusual. We could give hundreds of examples to prove this, and readers would still be tempted to believe that our own case is subject to a “special exception”. It is not. Less well known than the collapse of the Roman Empire, is the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations in approximately 1177 BCE. The empires of the Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Trojans, Indus Valley people, Assyrians and Babylonians created a civilization intermingling via trade, commerce, exchange and “cultural piggybacking,”. Near the end of the period, the Trojan war represented the most famous struggle for commercial control between these empires (Mycenaean Greeks and Trojans struggling for control of the Bosporus trade route). These nations referred to each other as sibling civilizations and depended on the sharing of core world resources (combining tin from central Asia with copper from Cyprus to create bronze, for example). Eric Cline showed that a “perfect storm” of attacks from sea peoples, climate change and internal rebellions meant that their very interdependence put them at risk. As trade routes collapsed and each empire was unable to meet basic survival needs for its people, the kingdoms collapsed like dominoes, the cities were abandoned, skills like metallurgy and pottery deteriorated drastically and within a generation literacy disappeared from most of the Middle East and Europe. By 1100 BC the cuneiform script which had been used to share letters between the great kings was unreadable (Cline, 2021).

Ironically, a new Phoenician script needed to be developed centuries later out of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, and this new script was far easier to learn than the old, and gradually gave birth to the Hebrew, Greek and Roman scripts, and ultimately to a great many modern alphabets (Cline, 2021). Ironically also, the collapse of trade led local populations to quickly embrace new technology for creating a furnace hot enough to smelt iron (which did not require strengthening by adding tin or arsenic to it like copper did). When civilization re-emerged, in city states such as Athens, Rome, Babylon, and Tyre, iron was the dominant metal. This is a reminder that not all of the consequences of decentralization are “bad” for human beings. Local production with new technology can sometimes produce a more energy efficient solution than the solutions gained by constantly increasing centralization and complexity. If the Roman Empire had not collapsed, modern mathematics might arguably never have evolved, because it depended on the adoption of Arabic numerals from 980 CE onwards, and the empire had been locked into Roman numerals which were far more cumbersome. In our civilization, the internet is arguably such a new technology, that allows us to do things locally that we would previously have done internationally.

Many other examples of civilization rise and fall could be used to demonstrate the general principles of complexity. While smaller Maya cities emerged around 750 BCE, by 50 BCE, the Maya in the rainforests of Central America made several innovations that allowed them to create cities of much greater complexity – each housing tens of thousands of people. By 250 CE, a series of city states such as Tikal, linked by trade, were using intensive agriculture, long distance hydraulic engineering (aqueduct and canal systems), a sophisticated hieroglyphic script, a mathematics systems that used the Zero (something the Roman empire did not have), and many other innovations allowing city populations to reach up to 120,000. This “Southern Lowlands” Classic Maya civilization collapsed abruptly in the period up to 950 CE (the last monument dated with the sophisticated Mayan calendar system was erected in Toniná in 909 CE). Over a 75 year period the population of the cities dropped from 3,000,000 to 450,000. Skeletons from this period show that collapsing food supplies were part of a picture that included severe climate change and frantic attempts to adjust politically, including replacing a rigid kingship system with city councils (Tainter, 1988). Again, we can see that there is a limit to the advantages of growth in complexity. The Maya still exist, just as the descendants of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire still exist. But the Maya never again adopted the previous level of complexity, as their territory was divided amongst the new colonial states of Central America. No-one can now fully read the Maya script, and almost the entirety of Maya science and mathematics has been lost with it.

Archaeologists David Graeber and David Wengrow produced a radical re-evaluation of history in 2021, when they argued convincingly that much progress in human history depends on the sequence of “collapse”. Collapse preserves our humanity by enabling us to go back and create a society that is worth living in, rather than one that is merely complex. They say, for example that the periods after “collapse” of the Ancient Egyptian empires were often times when equality between men and women was greater, when city democracies emerged, and when war was less common. “Museumgoers will no doubt be familiar with the division of ancient Egyptian history into Old, Middle and New Kingdoms. Each is separated by an ‘intermediate’ period, often described as epochs of ‘chaos and cultural degeneration’. In fact, these were simply periods when there was no single ruler of Egypt. Authority devolved to local factions or, as we will shortly see, changed its nature altogether. Taken together, these intermediate periods span about a third of Egypt’s ancient history, down to the accession of a series of foreign or vassal kings (known simply as the Late period), and they saw some very significant political developments of their own…. However much future Egyptologists would come to appreciate them, the elegance of Middle Kingdom literature like The Story of Sinuhe and the proliferation of Osiris cults likely offered little solace to the thousands of military conscripts, forced labourers and persecuted minorities of the time, many of whose grandparents were living quite peaceful lives in the preceding ‘dark ages’.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p. 380, 382)

Professional Helpers’ Organizations: Smaller Examples of Complexity

Most of us have experienced smaller instances where complexity at first delivered increasing advantages and then later became an energy drain and was abandoned. The New Zealand Medical Association was founded in 1886, and until 1967 was a branch of the British Medical Association. It published the New Zealand Medical Journal, an important source of research and professional information, and owned a building in central Wellington as a headquarters. In May 2022, it closed down. Medical educator and NLP Practitioner Bruce Arroll says he “believed the NZMA had simply outlived its usefulness. Arroll is professor and head of the department of general practice and primary health care at the University of Auckland. “It’s not a union for medical specialists and not one for GPs,” he said. “It doesn’t have a significant educational role. Other than running the medical journal, it had no purpose, sadly. I’m amazed it went for so long.” ” Epidemiologist Michael Baker, famous for his expert guidance during the Covid-19 pandemic, says that he identified one reason why the organization had declining numbers: “As a young doctor, I learned first-hand that the NZMA behaved in ways consistent with maintaining their position in the market rather than being driven by a sense of compassion. In 1989, the NZMA took a case against me for ‘bringing the practice of medicine into disrepute’.” His crime? Allowing people to get medical treatment and choose the amount they paid – a “koha” model from the Maori world. (Older, 2022). Like most professional organizations, NZMA had to prioritize professional credibility, and eventually became so driven by maintaining its own existence (running its journal, maintaining its building, policing doctors who behaved in ways not seen as fully professional or scientifically credible etc.) that it was not worth belonging to.

The New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists (NZAP) was set up in 1947 at a meeting of 26 people from various professional backgrounds, in Christchurch. I became a full member in 1988 after three years of training, writing case studies, doing written and clinical assessments and attending extensive training and supervision. In 2007 the complexity increased to nearer medical level, when psychotherapy became registered under the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003, (meaning that only government registered practitioners can call themselves “psychotherapists” though anyone can claim to be doing “psychotherapy”). The New Zealand Association of Counsellors / Te Roopu Kaiwhiriwhiri o Aotearoa (NZAC) was set up in 1974. It initially had a membership who were mainly untrained Secondary School Guidance Counsellors and it set about creating standards so they would have a professional training system and backing. At the time, members of NZAC often viewed NZAP as overly formal and complex: they were the “breakaway rebels”. In the early 1990s, NZAC shifted their requirements so that people needed to complete a 1-2 year counselling program to join (I co-taught such a program, accepted by them at the time). Now, in 2022, membership of NZAC is open only to those who have a Bachelors or Masters degree in counselling, and entrance is arguably as difficult as entrance to NZAP. With NZMA, NZAP and NZAC, we can see the usual cycle of a professional organization, but at different stages. NZAC has steadily increased its membership requirements and internal complexity, as have NZAP. In the case of NZMA, those membership requirements seemed to deliver less and less benefits for members, and the group collapsed. Do the benefits of 3 year counselling training and the complexity of internal supervision requirements outweigh the burden of these requirements on members? They must, right now, because the organization continues. But the proliferation of non-NZAC/NZAP brief psychotherapy trainings in the last decade also warns us that there is a point at which benefits will be outweighed by challenges of complexity.

The advantage of collapse is as obvious in these professional organizations as in the larger societies that eventually abandon complexity. Individuals can refocus on what they actually intended to achieve by complexity. In my career as a Psychotherapist and Counselor and Coach, I have watched as organizations rediscover and forget this in a predictable cycle. Robert Carkhuff and C. Truax (1965) showed that laypersons with less than 100 hours of training communicated the same levels of empathy and warmth as highly experienced counsellors, including Carl Rogers and Rollo May. In a 1968 study they showed that the non-professionals were rated as more accepting and less anxious than the professionals. Katherine Mair (“The Myth of Therapist Expertise” in Dryden and Feltham 1992, p 150) updated this conclusion, reporting “Hattie et al (1984) reviewed forty-three studies in which “professionals” defined as those who had undergone a formal clinical training in psychology, psychiatry, social work or nursing, were compared with “paraprofessionals”, educated people with no clinical training, for effectiveness in carrying out a variety of psychotherapeutic treatments. They came to the unpalatable conclusion that the paraprofessionals were, on average, rather more effective.”

Carl Rogers was himself quite clear on this. He firmly opposed moves to “professionalise” counselling. He says (Rogers 1980, p246) “If we were less arrogant, we might also learn much from the “uncertified” individual, who is sometimes unusually adept in the area of human relationships…. And I have slowly come to the conclusion that if we did away with “the expert”, “the certified professional”, “the licensed psychologist”, we might open our profession to a breath of fresh air, a surge of creativity, such as it has not known for years. In every area -medicine, nursing, teaching, bricklaying or carpentry -certification has tied it to the past, has discouraged innovation.” Rogers suggests that our energy is better put into educating the public, rather than into ever-escalating checks and criteria for certification. (Rogers 1980, p246) “If we concentrated on developing and giving outstanding personal help, individuals would come to us, rather than to con artists.”

From 1955 to 1961 a group of highly respected authorities including Leslie Le Cron, William Kroger MD and Milton Erickson MD organised a travelling teaching group called “Hypnosis Seminars”, teaching a three day course in hypnosis for dentists, doctors and psychologists. Their opinion was that basic hynosis is easy to learn, though it may take years of practise to become expert. They “did not believe it essential that its students have intensive background study in basic psychology, psychopathology, or psychodynamics. They held that the average physician, psychologist or dentist could, with this minimal three day training, be trusted to use hypnotic techniques in his practice or research in a primarily beneficial way.” (Watkins, 1965, p. 56)

I am not aiming to argue that here: merely to point out that the belief that it is true … is constantly resurfacing. New organizations are then set up to acknowledge that reality, and the NZANLP (New Zealand Association of Neuro Linguistic Programming) is one. Set up in the 1990s, the organization recognized 18 and 36 day trainings – at the low end of professional coaching training requirements. But even in this endeavour membership eventually plunged in the 2020s and the final 35 members were faced with maintaining a set of requirements for professional membership that included an hour of professional supervision by an approved supervisor every 5 weeks and 15 hours of professional development each year. To monitor this complexity, running a website, a complaints process, an admissions board, organising professional development days, and running a financially viable committee requires a group of about 6 people all working several hours a week. If there are only 36 members, that means that each member must be on that committee working that much one year in six. Just working out how to vote for each decision using the rules of the Incorporated Society can take considerable time at meetings, and that too requires extra learning.

Altogether, it’s hardly an onerous burden, unless you are only working part time as an NLP Master Practitioner, in which case you may be paying more for membership plus supervision than you are earning from clients, and doing a lot of committee work so that others can reap professional recognition. And in that case, you will leave, just like the farmers who left the Roman Empire because taxes were too high. You won’t complain because after all, these arrangements must suit someone. As with the collapse of civilizations, no-one is “to blame” for this cycle. The organization did offer the possibility of great benefits through increased complexity.

In the 1990s, NZANLP applied to have their trainings assessed by NZQA (the New Zealand Qualifications Authority). I was the President at that time, and we spent 5 years meeting for several weekends and getting the courses approved. At the final meeting where we would ratify these and have them installed on the NZQA system, so that our trainings would be credited towards University qualifications etc. … a group of new members enrolled specifically to vote to stop us doing that. Their fear was that having NZQA recognized qualifications would add undue complexity to their own businesses. Frustrated with this lost opportunity for NLP to become a recognized professional training, I applied for recognition as an NZQA registered training organization, and ran the NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner trainings as “Local Certificates” so our students could at least be able to apply for recognition of this prior learning. However, the cost of being audited financially and in terms of Quality Assurance by the NZQA system was over NZ$10,000 per year, and it took me weeks of extra work to prove our systems were functioning each year, as well as requiring us to forward fund every course, not spending any students’ money until the course was fully complete…. So after two years, I gave up and withdrew. Twenty five years later, in August 2022, after NZANLP membership standards rose and numbers dropped, the remaining members voted by an overwhelming margin to close the NZANLP incorporated society itself.

If you have ever belonged to an Incorporated Society or Trust of this sort, you know that the level of complexity added can quickly “burn out” members. As with civilizations, they then begin to look around for personalities to blame. The theme of this article is that complexity itself is eventually likely to collapse. How we handle that reduction in complexity determines whether this is a “good thing” or a “bad thing” for us. Our current civilization is destroying the planet. Complexity is simply not worth that price.

Bibliography

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• Carkhuff, R.R. and Truax, C. 1965. “Lay Mental Health Counselling” in the Journal of Consulting Psychology, 1965, 29, p. 426-432
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• Watkins, J. 1965. “Hypnosis in the United States” in Marcuse, F.L. ed Hypnosis Throughout The World, Thomas: Springfield