Collapse

Collapse is an economizing process

In "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse" [pdf], John Michael Greer writes:

Even within the social sciences, the process by which complex societies give way to smaller and simpler ones has often been presented in language drawn from literary tragedy, as though the loss of sociocultural complexity necessarily warranted a negative value judgment. This is understandable, since the collapse of civilizations often involves catastrophic human mortality and the loss of priceless cultural treasures, but like any value judgment it can obscure important features of the matter at hand."

In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter makes a distinct point that collapse "is an economizing process"

Complex societies, it must be emphasized again, are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity. The notion that collapse is uniformly a catastrophe is contradicted, moreover, by the present theory. To the extent that collapse is due to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity, it is an economizing process. It occurs when it becomes necessary to restore the marginal return on organizational investment to a more favorable level. To a population that is receiving little return on the cost of supporting complexity, the loss of that complexity brings economic, and perhaps administrative, gains.

Also read earlier posts:

• The Mechanics of Collapse
• Thesis #19: Complexity ensures collapse.
• Be afraid, Marco. Be very afraid.
• Thesis #12: Civilization must always grow.
• In the Shadow of Hubbert's Peak

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