So what do we mean by "collapse?" What is the danger that we're trying to avert? First of all, I think it's important we study collapse not just because of the consequences because it really represents a really good basis for social science. If you look at histories of collapse, if you look at processes of collapse, you can differentiate causality from correlation. You can say, "oh, these two social crises occur in tandem, but one does not cause the other." Or, yes, this social crisis leads to a social crisis in this domain. You can identify endogeneity versus exogeneity. Does the source of the crisis come from within the system, or does it come from outside the system? And again, we've talked about this, how we're particularly interested in endogenous sources of collapse. You can do nomothetic or ideographic, that's just a very fancy way of saying, you can focus on the particular—the particular history of a particular collapse. Why a particular family is unhappy or why a particular family is happy, to paraphrase from Tolstoy. Or you can look at, is there something about the structure of families that makes unhappiness what's to be expected? And you've got lots of natural experiments. Natural experiments can be very offensive to think of it this way, but we've got all these results, there's all this variance. Think of with COVID, for example. One of the things that my research group is thinking about is looking, at very granular level, differences in the incidence of COVID, in the hospitalization from COVID and the death of COVID as a way of saying, why was it different in one place or the other? Assuming all other things are equal, why was one society able to avoid one kind of crisis or another? And collapses provide, in a sense, very good natural experiments by which we can measure what works, what preventions work, what mitigations work. So what is collapse? The identity of the system is lost by loss of important components. What does that mean? That we recognize some kind of system— the simplest way is talking about, the Roman Empire loses its identity as the Roman Empire as it collapses in both the East and the West and then within the West into various feudal kingdoms, some of which have no control over large parts of society. So the identity of the system collapses. Or, if you wanted to think about the identity of the United States— should some kind of collapse come about that led to the United States breaking apart, it would lose its sense as the United States even if its various component parts— let's say Georgia and New York and California— remain the same, the identity of the system would be very, very different. "Core" capabilities disappear. And again, we can think of this as some sort of pyramid of needs, okay? There is food, our ability to produce food, our ability to produce energy, our ability to produce shelter, our ability to cure diseases. Which one of these—and one of the things that we're looking at is, which one of these capabilities is really the fundamental one? Is it the rule of law? Is it the availability of energy? Is it the availability of food or water? Is it the ability to cure someone who must be sick? And finally, a definition of collapse: the consequences must be lasting. That is, this is not just a small speed bump. This is an event or this is a phenomenon that once it's occurred, you can't go back. In a sense, going back to the notions we talked about a rubber band. Let's say the version of collapse with the rubber band is, you stretch that rubber band so far, not only does it lose its shape, it comes apart. Okay? It loses its identity as a rubber band, its capacity to stretch and come back together disappears. And you can't fix a rubber band, okay? That is a long-lasting change. And there's ethics and politics of collapse as well. Are all collapses bad? Let's take the most prominent example, the collapse of the dinosaur ecology with the asteroid that hit the Yucatan, or off the Yucatan. For the dinosaurs, this was a really bad thing. For mammals, a very good thing. We wouldn't be able to dominate the Earth if we had to compete with dinosaurs, if the environment was the same. Or, if you want to think about if you were a slave in a society, its collapse might be freeing, okay? You can mourn the collapse of a particular social system, but there might be many, many people within that system, or on the borders of that system, that see this decline as liberating. You've got a question of scale. What's acceptable? Is the collapse of a household acceptable? Is the collapse of a town acceptable? What is the scale, and what are the ethics and politics of allowing, or expanding, or shrinking that scale? And again, the classic question of who wins and who loses with any particular collapse and who gets to distribute the benefits of that collapse, who bears the cost of of that collapse? The most obvious example is with ecological collapses, and those are relatively simple. You can define those as the disappearance of a species or the death of a particular kind of animal. It can be about the reduction in the spread of a particular ecological niche. These, in a sense, are easier to measure than socially, because we can get easier concrete data about how you get a collapse of a particular niche or a particular species. Social collapse is different. Social collapse can be just as extreme. These are two pictures, I believe this is Aleppo. This is Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War. This is Aleppo, the same place, after the Civil War. And one of the ways that we can measure social collapse is looking at a decline in critical measures. Let's say we see a massive decline in life expectancy, or we see a decline in nutrition, or the amount of calories consumed, or we see an increase in deaths for one cause or another. These can be versions of social collapse. You can have disaggregation, I already talked about that a little bit with the Roman Empire, that one of the ways you can measure social collapse is by the system, in a sense, going down to its own modules. That the amount of flows or the amount of links between particular nodes is reduced. Sometimes this would lead to a change of identity, sometimes not. An interesting one is the notion of "asabiyyah." Apologies for my Arabic, I don't speak a word of Arabic, but it's a very interesting notion about community, about the sense of an "us." In a sense, this goes back to losing identity. One of the things that might happen with social collapse is the loss or the disaggregation of that social identity. Where previously we were all part of a particular group, all of a sudden, we're divided into the northern, the eastern, the southern, and the western parts of that group. Or those who believe in the manifestation of a divinity in one way versus the other. And it's that loss, that sense of an "us," that loss of a community, that might be the biggest indicator, or the best indicator, that a social collapse is going on, or has happened. How do we explain it? This is the cover from Edward Gibbon, The History and Decline of the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire is a very good example about how difficult it is to explain a collapse. A German historian has actually counted—and I think we published this about 20 years ago, so there's many more—220 different reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire. Everything that you can imagine, from an economics, to personal, to psychological, to military, et cetera. Explaining collapse is very, very hard. Particularly if it's a society that means something to you, or it's a society that is politically divided, finding out why it's collapsing or what is threatening is, of course, going to be a very difficult political problem and a big data and analysis problem. So yes, we might have to live with collapse, and our ability to actually predict any particular collapse in any particular system is very, very constrained, particularly as it becomes more complex, more within black boxes, more possibly endogenously dangerous. Where does this collapse begin? Well, we can have, again, the exogenous. Look at the conquests, the conquests of the Western hemisphere by the Europeans in the 15th and the 16th century led to a collapse of those societies: Mexica society, Inca society, et cetera. That, in some ways—who can predict that, that these ships will arrive? A disease could arise that could lead to a collapse. A climate shift which is not self-induced, some change in climate that really is not produced by the society in question, that it comes to it exogenously. Or bad luck, okay? And the ultimate example of this is, of course, aliens invading. You have the collapse of human society because someone comes and imposes violence. Again, these might be fun for sci-fi movies, but they're less interesting for social science. What we're really interested in is endogenous sources of collapse. This is one of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons, and if you can't see it, it just has— the real reason dinosaurs became extinct, and it's because they're all lighting up with cigarettes. The reasons for this endogenous source of collapse can be many. A loss of legitimacy. An unsustainable inequality. Splits within a governing elite. A normal accident. A hyperbolic discounting, where you, in a sense, don't care about the future, you only care about the present. The overuse of resources. Or, fear itself. Fear can lead to people behaving in such a way that leads to norms breaking down and behavior changing in radical ways. These are the kinds of things that we have talked about with global systemic risk that are endogenous to globalization and what the risks are from that. And you can also have interaction effects between an exogenous and an endogenous event. "The most interesting causes of collapse may not be the specific factors that initiate the process, but the structure that allows perturbation to amplify through the system." So the exogenous part might not be so bad, but it's how endogenously we deal with that threat that leads to problems. So, again, talking about systems theory, of the the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Well, one of those is that interaction effect, that emergence. And it can be, again, benign, or it can be very, very deadly. So now we're going to talk about the specific mechanisms by which we might arrive at collapse. So again, we can identify what some possible dangers might be.
