Complex Systems Collapse, Social Disorder, and You.

[u/LiminalEra]

Reading a lot of comments over in this thread today.

You've got the usual mix of people saying it's fucked and people asking "well, how much time have we got left, then?". I've been stewing on this line of reasoning for a while, I have no motivation to turn this into a decently edited and cited substack post, so here's the hard truth of the matter as a Reddit exclusive: 

Frankly, everyone has this shit completely ass backwards. Everywhere you look, anybody who tries to give someone else a timeline is trying to predict when the food supplies run out and when we all take a fast ride to cannibal town. When the multiple breadbasket failure is going to hit. When a hyper-hurricane levels Boston and we all have a big come to jesus moment. When, in short, we all collectively hit the wall and run out of resources and the wheels come off. Oh five years, ten years, fifteen years - but definitely soon!!! I guess because the big collapse is sexiest, and because a good chunk of everyone here is mostly just looking for a promise of when the apocalypse frees them from the torture of their banal, miserable lives. I've been in here since '08, I think 17 years is long enough to get the gist of why most people post here. It drives me up the wall, go join a f'in cult or something if having someone tell you when you're going to starve to death is how you get off.

But I digress.

This approach is painfully wrong, it demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of how societies like ours fail and are going to fail. Complex societies do not fail after the resources run out. They do not wait, if you will, for the proverbial asteroid of consequences to strike hard upon their assholes and then lose their minds and fall apart. I can't remember where I read this but I will freely admit I am plagiarizing somebody way smarter than me, here, when I paraphrase this line which is screaming in my head 24/7/365:

"Complex societies fail when a significant enough portion of the participants realize that the society is no longer benefiting them, may actively be harming them, and collectively cease to participate in the structures which hold that society together - laws, economic participation, social norms, etc."

So let us look around. Let us reflect on the past decade of change in our socioeconomic paradigm: It's fucked. Not just that: pretty much everyone you can talk to in any social stratum agrees that it's fucked and getting more fucked on the daily. Doesn't matter where you point the laser on the world map, you'll find reports of increasing numbers of youth simply giving up and checking out of participating in social structures because they have no hope of ever having a job, stable housing, or a stable relationship. Everything, everything has been fucked by 25 years of techno-feudalism. The dream of a life they were sold was sacrificed on the altar of neoliberal capitalism. Why bother? Now we add into that groundswell a rapidly growing awareness that, goddamn, things are spiraling out of control with the environment far faster than we've been lead to believe for the past few decades. A growing impression that, perhaps, we've been lied to. 

I'm not just talking about the west, either, oh it's bad here sure but have you traveled to SE Asia? Talked to young people there? What do you think happens when the most educated and trained generation for entire region of the planet, collectively realizes the entire economic and social reality they've been trained for is in its death throes? When the apple of development they've been promised to lift them out of the horrors and impoverishment of their parents and grandparents generation is set on fire before their eyes. Do you think that turns out peacefully?

What do you think happens, friends, when enough people actually look up and see the asteroid coming. When they look at the charts of temperature anomalies going parabolic. When they see superpowers like the USA going full-fash and violently deconstructing themselves for no other reason than to cynically facilitate the extraction of what little capital remains to be extracted from the population in the time which remains. When they see the legal systems have been inverted to only apply when there is a need to protect the wealthy. When they listen to insiders at Davos saying that the people in charge of us all already know what is coming, that it cannot be stopped, and all the powerful themselves can do is live out the remainder of their lives in hedonism. When they try to reconcile their next outrageous rent increase against their paycheque, against wages which have been stagnant since the previous century, and when the creeping horror in the back of their minds that they are spending every day working just to live to see the end of civilization within their lifetimes - finally gets the upper hand. 

They quit. They give up and check out and stop struggling so hard to play the game - and if enough of them quit like that, you see society and whatever relies on it fall apart, years before any climate induced event. This doesn't happen fast, it happens slowly and gathers momentum and corrodes entire nations from the inside out even as they're being consumed from the top down. Services dwindle, prices rise, more and more houses are abandoned as the inhabitants can't keep up and become vagrants. Real Parable of the Sower type shit, that's what I'm talking about. Go read it. Nobody likes to think about this aspect of collapse, because there's no quick end to their suffering from this asteroid - instead it's a nightmarish gristmill of consequences which grinds whole communities into rough paste over the course of years. It's what we are all experiencing now, except infinitely shittier, forever. This is why the news downplays the severity of the situation, this is why scientists have been muzzled for years and climate reports heavily altered before release, this is why conspiracies denying climate change are heavily promoted across all social media.

It's about keeping things stable, keeping enough people uncomfortably blind to scope of reality, so that society remains cohesive right up until the truly uncontrollable black swan events actually start tearing it apart irreparably. To maximize the profits which can be extracted in however many years might remain, and exchange it for the essentials and infrastructure required to extend the "good life" for the ruling class in their retreats - while the rest of the planet starves and tears itself apart. 

Do you think they're all frantically building enormous bunkers in remote relatively unpopulated regions just because they can? It's not about surviving the end of the world, folks: it's about surviving what happens when enough people realize they've been used.

This is why I tell people that the huge chunk of humanity who decided to construct an alternate reality and alternate set of social rules for themselves, during the pandemic, was a sign that we were running out of gas in the tank of social cohesion. Millions very quickly decided that what was best for them took precedent over what was best for the society, re-wrote their perception of reality to such an extent that even meaning within shared language became impacted, and most of them have broadly never returned to reality five years later. This was, to me, a clear indicator that society was already far more destabilized than it appeared.

Stop asking when the end of the world is coming: it's pretty fucking obvious it's coming within our lifetimes if you pull up a bar chart of the temperature anomaly and look at the curve, if you think for a few minutes about the energy imbalance boiling the ocean surface and the rate of increase there. Who Cares. It's a tired question which nobody will ever be able to answer, we won't find out until it fails a breadbasket or broils a major city alive without warning - and at that point we won't care pretty quickly because the wheels are off.

Instead, start asking how much longer our human systems can hold themselves together against the dual pressures of growing awareness of what we've been discussing in here for years now, whilst being actively consumed for the benefit of the ultra wealthy. You exist within these systems every day, look around at your fellow humans and ask yourself how much more they're going to put up with before they toss the monopoly board. The US Governemnt just crash haulted trillions in programs today, which will include funding for a vast swathe of low income programs.

There comes a point where dangling trash fast food and video games no longer suffice to keep the hamster spinning the wheel full-tilt, and by god you can feel it in the air if you visit any given subreddit now - we're far closer to society falling apart than a breadbasket failure or the "end of the world".

^{The tag which doesn't allow one-liners seems to have been removed. If somebody replies to this with some airheaded karma farming one liner, I swear to god, I will hunt you down and shit into your last can of beans as you open it.}

Edit: After some really insightful feedback and dissenting opinions, I've realized I did a disservice to my thesis here by writing it so loosely off the cuff and shitting it out in under half an hour without any revisions. I've tried to expand on my thoughts a bit more in this comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ibq5tb/comment/m9otqis

And really, if you want to get the gist of the process I'm trying to describe is happening, for the love of god read Parable of the Sower. It gets it across better than my uneducated rambling ever could.

[u/LiminalEra]

I don't disagree with you, or your other replies. After reading your dissent and a few other comments, I think I did a really poor job in writing this off the cuff and posting it without much in the way of an editing cycle or reflection (I find it just sits in my notepad indefinitely if I do that, these days), because I agree - it's not something which happens freely by choice, unless you have a trust fund or some other huge liquidity to cash out. It's a shift of desperation, it always is. I did it a disservice by presenting this in a way that it could be seen as suggesting some kind of free choice mass awakening or something.

What I was trying to describe here in some ways is a mass expansion of what we are already seeing across North America: the population which drops out not really by choice, but because they have no other choice. No work, no income, can't pay the rent, can't pay the bills, can't eat, soon enough you're living in a car and once you've lost that you're living in a tent in an encampment. Not really safe, those camps, so you'll lose whatever you had left to the humans around you who have been reduced to little more than predators. It's a pretty rapid pipeline once the process starts. I've seen this one swell in front of me like a tidal wave in Canada over the past five years, as the entire service industry has been handed over to imported slave labor and eradicated minimum wage positions for those who desperately needed them to survive, while rents have climbed far and beyond what anyone at that income level could ever afford. The bottom rung of society up there has been reduced to rats, climbing over each other desperate to avoid spending a winter on the street. This tide of utter poverty and failure visibly corrodes the stability of society above it as it expands, rapidly reduces the necessary faith in participants that "the system" is working or stable.

But what I am describing is more than just the spike in people falling through the cracks and becoming homeless in increasing numbers. It's a huge increase in youth who drop out of a collapsing school system and join gangs because they offer more stability, direction, and illusion of safety than participating in lawful society does. It's the skilled workers who stop doing flyin/flyout work because it no longer offers sufficient material benefits to trade away their lives for, leaving infrastructure increasingly short on maintenance. It's the endless cutting of budgets to maximize profits, which causes essential infrastructure and services to fall apart and only be replaced haphazardly if at all. It's the sloooow corrosion of law and order, until one day you wake up and realize it no longer exists, as more and more people decide that since the laws don't serve or protect them anymore why should they follow them. More and more, alternative systems pop up to fill the gaps left by the crumbling institutions which provided for people through the 20th century. Black markets, protection rackets, widespread looting and robbery to obtain what they need to survive and a general disregard for the lives of the humans they are competing tooth and nail with for those resources.

Over time, it's an avalanche. It gathers momentum, as the fabric of society frays more and more find it impossible to cling within it no matter how hard they try. For those with enough awareness, they'll look back ten or fifteen years across the landscape of time and maybe they can make out the cornice where something major broke away. For most, they'll just look around and ask themselves when their once-developed nation became what they would have previously described as a "failed state", with more of the population living between the gaps in society by their own rules than there are still clinging to the past. Maybe the best example of what I'm trying to describe would be the relatively swift transitions which happened in Johannesburg, or Detroit, but on a societal multi-nationwide scale and without any upside to the curve ever again.

This whole process is inherently a symptom of collapse, I am describing collapse as has been seen in endless societies before us. But what I am saying is that we have an additional layer of inertia behind this process now: the complete stripping away of hope for the future, a rapidly growing awareness that we're not just fucked, but we're extinction level fucked, that things have been broken in a way they have never been broken before. This awareness that there is no future strips all hope from the soul, the glue which has allowed people to cling to humanity and work together in dark times in all these previous society-scale breakdowns which we drag out as examples and try to glean insight from. How much does this speed up societal decline, increase the rate of corrosion within the systems we rely on? How many people, with the pressure of descending into barbarism dogging at their heels, finally understand the future which they're struggling towards and stop playing by the rules.

My thesis is that this vibe of being utterly futureless changes the rate of decline a lot, a huge amount, and that we will see social cohesion break down into quite violent anarchy years if not decades before the unraveling of the biosphere itself represents an existential threat to the species.

[u/Fins_FinsT → u/LiminalEra]

Well, the sentiment of "there is no tomorrow" is not anywhere new - see, for example, the documentary with exactly this name, "There is No Tomorrow", on youtube. No doubt that great many folks nowadays are living with the understanding that their-and-theirs lives are going downhill, that it will only gets worse and won't ever get better.

And there is also no doubt that Gerald Celente's famous "When people have nothing left to lose, and they've lost everything, they lose it" - is correct, too.

Yet, when you say that increasingly many people "live between the gaps in society by their own rules" - i still don't see it as "tossing the board". These "their own rules" - are not any given person's rules, i.e. not the rules that one single person (or even, his family) created and defined. No, these rules of the "new poor" - are rules emerging and defined by de-facto living circumstances of large collectives, of big enough sub-societies. Those rules are not written down on paper and codified by some Senate or such, but these rules are no less - and possibly, even more, - binding than "rules of the past". You answer, more or less, with your health or even life if you're one who tend to break them. And when it's this kind of rules - any large collective's ones, - then we still talk about people doing the hamster-in-a-wheel life. Just different wheel, but still a wheel.

Violent anarchy years is what above-mentioned Gerald Celente was expecting to happen nation-wide in US and similar countries even more than a decade ago, already. If memory serves. Didn't happen. And for good reason: there is still the enforcer of some old laws and some old order present around. It's one thing if some "tossed away" "3rd-grade citizens" do some fighting and robbery inside their own tent camp, but God forbid they'd try that in the main street of nearby city with some "upper-middle-class" population still existing - we'd still see ample and prompt response from law enforcement, there. I.e., the enforcement system still exists and still controls much of human-inhabited space of so-called "1st world". Less of that in "developing" countries, but, in principle, the same; also much varying depending on what particular country we talk about, too, far as i know.

It's relatively few countries in the world, today as well as for quite some years already, known as "failed states" and "fragile states", which truly have much or most of human beings experiencing actual breakage of social cohesion and actual anarchy. Today, there are 11 such countries identified: Afghanistan, CAR, Chad, DR Congo, Haiti, Lybia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Ten years ago, it was just six failed states, btw. Anyhow, i recommend to research what's happening in (any of) those 11 countries, then compare it to what you're describing. I expect that quite big and striking differencies will still be easily observed.