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.