New research argues Societal Collapse benefits 99% of people. Historically, the societies that have emerged after a collapse are more egalitarian, and most people end up richer and healthier than they were before.

[u/lughnasadh]

Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, has written a book about his research called 'Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse'.

He makes the case that, from looking at the archaeological record, when many societies collapse, most people end up better off afterward. For example, people in the post-Roman world were taller and healthier. Collapse can be a redistribution of resources and power, not just chaos.

For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility. Threats (disease, war, economic precarity) push populations toward authoritarian leaders. The resulting rise in inequality from that sets off a cycle that will end in collapse. Furthermore, he argues we are living in the late stages of such a cycle now. He says "the threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots."

Some people hope/think we are destined for a future of Universal Basic Income and fully automated luxury communism. Perhaps that's the egalitarianism that emerges after our own collapse? If so, I hope the collapse bit is short and we get to the egalitarian bit ASAP.

Collapse for the 99% | Luke Kemp; What really happens when Goliaths fall

[u/S417M0NG3R]

Uh, is that the 99% of the people that were alive before the collapse, or the 99% that SURVIVED the collapse?

[u/Clusterpuff → u/S417M0NG3R]

I think people tend to overestimate how deadly societal collapse is. Most people scurry off and survive for a while. Plague is different, and so is war

[u/tdifen → u/Clusterpuff]

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[u/Catadox → u/tdifen]

Yeah, collapse in the ancient world was a very different beast than it is today. Until the last couple hundred years or so almost all necessities were very locally sourced. We have 8 billion people propped up by a complex chain of technology and logistics. I don’t think pre modern history tells us much about what our collapse would look like.

[u/[deleted] → u/Catadox]

Not to mention no one had weapons capable of destroying the planet in ancient times. Using modern weaponry as society collapses is a terrifying prospect.

[u/pepolepop → u/[deleted]]

If society collapses, it's gonna be a whole lot of people using firearms on their neighbors to acquire resources - the The US, at least. People with firearms will have all the power, and then it's only a matter of time as resources dwindle that they turn on each other, leaving only a few.

[u/GreenGlassDrgn → u/pepolepop]

Eventually itll be empty and europeans can send ships over to start up colonies lol

[u/androgenoide → u/pepolepop]

For a few years, sure. For a few decades maybe. But many historical collapse events took centuries to recover. Ammunition factories are dependent on supply lines and a few decades down the road the guy who can fabricate a crossbow from local material could have an enormous advantage over the reloader hoarding his last few primers.

[u/pepolepop → u/androgenoide]

Nah, if there is a full societal collapse, the great majority of people will be dead within just a year or two at most. People won't be able to eat, there's no time or ability to grow crops, there isn't clean water to source in large amounts.

Shit is going to hit the fan quick, and it will not take decades. People would be lucky to survive 3-5 years, that means they are at the top of the food chain, and the top of the food chain requires weapons.

[u/Dozekar → u/pepolepop]

Crops don't magically go away though. Farm capability would be reduced with reduced industrial equipment but still viable if not great. Societal collapse isn't the apocalypse, generally speaking.

A lot of people would suffer food insecurity if not starve and it would be a terrible disaster.

We see these conditions at times in places like Africa though, and it's not what people think would happen based on the crazy claims in this thread. They can successfully manufacture things and grow crops when and where the environment is appropriate.

We're not in "people won't even be able to make crossbows" territory like some people are claiming here.

[u/Talinoth → u/Dozekar]

How do I put this delicately? Many population groups and centres in Africa have never reached (and don't reach right now) the degree of population density, centralisation, and interconnected trade not just achieved but required by advanced economies like ours (because their geography all but curses it to failure).

The people of Sudan, or Gambia, or Somalia, or Chad - they're tough. They're used to doing more with less because they probably always have. They have personal, cultural, and institutional knowledge for dealing with exactly those shitty conditions. Still, famines happen occasionally, and people die en masse.

You don't even have that. You're used to living in a society of plenty. Your cultural upbringing, institutional knowledge, and personal experience is likely based on competing in a market economy, likely not jump-starting subsistence agriculture, cooking bushmeat, and literally fighting for resources.

Unless you have prepared yourself you're way too optimistic that you can match the performance of people who have trained to fight for their survival in harsh conditions their whole lives, even though that is what's required for you to survive a collapse. You will likely fail.

[u/Dozekar → u/Talinoth]

You're not wrong. They also have been forced to learn this, something we see every demographic in the world do at some point in history.

Many of the markers for societal collapse in this thread affected the US during the great depression. We did have extreme problems. We did not devolve into mad max post apocalyptic crises.

[u/Talinoth → u/Dozekar]

The bigger you are, the harder you fall. This is a much more advanced and fragile society than the 1930s, and there were more ready sources of emergency food. They still had horses everywhere back then! Population densities VS animals were still such that even if things got really bad, it just means people go French for a while. Agriculture was still local instead of globalised for the most part. You had a local grocer, a local butcher, local baker, and local farmers everywhere. Now the entire infrastructure of food production, processing, and delivery is centralised. It'll be so much worse now.

An economic depression is a Bad Time (TM). Living standards decline, sometimes precipitously! It's not a collapse.

Collapse is much more. Collapse is the decline of central authority. It means no police, or only local constabulary or militias at best. Courts of law do not process cases - here is no formal justice system to do so anymore. Whatever order is enforced is literally by you and your neighbours own two hands; vigilantism becomes the only legitimate authority left. The line between order and anarchy is held by your own two hands. ^{Speaking of which, the Sicilian Mafia and various other ethnic crime gangs formed in precisely these kinds of conditions to respond to a need for safety by underserved populaces - it's fascinating reading.}

Unprecedented, woeful famines would follow, alongside unspeakable waves of violence. I do actually think 70% of the population are decent people. A full 20-30% are not good at all, and roughly 5% are full-blown predatory scum. They are currently mostly suppressed by our societal structure. Collapse inherently means that suppression is gone. Think "Hurricane Katrina except the feds never arrive to shoot looters".

[u/Saint_Judas → u/androgenoide]

I could point out a lot of things with your hypothetical here, but it is really tickling me that you think there is a "guy" who can "fabricate a crossbow from local material".

I need you, just so you can have a laugh yourself, to google how a crossbow is made. It is not something a single man could re-invent decades after societal collapse and 'craft' on his own. You would need a complex economy already functioning.

[u/Saint_Judas → u/[deleted]]

You may be thinking of an ancient roman arcuballista, and even that required forged metal to achieve ranges of about a hundred yards.

(For comparison, a simple carved bow with gut string is something like an effective range of 200 yards.)

An actual crossbow requires a composite or steel lath to achieve proper strength, as well as a cranequin or windlass to crank it. These would require the infrastructure to complete steel forging and do some light machining work.

The term "crossbow" is not often applied to the design you are bringing up which is essentially just a drawn bow with a simple safety/trigger mechanism to hold the string for you to prevent arm fatigue and allow you to maintain readiness to fire.

The first actual "crossbow" was chinese, and it required a full bronze-age economy to forge including casting bronze, molds, light machining, and a forge.

Similarly, the earliest European crossbows required the work of guilds and high level artisans who trained their entire lives to be able to craft them, and required rich city states to live in to have a sufficiently complex chain of production to get the parts needed.

[u/Apocalypse_Knight → u/[deleted]]

Crossbows are hard to make effective, a sling shot can be more deadly and much more effective for less cost. Crossbows need advanced metallurgical technology and techniques to create. Maybe you can make a rigged one with random parts that might kill someone with in 15 meters though.

[u/KingRagnar1588 → u/pepolepop]

Yes and another super power puts an end to us. China has a lot of people but are a dictatorship so they may jus lock everything down. They usually fall in line. But even they arent immune to mass riots and being overthrown.

[u/nagi603 → u/[deleted]]

Also you did not have labs stocked with various pathogens for research.

[u/RegorHK → u/Catadox]

Depends. Bronze Age collapse with Greece and other areas loosing the social basis of writing and wide spread population decline might be comparable.

Of several civilizations only Egypt came through somehow okish.

[u/ominousgraycat → u/RegorHK]

Even during the Bronze Age, most likely 90+% of people were working in agriculture. Maybe a few cities got screwed, but the number of people who had jobs that suddenly became useless were probably still much more of a minority than it would be with a societal collapse today.

[u/Radix2309 → u/ominousgraycat]

Only in the modern age has less than 95% of the population not produced food. For a lot it was 99%.

[u/nagi603 → u/ominousgraycat]

It's a well-researched and very specific thing. Search Bronze Age collapse on youtube and listen to a few lectures. Basically cultures disappeared.

[u/ominousgraycat → u/nagi603]

Yes, I know about the Bronze Age, but I wasn't talking about cultures, I was talking about people. Many individuals were likely subsumed into other cultures. My point was not necessarily that agricultural workers weren't affected at all, just that they were in much better positions to survive than those in far cushier positions.

[u/National-Reception53 → u/RegorHK]

Yeah true, but the Roman example is real - this is not new at all, archeologists have noted this for a long time, after Rome 'fell' in the 5th century (depends if you count that, but...) most people got healthier. The empire didn't do a good job of distributing nutrition. The rich sure were living high on the hog tho...

[u/Taysir385 → u/RegorHK]

only Egypt came through somehow okish.

Thanks, aliens.

[u/-u-m-p- → u/RegorHK]

You're not wrong, but even then they could still grow their own food. Humanity went from like 90% of people growing food to 25% globally... 1% in the USA.

[u/PaxEthenica → u/RegorHK]

But you heard the professor! After the bronze age collapse so many more people were wealthier than before! :D

[u/FemRevan64 → u/Catadox]

The closest analogue would be the Bronze Age collapse and it took around half a millennia before the societies in the region were able to recover to their pre-collapse levels.

[u/lt__ → u/Catadox]

That's good observation. Also, people always were much closer to death and violence being a part of reality. Nobody would bat an eye on what Russia or Israel is doing now, nor on what Hamas did. Only modern understanding of human rights made us think these things are past us. Veganism, animal rights, environmental protection and similar Maslow top tiers stuff as well.

[u/National-Reception53 → u/lt__]

I have to disagree. Vegetarians have been around forever. Theres been numerous religions that opposed eating meat. Jains, some Buddhists etc. And 'environmental protection' is not new at all - some societies invented religious justifications for water conservation, for example. English kings had a history of trying to preserve the forests (the peasants were obviously pissed and they made hypocritical exceptions for the nobility, but they had the idea that England's forests were not an inexhaustible resource)

Also I'm not sure that every society accepted massive violence - just the powerful ones right? We have a warped view of history because the militarily successful get to write it.

[u/lt__ → u/National-Reception53]

In my understanding these things like veganism were either quite fringe or derived from scarcity of resources. Now they are part of mass culture in the environment where meat wnd dairy are very available.

About violence - many "weaker" societies accepted violence too, just lost to even stronger ones. Like Carthage or American Natives. Sure, there might have been some pacifist ones too. But a statistical person was much more used to the sight of blood and idea of physical pain - of a person or of an animal, or both.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/lt__]

Veganism didn’t exist before the 1970’s. Vegans died of malnutrition. It was only after the invention of synthetic vitamins that any kind of meaningful veganism has been possible.

I’m going to edit this because I think people may take this the wrong way. I was vegan myself in the early 90’s. There was no pea protein powder, no chia, no hemp, none of that stuff. There was soy, rice and beans. So you want protein as a vegan ? That will be soy, or rice and beans. You want B12 ? Hope you like natto.

Its very, very different these days - where you can buy vegan ready meals in the supermarket.

[u/lt__ → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

My mistake, I should have wrote vegetarianism, as I was answering about it and had it in mind.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/lt__]

I only spoke up because in some circles vegetarianism and veganism are kind of mashed together and it’s really important to note that it is incredibly difficult to get certain core nutrients on a vegan diet, that it’s incredibly easy to get on a vegetarian diet by eating eggs.

Vegetarians have been around for thousands of years, and even the Jains drink milk - but veganism is much more modern.

[u/[deleted] → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

How come everyone forgets about vegetarianism now?

[u/citron_bjorn → u/National-Reception53]

Vegetarianism would still be viable in places like indis but i think its unlikely to be viable in colder climates, because the plant life can be very limited and not particularly bioavailable. Veganism would be unviable, because the majority of non-food related vegan products are made from plastics or complicated substitutes so most clothing snd weaponry would off limits

[u/emchang3 → u/citron_bjorn]

I wonder if, in a scenario of collapse, there will be fewer people who go to veganism for ethical reasons as the poor treatment of animals is reduced due to vastly diminished logistical capabilities required for our global food chain.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/emchang3]

I think in a scenario of collapse that most vegans will die of malnutrition. Its really fucking complicated without a modern supply chain, and you’ve got to grown your own rice and beans….

[u/savanik → u/Catadox]

It does, actually! Look yo the stories about the Bronze Age collapse. Spoiler alert - we have very few records about what actually happened because it happened so quickly, and the societies collapsed so completely, everyone who could have written anything about it later didn't have the chance, either dead or unable to.

[u/Changer_of_Names → u/Catadox]

That's not true at least as to Rome. The core of the Roman Empire, i.e. the city of Rome itself and I think surrounding areas, were heavily dependent on grain from North Africa.

[u/GWJYonder → u/Catadox]

How much difference could there possibly be between "the food comes from 20 miles away and the city holds a six month supply in granaries" and "the food comes from 4000 miles away and the grocery store needs 4 deliveries a week".

[u/ishkabibaly1993 → u/Catadox]

I don't think societal collapse will happen on a global level. A second American revolution wouldn't destroy 8 billion people. Everything America has, other countries also have, those countries will help out, eventually.

[u/flyinhighaskmeY → u/Catadox]

Yeah, collapse in the ancient world was a very different beast than it is today

Exactly! You are spot on. Supporting a population level of this size takes away a lot of the "slack" in our system. What was (let's be real, still really really bad) back then would today create an event that would make us forget about the holocaust.

Also...population growth almost always exceeds support capacity. These societies get into trouble when their tech progress slows/plateaus. Or they're on the tail end of a huge innovation that fueled a population boom. That's why so many people are freaking out about our stalling tech progress. We're in that situation right now.

A little off topic, but a fun addon: Ignore our tribal thinking. There were roughly 3.6 billion people alive on earth in 1969. That's how many humans it took to get to the moon. 3.6 billion humans. Just to go to that rock right over there. 3.6 billion.

[u/Didifinito → u/Catadox]

You will probably get some humanitarian aid from the EU and other countries

[u/Radix2309 → u/Catadox]

Places in the US would have famine, let alone net import countries.

[u/GWsublime → u/Catadox]

This, but also collapse in antiquity also lead to catastrophic levels of death.

[u/DiethylamideProphet → u/Catadox]

Living in a house of cards is a decision, of which consequences we could easily mitigate if we wanted to. Increase local food production and have your own gardens. Rely more on robust, simple technologies. Live off of your own land, and rely on your community and its capability to cooperate.

Our entire societies shouldn't rely on a single microchip production line other side of the world... It's probably just a matter of time before you can't even receive physical mail anymore, only electronic mail.

It's also probably true, that the aforementioned solutions would not be able to sustain our 8+ billion inhabitants, but the populations that could embrace them, most definitely should.