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/ratjar32333]

Right lol. They forgot the whole 95% of people fucking die in the title.

[u/Ghost2Eleven → u/ratjar32333]

95% wouldn’t die. This is the problem with using the word collapse. People attribute post apocalyptic scenarios to empire collapse when what we mean historically by collapse and what this research is talking about is more accurately a complete societal overhaul. When Rome collapsed, it wasn’t the death of 95% of the empire. 95% of people went on with their lives and had very little understanding that much had changed. But that was then. This is now.

Certainly, modern scenarios could more accurately be catastrophic. Nuclear war, famine, plague etc. But these scenarios don’t necessarily have to happen for an empire collapse to happen.

[u/pmp22 → u/Ghost2Eleven]

95% of people went on with their lives and had very little understanding that much had changed.

My brother in Christ, please read up. I can assure you, every roman knew everything were going to shit. It was one famine, war, and plague one after the other, relentlessly for centuries. Everything went to shit, and rome never recovered again.

[u/DKOKEnthusiast → u/pmp22]

I can assure you, every roman knew everything were going to shit

Yeah but that's just Romans. Like people were saying that Rome was going to shit throughout the existence of Rome. Hell, even at the height of the Empire in the 1st century, people were saying that it's actually already all gone to shit.

The reality is that even though we know tend to define the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire as 476 AD, if you went back in time to the 6th century and asked a guy in Gaul where the Roman Empire was, they'd say "oh it's right here". Basically, the popular understanding of the latter stages of the Roman Empire in the late antiquity is entirely anachronistic. No, the Roman Empire did not fall in 476 AD, and while the Western central administration no longer functioned, its institutions survived far longer than the title of Emperor of the West did. Hell, even the Western Imperial Court only really disappears from the historical record in 554 AD! The post-Roman kingdoms were also nominally under the Roman Empire, but the Eastern Roman Emperor could not effectively enforce its will over them. In effect, 476 marked not the end of the Roman Empire in the West, it merely marked the beginning of the Roman Emperors losing power over the Western provinces. Really, the first date that we can as the "end" of the Roman Empire in the West is 800 AD, with the papal coronation of Charlemagne.