For someone who has examined 361 studies and 73 books on societal collapses, Danilo Brozović’s conclusion on what must happen to avoid today’s world imploding is both disarmingly simple and a daunting challenge: “We need dramatic social and technological changes.”
The collapse of past civilisations, from the mighty Mayan empire to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), has long fascinated people and for obvious reasons – how stable is our own society? Does ever-growing complexity in societies or human hubris inevitably lead to oblivion? In the face of the climate crisis, rampant destruction of the natural world, rising geopolitical tensions and more, the question is more urgent than ever.
“More and more academic articles are mentioning the threat of collapse because of climate change,” says Brozović at the school of business at the University of Skövde, Sweden. The issue of collapse hooked him after it was raised in a project on business sustainability, which then led to his comprehensive review in 2023.
The field is not short of extreme pessimists. “They believe what we are doing will eventually cause the extinction of the human race,” says Brozović. Some say today’s challenges are so great that it is now time humanity comes to terms with extinction, and even build a vault containing our greatest cultural achievements as a record for some future – perhaps alien – civilisation. Others, using data on deforestation and population, rate the chance of catastrophic collapse at 90% or more.
Most scholars are more optimistic, if not actually optimists. Brozović says: “They say collapse for us will just be the end of life as we know it today. There will be less globalisation and a lower standard of life, affecting public health very negatively.”
This raises the question of what is meant by collapse: most agree it is the loss of complex social and political structures over a few decades at most. But by this definition, many classic collapses, misinterpreted in the rear-view mirror of history, may actually be better described as transformations. He says: “In the last 10 years or so, people are asking did the Rapa Nui society collapse or did it reinvent itself?” he says.
The search for explanations of societal collapse has been a long one, going back at least to Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population and Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which blamed decadence and barbarian invasions.
Today, collapses are seen as the result of combined factors, such as environmental problems, disease, political or economic turmoil, religious crises and soil exhaustion, even if one factor might precipitate the collapse.
Brozović says: “But there is one theory of collapse that stands out as the most frequently invoked: Joseph Tainter’s theory of complexity.” Tainter’s theory was published in 1988 and has since been described as “peak complexity”.
Brozović says: “He says the main function of every society is solving problems by investing resources. But as society becomes more complex, the problems become more complex, so you have to invest more resources. Painter says at the end of this spiral, collapse is inevitable, because you cannot do this for ever. Technological innovations can simplify increasingly complex problems. But, again, this cannot go on indefinitely.”
After that came the sunk-cost effects theory of collapse. He says: “[Societies] are unwilling to abandon something – for example a settlement or the current global economy – if a great deal has been invested in it, even if future prospects are dim.” Others have blamed social hubris, he says, meaning excessive pride or arrogance led societies to ignore warning signs and block preventive action.
“It’s like being in a bad marriage,” Brozović says. “You know you should get out, but you have invested a lot of yourself and a lot of time, and it’s really hard.”
Growing gaps between the rich and poor also come up as a factor, he says. Research using big data to model historical societies has found that elites and inequality appear towards the end. “If it’s not a cause, it’s definitely a symptom,” he says.
There is a problem, however, in attempting to draw insight for the future: past collapses were local or regional. “But we live in a global and extremely complex society,” says Brozović. “[Nonetheless], one very important insight is that, regardless of the cause of collapse, how a society reacts seems crucial.”
In his 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond identified two vital choices distinguishing societies that failed from those that survived.
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The first, tackling the sunk-cost problem and political short-termism, is long-term planning: making “bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they have reached crisis proportions”. Diamond cites Tokugawa shoguns, Inca emperors and 16th-century German landowners as positive examples, having faced and reversed disastrous deforestation.
The second, combating social hubris, is the painful process of overturning core values. Diamond says: “Which of the values that formerly served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed circumstances? Which of these treasured values must instead be jettisoned and replaced with different approaches?” Here he cites Scandinavian settlers in Greenland during the medieval period as a negative example, saying they refused to jettison their European farming identity and died as a result.
Having extensively surveyed the study of societal collapses, does Brozović think the way humanity currently lives looks sustainable? “No, no – definitely not,” he says. “We have to do something – that’s the conclusion that arises from reading all this research.”
“At the end of the day, we have to radically transform society, and we have to do it fast,” he says. That means overhauling politics, policies and institutions, safeguarding food production and the natural world that supports life on Earth.
“That’s the recipe to mitigate collapse,” he says. “But nothing is really happening substantially. We are shifting the discussion of what is acceptable and what is not, and a lot of good, positive things are happening. But the question is, will it happen fast enough?”
Brozović’s review highlights a significant barrier to action noted by Paul and Anne Ehrlich: convincing people of the necessity of such measures, a task made even harder by the rise of online disinformation.
The idea that humanity’s fate is in its own hands is not new. In the mid-20th century, historian Arnold Toynbee, who had studied the varying fates of 28 societies, said: “Civilisations die from suicide, not from murder.” But Diamond channeled Winston Churchill’s thought on democracy to reach a more positive conclusion: “A lower-impact society is the most impossible scenario for our future – except for all other conceivable scenarios.”