Societal collapse is the fall of a complex
human society.
Such a disintegration may be relatively abrupt,
as in the case of Maya civilization, or gradual,
as in the case of the fall of the Western
Roman Empire.
The subject of societal collapse is of interest
in such fields as history, anthropology, sociology,
political science, and, more recently, cliodynamics
and complex-systems science.
== Causes of collapse ==
Common factors that may contribute to societal
collapse are economical, environmental, social
and cultural, and disruptions in one domain
sometimes cascade into others.
In some cases a natural disaster (e.g. tsunami,
earthquake, massive fire or climate change)
may precipitate a collapse.
Other factors such as a Malthusian catastrophe,
overpopulation or resource depletion might
be the proximate cause of collapse.
Significant inequity and exposed corruption
may combine with lack of loyalty to established
political institutions and result in an oppressed
lower class rising up and seizing power from
a smaller wealthy elite in a revolution.
The diversity of forms that societies evolve
corresponds to diversity in their failures.
Jared Diamond suggests that societies have
also collapsed through deforestation, loss
of soil fertility, restrictions of trade and/or
rising endemic violence.
=== Foreign invasions ===
The decline of the Roman Empire is one of
the events traditionally marking the end of
Classical Antiquity and the beginning of the
European Middle Ages.
Throughout the 5th century, the Empire's territories
in western Europe and northwestern Africa,
including Italy, fell to various invading
or indigenous peoples in what is sometimes
called the Barbarian invasions, although the
eastern half still survived with borders essentially
intact for another two centuries (until the
Arab expansion).
This view of the collapse of the Roman Empire
is challenged, however, by modern historians
who see Rome as merely transforming from the
Western Empire into barbarian kingdoms as
the Western Emperors delegated themselves
out of existence, and the East transforming
into the Byzantine Empire, which only fell
in 1453 AD.
North Africa's populous and flourishing civilization
collapsed after exhausting its resources in
internal fighting and suffering devastation
from the invasion of the Bedouin tribes of
Banu Sulaym and Banu Hilal.
Ibn Khaldun noted that the lands ravaged by
Banu Hilal invaders had become completely
arid desert.In the brutal pillaging that followed
Mongol invasions, the invaders decimated the
populations of China, Russia, the Middle East,
and Islamic Central Asia.
Later Mongol leaders, such as Timur, destroyed
many cities, slaughtered thousands of people
and did irreparable damage to the ancient
irrigation systems of Mesopotamia.
These invasions transformed a settled society
to a nomadic one.
==== Introduced diseases ====
In addition to the disruption from direct
human action by invaders, encounters between
European explorers and populations in the
rest of the world often introduced local epidemics
of extraordinary virulence.
Smallpox ravaged Mexico in the 1520s, killing
150,000 in Tenochtitlán alone, including
the emperor, and Peru in the 1530s, aiding
the European conquerors.
Some believe that the death of up to 95% of
the Native American population of the New
World was caused by Old World diseases although
new research suggests tuberculosis from seals
and sea lions played a significant part.
Goods or people infected with the smallpox
virus were included in the ship inventories
of the Australian first settlement, and a
smallpox epidemic spread across the continent
3 years after European settlement.
=== Sub-replacement fertility ===
The Greek historian Polybius, writing in The
Histories, largely blamed the decline of the
Hellenistic world on low fertility rates:
In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth
of children and generally a decay of population,
owing to which the cities were denuded of
inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness
resulted, though there were no long-continued
wars or serious pestilences among us….
For this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without
attracting attention, by our men becoming
perverted to a passion for show and money
and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly
either not marrying at all, or, if they did
marry, refusing to rear the children that
were born, or at most one or two out of a
great number, for the sake of leaving them
well off or bringing them up in extravagant
luxury.
In a speech to Roman nobles, Emperor Augustus
commented on the low birthrates of the Roman
elite:
How otherwise shall families continue?
How can the commonwealth be preserved if we
neither marry nor produce children?
Surely you are not expecting some to spring
up from the earth to succeed to your goods
and to public affairs, as myths describe.
It is neither pleasing to Heaven nor creditable
that our race should cease and the name of
Romans meet extinguishment in us, and the
city be given up to foreigners,—Greek or
even barbarians.
We liberate slaves chiefly for the purpose
of making out of them as many citizens as
possible; we give our allies a share in the
government that our numbers may increase:
yet you, Romans of the original stock, including
Quintii, Valerii, Iulli, are eager that your
families and names at once shall perish with
you.
Upon the establishment of the Roman Empire,
Augustus introduced legislation designed to
increase the birth rate.
== Changes occurring with collapse ==
There are three main types of collapse:
Reversion/Simplification: A society's adaptive
capacity may be reduced by either a rapid
change in population or societal complexity,
destabilizing its institutions and causing
massive shifts in population and other social
dynamics.
In cases of collapse, civilizations tend to
revert to less complex, less centralized socio-political
forms using simpler technology.
These are characteristics of a Dark Age.
Examples of such societal collapse are: the
Hittite Empire, the Mycenaean civilization,
the Western Roman Empire, the Mauryan and
Gupta Empires in India, the Mayas, the Angkor
in Cambodia, the Han and Tang dynasties in
China and the Mali Empire.
Incorporation/Absorption: Alternately, a society
may be gradually incorporated into a more
dynamic, more complex inter-regional social
structure.
This happened in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia,
the Levantine cultures, the Mughal and Delhi
Sultanates in India, Song China, the Aztec
culture in Mesoamerica, the Inca culture in
South America, and the modern civilizations
of China, Japan, and India, as well as many
modern states in the Middle East and Africa.
Obliteration: Vast numbers of people in the
society die, or the birth rate plunges to
a level that causes a dramatic depopulation.
Other changes that may accompany a collapse:
Destratification: Complex societies stratified
on the basis of class, gender, race or some
other salient factor become much more homogeneous
or horizontally structured.
In many cases past social stratification slowly
becomes irrelevant following collapse and
societies become more egalitarian.
Despecialization: One of the most characteristic
features of complex civilizations (and in
many cases the yardstick to measure complexity)
is a high level of job specialization.
The most complex societies are characterized
by artisans and tradespeople who specialize
intensely in a given task.
Indeed, the rulers of many past societies
were hyper-specialized priests or priestesses
who were completely supported by the work
of the lower classes.
During societal collapse, the social institutions
supporting such specialization are removed
and people tend to become more generalized
in their work and daily habits.
Decentralization: As power becomes decentralized,
people tend to be more self-regimented and
have many more personal freedoms.
In many instances of collapse, there is a
slackening of social rules and etiquette.
Geographically speaking, communities become
more parochial or isolated.
For example, following the collapse of the
Maya civilization, many Maya returned to their
traditional hamlets, moving away from the
large cities that had dominated the political
landscape.
Destructuralization: Institutions, processes,
and artifacts are all manifest in the archaeological
record in abundance in large civilizations.
After collapse, evidence of epiphenomena,
institutions, and types of artifacts change
dramatically as people are forced to adopt
more self-sufficient lifestyles.
Depopulation: Societal collapse is almost
always associated with a population decline.
In extreme cases, the collapse in population
is so severe that the society disappears entirely,
such as happened with the Greenland Vikings,
or a number of Polynesian islands.
In less extreme cases, populations are reduced
until a demographic balance is re-established
between human societies and the depleted natural
environment.
A classic example is the city of Rome, which
had a population of about 1.5 million at the
peak of the Roman Empire during the reign
of Trajan in the early 2nd century AD, but
in the Early Middle Ages the population had
declined to only around 15,000 inhabitants
by the 9th century.
Decadence: Sir John Glubb Pasha (1897-1987),
a British military officer and historian in
his essay, 'Fate of Empires' said most empires
will tend to experience an age of decadence
before collapsing.
== Population dynamics ==
In the general study of cultural change and
population dynamics, a whole system displays
complex ecosystem changes.
Organizational adaptability relates importantly
to organizational diversity.
Several key features of human societal collapse
can be related to population dynamics.
For example, the native population of Cusco,
Peru at the time of the Spanish conquest was
stressed by an imbalance in the sex ratio
between men and women.Other population imbalances
may occur when low fertility rates coincides
with high dependency ratios or when there
is an unequal distribution of wealth between
elites and commoners.
Both characterized the Roman Empire.There
is strong evidence that humans also display
Population cycles.
== Theories ==
The complete breakdown of economic, cultural
and social institutions with ecological relationships
is perhaps the most common feature of collapse.
In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond proposes
five interconnected causes of collapse that
may reinforce each other: non-sustainable
exploitation of resources, climate changes,
diminishing support from friendly societies,
hostile neighbors, and inappropriate attitudes
for change.Joseph Tainter theorizes that collapsed
societies essentially exhausted their own
designs, and were unable to adapt to natural
diminishing returns for what they knew as
their method of survival.
It matches closely Arnold J. Toynbee's idea
that "they find problems they can't solve".
=== Linking social and environmental dynamics
===
Modern social critics commonly interpret things
like sedentary social behavior as symptomatic
of societal decay, and link what appears to
be laziness with the depletion of important
non-renewable resources.
However, many primitive cultures also have
high degrees of leisure, so if that is a cause
in one place it may not be in another—leisure
or apparent laziness is then not a sufficient
cause.
What produces modern sedentary life, unlike
nomadic hunter-gatherers, is extraordinary
modern economic productivity.
Tainter argues that exceptional productivity
is actually more the sign of hidden weakness,
both because of a society's dependence on
it, and its potential to undermine its own
basis for success by not being self limiting
as demonstrated in Western culture's ideal
of perpetual growth.
As a population grows and technology makes
it easier to exploit depleting resources,
the environment's diminishing returns are
hidden from view.
Societal complexity is then potentially threatened
if it develops beyond what is actually sustainable,
and a disorderly reorganization were to follow.
The scissors model of Malthusian collapse,
where the population grows without limit and
resources do not, is the idea of great opposing
environmental forces cutting into each other.
For the modern world economy, for example,
the growing conflict between food and fuel,
depending on many of the same finite and diminishing
resources, is visible in recent major commodity
price shocks.
It is one of the key relationships researchers,
since the early studies of the Club of Rome,
have been most concerned with.
Jared Diamond pursues these themes in his
2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Fail or Succeed.
=== Population pressure and mineral resource
exhaustion ===
Romanian American economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,
a progenitor in economics and the paradigm
founder of ecological economics, has argued
that the carrying capacity of Earth—that
is, Earth's capacity to sustain human populations
and consumption levels—is bound to decrease
sometime in the future as Earth's finite stock
of mineral resources is presently being extracted
and put to use; and consequently, that the
world economy as a whole is heading towards
an inevitable future collapse, leading to
the demise of human civilisation itself.Georgescu-Roegen
is basing his pessimistic prediction on the
two following considerations:
According to his ecological view of 'entropy
pessimism', matter and energy is neither created
nor destroyed in man's economy, only transformed
from states available for human purposes (valuable
natural resources) to states unavailable for
human purposes (valueless waste and pollution).
In effect, all of man's technologies and activities
are only speeding up the general march against
a future planetary 'heat death' of degraded
energy, exhausted natural resources and a
deteriorated environment—a state of maximum
entropy on Earth.
According to his social theory of 'bioeconomics',
humanity's economic struggle to work and earn
a livelihood is largely a continuation and
extension of the biological struggle to sustain
life and survive.
This struggle manifests itself as a permanent
social conflict that can be eliminated neither
by man's decision to do so nor by the social
evolution of mankind.
Consequently, we are biologically unable to
restrain ourselves collectively on a permanent
and voluntary basis for the benefit of unknown
future generations; the pressure of population
on Earth's resources will nothing but increase.Taken
together, the Industrial Revolution in Britain
in the second half of the 18th century has
unintentionally thrust man's economy into
a long, never-to-return overshoot-and-collapse
trajectory with regard to the Earth's mineral
stock.
The world economy will continue growing until
its inevitable and final collapse in the future.
From that point on, Georgescu-Roegen conjectures,
ever deepening scarcities will aggravate social
conflict throughout the globe and ultimately
spell the end of mankind itself.
Georgescu-Roegen was the paradigm founder
of ecological economics and is also considered
the main intellectual figure influencing the
degrowth movement.
Consequently, much work in these fields is
devoted to discussing the existential impossibility
of allocating earth's finite stock of mineral
resources evenly among an unknown number of
present and future generations.
This number of generations is likely to remain
unknown to us, as there is no way—or only
little way—of knowing in advance if or when
mankind will ultimately face extinction.
In effect, any conceivable intertemporal allocation
of the finite stock will inevitably end up
with universal economic decline at some future
point.
=== Theories of energy return on energy invested
===
A related economic model is proposed by Thomas
Homer-Dixon and by Charles Hall in relation
to our declining productivity of energy extraction,
or energy return on energy invested (EROEI).
This measures the amount of surplus energy
a society gets from using energy to obtain
energy.
There would be no surplus if EROEI approaches
1:1.
What Hall showed is that the real cutoff is
well above that, estimated to be 3:1 to sustain
the essential overhead energy costs of a modern
society.
Part of the mental equation is that the EROEI
of our generally preferred energy source,
petroleum, has fallen in the past century
from 100:1 to the range of 10:1 with clear
evidence that the natural depletion curves
all are downward decay curves.
An EROEI of more than ~3, then, is what appears
necessary to provide the energy for societally
important tasks, such as maintaining government,
legal and financial institutions, a transportation
infrastructure, manufacturing, building construction
and maintenance and the life styles of the
rich and poor that a society depends on.
The EROEI figure also affects the number of
people needed for sustainable food production.
In the pre-modern world, it was often the
case that 80% of the population was employed
in agriculture to feed a population of 100%,
with a low energy budget.
In modern times, the use of cheap fossil fuels
with an exceedingly high EROEI enabled 100%
of the population to be fed with only 4% of
the population employed in agriculture.
Diminishing EROEI making fuel more expensive
relative to other things may require food
to be produced using less energy, and so increases
the number of people employed in food production
again.
==== Energy scenarios of Bryn Davidson ====
Here are the four "energy scenarios" described
by Bryn Davidson (of the Dynamic Cities Project
in Vancouver):
According to Rob Hopkins, energy descent is
the only desirable option we have left (because
reactive responses have dramatic consequences
and it is likely too late for sustainable
development).
=== Models of societal response ===
According to Joseph Tainter (1990), too many
scholars offer facile explanations of societal
collapse by assuming one or more of the following
three models in the face of collapse:
The Dinosaur, a large-scale society in which
resources are being depleted at an exponential
rate and yet nothing is done to rectify the
problem because the ruling elite are unwilling
or unable to adapt to those resources' reduced
availability: In this type of society, rulers
tend to oppose any solutions that diverge
from their present course of action.
They will favor intensification and commit
an increasing number of resources to their
present plans, projects, and social institutions.
The Runaway Train, a society whose continuing
function depends on constant growth (cf.
Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis):
This type of society, based almost exclusively
on acquisition (e.g., pillage or exploitation),
cannot be sustained indefinitely.
The Assyrian, Roman and Mongol Empires, for
example, both fractured and collapsed when
no new conquests could be achieved.
Tainter argues that capitalism can be seen
as an example of the Runaway Train model,
in that generally accepted accounting practices
require publicly traded companies, along with
many privately held ones, to exhibit growth
as measured at some fixed interval (often
three months).
Moreover, the ethos of consumerism on the
demand side and the practice of planned obsolescence
on the supply side encourage the purchase
of an ever-increasing number of goods and
services even when resource extraction and
food production are unsustainable if continued
at current levels.
The House of Cards, a society that has grown
to be so large and include so many complex
social institutions that it is inherently
unstable and prone to collapse.
This type of society has been seen with particular
frequency among Eastern bloc and other communist
nations, in which all social organizations
are arms of the government or ruling party,
such that the government must either stifle
association wholesale (encouraging dissent
and subversion) or exercise less authority
than it asserts (undermining its legitimacy
in the public eye).
By contrast, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed,
when voluntary and private associations are
allowed to flourish and gain legitimacy at
an institutional level, they complement and
often even supplant governmental functions:
They provide a "safety valve" for dissent,
assist with resource allocation, provide for
social experimentation without the need for
governmental coercion, and enable the public
to maintain confidence in society as a whole,
even during periods of governmental weakness.
==== Tainter's critique ====
Tainter argues that these models, though superficially
useful, cannot severally or jointly account
for all instances of societal collapse.
Often they are seen as interconnected occurrences
that reinforce each other.
For example, the failure of Easter Island's
leaders to remedy rapid ecological deterioration
cannot be understood without reference to
the other models above.
The islanders, who erected large statues called
moai as a form of religious reverence to their
ancestors, used felled trees as rollers to
transport them.
Because the islanders firmly believed that
their displays of reverence would lead to
increased future prosperity, they had a deeply
entrenched incentive to intensify moai production.
Because Easter Island's geographic isolation
made its resources hard to replenish and made
the balance of its overall ecosystem very
delicate ("House of Cards"), deforestation
led to soil erosion and insufficient resources
to build boats for fishing or tools for hunting.
Competition for dwindling resources resulted
in warfare and many casualties (an additional
"Runaway Train" iteration).
Together these events led to the collapse
of the civilization, but no single factor
above provides an adequate account.
Mainstream interpretations of the history
of Easter Island also include the slave raiders
who abducted a large proportion of the population
and epidemics that killed most of the survivors
(see Easter Island History § Destruction
of society and population).
Again, no single point explains the collapse;
only a complex and integrated view can do
so.
Tainter's position is that social complexity
is a recent and comparatively anomalous occurrence
requiring constant support.
He asserts that collapse is best understood
by grasping four axioms.
In his own words (p. 194):
human societies are problem-solving organizations;
sociopolitical systems require energy for
their maintenance;
increased complexity carries with it increased
costs per capita; and
investment in sociopolitical complexity as
a problem-solving response reaches a point
of declining marginal returns.With these facts
in mind, collapse can simply be understood
as a loss of the energy needed to maintain
social complexity.
Collapse is thus the sudden loss of social
complexity, stratification, internal and external
communication and exchange, and productivity.
=== Toynbee’s theory of decay ===
The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in
his 12-volume masterpiece A Study of History
(1961), theorized that all civilizations pass
through several distinct stages: genesis,
growth, time of troubles, universal state,
and disintegration.
(Carroll Quigley would expand on and refine
this theory in his "The Evolution of Civilizations".)
Toynbee argues that the breakdown of civilizations
is not caused by loss of control over the
environment, over the human environment, or
attacks from outside.
Rather, societies that develop great expertise
in problem solving become incapable of solving
new problems by overdeveloping their structures
for solving old ones.
The fixation on the old methods of the "Creative
Minority" leads it to eventually cease to
be creative and degenerates into merely a
"dominant minority" (that forces the majority
to obey without meriting obedience), failing
to recognize new ways of thinking.
He argues that creative minorities deteriorate
due to a worship of their "former self", by
which they become prideful, and fail to adequately
address the next challenge they face.
He argues that the ultimate sign a civilization
has broken down is when the dominant minority
forms a Universal State, which stifles political
creativity.
He states:
First the Dominant Minority attempts to hold
by force - against all right and reason - a
position of inherited privilege which it has
ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat
repays injustice with resentment, fear with
hate, and violence with violence when it executes
its acts of secession.
Yet the whole movement ends in positive acts
of creation - and this on the part of all
the actors in the tragedy of disintegration.
The Dominant Minority creates a universal
state, the Internal Proletariat a universal
church, and the External Proletariat a bevy
of barbarian war-bands.
He argues that, as civilizations decay, they
form an "Internal Proletariat" and an "External
Proletariat."
The Internal proletariat is held in subjugation
by the dominant minority inside the civilization,
and grows bitter; the external proletariat
exists outside the civilization in poverty
and chaos, and grows envious.
He argues that as civilizations decay, there
is a "schism in the body social", whereby
abandon and self-control together replace
creativity, and truancy and martyrdom together
replace discipleship by the creative minority.
He argues that in this environment, people
resort to archaism (idealization of the past),
futurism (idealization of the future), detachment
(removal of oneself from the realities of
a decaying world), and transcendence (meeting
the challenges of the decaying civilization
with new insight, as a Prophet).
He argues that those who transcend during
a period of social decay give birth to a new
Church with new and stronger spiritual insights,
around which a subsequent civilization may
begin to form after the old has died.
Toynbee's use of the word 'church' refers
to the collective spiritual bond of a common
worship, or the same unity found in some kind
of social order.
=== Systems science ===
Researchers, as yet, have very little ability
to identify internal structures of large distributed
systems like human societies, which is an
important scientific problem.
Genuine structural collapse seems, in many
cases, the only plausible explanation supporting
the idea that such structures exist.
However, until they can be concretely identified,
scientific inquiry appears limited to the
construction of scientific narratives, using
systems thinking for careful storytelling
about systemic organization and change.
History includes many examples of the appearance
and disappearance of human societies with
no obvious explanation.
The abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union
in the course of a few months, without any
external attack, according to Johan Galtung
was due to growing structural contradictions
brought on by geopolitical overreach, which
could not be resolved within the existing
socio-political systems.
Although a societal collapse is generally
an endpoint for the administration of a culture's
social and economic life, societal collapse
can also be seen as simply a change of administration
within the same culture.
Russian culture would seem to have outlived
both the society of Imperial Russia and the
society of the Soviet Union, for example.
Frequently the societal collapse phenomenon
is also a process of decentralization of authority
after a 'classic' period of centralized social
order, perhaps replaced by competing centers
as the central authority weakens.
Societal failure may also result in a degree
of empowerment for the lower levels of a former
climax society, who escape from the burden
of onerous taxes and control by exploitative
elites.
For example, the black plague contributed
to breaking the hold of European feudal society
on its underclass in the 15th century.
== Examples of civilizations and societies
that have collapsed ==
=== 
By reversion or simplification ===
Akkadian Empire
Hittite Empire
Mycenaean Greece
The Neo-Assyrian Empire
Indus Valley Civilization
Angkor civilization of the Khmer Empire
Han and Tang Dynasty of China
Anasazi (disputed)
Western Roman Empire
Izapa
Maya, Classic Maya collapse
Munhumutapa Empire
Olmec
Maurya Empire
Gupta Empire
=== 
By absorption ===
Sumer by the Akkadian Empire
Ancient Egypt by the Libyans, Nubians, Assyria,
Babylonia, Persian rule, Greece, Ptolemaic
Dynasty, and the Roman Empire
Babylonia by the Hittites
Etruscans by the Roman Republic
Ancient Levant
Classical Greece by the Roman Empire
Britons by the Anglo-Saxons
Khazar Khaganate by the Eastern Slavs of the
Kievan Rus'
Dacians by the Roman Empire
Eastern Roman Empire (Medieval Greek) of the
Byzantines by the Arabs and Ottoman Empire
Extinction of Khitan, Jurchen, Tangut and
Nanzhao cultures by Mongol Empire
Champa civilization
Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan, ending with the
Meiji Restoration
Kingdom of France, an medieval absolute monarchy
in Western Europe, ending with the French
Revolution, thus being succeeded by the French
First Republic
Aztecs by the Spanish conquest of the Aztec
Empire
Incas by the Spanish conquest of the Inca
Empire
Maya by the Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica
Seven Spanish Cities by the Mapuche
=== By extinction or evacuation ===
Cahokia
Original Rapa Nui civilization on Easter Island
(disputed)
Lost cities
Norse colony on Greenland
Original Polynesian civilization on Pitcairn
Island
Malden Island
Flinders Island
Garamantes
Carthaginian Empire
Native Americans by European colonization
of the Americas
== 
See also ==
Malthusian and environmental collapse themes
Cultural and institutional collapse themes:
Systems science
