What Is "Collapse"?
Civilizational collapse (also called societal collapse) is a complex phenomenon resulting in political disintegration, widespread lawlessness, disruption of vital goods and services, macroeconomic collapse, and loss of cultural identity. In our strategic foresight consulting, we use a framework involving six types of forces that influence society (and its collapse). This framework is described below.
Six Types of Forces That Influence Society / Civilization
Culture
A society's culture encompasses its values and assumptions about the world (its "worldview"), its attitudes toward social issues, its social norms and behaviors, its institutions, art, customs, beliefs, and knowledge.
Aspects of a society's culture can endanger its survival, such as a widespread rejection of science and expertise, or norms that encourage the oppression or outright persecution of a minority.
(Image by SkepticalScience modified by Gregor Hagedorn. Licensed under CCA BY-SA 4.0 Deed.)
Technology
"Technology" encompasses both the technologies currently used within a society, and those technologies currently under development.
Aspects of a society's technology can endanger its survival, such as problems with its technological infrastructure (such as the use of lead pipes to carry drinking water) or infrastructure vulnerabilities to disruption by natural events or the action of humans (for example, causing the crash of power grids or food distribution systems).
Another issue with technology is what we at the firm call the Law of Increasing Destructive Power: over time, the ability of one or a few individuals to cause destruction increases. In the 1500s, 19 men armed with the most sophisticated armaments of the day could only have caused so much damage before being killed themselves. On September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with box cutters and large passenger airplanes killed almost 3,000 people. Today's societies can be disrupted by the actions of a relatively small number of people.
(Image: Implosion of a fusion microcapsule on the NOVA laser system. 300 terawatts of energy hit a target 0.5 mm in diameter. Microcapsule contained deuterium-tritium fuel.)
Environment
The "Environment" encompasses the entire natural world. This includes the atmosphere, all land masses, all natural resources, the seas and seafloors, bacteria, viruses, bats, and all non-human living things. It encompasses dynamic phenomena, such as earthquakes, climate change and its effects, and pandemic diseases. It also encompasses such Earth-directed space phenomena as solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs).
Environmental factors can play a large factor in disrupting a society. Megadroughts, pandemics, and radical depletion of natural resources have all played a part in the collapse of some earlier civilizations.
In our day, the effects of climate change alone--which propels the emergence of zoonotic pandemic diseases, reduces the amount of arable land and the length of growing seasons, and which can drive "climate migration" of vast populations--might itself be enough to lead to the collapse of Western civilization.
Others point out that the inevitable exhaustion of supplies of fossil fuels will lead to either global deindustrialization or an outright collapse.
Economics
The economic sphere encompasses both microeconomics (the economic behavior of people and companies) and macroeconomics (the economic behavior of nations and their financial markets)--two domains that are more deeply connected than might appear at first glance.
Economic behavior can have a large impact on a society's survival or collapse. Massive wealth disparity sparked a revolution that brought down the French monarchy in the 1780s and 1790s. Heavy institutional investment in unregulated and rather shady financial instruments led to the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, leading to a widespread depression that nearly ignited a global financial depression.
In our time, rampant speculation in unregulated financial instruments and digital currencies threatens to bring about another crisis of 2007 proportions or greater. In addition, a precipitous increase in personal, corporate, and sovereign debt raises the possibility of massive, multi-layered defaults that would have staggering consequences.
(Image: HQ of Lehman Brothers, the sudden failure of which is considered a catalyst for the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. Photo by David Shankbone. Licensed under CCA BY-SA 3.0 Deed.)
Domestic Politics
Domestic politics encompasses all political activity within a given polity: not just elections, but the actual workings of government at all levels.
Domestic political factors can have an immensely disruptive effect on a society's survival or collapse. For example, Germany's embrace of fascist politics in the 1930s and 1940s came close to ending Germany as a separate nation. Similarly, Japan's simultaneous embrace of State Shinto and the imperial ambitions of its military leaders nearly led to the reduction of the Japanese Home Islands to radioactive wastelands.
In our day, the rise of hard-right movements in Europe and the United States raises the specter of both civil war and the end of democracy in favor of tyranny, which rarely bodes well for a society's survival.
(Image: Charlottesville, VA "Unite the Right" rally counter-protesters and legal observers [green hats], August 12, 2017. Photo by Anthony Crider. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 Deed.)
Geopolitics
In an era when multiple nations, some aligned against others, possess thousands of nuclear weapons each typically in the 1.5-megaton-yield range ("100 Hiroshimas"), it takes no imagination to see how geopolitical factors could end, not just a society, but all of human civilization.
(Image: The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.)