Collapse Narratives Return

As social mood turns at the bear market peak and heads towards a new low, the collapse narratives will intensify. The big question is whether they are correct, rather than popular due to current mood. If you believe a grand super cycle top is underway (Prechter), or you read Tainter (see this presentation), or you read Turchin, or Strauss & Howe, or Roman history, there are a lot of collapse narratives all pointing in the same direction.

Financial Sense: Peak Civilization

Two millennia after the battle of Teutoburg, we can see how useless it was that confrontation in the woods soaked with rain. A few years later, the Roman general Germanicus, nephew of Emperor Tiberius, went back to Teutoburg with no less than eight legions. He defeated the Germans, recovered the standards of the defeated legions, and buried the bodies of the Roman dead. Arminius, the German leader who had defeated Varus, suffered a great loss of prestige and, eventually, he was killed by his own people. But all that changed nothing. The Roman Empire had exhausted its resources and couldn't expand any more. Germanicus couldn't conquer Germany any more than Varus could bring back his legions from the realm of the dead.

Civilizations and empires, in the end, are just ripples in the ocean of time. They come and go, leaving little except carved stones proclaiming their eternal greatness. But, from the human viewpoint, Empires are vast and long standing and, for some of us, worth fighting for or against. But those who fought in Teutoburg couldn't change the course of history, nor can we. All that we can say - today as at the time of the battle of Teutoburg - is that we are going towards a future world that we can only dimly perceive. If we could see clearly where we are going, maybe we wouldn't like to go there; but we are going anyway. In the end, perhaps it was Emperor Marcus Aurelius who had seen the future most clearly:

Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new.

Marcus Aurelius Verus - "Meditations" ca. 167 A.D.

It is difficult to know the right path, but it is possible to understand the wrong path from history. Complexity, centralization and inefficiency must be ruthlessly destroyed. An example comes in healthcare and education. If you look at spending and outcomes in those two industries, there is one clear step that would improve overall efficiency in the U.S.: slash spending. The marginal return on education and healthcare spending is negative and has been for 30 years or more. It doesn't matter what you do with the smaller sum of money, it could be wasted in the existing system or the cuts might trigger new efficiencies, but by reducing spending, resources are conserved.

Complexity destroyed retirement. Before social security, many people prepared for old age by having at least two children, in the expectation that they would care for their parents in old age. A government run system is complex and individuals do not see the need for youth to support them. Some might argue that you can save and invest if you have no children, but how would that work if everyone did the same thing? There's no one to sell financial assets to in the future. Boomers are in trouble because of low fertility rates, in addition to the fact that Millennials are more interested in cryptocurrencies and are so debt burdened that they cannot afford marriage, families and homes. Comfortable Boomer retirement could disappear starting tomorrow if the 1987 and 1929 market analogs hold up. If they manage to avoid a financial decline, they will leaves ashes in their wake.

Complexity is destroying the West, but recognizing that fact is close to impossible because the society is built on complexity, those institutions that are least needed are the most powerful and revered. Staving off collapse requires a "pre-collapse" retrenchment of economic, military and political power. The very symbols of American power, such as the wealth of Wall Street, the powerful military and ever growing Washington bureaucracy (reflected in the wealth around Northern Virginia) is a sign of American collapse. When Rome collapsed, the standard of living in many parts of the former empire went up, not down, because the farmers and hinterlands were no longer financing an empire.

If You Want to Read About Collapse, Read The Good Stuff

Collapse is a popular word these days owing to negative social mood, but the word is used cheaply. There is serious scholarship on the topic of collapse and it pays to read some of the better work on the subject if you want to have a deeper understanding. The two authors below deal with historical and archaeological evidence; complexity theory is another.

I have read Dr. Joseph Tainter. (See: Dr. Joseph Tainter presentation. His book is a must read for anyone interested in the topic and his findings are interesting, such as the fact that collapse does not necessarily lead to a decline in standard of living because complexity consumes resources (A very simplified explanation of collapse is that when the marginal cost of complexity begins to exceed the benefit, collapse becomes increasingly likely.) The Collapse of Complex Societies

There is another book out that makes use of archaeology and history in studying collapse: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

Here is a review: System Failure: Eric H. Cline on 1177 B.C. – The Year Civilization Collapsed

The concept of systemic breakdown plays an important role in Cline’s analysis of the Catastrophe, and so too quite naturally does the concept of a system or an economy. Establishing that the Eastern Mediterranean world in the Late Bronze Age was a unified system or economy is one of the admirable goals of Cline’s exposition. Modernity, believing its own myth, styles itself as the unprecedented result of a long and arduous historical progressus from the troglodyte dawn of humanity to the present lustrous global technocracy. Cline argues that modernity is not unique in its intimate network of communications, commerce, and diplomacy, but that the Late Bronze Age also in precedence qualified as “a complex international world.”

......Just before reading The Year Civilization Collapsed I read Gregory R. Copley’s Un-Civilization: Urban Geo-Politics in a Time of Chaos (2013). Copley sees the existing global economy as a distorted, unstable system already embarked down the slope of collapse. The malaise of the contemporary system in Copley’s analysis stems from many of the distortions that Cline cites as contributing to the end of the Bronze Age: Centralized bureaucratization of the societies; overspecialization within the total mercantile network such that a disruption anywhere must spread its effects like ripples everywhere else; vulnerable infrastructure, such as, in the modern instance, the electrical grid; unregulated, massive migrations of peoples; and the development of enmitous social factions within societies, in some cases massively immigration-driven. Copley predicts a crisis, one effect of which will be plummeting depopulation leading to the desertification of the distended World Cities.

This one is on my reading list, as is Copley's book. You can find free digital versions (PDF or epub) of it here: Un-Civilization: Urban Geo-Politics in a Time of Chaos

One vote for Prechter's Grand Supercycle top

Some perspectives from Prudentius

"The past isn't dead; it isn't even past." And we all know that America is Rome. Late Rome.

But which late Rome? The late Republic? Or the late Empire? Do we deserve an Augustus? Or are we just waiting for our Alaric?

Tonight I thought we'd hear from one of the leading experts on the subject. That's right - let's give a big hand to Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (no relation to Sam). Courtesy of our capable medium, Sister M. Clement Eagan, C.C.V.I. (Incarnate Word College, San Antonio, TX, 1965), we'll speak with Prudentius live and in blank verse - from the very special year 403.

He goes on to quote the Roman poet:

To curb this madness, God has everywhere
Taught nations to accept the selfsame laws
And Romans to become -- all by the Rhine
And Danube washed, by Tagus' golden flood,
The great Ebro and Hesperia's horned stream,
The Ganges and warm Nile with seven mouths,
He bound them by a common law and name
And brought them into bonds of brotherhood.
In all the world they live as citizens
Within their native city's sheltering walls,
United round the same ancestral hearth.
Tribes far apart and sundered by the sea
Are brought together through appeals and trials
In common courts, through their commerce and trades
In crowded marts, through intermarriage
With those of other climes; for many bloods
Are intermingled in a single race.

This Roman poet is expressing the exact same ideas expressed by Americans today, a world united by a single government, even bringing forth a single race through intermarriage. A peak social mood sentiment, only made possible by a global peace kept by a global hegemon.

Dr. Joseph Tainter presentation

Parts six and seven are the question and answer session.
Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven