A Hot Mess: The Collapse of Civilisation - An Unprecedented Opportunity for Renewal

Nafeez Ahmed explores the adaptive cycle of growth, conservation, release and reorganisation

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The inflection point we are experiencing today on a global scale is unprecedented, but it’s not unique. Societies have risen and fallen throughout history, and every civilisation goes through a life cycle of growth and decline.

One of the most fruitful attempts to examine the rise and fall of civilisations using complexity science was by Utah State University archaeologist Joseph Tainter who, in his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, examined two dozen cases of collapsed societies, including the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Mayan and Chaco civilisations.

The pattern Tainter found was that civilisations would develop more complex and specialised bureaucracies to solve emerging problems. With each new layer of problem-solving infrastructure, a whole new order of problems would be created. As each new layer also requires the greater consumption of resources, it eventually cannot produce enough resources to both sustain itself and resolve the problems generated. The result is that society collapses to a new equilibrium by shedding layers of complex infrastructure amassed in previous centuries. This can take place in a matter of decades or last as long as centuries.