Collapse
Posted on October 9, 2008
Filed Under All, Context |
It so happens, during these very interesting times, that I’m reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, his fascinating study of societies that underwent sudden, disastrous decline and the causes that lead to those crashes. Diamond studied the fall of both ancient (Easter Island, Maya, the Norse Greenland Colonies) and modern (Rwanda, Haiti) societies, and comes up with 5 common contributing factors: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trading partners and a given society’s response to its problems.
Clearly, the United States, faces all 5 issues; indeed the whole planet is confronting them. Of interest in these times of plummeting stock markets is the surprising ‘friendly trading partners’ issue. It can happen that a successful society becomes reliant on trading partners for some vital resource. Should the trading partners suddenly become unable to deliver that resource, a decline can ensue.
If the society is unwilling or unable to address the problem, the decline becomes precipitous, eventually spreading out of control. If one looks at liquid credit markets as a resource shared among trading partners, then we may be seeing a national, if not global, beginning of such a decline. [update: the UK has frozen Icelandic banks' UK holdings in a diplomatic spat over UK citizens' deposits in Iceland.]
Diamond also looks at societies that succeeded in spite of (sometimes repeatedly) facing these problems - Japan, Iceland and Polynesian Tikopia. A common thread in their success was a commitment by citizens (bottom-up) and leaders (top-down) alike to understand their problems and solve them. This often meant shedding long-held principals and practices and facing difficult realities, but the reward was a society better-prepared to face problems and, ultimately, better-off than it had been. Good study, IMHO, that ranges from Montana to New Guinea to China…
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Placing society above self & empowering central leaders is programmed into human nature & has been the way for most of history. What hasn’t been tried is emphasizing self interest & empowering individuals.