Why do Societies/Civilisations Fail?

[Michaelangelica]

Just read this interesting article by Jared Diamond (bio here:- The Lewis Thomas Prize ) in Cosmos.

It was a part of his Lewis Thomas Prize Lecture

He has written a book "Collapse: How societies Choose to Fail or Succeed' (Penguin)

Some extracts from:-

Edge 114

 

The first item on my road map is that groups may do disastrous things because they didn't anticipate a problem before it arrived.

 

a society may fail to anticipate a problem before it actually arises. Another reason is that they may have had prior experience but that prior experience has been forgotten.We, too, tend to forget things, and so for example Americans recently behave as if they've forgotten about the 1973 Gulf oil crisis. For a year or two after the crisis they avoided gas-guzzling vehicles, then quickly they forgot that knowledge, despite their having writing. And again in the 1960s the city of Tucson, Arizona went through a severe drought, and the citizens swore that they would manage their water better after that, but within a decade or two Tucson was going back to its water-guzzling ways of building golf courses and watering one's gardens. So there we have a couple of reasons why a society may fail to anticipate a problem before it has arrived.

 

The remaining reason why a society may fail to anticipate a problem before it develops involves reasoning by false analogy.

 

after a society has anticipated or failed to anticipate a problem before it arises, involves a society's failing to perceive a problem that has actually arrived. There are at least three reasons for such failures, all of them common in the business world and in academia. First, the origins of some problems are literally imperceptible.

 

An even commoner reason for a society's failing to perceive a problem is that the problem may take the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations. The prime example in modern times is global warming

 

The remaining frequent reason for failure to perceive a problem after it has arrived is distant managers, a potential problem in any large society. For example, today the largest private landowner and the largest timber company in the state of Montana is based not within the state but in Seattle, Washington. Not being on the scene, company executives may not realize that they have a big weed problem on their forest property.

 

All of us who belong to other groups can think of examples of imperceptibly arising problems, creeping normalcy, and distant managers.

 

The third step in my road map of failure is perhaps the commonest and most surprising one: a society's failure even to try to solve a problem that it has perceived.

 

Such failures frequently arise because of what economists term "rational behavior" arising from clashes of interest between people. Some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior that is harmful for other people.. . . A typical example of rational bad behavior is "good for me, bad for you and for the rest of society" — to put it bluntly, "selfishness.. . . Rational behavior involving clashes of interest also arises when the consumer has no long-term stake in preserving the resource. For example, much commercial harvesting of tropical rainforests today is carried out by international logging companies, which lease land in one country, cut down all the rainforest in that country, and then move on to the next country.

 

 

Failure to solve perceived problems because of conflicts of interest between the elite and the rest of society. . .

situations in which a society fails to solve perceived problems because the maintenance of the problem is good for some people.. . .

Religious values are especially deeply held and hence frequent causes of disastrous behavior. For example, much of the deforestation of Easter Island had a religious motivation, to obtain logs to transport and erect the giant stone statues that were the basis of Easter Island religious cults.

 

Irrational failures to try to solve perceived problems also frequently arise from clashes between short-term and long-term motives of the same individual. Billions of people in the world today are desperately poor and able to think only of food for the next day. Poor fishermen in tropical reef areas use dynamite and cyanide to kill and catch reef fish, in full knowledge that they are destroying their future livelihood, but they feel that they have no choice because of their desperate short term need to obtain food for their children today. Governments, too, regularly operate on a short-term focus:

 

The last reason that I shall mention for irrational failure to try to solve a perceived problem is psychological denial. . . . Psychological denial is a phenomenon well established in individual psychology. lt seems likely to apply to group psychology as well. For example, there is much evidence that, during World War Two, Jews and other groups at risk of the developing Holocaust denied the accumulating evidence that it was happening and that they were at risk, because the thought was unbearably horrible. Psychological denial may also explain why some collapsing societies fail to face up to the obvious causes of their collapse.

 

Finally, the last of the four items in my road map is the failure to succeed in solving a problem that one does try to solve. There are obvious possible explanations for this outcome. The problem may just be too difficult, and beyond our present capacities to solve. . . .

Often, too, we fail to solve a problem because our efforts are too little, begun too late.

 

Thus, my reason for discussing failures of human decision-making is not my desire to depress you. Instead, I hope that, by recognizing the sign posts of failed decision making, we may become more consciously aware of how others have failed, and of what we need to do in order to get it right.

[paigetheoracle]

For my part there are other viewpoints on this subject - One being that societies age just like individuals do. This manifests in community dissolving into greed or every man for himself: Spiritual cohesion against a common enemy, giving way to triumph and collapse into materialism and selfishness (spiritual boredom)as we see now. Everything starts off simple and grows more complex over time, reverting back to simplicity (second childhood) eventually.

[Michaelangelica]

For my part there are other viewpoints on this subject - One being that societies age just like individuals do. This manifests in community dissolving into greed or every man for himself: Spiritual cohesion against a common enemy, giving way to triumph and collapse into materialism and selfishness (spiritual boredom)as we see now. Everything starts off simple and grows more complex over time, reverting back to simplicity (second childhood) eventually.

Interesting thought.

The 4? ages of man/society m m m

 

You could post this on the "Is Helath Insurance Socialism" thread