General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What If A Collapse Happened And Nobody Noticed? [View all]GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)The question of system resilience hasn't entered the public debate, maybe because it's too new and too abstract a concept. It's a lot easier to understand the role of greed than loss of resilience.
What I'm trying to find out right now is what drives greed (aka the accumulative behaviour of social elites). It seems to have been s a common feature in the run-up to the breakdown of other cycles of civilization - Rome, Middle Ages Europe, Chinese dynasties etc. as well as the modern situation. That implies that there is some underlying dynamic that drives the behaviour.
I'm starting a book that might shed some light on this subject: "Secular Cycles" by Turchin and Nefedov. Their general descriptions of the social and demographic situations during these earlier cycles are positively eerie, despite the fact that they are talking about breakdowns in agrarian rather than industrial societies. I can't help but think that our exponentially more powerful technology has largely succeeded in simply digging us into a deeper hole - and taking the rest of life on the planet along for the ride.