Civilization is a fragile thing. Or at least, that is what the movies tell us. We have this collective obsession with the idea that one day the lights just flicker and everything we've built—the supply chains, the internet, the morning latte—simply vanishes into a cloud of dust and anarchy. But history is rarely that dramatic. If you look at the collapse of complex societies through the lens of actual archaeology rather than Hollywood scripts, the reality is much weirder and, honestly, a bit more frustrating.
Things don't usually "end." They just get smaller.
Take the Maya. People love to talk about the "lost" Maya, as if millions of people just evaporated into the jungle because of a bad harvest or a bloodthirsty king. It didn't happen like that. Cities like Tikal were abandoned, sure, but the people didn't vanish. They moved. They simplified. They stopped building massive stone calendars and started living in smaller, more sustainable ways. It was a failure of the state, not the species.
What we get wrong about the collapse of complex societies
Most people think of collapse as a single event. A cliff. You're at the top, and then—whoosh—you're at the bottom.
Joseph Tainter, the guy who basically wrote the bible on this topic back in 1988, argues that collapse is actually a rational economic choice. His book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, is a bit of a slog if you aren't into academic prose, but his central point is a total brain-breaker: complexity has diminishing returns.
Think about it this way. When a society is young, adding a little bit of complexity—like building a bridge or hiring a record-keeper—gives you a huge boost in productivity. But eventually, you reach a point where you’re spending all your energy just maintaining the stuff you already built. You need a bureaucracy to manage the bureaucracy. You need an army to protect the tax collectors who are paying for the army.
The Tainter Curve
Imagine a graph. On one axis, you have "Complexity." On the other, "Benefit."
At first, the line shoots up. Life gets better. You have irrigation, specialized doctors, and paved roads. But then the line starts to level off. You’re working harder and harder for smaller and smaller gains. Eventually, the line dips. This is where a society becomes "brittle." One bad drought or one lost war, and the whole house of cards realizes it’s cheaper to just stop being a "civilization" and go back to being a bunch of self-sufficient farmers.
Collapse, in Tainter’s view, is just a rapid reduction in complexity. It's a "reset" button.
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The Roman example: A slow-motion car crash
The Western Roman Empire is the poster child for this. We're taught that Rome "fell" in 476 AD when Romulus Augustulus was kicked off the throne. But if you were a peasant in Gaul at the time, you might not have even noticed for a few decades.
The collapse of the Roman state took centuries.
- The Currency Problem: Rome started debasing its silver coins. By the end, they were basically copper dipped in a tiny bit of silver. Inflation went nuts.
- The Defense Problem: The borders were too big. They couldn't pay the soldiers, so they started hiring "barbarians" to fight other "barbarians."
- The Elite Problem: The people at the top stopped caring about the public good and focused entirely on protecting their own wealth.
Sound familiar? It’s easy to draw parallels to today, but we have to be careful. The Romans didn't have the internet or nuclear energy. Their "energy subsidy" was mostly human and animal labor. When that became too expensive to manage, the system broke.
It's usually about the calories
You can't talk about the collapse of complex societies without talking about dirt and rain.
Look at the Akkadian Empire in ancient Mesopotamia. About 4,200 years ago, it was the first real empire in history. Then, it went dark. For a long time, historians thought it was just bad politics. But recent soil samples and climate data show a massive, century-long drought hit the region.
When you can't feed the city, the city doesn't exist. It’s that simple.
Harvey Weiss, a Yale archaeologist, has done some incredible work linking these "abrupt climate changes" to the fall of dozens of Bronze Age civilizations. It’s not that these people were stupid. They were actually incredibly sophisticated. But they were "optimized" for a specific climate. When the climate shifted, their optimization became their biggest weakness. They were too rigid to change.
The trap of "sunk costs"
Societies hate admitting they're wrong. We have "sunk cost bias." We’ve spent so much money on a specific way of doing things—like building cities in deserts or relying on a specific type of fuel—that we’d rather double down on a failing strategy than try something new.
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This is what Jared Diamond talks about in his book Collapse. He looks at the Greenland Norse. They tried to farm like they were in Norway, even when the climate turned freezing. They kept raising cattle when they should have been hunting seals like the Inuit. They chose "identity" over "survival."
They starved because they refused to stop being Norse.
The modern context: Are we different?
This is the big question. Does the collapse of complex societies even apply to us? We have global communication, advanced medicine, and space travel.
Some experts, like Thomas Homer-Dixon, argue that our complexity is now "hyper-connected." In the past, if the Maya collapsed, the Chinese Han Dynasty didn't even feel it. Today, a banking glitch in London or a virus in a regional market can shut down a factory in Ohio within 48 hours.
We have "tight coupling." Everything is linked.
But we also have something the Romans didn't: a conscious understanding of history. We can see the "Tainter Curve" coming. We have the data. The question is whether we have the political will to "simplify" voluntarily before the system does it for us.
The myth of the "Dark Ages"
We need to stop using the term "Dark Ages." It’s misleading.
When the Roman Empire in the West fell apart, literacy rates dropped and trade slowed down. But for a lot of people, life actually got... better? Taxes went away. The local lords were still jerks, but they didn't have the reach of the Imperial tax machine.
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Innovation didn't stop. It just changed. Instead of massive monuments, people focused on better plows, water mills, and crop rotation.
Collapse is a redistribution of power. It's the end of a specific way of living, not the end of life.
How to actually prepare for systemic shifts
If you’re worried about the collapse of complex societies, don't buy a bunker and 50 cases of canned beans. That's "prepper" fantasy stuff. If things really go south, a bunker just makes you a target.
Instead, look at the societies that survived. The ones that made it were flexible. They had "redundancy."
- Build Local Networks: In a collapse, your neighbors are your greatest asset. The Romans who survived were the ones in small, self-sufficient communities, not the ones in the high-rise apartments in the capital.
- Skill Acquisition: Knowledge is the only thing that doesn't lose value when the currency fails. Can you fix a tool? Do you know how to grow a tomato? Can you provide basic first aid?
- Reduce Dependency: The more "steps" there are between you and your basic needs (water, food, heat), the more vulnerable you are.
- Mental Resilience: This is the big one. Most people in collapsing societies suffer because of the psychological shock. They can't imagine a world without the "old ways."
Why we should be optimistic (sorta)
Collapse is scary, but it’s also a form of evolution.
Forests need fires to clear out the dead wood and let new growth reach the sunlight. Societies are the same way. We get bloated, we get "brittle," and eventually, the system resets. It’s painful, it’s messy, and it’s usually quite slow.
But humanity is remarkably good at starting over. We’ve done it dozens of times. We are the descendants of people who survived the fall of Rome, the Black Death, and the collapse of the Bronze Age.
The "end of the world" has happened many times before. And yet, here we are, still talking about it.
Actionable steps for the "brittle" era
- Diversify your "life systems." Don't rely on a single source of income or a single grocery store chain.
- Study the past without the "doom" goggles. Read Tainter or Diamond. Understand the mechanics of how systems fail so you can spot the warning signs in your own community.
- Invest in "low-tech" backups. Have a way to cook or stay warm that doesn't require the grid. Not because the world is ending tomorrow, but because "resilience" is just good common sense.
- Advocate for modularity. Support local farms, local energy grids, and local businesses. A modular society is much harder to break than a centralized one.
The collapse of complex societies isn't an apocalypse. It’s a transition. It's the moment when the cost of being "big" finally outweighs the benefits, and we find a way to be "small" again.