This new section assembles our material on the collapse of societies and civilizations.

Discussion

By Jem Bendell, Rupert Read:

"In their classic 2009 book Questioning Collapse, Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee present evidence for how famous collapses were actually periods of reorganisation and decentralisation.

The work most relevant to our topic here is contained in the 2023 edited compilation “How Worlds Collapse.” Their central explanation is that leaders often faced a ‘cognitive crunch,’ when they recognised crises like resource depletion, but could not respond to the complexity of that, leading to maladaptive decisions. This created tension between elite protection (clinging to power by intensifying extraction) and adaptive leadership (orchestrating a deliberate simplification for wider survival).

Regarding collapse as a process, not an event, the authors in this book identify an optimal outcome is a managed reorganisation with smaller units of complexity — a “soft landing.” It stands as the first major scholarly synthesis to explicitly explore the daunting principles and historical precedents for a managed descent in response to our current situation of global ecological overshoot.

Luke Kemp, in Goliath’s Curse, explores similar themes, particularly how coercive institutions generate both power and fragility, suggesting that collapse can sometimes release adaptive capacity rather than extinguish it. Building on and rhyming with Graeber, Wengrove and other scholars, Kemp’s work challenges the assumption that larger, more coercive systems are inherently more successful. So if we consider collapse to involve the unravelling of coercive over-reach, then historians could help us imagine futures that are less powerful but more viable."

(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2026-03-11/inspirational-collapses-learning-from-the-civilisations-that-tried-to-break-down-well/)

Quote

"Civilizations don’t collapse overnight — they slip out of what experts call the window of viability, a delicate balance between resilience and efficiency that ensures systems can thrive over the long term. When a system prioritizes one force too heavily, it sacrifices its ability to adapt, eventually leading to collapse.

...

Systemic collapse is not a binary event where systems “stop working.” Instead, it is a nonlinear process of reorganization. Driven by feedback loops and tipping points, collapse pushes systems into a new state of behavior, structure, and adaptability.

Think of a forest after a wildfire: what appears to be destruction is actually a reorganization of energy, resources, and relationships, often leading to renewal and greater biodiversity. Similarly, the collapse of human systems — whether economic, ecological, or social — can result in chaos, but it also creates opportunities for regeneration."

- Ernesto van Peborgh [1]