Immoderate Greatness
- Book: IMMODERATE GREATNESS. by William Ophuls (2012)
URL =
Review
H.J. Spencer:
"This 116-page powerful, short book explains how a civilization’s very magnitude conspires against it to cause its downfall. Civilizations are hard-wired for self-destruction. Ophuls abstracts from the long and historical record, the six major factors that drive civilizations to defeat. He identifies the inexorable trends and claims that complex adaptive systems (like societies) are ultimately unmanageable. Societies are organisms that evolve organically; (unlike machines) they are not invented deliberately or imposed by prescription. All Civilizations travel an arc from initial success to terminal decay and ultimate collapse due to intrinsic, inescapable biophysical limits combined with an inexorable trend toward moral decay and practical failure. Because our own civilization is global, its collapse will also be global, as well as uniquely devastating owing to the immensity of its population, complexity, and consumption. To avoid the common fate of all past civilizations will require a radical change in our ethos—to wit, the deliberate renunciation of greatness—lest we precipitate a dark age in which the arts and adornments of civilization are partially or completely lost. Perhaps, the technocrats planning our current 'virological' crisis have read this book and tried to short-circuit a radical solution?"