Nate Hagens

Maybe there's gasoline and diesel shortages and empty store shelves due to military action overseas.

Fear and uncertainty spike, people accept restrictions that they wouldn't normally accept, and a leader consolidates power and then surveillance expands and opposition is algorithmized, is that a word?

And suppressed, sometimes probably violently, sometimes just through social pressure and institutional capture.

Nate Hagenshaw, Ph.D.

And that transition from open society to authoritarianism during crisis can happen in years or decades, such as the slow erosion of the Roman Empire.

We've also seen it happen in months or even faster.

Modern examples were Peru in the 1990s and Tunisia a few years back.

It's what I would label a behavioral downhill roll because once started, it gathered its own momentum and it follows the gravitational logic that we talked about in part two of this series.

Contraction plus fear pulls power towards consolidation.

But now try to reverse all that.

Try to rebuild democratic governance after authoritarian rule.

You would need, among other things, independent courts and a free press in a landscape where civic habits of debate and disagreement have atrophied.

You would need institutional knowledge that was purged and a population that knows what self-governance feels like and believes that it's possible.

You would need to rebuild trust itself.

Arguably, in my opinion, our most valuable resource from neighbor to neighbor and citizen to government.

Such a transition probably takes a generation at minimum, often longer.

And sometimes it doesn't happen at all.

So the transition from democracy to authoritarianism downhill took months, but the transition back takes decades.

This asymmetry, something my friend in Italy, Ugo Bardi, calls the Seneca effect, where things grow slowly and collapse suddenly, is not an accident or bad luck.

It's a feature of the landscape topography itself.