Why Sarah Wilson says civilisation is collapsing
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Rivi Jones, and you're listening to 7am.
What large-scale crises is civilization currently facing?
The world is facing a series of large-scale crises. War, declining democracy, climate catastrophe. So is it all a sign that our civilisation is reaching its limits and that our economic and political systems are nearing collapse? That's the question Australian author Sarah Wilson has been interrogating for the last three years. Today, writer Sarah Wilson on what happens when the systems that hold us together begin to fray all at once, and what the future looks like after civilizational collapse.
It's Monday, June 1. Sarah, your new book is all about civilizational collapse, which you say we're in the midst of right now. We'll get to that part in a moment. But first, could you just tell us what you're talking about when you talk about civilizational collapse?
It's a hard thing to enter into because when we talk collapse, we're not necessarily talking the collapse of humanity, although that is definitely a possibility according to most modelling that's out there at the moment. What we're really talking about is the collapse of the system. And this is sort of a bit of a misnomer. I think we think that collapse is going to be like the movies, you know, people wandering around with a shopping trolley, you know, through apocalyptic scenes. That is not how it goes. It's a very gradual at first and then a sped up sort of undoing of all the complexifying that has been happening for the last 270 years or so. We tend to explain things in a very linear format where we grab an issue and work with it as a system in isolation.
But to understand actually what's happening to the world today, we need to actually think in terms of complex systems theory, which is about understanding that we are in a complex system of complex systems. That is essentially what our civilisation is. Every complex civilisation throughout history has collapsed and it has collapsed because of its complexity. So if you think of the Roman Empire, the Mayan Empire, the Jing Dynasty, they've all collapsed because they've just got too many armies, too many cities, it's required too many taxes, too many farmers that are required to pay the taxes. And then what happens is some small volcano erupts a small climate catastrophe, perhaps a small army entering the system.
It can't actually deal with something like, for instance, a flood or a volcano eruption or something like that. And that is essentially what brings a civilisation to its knees. And every complex civilisation has gone this way. We are a complex civilisation and we are at a point where all the systems that make up our civilisation, the post-industrial civilisation, are under all kinds of stress and they're interacting with each other. So trade route system, the AI system, the nuclear threat system, the food security system, they're all wobbling. They're all feeding into each other. And the extra element to all of this, Ruby, is that unlike the Roman Empire, our civilisation is global. And so what is happening in South America or what's happening in the UK is going to affect all of us.
Can we talk a little bit more about how that might look? Because you reference collapsology and collapsologists in your work. So tell me a bit about, I guess, the field here and what you can kind of glean about how this might go.
Well, in some ways, the best way to put it is to say collapse looks like what we're in. And instead of kind of getting better, which I think a lot of people have this sense that we're going to return to some sort of sense of normal, some sense of order once again, that ain't going to happen according to most of the modelling done in think tanks and institutes around the world. Instead, it's going to get worse. a little bit worse, and then a little bit worse. So this, but worse. When I say this, I'm talking about fragmentation, the collapse of democratic institutions. 7% of the world, only 7% of the world today lives in a liberal democracy. And that percentage is likely to decrease over coming years.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:09
2
What large-scale crises is civilization currently facing?
0:09–5:43
3
What does Sarah Wilson mean by civilizational collapse?
5:43–10:04
4
How do complex systems theory and civilization relate?
10:04–12:08
5
What factors contribute to the collapse of civilizations?
12:08–13:48
Speakers
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