WRoL We Are Not The First Civilization To Collapse, But We Will Probably Be The Last

TFergeson

Non Solum Simul Stare
We Are Not The First Civilization To Collapse, But We Will Probably Be The Last
BY TYLER DURDEN

I am standing atop a 100-foot-high temple mound, the largest known earthwork in the Americas built by prehistoric peoples. The temperatures, in the high 80s, along with the oppressive humidity, have emptied the park of all but a handful of visitors. My shirt is matted with sweat.

I look out from the structure—-known as Monks Mound — at the flatlands below, with smaller mounds dotting the distance. These earthen mounds, built at a confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, are all that remain of one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements north of Mexico, occupied from around 800 to 1,400 AD by perhaps as many as 20,000 people.

This great city, perhaps the greatest in North America, rose, flourished, fell into decline and was ultimately abandoned. Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.

“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in The Collapse of Complex Societies. “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”
Doomsday Selfie - by Mr. Fish

Several centuries ago, the rulers of this vast city complex, which covered some 4,000 acres, including a 40-acre central plaza, stood where I stood. They no doubt saw below in the teeming settlements an unassailable power, with at least 120 temple mounds used as residences, sacred ceremonial sites, tombs, meeting centers and ball courts. Cahokia warriors dominated a vast territory from which they exacted tribute to enrich the ruling class of this highly stratified society. Reading the heavens, these mound builders constructed several circular astronomical observatories — wooden versions of Stonehenge.

The city’s hereditary rulers were venerated in life and death. A half mile from Monks Mound is the seven-foot-high Mound 72, in which archeologists found the remains of a man on a platform covered with 20,000 conch-shell disc beads from the Gulf of Mexico. The beads were arranged in the shape of a falcon, with the falcon’s head beneath and beside the man's head. Its wings and tail were placed underneath the man’s arms and legs. Below this layer of shells was the body of another man, buried face downward. Around these two men were six more human remains, possibly retainers, who may have been put to death to accompany the entombed man in the afterlife. Nearby were buried the remains of 53 girls and women ranging in age from 15 to 30, laid out in rows in two layers separated by matting. They appeared to have been strangled to death.

The poet Paul Valéry noted, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.”
Across the Mississippi River from Monks Mound, the city skyline of St. Louis is visible. It is hard not to see our own collapse in that of Cahokia. In 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796. Today, that number has fallen to below 300,000, a drop of some 65 percent. Major employers — Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, TWA, Southwestern Bell and Ralston Purina —have dramatically reduced their presence or left altogether. St. Louis is consistently ranked one of the most dangerous cities in the country. One in five people live in poverty. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has the highest rate of police killings per capita, of the 100 largest police departments in the nation, according to a 2021 report. Prisoners in the city’s squalid jails, where 47 people died in custody between 2009 and 2019, complain of water being shut off from their cells for hours and guards routinely pepper spraying inmates, including those on suicide watch. The city’s crumbling infrastructure, hundreds of gutted and abandoned buildings, empty factories, vacant warehouses and impoverished neighborhoods replicate the ruins of other post-industrial American cities, the classic signposts of a civilization in terminal decline.

“Just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing,” Jared Diamond argues in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. “When people are desperate, undernourished and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.”

Pre-industrial civilizations were dependent on the limits of solar energy and constrained by roads and waterways, impediments that were obliterated when fossil fuel became an energy source. As industrial empires became global, their increase in size meant an increase in complexity. Ironically, this complexity makes us more vulnerable to catastrophic collapse, not less. Soaring temperatures (Iraq is enduring 120 degree heat that has fried the country’s electrical grid), the depletion of natural resources, flooding, droughts, (the worst drought in 500 years is devastating Western, Central and Southern Europe and is expected to see a decline in crop yields of 8 or 9 percent), power outages, wars, pandemics, a rise in zoonotic diseases and breakdowns in supply chains combine to shake the foundations of industrial society. The Arctic has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia are warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050.

“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up,” the anthropologist Ronald Wright warns, calling industrial society “a suicide machine.”
In A Short History of Progress, he writes:

Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn't easily moved. This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.
Wright also reflects upon what will be left behind:
The archaeologists who dig us up will need to wear hazmat suits. Humankind will leave a telltale layer in the fossil record composed of everything we produce, from mounds of chicken bones, wet-wipes, tires, mattresses and other household waste to metals, concrete, plastics, industrial chemicals, and the nuclear residue of power plants and weaponry. We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth.
Calculations of humanity’s footprint suggest we have been in ‘ecological deficit,’ taking more than Earth’s biological systems can withstand, for at least 30 years. Topsoil is being lost far faster than nature can replenish it; 30 percent of arable land has been exhausted since the mid-20th century.
We have financed this monstrous debt by colonizing both past and future, drawing energy, chemical fertilizer and pesticides from the planet’s fossil carbon, and throwing the consequences onto coming generations of our species and all others. Some of those species have already been bankrupted: they are extinct. Others will follow.

As Cahokia declined, violence dramatically increased. Surrounding towns were burned to the ground. Groups, numbering in the hundreds, were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. At the end, “the enemy killed all people indiscriminately. The intent was not merely prestige, but an early form of ethnic cleansing” writes anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat, in Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians. He notes that, in one fifteenth-century cemetery in central Illinois, one-third of all adults had been killed by blows to the head, arrow wounds or scalping. Many showed evidence of fractures on their arms from vain attempts to fight off their attackers.

Such descent into internecine violence is compounded by a weakened and discredited central authority. In the later stages of Cahokia, the ruling class surrounded themselves with fortified wooden stockades, including a two-mile long wall that enclosed Monks Mound. Similar fortifications dotted the vast territory the Cahokia controlled, segregating gated communities where the wealthy and powerful, protected by armed guards, sought safety from the increasing lawlessness and hoarded dwindling food supplies and resources.
Overcrowding inside these stockades saw the spread of tuberculosis and blastomycosis, caused by a soil-borne fungus, along with iron deficiency anemia. Infant mortality rates rose, and life spans declined, a result of social disintegration, poor diet and disease.
By the 1400s Cahokia had been abandoned. In 1541, when Hernando de Soto’s invading army descended on what is today Missouri, looking for gold, nothing but the great mounds remained, relics of a forgotten past.

This time the collapse will be global. It will not be possible, as in ancient societies, to migrate to new ecosystems rich in natural resources. The steady rise in heat will devastate crop yields and make much of the planet uninhabitable. Climate scientists warn that once temperatures rise by 4℃, the earth, at best, will be able to sustain a billion people.

The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into self-defeating responses, violence, magical thinking and denial.

The historian Arnold Toynbee, who singled out unchecked militarism as the fatal blow to past empires, argued that civilizations are not murdered, but commit suicide. They fail to adapt to a crisis, ensuring their own obliteration. Our civilization’s collapse will be unique in size, magnified by the destructive force of our fossil fuel-driven industrial society. But it will replicate the familiar patterns of collapse that toppled civilizations of the past. The difference will be in scale, and this time there will be no exit.

 

jward

passin' thru
To the contrary, for me, knowing the vast # of times societies rose and then found their fitting ends due to their insurmountable flaws, and the rot that went all thru their political, social, cultural edifices gives me reason for optimism; such monstrosities should fail.

Not sure if I'd be in 100% lockstep with the reasons the fail as presented by this article, but I come away with something to consider, and I always appreciate that.
 

Lei

Veteran Member
As a child I played on the mounds. They were green hills ,some with trees. There was
a little museum with trinkets for sale. My friend lived in a trailer court next to the mounds. Her dad worked at the race track nearby . In my high school ,a few years later , our team was called the Kahoks
and at half time boys dressed in Indian costumes did fire dances.
 

Jake Grey

Veteran Member
I am really beginning to think that the folks most likely to survive or even thrive after this collapse will be the combination homesteaders/regenerative agriculture adherents/preppers.

They can raise livestock, poultry, etc. with very little or no outside inputs. Conventional farming is suffering now because of reliance on the global supply chain.

Essentially, when I watch certain homesteading channels on YouTube, they give me hope that there will be some good folks in the next generation. These families are teaching their children methods of regenerative farming that took folks like Joel Salatin decades to learn.
 

raven

TB Fanatic
Most likely the collapse will look more like China when the Peoples Liberation Army took over in 1949.
You will die, comply, or flee and communism or whatever it happens to be called will rule for the next 70 years.
 

mecoastie

Veteran Member
I am really beginning to think that the folks most likely to survive or even thrive after this collapse will be the combination homesteaders/regenerative agriculture adherents/preppers.

They can raise livestock, poultry, etc. with very little or no outside inputs. Conventional farming is suffering now because of reliance on the global supply chain.

Essentially, when I watch certain homesteading channels on YouTube, they give me hope that there will be some good folks in the next generation. These families are teaching their children methods of regenerative farming that took folks like Joel Salatin decades to learn.
Except there arent enough people that are really living like that. Most of those homesteaders are heavily reliant on the global supply chain for everything but their food. And many of them are reliant on the chain for their food. The Amish are in the same boat.
 

inskanoot

Veteran Member
The article is an interesting way to start a conversation about what we want.

What does a good bunch of people look and feel like? What does good technology look like? How do we raise our children and protect our elders? What happens to our artists and geniuses? How is power allocated and by whom? What does a truly open (I’m not going to say global) economic system look like and what secrets would be guarded to prevent us from having one? Is it true, as Clif High has opined, that we really need every last one of us to accomplish our loftiest goals?
 
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inskanoot

Veteran Member
'We' are a society, not a civilization. And it is enormously egotistical to assume we will be the last, ever.

Offered for consideration:

Difference Between Society and Civilization​

November 21, 2016 Posted by Hasa
Society and civilization are two common words we often use, but do you know what the difference between society and civilization is? Society is a collection of individuals who live together under one set of traditions, laws or orders. Civilization is an advanced stage human social development and organization. This is the difference between society and civilization.

What Does Society Mean?​

Society is a collection of individuals who live together under one set of laws or orders. Let’s look at some definitions of this word in order to understand it better.

“The aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community” – Oxford dictionary

“People in general thought of as living together in organized communities with shared laws, traditions, and values” – Merriam-Webster dictionary

As evident from these definitions, people in a society share traditions, values, and laws. They also often share same geographical territory and are subject to the dominant cultural expectations and the same political authority. A society is also characterized by social relations between individuals within the society.



What Does Civilization Mean?​

The term civilization may have different meanings and interpretations to different people. It can be generally described as an advanced stage human social development and organization. Let’s look at some definitions of this word in order to understand it better.

“The stage of human social development and organization which is considered most advanced” – Oxford dictionary

“The condition that exists when people have developed effective ways of organizing a society and care about art, science, etc.” – Merriam-Webster dictionary

According to these definitions, civilization can be termed as a particular well-organized and developed society. It is also important to note that civilization is made up of both society and culture.

In general usage, civilization can also refer to the comfort and convenience of modern life, regarded as available only in towns and cities. This word has been used in the past by Westerners to describe their way of life, in contrast to the different way of life they encountered in the east.



What is the difference between Society and Civilization?​

Definition:​

Society is the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.

Civilization is the stage of human social development and organisation which is considered most advanced.

  • Civilization can sometimes refer to a particular well-organized and developed society.

Culture:​

Society may consist of people belonging to different cultures.

Civilization is made up of both society and culture.

Image Courtesy: Pixabay
 

Jeff B.

Don’t let the Piss Ants get you down…
Unless we manage to physically destroy the surface of the earth and poison the atmosphere, something new will arise, as it always does.

IMO, the level of narcissism that societies possess, believing that they are the pinnacle of development directly leads to their own destructive actions.

A cycle that repeats and has been unstoppable.

Jeff B.
 

jed turtle

a brother in the Lord
To the contrary, for me, knowing the vast # of times societies rose and then found their fitting ends due to their insurmountable flaws, and the rot that went all thru their political, social, cultural edifices gives me reason for optimism; such monstrosities should fail.

Not sure if I'd be in 100% lockstep with the reasons the fail as presented by this article, but I come away with something to consider, and I always appreciate that.
The claims in the article about the polar areas heating up have been decidedly dismissed by actual recent science since 2016...

othewise, article was worth reading. Betcha this civilization will take itself out with a bang and not a whimper..

it is clearly going out on a tide of violence and vast amounts of personal and corporate corruption.
 

willowlady

Veteran Member
'We' are a society, not a civilization. And it is enormously egotistical to assume we will be the last, ever.
That depends on your definition of civilization. There is no doubt we are a society, but many animals (not just primates) have a "society." The word "civilization" applies to humans and involves certain "advanced" traits, such as record keeping, writing, etc. Using that definition, we certainly qualify as a civilization, many of which have risen and fallen in the past and are still unknown today.
 

Kayak

Adrenaline Junkie
If society completely fails and humans go back to the stone age, there can't be another iron age or bronze age until we have some major earth changes, as those metals are no longer easy to get to.
 

TheSearcher

Are you sure about that?
If society completely fails and humans go back to the stone age, there can't be another iron age or bronze age until we have some major earth changes, as those metals are no longer easy to get to.
That makes no sense to me. There are copious amounts of already refined metals available to be repurposed by any societies rebuilding from a collapse.
 

Kayak

Adrenaline Junkie
That makes no sense to me. There are copious amounts of already refined metals available to be repurposed by any societies rebuilding from a collapse.

So, society falls, and thirty years from now you have a few thousand people still alive per continent. Things get a little easier ten to fifteen years after the die-off, because the animals reproduce and there are more to hunt and eat. Once these new groups of people stabilize and have time to look for a better way, they aren't going to be able to easily find iron or other metals near the surface of the earth as our ancestors did. Yes, they will still have plenty of tools left over after the fall, but go another thousand years, when most of those tools are gone and humans are working with stone tools once again, where do they find metals? Maybe they find a landfill and figure out how to pull the metal out of what will be something close to dirt by then. Maybe some of the metals end up in creeks and streams and can be panned for? I don't know the answer, but they aren't going to be able to mine for it near the surface unless we have enough earth changes to move what's deep underground now closer to the surface.
 

Raggedyman

Res ipsa loquitur
went to school in St Louis in the mid 70's - Wash U. - I was there last in 2016 - the difference in the city was staggering. even out to Chesterfield and into St Charles the changes were notable. you couldn't pay me enough to live there
 

TheSearcher

Are you sure about that?
So, society falls, and thirty years from now you have a few thousand people still alive per continent. Things get a little easier ten to fifteen years after the die-off, because the animals reproduce and there are more to hunt and eat. Once these new groups of people stabilize and have time to look for a better way, they aren't going to be able to easily find iron or other metals near the surface of the earth as our ancestors did. Yes, they will still have plenty of tools left over after the fall, but go another thousand years, when most of those tools are gone and humans are working with stone tools once again, where do they find metals? Maybe they find a landfill and figure out how to pull the metal out of what will be something close to dirt by then. Maybe some of the metals end up in creeks and streams and can be panned for? I don't know the answer, but they aren't going to be able to mine for it near the surface unless we have enough earth changes to move what's deep underground now closer to the surface.
I'm saying they won't have to mine for it, it's been mined already. Samuel had a great response.
 

To-late

Membership Revoked
IF we actually knew how many civilizations have come and gone through out the time of this planet has existed we'd probably be beyond amazed and seriously scared.
I am honestly seriously scared now.
No, not for myself. ( I’ve faced war, and have pulled the trigger on an enemy at the actual end of my rifle barrel in Vietnam.) I’m old and approaching the jumping off place .
but I am so seriously scared for my grandchildren. Although most are adults now. Two are just elementary school children.
this world as I knew it has dissapeared, or is disappearing right before my eyes.

Yeah, a natural life progression,, I know. The next generation is taking my old place.

however, today, I saw my first homeless male gang roaming a shopping center. Mostly between the ages of 20’s to 40’s I would guess. There were 7 males in a mid to upper class shopping center. Moving as a group on patrol. Spread no more than 20 ft. From first to last. Just out looking for trouble.
this is not something I expected to see in my neighborhood.
not yet, anyway.
 

db cooper

Resident Secret Squirrel
If society completely fails and humans go back to the stone age, there can't be another iron age or bronze age until we have some major earth changes, as those metals are no longer easy to get to.
There used to be a TV series called Ancient Aliens. It was quite entertaining, some science fiction, some historical fact. The historical fact part was where they actually reviewed ruins from ancient civilizations. Most remarkable was our ancient ancestors ability to cut stone to extreme precision and move pieces hundreds of tons in weight. They had technologies, literally proven by stone work, that we do not have today.

Considering that history constantly repeats itself, it's not too far out to think we as a complete world civilization just might reset ourselves back to the stone age, a nuclear holocaust or man made virus could do just that. The democrats/communists are on such a self destructive course they have to fail at some point. The question is, will their failure be the complete failure of our civilization or the complete destruction of the rats?
 

glennb6

Inactive
There used to be a TV series called Ancient Aliens. It was quite entertaining, some science fiction, some historical fact. The historical fact part was where they actually reviewed ruins from ancient civilizations. Most remarkable was our ancient ancestors ability to cut stone to extreme precision and move pieces hundreds of tons in weight. They had technologies, literally proven by stone work, that we do not have today.

Considering that history constantly repeats itself, it's not too far out to think we as a complete world civilization just might reset ourselves back to the stone age, a nuclear holocaust or man made virus could do just that. The democrats/communists are on such a self destructive course they have to fail at some point. The question is, will their failure be the complete failure of our civilization or the complete destruction of the rats?

If y'all want some serious extinction level doom, see Diehold Foundation on YT. Doug Vogt is a genuine rocket scientist and has done volumes of research about the sun going micro nova or full nova ever so many years. I think it is aprox ever 12,500 yrs but his vids explain. Basically said the earth has been darn near wiped clean a number of times in the past but for a few lucky cave dwelling survivors, the latest turned into us.
Says we're due in about 25 yrs again. Doug is about as far right anti-globalistwarmingbs as you can be, and is from Jax Fla.
 

db cooper

Resident Secret Squirrel
Basically said the earth has been darn near wiped clean a number of times in the past but for a few lucky cave dwelling survivors, the latest turned into us.
I tend to believe this as a good possibility. As an animal, the human race is so self destructive.
 

Matt

Veteran Member
As Cahokia declined, violence dramatically increased. Surrounding towns were burned to the ground. Groups, numbering in the hundreds, were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. At the end, “the enemy killed all people indiscriminately. The intent was not merely prestige, but an early form of ethnic cleansing”

Scores get settled in every collapse. They have to! The thieves and child phuckers can't be allowed to roam about victimizing at will. In fact, the first step to rebuilding any semblance of peace and safety is ruthlessly running the vermin to ground.
 

jed turtle

a brother in the Lord
So, society falls, and thirty years from now you have a few thousand people still alive per continent. Things get a little easier ten to fifteen years after the die-off, because the animals reproduce and there are more to hunt and eat. Once these new groups of people stabilize and have time to look for a better way, they aren't going to be able to easily find iron or other metals near the surface of the earth as our ancestors did. Yes, they will still have plenty of tools left over after the fall, but go another thousand years, when most of those tools are gone and humans are working with stone tools once again, where do they find metals? Maybe they find a landfill and figure out how to pull the metal out of what will be something close to dirt by then. Maybe some of the metals end up in creeks and streams and can be panned for? I don't know the answer, but they aren't going to be able to mine for it near the surface unless we have enough earth changes to move what's deep underground now closer to the surface.
Millions of automobiles abandoned on millions of roads and streets... all they have to do is figure out how to take all those billions of mirrors off the cars, set them up to focus all on one spot and melt down the various selected metals and pour ingots to their hearts content...
 

jed turtle

a brother in the Lord
If y'all want some serious extinction level doom, see Diehold Foundation on YT. Doug Vogt is a genuine rocket scientist and has done volumes of research about the sun going micro nova or full nova ever so many years. I think it is aprox ever 12,500 yrs but his vids explain. Basically said the earth has been darn near wiped clean a number of times in the past but for a few lucky cave dwelling survivors, the latest turned into us.
Says we're due in about 25 yrs again. Doug is about as far right anti-globalistwarmingbs as you can be, and is from Jax Fla.
Yeah, been posted more than once in some of the sub forums. He is the real deal and acknowledged as such by the fellow who runs Suspicious Observers. His prediction, however of the next mini nova - iirc 2046 - was based on some esoteric interpretation of something from maybe genesis. My suspicion is it could be a lot - and I mean a LOT - sooner. Also, the survivors of the next catastrophe will be mostly those who took to deep tunnels or made it out on the next “rapture”. Pretty sure that would be my personal choice...
his explanation of what happens when the plasma storm gets here from the mini-nova is awe inspiring and explains why ice ages happen so suddenly and age-ending... and why they also end suddenly with huge floods
 

jed turtle

a brother in the Lord
As Cahokia declined, violence dramatically increased. Surrounding towns were burned to the ground. Groups, numbering in the hundreds, were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. At the end, “the enemy killed all people indiscriminately. The intent was not merely prestige, but an early form of ethnic cleansing”

Scores get settled in every collapse. They have to! The thieves and child phuckers can't be allowed to roam about victimizing at will. In fact, the first step to rebuilding any semblance of peace and safety is ruthlessly running the vermin to ground.
That’s why israel refused to let any sodomites in the Israeli army and Moses said to have any man who lies with man to be killed. Not on his watch...
 
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