55: Here Are The Signs That A Civilization Is About To Collapse

about the future of civilization at the moment? Tracy? It's just all looks so bleak, So everything is so depressing. It seems like all of the things that we took for granted in terms of political norms and systems that we just assumed we're permanent, all seemed to be going down. The drain seems to be all over, doesn't it. That's

one way of putting it. Was that a little more, was that a little was it was actually, you know, I'm always trying to cheer you up, So I thought today we could talk to an expert on the collapse of civilizations. That sounds wonderful. That sounds like the perfect pick me up topic. In all seriousness, I think you're going to like this particular guest because I know that you have an interest in Guatemala in particular, I think your mother lives out there, now, that's right, Yeah, that's right.

My mom is sort of a retired to Guatemala to be a painter and live at the side of a lake. And I spent a month out there actually, right before I joined your team, So I got to see some of the old Mayan monuments things like that. And the mind civilization is of course famous for its collapse, one of many ancient civilizations that have collapsed over the millennia, I suppose, and to talk about that today and to connect it to what's potentially happening in the rest of

the world. Right now, we have a guy who has at various times been dubbed the real Indiana Jones. Oh my god. Yeah. And actually the person who recommended him to us was a previous gust on this show. It's John Shane, also known as Merle Hazard, and he described he described our guest as a man who spends much of his time in a tent in various tropics with bottles of scotch and philosophy books. But I should give him a proper intro. It is Arthur Demorrist. He is

an anthropologist. He's the author of something like twenty books about various societies, and he is also a professor at Vanderbilt University. So I think it's going to be really really interesting. Well, I think a living intent and drinking scotch and reading philosophy books maybe in all of our cards at some point. So don't not write that bleak. But but I can't wait. Let's get it started. Arthur, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you,

Thank you. I have some comments on your comments if you like, yeah, just jump right in. We don't even have to ask you a question. Well, you know, a living in the in the jungle, it's like degrees all the time and mud and full of snakes and scorpions and stuff and mosquitoes. But living in a tent in the jungle, once you get used to that, uh, you kind of need some scotch in the evening. But I mean you can. You can't binge drink it because you

gotta make it last. Yeah. I was just gonna say, you have to bring it in yourself, right, there's probably not an easy way to Now it's it's bout and forward drive vehicle, and you know you can't get there except bye bye riverboat. Ultimately, and I do have the best philosophy library and the entire pretend rainforest. I'm reason be sure that I haven't actually checked, but I already liked this episode. I just want to say I love it. I love it there, I really love it there. Let's

talk about civilization collapsing happier topics. UM, What makes a civilization collapse? Almost all civilizations collapse, especially complex ones. Uh. And there are many different reasons. But my after studying, you know, I teach about eighteen or nineteen collapses, and I'm working now with angor collapse. I've also been working with business people, UM like Bart Victor at the at the Owen School of Business about it. And you see patterns.

But the broadest pattern is that often, maybe usually, the strengths of a civilization, it's basic characteristics over time are the same things that bring it down. Um. And the other thing you see is a broad characterization. People think collapse, you know, decline, things fall apart a little by little. The apogees of civilizations, the right fluorescences are often the collapses.

The collapses going on, and it looks really good from the from the monuments and stuff, and uh and and then there are a bunch of patterns that you see over and over again, many of which apply to us and business and so on. So I can't really help you with being optimistic. I'm sort of it's kind of it's I'm sort of like, you know, a funeral parlor director of civilizations. I I emphasize the collapses because from the way they collapse, you can go back and see

what went wrong and how they were structured. So it's also just a way to look uh more carefully at the basic features of civilizations too. I'm curious. So you said that often civilizations collapse for the same due to the same characteristics that may have defined their strong periods,

so the strengths become their weaknesses. Give us a concrete example of the civilization where you know, you can point to one aspect of the civilization that made it thrive, and then that same that same aspect proved to be its undoing. Well, it's never one aspect, but a perfect example is the Maya civilization. And I've been uh, you know,

working comparatively with anger in Cambodia. You know, they have Anger Watch and that's very similar in both of them, and that is that high civilizations really aren't supposed to exist in a tropical forest, um, because of the thin soils, the fragile environment and all of that. UH. And they really, you know, the lost cities in the jungle thing, it's

you know, it's kind of like what I do. And that's one of the reasons why there's so much public interest, because you always have those in the movies, but there really aren't a lot of places, and so there's they're successful secret was to adapt their cities to the tropical forest uh, and to make them kind of dispersed, more disperse, more green and spread out and to mimic the diversity and diversion of there are all different kinds of field systems,

nothing like Kansas, you know, no monoculture, one crop, but a lot of different kinds of field systems sensitive to the micro environment. And that means it had to be decentralized so the local farmers uh could do things and UH and that was great UM. And you know, many things can go wrong though, as you start to get too successful and uh and build up and population grows

that begins to put a strain on the environment. But the latest stuff that I've been doing, and this is this is you know, the work that I'm doing now at con Quinn, this Maya city and the whole region. My projects cover the whole whole region. Um. It's actually a big part of that's owned by Vanderbilt. Um. But anyway, Um, they started to switch. The whole world of Mesoamerica began and to switch to something much closer to our kind of economy, you know, a long distance exchange over there.

The basic characteristics of our our economy since Mesopotamia, Western economies is overproduction of one thing in one area and then over production of another thing in another area, and exchange through a market. Like you know, you have tons of wheat and one area and goats in another, and then you have a market exchange sometimes over large distances. That had started to spread because you know that's sort

of um, it's closer to capitalism in a way. Um. It's very successful, and it kind of spread through Mesoamerica. And once that really took hold, the Maya area was not very competitive and eventually their trade routes were um, you know, taken over by by various people and moved to the coasts. And um also their decentralized system. How do you hold together or civilization, it's like that dispersed.

And the answer you see an Anger watt and with the Maya, is this divine kingship system where these huge rituals in these beautiful ceremonial centers that kind of hold the state together. And the king's power isn't just political, it's largely religious. Uh, they're divine kings and that's perfect for the forest. But also the king is you know, he's a general, he's a ruler. He's also like the pope um. He's also a ball player in their games.

He's also a performer. They sang and danced, and anything that goes wrong is his fault because you know, even if it's just like you know, bad rains or crops or hurricane, whatever it is, he's supposed to be talking to the gods and the ancestor, you know. But anyway, that's that's an example of of a civilization whose basic wonderful adaptation in the rainforest to the rainforest made them vulnerable.

Anger has the same exact type of collapse. I mean, ours will be very very different from that, more like the Indus, I think. So, I'm just curious, when these societies start nearing collapse, do you see certain patterns of behavior by their elites, like their kings and their religious figures. Because of course, with the rise of Donald Trump and some other populist or nationalist parties in Europe, we've really seen um a lot of judgment heaped on the elites

of those particular political systems. Well, yeah, you do see counter movements and counter trends, which are sometimes good and sometimes not, but those are usually reactions to an ongoing, as you said, and ongoing collapse. What you see most and this is this is one of the things that you know, you can talk about two C e O s and all, and is that the leaders do more

of what they do. They intensify whatever they do, because that's you know, they don't know about doing something else, so they just intensify, They double and triple down on the existing order. Yeah, and it is almost always counterproductive. Um it's it's almost always counterproductive. With the maya and anger, you know, things are not going well, so obviously you've got to build more temples. They have to be more impressive. Bigger rituals make the gods happy but also make the

people happy. UM. And so you're put you're taking more and more energy out of the environment and bringing things down. And you see that over and over again, and it's you know, I think I think it's going on pretty obviously right now. I would say more in business and technology than in politics. I think in our case, the politics is sort of, uh, you know, a reaction to the trend, not leading it, and that is often the case. We gotta take a quick break for a word from

our sponsor and we'll be right back. But Knowledge to work and grow your business with c i T from transportation to healthcare to manufacturing. C i T offers commercial lending, leasing, and treasury management services for small and middle market businesses. Learn more at c i T dot com Put Knowledge to Work. And we're back with Professor Arthur Demerist. He's a anthropologist who studies the collapse of civilizations. UM. He's

been called the real life Indiana Jones. We're talking about before the break, how when civilizations collapse, you see leaders doubling and tripling down on whatever they're doing. Now, you mentioned that you see that a lot in business, not just in uh civilizations, but you see it in business. What are some examples when you talk to business schools and business leaders, there are some examples that sort of

really highlight this behavior. That behavior often also comes from short term thinking and leaders trying to hold onto power by doing more of what they do. And that's you really see that with c e O s now. I think the short cycle in which they're judged and this is also happening with politicians. It's shorter and shorter cycles on which they're judged um leads them to try to

make fast reactions, fast solutions, and you really can't. Like business, a CEO is like a president like has to can't go out and say, well, you know, we're gonna slow down and have really much slower growth and probably you know, lower stock prices for three or four years and we can build back up, you know, and then you know, all these politicians and you know, the new president actually all of them will say, well, we're gonna fix all this, and they're only in there for four eight years, and

you can't fix anything with that, you know, you can just lay groundwork, so they they during that period, they can't you have time to restructure things. So you just intensify and you know, that's a pattern, that's um it's very common, and that's one of the reasons why uh apogees or fluorescences, you know, the peak of things actually we looks really great to us, especially with ancient civilizations, but or even historical ones. But that really is some

of that going on. And I think it's also some of that that you know you see in bubbles. The bubbles you see uh with um like the you know, the the high tech bubble and the e bubble, all of that, um that is that the real estate bubble. That is a perfect example of intensifying more and more something that has been successful and is actually beginning to undermine the system and then it leads right into collapse.

And so when once you start studying that, you look back at things like a Renaissance in Italy, which everyone wow, what a great The Renaissance was a collapse. It was it was a complete collapse and it ended in you know, disaster, as did the Golden Age of Greece and so on. So when people are looking for you know, the down periods, they they don't see that factor. And it is really very common and that's because of that leadership problems. You run a problems, it just leads you to think in

sort of desperate solutions, shorter and shorter solutions. Um, it's happening. I think also with high tech a lot the hypercoherence is just being made worse constantly. Joe and I have spent um probably many hours at this point talking about market bubbles and what tips bubbles. Uh, you know, from euphoria into fear and pain. I suppose is there a particular thing, like one thing that you could pinpoint that's the tipping point when it comes to civilizations? Uh, not

one the thing that you know I'm making. I'm making these statements and they there they apply. And the thing that's great about the study of civilizations, and I'm teaching this class right now that is a seminar that's eighteen civilizations. They have different lessons and so you draw different aspects from different cultures and then you can see that those patterns reapplying. So not all of the collapses are that kind of apag bubble thing. Um, you do see the

pattern of that intensification of of what you do. You do see the pattern almost always of shorter and shorter term thinking. You know, you're getting into trouble, so you're trying to fix it faster and faster, and that is another counterproductive response. You can also see in you know, you also study non collapse. I mean most of the time, Uh, there's a near collapse and then uh they change some things and they have maybe a kind of a big

recession and then they go on. Uh. So you also get to study, you know, why there was a collapse in this case and not in another case. Our civilization, I would take from the indus um hyper coherence. What does that mean? Hyper coherence? Well, it's it's one of those really great strengths. I mean, well, I think one of you is in Abu Dhabi. Uh. It's the the integration of the society. It's the society gets better and better integrated, leading to better decision making, leading to great wealth.

Uh are A good example is our our situation. We're probably the most hyper coherent where the you know, the computer, the Internet, satellites were all really all tied together. And that's great, and it's getting getting more and more over time, and that's creating more and more wealth. And you know, with the E network and Amazon and all the rest.

But um, if there's a problem in one part of the system, it radiates through the whole system and at a certain point can bring the whole thing down, which we see, you know, like there's a slowdown, not even a recession in China, and pizza parlors are closing all over you know Chili. Um you can see it when well, I mean I see it. I tell I tell people that the foremost common words in the English language are the system is down. Uh, that's you hear that everywhere.

And there's some glitch in something, uh in Atlanta or uh and Delta has to cancel three thousand flights. I mean that happens all the time, that kind of thing. We are really hypercoherent and uh it's the source of our great wealth. But it really is becoming a vulnerability. And the response to that, because you have business competition, is more and more integration, better and better systems of integration, and more in or hyper coherence, and more and more fragility.

I was just gonna say, it seems like the natural conclusion from that point would be to build sort of walls into the system, or to build some sort of like protection or buffer. But people up until very recently didn't really seem to like doing that, Like going against the grain of globalization was seen as a bad thing, particularly for markets and economics. These are things that business people in particular don't like to hear. Well, there's a

lot of reasons for that. Um one of them, and this we've taken from business with my interactions with my colleagues, But there's a one popular theory that as society has become more complex, investment has diminishing marginal returns. You know, at first you make an investment of a hundred dollars in Microsoft, and then you know, over time, uh, you

don't get you know, a thousand present profit. It slows down gradually, and eventually as you add more employees and so on, it it breaks off or even causes the system to slow down and to become less productive. And you're, you know, you're you go from diminishing marginal returns to diminishing returns, and that happens a lot in complex societies. The other problem is status rivalry, which you see with me. That's one of the problems in the renaissance. You know,

you see it here with us. It's companies and countries and so when you know that you really should sort of slow down and UM, and it costs money to do the backup systems and UM may just require UH cutting down on the degree of coherent hyper coherence that causes profit loss, that causes that diminishing marginal returns. And the rulers of the Maya state, it's UH, or the rulers of the Renaissance cities, they they can't get away with that. They've got a public that wants things more quickly.

And again that when you have that kind of competition, the the desire to beat the other guy or do better UH is really that's what the leader depends upon. Does that competition sort of engender what you say, these apogees of civilization, the building of pyramids, the funding of great works of art, is that part of what drives that. So you have everyone competing for status and trying to

establish something great to compensate for the decline. And so we get these periods that look amazing, but they're actually a phenomenon of decline. That's perfect I think better phrase than mine. I'm not accustomed to saying things in less than an hour and a half. But that's why it's called status rivalry. Status war is a form of status rivalry, but also, like the Renaissance is a good example, competitive art and building cathedrals better than the other guy and

so on, and it does generate this this magnificence. And Bill Gates had just said, this is something about this is the best time and in history or our history in terms of you know, the way the world is or something, and I said, wow, that's really ominous, because that's when you start to say something like that. Maybe you're in a crescendo, maybe you're in a bubble, and uh, you see that over and over again. It looks really really great, like the Maya civilization. Wow, anger incredible stuff

they're building in the jungle. But everyone admires the Renaissance. Look at all of that. It looks great. But that's more and more expenditure. And it's also leaders competing with other leaders. It's more with C e O s now, but also with countries, and that keeps it accelerating, keeps it looking better and better, and keeps making it more

and more fragile. So when Donald Trump says he wants to build a great wall and start an infrastructure fund and ramp up defense, spending and things like that, Um, how working should we be? Well we should again. I think these things are more of you know, people are worried about about Trump, and yeah, that's you know, a symptom more than a cause. It's it's the pressure for shorter and shorter term results, which happens as things begin to not keep up and people begin to get dissatisfied,

like all of the workers in Pennsylvania and so on. Uh. You then you know, you see counter movements and reactions. But the problem with what he wants to do and what every president has wanted to do to some degree, the promises of renewing our infrastructure and building the wall. The problem is that, um, that can't be done quickly.

And I mean that really ties into a whole another group of theories that some people call entanglement theory, which is that you you build this infrastructure that is so great and so wonderful, but then over time, the government, the institutions, the people are sort of entangled in it, and as you lose resources, you're dependent on this system that you can't maintain, and it's impossible to really scale back. I mean, you know, you can't say, well, we can't

maintain this interstate system. So we're just gonna concentrate on some main roads. Or this subway line is really losing money, so we're just going to close it. Uh. Mayors can't do that, they'll get kicked out. So what you get is this, This happened with anger and a lot of them. Uh, this dependence on this infrastructure and no way to really when it gets to be hard to fund and maintain, no way to do that. So you have, you know, you intensify efforts and you just don't have the resources,

and it can bring whole civilization down real quickly. Because we're just about out of time just a few seconds. Uh, how quickly can it all collapse? Very quickly? Uh? I'm sorry, this has been very depressing with Look, with with more time, I could make your your listeners weep. Would you like that? No? I mean it can happen very very quickly. The Maya civilization was most spectacular at around seven eight um seven, and by eight ten, Uh, it was just in pieces

eight hundred a lot of places. So it can happen really really quickly. It's often happened slowly in one part and then that reaches a critical point and then it just runs through the whole system, which is what happened also with the Maya. I have one I have one more quick question before you go. Uh when when civilization collapses, can Joe and I come stay in your tent and drink scotch and read philosophy books. Ah, that's the key question. Hey man, you know what I am. I am ready.

I am ready than any survivalist. We have no electricity, no running water, but we have a river right there, we have a tent. The Maya grow the food all around there, the turkeys in the corn. And I don't think we're even going to know when the collapse comes out there, except it will be hard to get the good scotch. And that really makes shout us down. Well, Tracy and I will definitely bring some. Uh. Professor Demeris, thank you so much. Fascinating, depressing, but still very enlightening

loss to chew on. Now I'm gonna go read all your books. Really appreciate you joining us. Okay, thanks, Thanks So Joe, are we all sufficiently depressed? Are are you going to be reaching for the scotch tonight? No? You know what, I think I'm in a better mood. Uh, than I was. You know, at the beginning, I was feeling pretty glum, and then obviously that was pretty uh, pretty down. But now I'm just sort of excited about studying a new thing. And I'm not joking. Now I'm

gonna go download all his books to my kindle. And you know, it's the it's the circle of you know, it's it's good to know that patterns repeat. It's sort of comforting, Yeah, I know what you mean. Like the idea that even if Western civilization collapses, that's kind of a normal thing across the millennia. It's unfortunate for us though, if we live through that collapse. Um, but yes, it's

somewhat comforting. I never thought of things like the Pyramids or the Renaissance, you know, we I thought that was a fascinating idea, that these things that we associate with the peak are actually signs of the decline. It sort of makes me think of all of history in a way a little bit differently. All right, Well that's it for another edition of Odd Lots. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Halloway and I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stallart. Thanks for listening.

Put knowledge to work and grow your business with c i T. From transportation to healthcare to manufacturing. C i T offers commercial lending, leasing, and treasury management services for small and middle market businesses. Learn more at c i T dot com. Put knowledge to work