Clay Shirky (@cshirky) on why complex societies collapse –
In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.
The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it… Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.
A society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.
When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.
As an aside, I often find that people confuse simplicity with simplism, being simple with being simplistic. Simplism makes a virtue out of an absence of understanding about nuances. Simplicity emerges out of an appreciation for nuances. The only way to reach simplicity, by design, not by accident, is to go from simplism to complexity to simplicity. So, in Shirky’s narrative, “the people who escape the old system” are the most likely to have traveled the arc from simplism to simplicity. Your thoughts?
