There Is No Fixing What Is Wrong

Anyone with a plan or a set of policies that will "fix" things is lying to themselves and to you. It's not a matter of "if" things go sideways, it's more a question of "when" and "how bad will it be?"

70. There Is No Fixing What Is Wrong

We all live these days with a sense that things are not right. There is a weird disconnect at times between the seeming normalness of so much of life — buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, going on cruises, the lot of it — that it is at times hard to fathom that we are on a trajectory for a global collapse at some point in the future. It probably won’t be tomorrow. But it will come sooner than people think. Why is this? We could make a lot of arguments about energy and other non-renewable resources, and these are important, and they may be the catalysts for why things start breaking down rapidly once the tipping point is reached, but this is really not the main force of the argument I wish to make today. The problem is with the system and the nature of technology itself. Let us begin with a quick dive into the work of Joseph Tainter who wrote “The Collapse of Complex Societies.”

His work can be critiqued as too focused on the material conditions of collapse, ignoring, even dismissing other causes like the religious or cultural. But one of the advantages of his analysis is that by focusing on the material aspects, it allows us to let go of the delusion that a “revival” will solve the problems we face. Religious revival, civic revival, institutional revival, all run up against certain limits and realities inherent in the nature of civilization itself. The revivals may be the catalyst for collapse, or a positive outcome of the collapse, but they cannot reverse the general directionality of a civilization. If they are successful before the collapse, they are merely staving off the inevitable. This view, of course, assumes the cyclical understanding of civilizations and cultures. They are born, they rise to prominence and strength (or not), and then after a time, sometimes a long time, they eventually come to an end, usually through some form of collapse. Something of the old civilization can remain and form the seed for the next culture to rise up, but this new thing cannot be seen as a mere continuation of the old civilization. It will go through its own life cycle.

What Tainter argues is that what compels a society with a relatively simple social organization to embrace one of greater scale and size is they meet some challenge or another which can only be overcome through the adoption of more complex forms of social organization.

“The state arises out of changing circumstances, as a response to those circumstances.”

Further, he argues that this dynamic is at the heart of all societies:

“The nature of complex societies as problem solving organizations has much to do with why they collapse.”

This is important to understand. At some point a society will face a challenge to which they must adapt to the crisis by developing a response. This response invariably results in the growth of the complexity of the society. The alternative is to do nothing, continue as things are, and risk the future of the society. But having embraced the increased complexity, this sets the society on the path to an eventual collapse at some point down the road, but not today.

The way that Tainter wants us to look at society is as a problem solving organization. Civilization itself arises out of the process of facing and overcoming crises together as a society. As the society grapples with more problems, it will continue to grow in complexity as it addresses these new challenges. These problems solving systems require “energy” inputs to make them work. This might be actual energy, such as the burning of fossil fuels, or it might mean the input of social energy. It often means that as the civilizational system grows it requires more human, resource and financial inputs to sustain it at this new level of scale. There is an overall per capita cost that will go up as the society grows in scale and complexity to meet new problems. Eventually, the investment in socio-political complexity as a problem solving response will reach a tipping point of declining marginal gains. More and more per capita investment in inputs, yields ever skimpier margins until the system over all becomes extractive, at which point collapse is inevitable.

The biggest gains are made early on as the level of complexity begins to rise. This creates a feedback loop which encourages more complexity so as to bring about more gains. And while the absolute gains may continue to rise, the per capita margins will be decreasing until there ceases to be any gains at all and the system becomes extractive. These inputs and outputs are not merely financial. They include how much physical, mental and emotional energy is required. How much time does a society spend overall to maintain the system? There is a whole series of inputs and outputs and not all can be easily measured, but we can see the effects nonetheless.

Tainter spends a healthy portion of the book looking at the “current” American situation, current for 1988 at least. For example, when looking at resource based production, even though there is an overall growth, the growth per person slows over time. He notes that in 1960 it cost a $1.00 of investment to produce 2,250,000 btu of output energy. By 1970, that same $1.00 of investment was only yielding 2,168,000 btu and by 1976 it was down to 1,845,000 btu.

In terms of innovation, he argues that the number of patents per person rose until the 1920’s and has been in decline ever since. During that same period, the amount of money spent on research and development per person has increased even as the number of new patents per person has gone down. In 1930, 3.3% of GDP was spent on health care and medical research and the average life expectancy was 59.7 years. By 1982 the life expectancy had risen all the way up to 74.5 years. This is great, you think. But, at that time 10.5% of GDP was being spent on health care. Yes, you are living longer, but the cost to the overall economic system increased by 300%. As a total piece of the whole social-economic pie, health care has come to consume an ever greater portion of the energy and wealth of the civilization. You are living longer, but at what cost? You are living longer, but you are at the same time shortening the future life span of your society.

In terms of education, in 1870 only 1.7% of the population was enrolled in higher education. By 1960, that number was 33.5%. Over that same period, the length of schooling increased and its costs per student also rose. As the number of students increased, the amount of specialization also increased. The most benefit, argues Tainter, is in a short, generalized education. As complexity and specialization increases, the benefits of education to the person and for society as whole decreases.

He notes that in the British shipping industry, between 1914 and 1967 the number of British ships decreased by 78.9% and the number of seamen by 32.9% and the number of dockworkers by 33.7%, while in that same period the number of office personnel working in the shipping industry increased by 769%.

Tainter argues that in whatever field you examine, whatever resource you examine, over time the law of diminishing returns applies. As demand for a commodity grows, whether it is natural resources or labour, increased production will result in depletion of the resource meaning that more costly sources must be sought with declining marginal returns. As I have argued elsewhere, in terms of labour, there are only so many people with top skills in each field. As the supply of those people is used up, you can expand those numbers somewhat, compensating for innate talent with training and policy regimes, but that will only carry you so far. Eventually, the need for people who can work to maintain the complexity of the system reaches the limits of society to produce capable people as a percentage of the whole. And if you expand the system globally, you will eventually run out of talent on a global scale. At this point you have likely capped out the system’s ability to add complexity to address new problems. And once those problems accumulate, the stresses they create on the system potentially lead to collapse.

Whether we are talking about education, research and development, health care, resource acquisition, in pretty much every sector across the board, almost all the greatest gains are made very early on in the cycle. Eventually, you reach a point of diminishing or negative returns. Tainter argues that complexity grows exponentially. What this means is that as you move from the earliest phases where the most gains are made for the least amount of extra input, as you move forward in time the gains diminish, but the costs increase rapidly during the same period.

Is there a way to fix or avoid this happening? Tainter argues that there is not. The demise of a civilization is written into its future the moment it embraces complexity to address a problem or crisis it faces. Why is this? To answer this question, we turn to the writing of Jacques Ellul. There are a lot of similarities to the picture Tainter draws for us using this idea of “complexity” and the conclusions Ellul comes to when talking about the technological society. Even though there are differences between, say, the Roman forms of social and political complexity and the complexity in our technological society, there are many touchpoints and similarities as well. And, the reality is, we live in a technological society of great complexity. There are characteristics of technique that help us understand why this growth in complexity does by necessity lead to eventual collapse.

One of the key things that Ellul teaches us in regards to technique is that it is ambivalent. It does not care. Technique is neither “good” nor “evil.” Nor is it “neutral” either. Technology, whether in the form of devices, systems, methodologies or policies, is not an empty vessel that we then fill with our moral content. You will often hear this when talking about guns in society. Its not the gun, but how you use it. Its not the TV, but the show you watch. Ellul says this is the incorrect way to understand technique. He developed the four laws of technical ambivalence in his work “The Technological Bluff”:

“First, all technical progress has its price.

Second, at each stage it raises more and greater problems than it solves.

Third, its harmful effects are inseparable from its beneficial effects.

Fourth, it has a great number of unforeseen effects.”

Given our discussion thus far with Tainter, even if a society never reaches the level of technical sophistication necessary to generate a technological society, a society defined by technique, we can see now the growth of complexity eventually leads to collapse. When Ellul talks about a “price,” the resultant cost may not necessarily need to be thought of as an evil. For example, the cost of a new program to address a societal issue might be as simple as the growth of the number of non-productive bureaucrats needed to manage the program. This will also have downstream effects, both good and bad, many which cannot be anticipated in advance.

The whole thing becomes a treadmill that needs to go faster and faster, requiring ever more energy inputs to deal with the increased complexity and the new problems which arise from this. This of course requires more complexity which then generates more problems, often more than it solves. And as we noted from Tainter, the goods that are received, are often realized not just early in the whole meta cycle, but early in each stage of technical sophistication and complexity. Again, as we noted earlier, as a society embraces a “solution” to solve the necessity of the present problem, once this is embarked upon, the ambivalence of these solutions, bringing both goods and ills, solutions and new problems, means that it is impossible to arrive at a point where all of society’s problems are solved.

This is “big lie” of the scientific and technological society. We are told that through social engineering, as long as we commit adequate resources, we will reach a point where we have solved all our problems. Ellul tells us that because each solution brings new problems, you will never reach a point where all the problems have been solved. The “wizards” can win for a while, a long while, but not forever. Tainter tells us that the attempt to do so consumes ever larger social inputs with ever diminishing returns such that societal collapse is inevitable. There is no way to avoid this. It is generally assumed that we should be maintaining a growth rate of 2%. But Tainter argues that to sustain a long term growth rate of 2%, you need grow research and development expenditures at a rate of 4-5% every year. Either growth will at some point cease, or R&D expenditures will make up the whole of the economy. Continuous productivity growth cannot continue, nor can continuous limitless economic growth. And the signs are here that the process of collapse has already begun. It is still early in that process, but the end game upon us. We passed the tipping sometime in the 1970’s when law of diminishing returns had begun to catch up to us.

What can we expect? As more and more resources are drained from the support population to maintain the increasing complexities of society, we can expect an increase in the efforts to actively assert and maintain the legitimacy of the system. Increased propaganda use. Increased manipulation of legitimizing instruments. The increased use of coercion and force, that is, violence. There will be a demand for every more administrators to actively administer regime power, further taxing the system. Eventually there will come a test to the system that will use up remaining reserves — reserves which are increasingly absent or depleted and cannot be replenished by increasing production. Each further shock will weaken the system, making it ever more vulnerable to collapse.

During this period, both in the core and at the margins, portions of society begin breaking away formally or informally to pursue their own interests separate from the main of society. As these parallel interests develop and establish themselves, they weaken the over all system and hasten its collapse. There does not even need to be a situation of mass violence. Apathy of those in the parts of the broader civilization towards the central power, can simply be expressed in them doing their own thing and getting no resistance from the centre. Even if in name they are part of a whole, functionally they work as two separate entities.

The key is that the greater civilization must be reduced in overall size or be broken up into components such that localities can be sustained by their own local resources. The parts cease to feed the resource needs of the centre. At a certain point, likely in a period of not longer than a few decades, you will see a lower degree of social stratification. This stratification is built on scale and complexity, without which our current global elites will not be able to maintain themselves at the levels they do. Without this complexity, the distance between elites and commoner will diminish. There will be less economic specialization. People will have to maintain a multiplicity of skills to survive. There will be less overall social and behavioural controls. Life will be simpler, and likely harder. There will be less information flow across the civilization and from the centre to the periphery. There will be less trading of goods and less consumption of resources. Population will decline, perhaps steeply, to that which can be sustained on local resources. Territories will be smaller and more easily managed.

This seems bleak. It is. But we can prepare. This is yet another reason for building parallel structures which have the resiliency to survive what is coming. It may not happen for us, or our children or grandchildren. But it is time to stop thinking in terms of quarterly reports or elections cycles and begin asking ourselves what we can do to help each other weather the storm that is coming. The harsh reality is that pouring our efforts into reforming and renewing the system as it is might buy some time, but the costs may also be high and are only a rear guard action. Armed with this knowledge, we can do something about it locally. This is where the action is going to be. We can begin reclaiming for ourselves the core functions and pieces of our civilization, but at a local level.