Why do civilizations collapse? And is ours next? (with Samo Burja)

1. Cultivate Adaptability, Quality, Unity

For long-term civilizational success, foster adaptability to changing circumstances, ensure quality maintenance and effective succession planning within institutions, and actively prevent societal descent into extreme polarization and zero-sum conflicts.

2. Reform Extractive Institutions

Actively reform or replace institutions that become extractive, fail to fulfill their purpose, mismanage resources, or fail to attract and cultivate talent, to prevent broader economic and technological decline.

3. Cultivate Social Capital for Industry

Actively foster social capital, including public truth-speaking, strong work ethic, and high social trust, as these are essential, though difficult to measure, for sustaining industrial production and innovation.

4. Foster Public Truth-Speaking Norms

Actively promote a social norm where public truth-speaking is valued and untruths lead to negative consequences, resisting the tactical expediency that can erode social technologies and lead to a decline in societal function.

5. Reboot Credentialing Systems Regularly

To combat Goodhart’s Law and ensure genuine competence, regularly update and reboot credentialing systems like university admissions and civil service exams, preventing people from merely studying for the test rather than acquiring true knowledge.

6. Support Great Social Reformers

Identify and support “great founders” or deep social reformers who can create and implement transformative social technologies, as these individuals are critical bottlenecks and gatekeepers for civilizational development and material progress.

7. Apply Historical Social Technologies

Gain a clear, narrow understanding of specific historical events to reconstruct past social technologies and tactics, then apply these insights fruitfully to present-day challenges, using history as an existence proof of what’s possible.

8. Study Societal Collapse

Examine historical civilizational collapses to identify common patterns and better understand their causes, which can help current societies prepare for and prevent their own potential decline.

9. Monitor Institutional Rigidification

Be vigilant for the long-term rigidification of institutions and the emergence of parasitic elites who protect existing networks rather than serving a caretaker function, as this signals a loss of societal adaptability.

10. Challenge Elite Status Quo Bias

Prevent elites from becoming overly invested in maintaining the status quo, especially when the environment changes, as their resistance to adaptation can lead to societal collapse.

11. Support New Functional Institutions

Actively foster the creation of new, functional institutions and provide pathways for them to circumvent or replace old, decaying ones, thereby preventing societal rigidification and enabling progress.

12. Limit Rent Extraction

Work to curb rent extraction by established power centers, particularly during periods of stagnant or shrinking economic growth, to prevent it from outstripping productivity and causing societal decline.

13. Critically Evaluate Credentialing Systems

Maintain a critical perspective on credentialing systems and their outputs, as their decay can lead to the spread of misinformation and a poisoning of the epistemic commons, making it difficult to discern truth.

14. Identify Overperforming Institutions

Seek out and analyze institutions that radically overproduce or outperform their peers relative to their resource base, as these are clear indicators of functionality and can offer lessons for success.

15. Prioritize Founder-Led Succession

Acknowledge the critical role of founders in creating functional institutions and implement strong succession planning to ensure the organization’s continued effectiveness after the founder’s departure.

16. Cultivate Functional Specialization

Promote functional specialization within institutions, allowing individuals to develop deep, distinct skills and work in social symbiosis, which fosters clear expectations and collaboration without needing rigid status hierarchies.

17. Foster Institutional Intellectual Sovereignty

Encourage institutions to cultivate intellectual sovereignty by being unique, thinking independently about their area of activity, and avoiding close imitation or undue reliance on external authorities or dependencies.

18. Use History for Hope and Potential

Leverage the historical record as an “existence proof” of human capabilities and a source of hope, using past achievements to challenge ingrained beliefs about impossibility and inspire new actions.

19. Study Long History

Take archaeological and genetic evidence seriously when studying human culture over tens or hundreds of thousands of years, as this approach can help understand the world and steer the future.

20. Monitor Material Production Capacity

Pay close attention to a society’s capacity for organizing material production and be willing to acknowledge any decline, as this could be a critical, often unacknowledged, failure point for industrial civilization.

21. Beware Choreographed Resumes

When evaluating candidates, be critical of overly “choreographed” experiences and “fake resumes,” as these often indicate class privilege rather than genuine intelligence or skill.

22. Re-evaluate Homo Sapiens Nature

Consider the hypothesis that Homo sapiens may have always been gardeners or lived in villages, as this re-evaluation could significantly impact evolutionary psychology and our understanding of human behavioral adaptations to larger societies.

23. Re-evaluate Human Civilization’s Age

Challenge the traditional view that civilization is only 10,000 years old by considering new evidence that suggests a much longer history, which could change our conception of what humans are.

24. Foster Historian-Archaeologist Collaboration

Encourage historians and archaeologists to collaborate, particularly when exploring the very edges of recorded history, to overcome institutional gaps and develop new understandings of the past.

25. Challenge Historical Inference Biases

Avoid the bias of being reluctant to infer complex behaviors from ancient human remains; instead, use current knowledge of human behavior and technology to infer more about past achievements than direct finds alone suggest.