Why do civilizations collapse? And is ours next? (with Samo Burja)
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Samo Buria about long history, civilizational collapse, and the influence of social capital on economies of scale. They discuss features of functional institutions and how societies can avoid internal rot.
Deep Dive Analysis
14 Topic Outline
Defining Long History and its Significance
Traditional History vs. Long History Timeframes
The Role of Agriculture in Civilization Development
Göbekli Tepe and Evidence of Ancient Complex Societies
The Fragility and Collapse of Complex Human Societies
Internal and External Causes of Civilizational Collapse
Institutional Decay and Failure of Political Coordination
Qualities of Successful and Adaptive Civilizations
Goodhart's Law and Rebooting Credentialing Systems
Predicted Failure Modes for Modern Industrial Society
The Illusion of Inevitable Progress and Loss of Capacity
Social Technologies and the Extractive vs. Productive Forces
Characteristics of Functional Institutions
Great Founder Theory and Social Reformers
8 Key Concepts
Long History
An approach to studying the prehistory of society as seriously as recorded history, incorporating archaeological and genetic evidence. It suggests that civilized history is much longer than traditionally assumed, predating written sources and potentially extending back tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
Proto-agriculture
An early form of agriculture, such as simple cultivation, that predates the complex, large-scale grain farming associated with early city-states. It suggests a long transition from hunter-gatherer societies where gardening was part of a broader toolkit, not an immediate switch to a fully agricultural lifestyle.
Institutional Rigidification
A process where a society's institutions become less adaptive to new circumstances, often due to elites protecting existing patronage networks or revenue streams. This can lead to a society's inability to respond to stressors like climate change, ultimately causing internal decay and collapse.
Goodhart's Law
The principle that as soon as some kind of social measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This is exemplified by civil service exams or university admissions, where people start 'studying for the test' rather than genuinely acquiring the knowledge or skills the test was designed to measure.
Social Capital Exhaustion
The depletion of difficult-to-measure social qualities like public truth-speaking, work ethic, or high social trust within teams. This exhaustion can undermine the capacity to organize material production, leading to de-industrialization, declining product quality, and rising prices.
Social Technology
Elements of culture like law, organized religions, or specific modes of social organization (e.g., a police force). These are viewed as social machinery in operation, distinct from material technology, and their existence, function, and loss are critical to civilizational development and decline.
Functional Institution
An organization that radically overproduces its peers given its resource base, often characterized by unique approaches, strong founder influence, internal functional specialization (like a superhero team), and intellectual sovereignty, meaning it doesn't merely imitate others or seek external validation.
Great Founder Theory
A theory of history positing that deep social reformers who create new, unique, and innovative institutions or social technologies are the most important figures in civilizational development. These founders implement transformative social technologies that act as bottlenecks or gatekeepers for material technological progress.
10 Questions Answered
Long history is an approach that studies the prehistory of society using archaeological and genetic evidence, aiming to understand human culture's development over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. It matters because it could re-evaluate our understanding of Homo sapiens and highlight the fragility of complex human societies.
Traditionally, historians rely on primary written sources, creating an institutional gap where pre-written history is left to archaeologists. While archaeologists discover evidence, they are not typically trained to rethink social systems in the same way historians are.
While the consensus is about 10,000 years, new evidence like the Ohalo site suggests agriculture 23,000 years ago, and Göbekli Tepe shows complex society 11,500 years ago. The long history perspective suggests human civilization could extend back 50,000 years, or even further into the last ice age.
The consensus theory links agriculture directly to complex society, assuming it enables large populations, food storage, and taxation. However, new evidence suggests early agriculture (gardening) long predated complex city-states, indicating a gradual transition rather than an immediate societal shift.
Civilizations primarily dissolve from within due to internal rot or from external conquest, though external threats can be facilitated by internal weaknesses. Climate change or resource scarcity are usually stressors that a vital, adaptive society can overcome, but they can be decisive blows to an already troubled society.
Institutions decay when they cease to be adaptive to changing circumstances, experience profound succession failure (loss of knowledge or competent leadership), or suffer from political coordination failures leading to endemic, fractal warfare and declining economies of scale. Elites may become parasitic, protecting rents rather than directing society.
It might be very useful to completely reboot university admissions every 20 or 30 years. This is because, due to Goodhart's Law, people tend to 'prep for the test' or create staged experiences (like fake non-profits) rather than genuinely acquiring the skills or knowledge the tests and applications are meant to measure.
Modern industrial civilization could decline if it loses the capacity to organize material production, driven by the exhaustion of social capital like public truth-speaking and work ethic. This would lead to rising prices, worsening products, shrinking globalization, and a rollback of technological progress, stabilizing at a lower living standard.
Functional institutions radically overproduce their peers, often have a significant founder influence, exhibit internal functional specialization where individuals have distinct but complementary roles, and maintain intellectual sovereignty, meaning they don't merely imitate others or rely on external authorities.
Great Founder Theory posits that social technologies (like law or organized religion) are akin to material technologies, having inventors and implementers. The most important figures in history are not just powerful leaders, but 'great founders' who create new, unique, and innovative social technologies that profoundly reshape civilization.
25 Actionable Insights
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.
8 Key Quotes
Long history is my approach and this general approach to studying the prehistory of society as much as we study, say, recorded history.
Samo Burja
Even our prehistory history had a prehistory.
Samo Burja
I think one of the biggest consequences is that perhaps we have to reevaluate what Homo sapiens is. Now I have to say that, again, this is not something that's been proven, but it's a hypothesis worth exploring. The hypothesis being that maybe Homo sapiens has always been a gardener, maybe we have always occasionally lived in villages.
Samo Burja
After all, we have grander aspirations than just to be another set of ruins for future archaeologists to study.
Samo Burja
I think if a society is adaptive, vital, it will perhaps take a hit, but it will adapt to new climate conditions, it'll come to live with them. However, if the society is already in trouble, such as say the Mayan civilization was, right, then I could think climate could be a decisive blow.
Samo Burja
I think it's an extraordinary argument that we are different. So I feel I've yet to hear that extraordinary argument.
Samo Burja
The self-perception of scientists is valuable, but not necessarily accurate. You know, at the end of the day, we don't ask a bird to teach us aerodynamics, even though we don't question the bird's expertise at flying.
Samo Burja
The historical record isn't just a warning for things like civilizational collapse and so on. It's also a source of hope. It's an existence proof, right? What one human being can do, another can do.
Samo Burja