This Too Shall Pass: Why Civilizational Collapse Awaits

Hanson defines civilizations functionally rather than politically: ‘regions of people with who share culture and high levels of trading, talk, travel, and governance. Such regions tend to rise and fall together, while separate co-existing civilizations have much weaker correlations re their rises and falls.’ The key concept involves ‘whatever makes its internals correlate in their rise and falls,’ with this correlation depending ‘a lot more to do with sharing trade, travel, and talk than it does shared governance.’ This prioritizes economic integration, cultural exchange, and communication networks over political unification in determining civilization boundaries. Contemporary globalization creates unprecedented interconnection where financial crises, pandemics, technological disruptions, and cultural movements propagate rapidly across national boundaries, creating synchronized boom-bust cycles characteristic of past civilizations’ internal dynamics. While some object that ‘our world today counts as an integrated civ, as it doesn’t have a single ruler over it all’ and dismiss US dominance duration as insufficient, Hanson argues political fragmentation doesn’t prevent civilizational integration if economic and cultural ties create correlated fortunes. Historical civilizations like Mesopotamia or Han China possessed internal political divisions yet exhibited coordinated rise-fall patterns through shared trading networks and cultural frameworks. Today’s world shows similar integration through global supply chains, internet communication, international institutions, and cultural homogenization, making national political boundaries less relevant for civilizational analysis than underlying correlation mechanisms determining collective fate.

The integrated model resolves contradiction through multi-scale dynamics where individual civilizations follow rise-fall cycles while aggregate world economy grows through changing civilization parameters. Hanson explains: ‘civs arise randomly, then consistently rise and then fall, and have a changing rate at which they appear and/or a changing height to which they rise, so as to predict the historical rise in total world product. And as % of world product within the then-largest-civ has been rising over time, we should posit that this peak civ height has been rising faster than has the world economy.’ This mechanism operates through either increasing civilization frequency (new civilizations appearing more often) or rising peak heights (each civilization reaching higher absolute levels before collapse), both generating upward global trajectory despite individual catastrophic falls. The crucial insight involves peak civilization heights outpacing overall economic growth, concentrating increasing world product percentage within dominant civilization—meaning as world economy quintupled then increased twentyfold, leading civilization’s share grew even faster. This reconciles patterns because world trend aggregates across all civilizations including many simultaneously existing at different lifecycle stages, while civilization trend tracks individual unit trajectories showing consistent collapse after 2.5 centuries from peak. The model predicts both historical patterns—steady aggregate growth plus individual catastrophic decline—while forecasting ‘big fall in the next few centuries’ because today’s globally integrated world constitutes single civilization subject to collapse dynamics rather than collection of independent regional units whose failures partially offset through others’ continued rises.

While Hanson only briefly mentions cultural drift—’my prediction too, based both on this general trend analysis, and on my more specific analysis of the problem of cultural drift’—the concept derives from evolutionary cultural theory analogizing cultural transmission to genetic inheritance. Cultural drift refers to random changes in cultural traits (beliefs, practices, institutions, norms) over time through transmission errors, mutations, or stochastic processes, causing populations to diverge from previously adaptive configurations. Unlike natural selection operating through fitness differentials, drift occurs randomly particularly in small populations or for neutral traits, potentially causing maladaptive cultural evolution where societies accumulate suboptimal practices despite lacking selective pressure. Applied to civilizations, cultural drift might explain institutional decay where initially effective governance structures, economic arrangements, or social norms gradually degrade through imperfect transmission across generations, copying errors, random innovation, or loss of tacit knowledge underpinning formal institutions. This provides mechanistic explanation for why civilizations collapse beyond resource depletion or external invasion—cultural practices and institutions that enabled initial rise slowly corrupt through drift until civilization can no longer maintain coherence, triggering collapse. Hanson’s brief mention positions cultural drift as ‘more specific’ analysis compared to ‘general trend analysis,’ suggesting he possesses detailed theoretical framework explaining processes underlying observed rise-fall patterns. The convergence between empirical trend forecasting and mechanistic cultural theory strengthens prediction confidence—both independent analytical approaches reaching identical conclusion about coming collapse through different methodologies.

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This article is rated Advanced level, demanding sophisticated understanding of statistical reasoning, historical pattern recognition, and ability to evaluate abstract theoretical arguments about civilizational dynamics while tracking Hanson’s methodological critique of how people integrate contradictory evidence. The piece assumes familiarity with quantitative concepts (exponential growth, median values, orders of magnitude, correlation coefficients, statistical significance), historical knowledge (recognizing Roman Empire, Han Dynasty, Maya, Aztec, Inca civilizations and their approximate timelines), and philosophical methodology (Occam’s razor, model integration, falsifiability). Advanced readers must simultaneously track multiple competing forecasting frameworks (specific recent trends versus long-term patterns, growth versus decline evidence, world-scale versus civilization-scale analysis) while understanding why Hanson considers most people’s reasoning ‘clearly wrong’ despite democratic popularity. The piece requires evaluating meta-level methodological argument about proper evidence synthesis rather than simply absorbing factual claims—readers must assess whether Hanson’s integrated modeling approach actually resolves contradiction better than selecting apparently-stronger trend, whether today’s world genuinely constitutes integrated civilization, whether ten-civilization sample plus cross-scale robustness provides adequate statistical foundation, and whether modern uniqueness claims deserve dismissal through historical symmetry arguments. Understanding involves recognizing characteristic Hansonian contrarianism positioning himself against consensus through analytical superiority claims, appreciating how brief cultural drift mention signals deeper theoretical apparatus without requiring full exposition, and evaluating whether confident tone (‘obvious answer,’ ‘just clearly wrong’) reflects justified methodological insight or rhetorical overreach. This difficulty level suits readers interested in futures studies, civilizational analysis, or long-term forecasting capable of critically engaging with abstract theoretical arguments while appreciating how quantitative pattern analysis combines with mechanistic theory in complex predictions about humanity’s trajectory—preparing for graduate-level discourse where empirical trends, statistical methodology, historical analogy, and theoretical mechanisms must be simultaneously evaluated in reaching defensible forecasts about fundamentally uncertain futures.

The Black Death serves as crucial calibration point establishing maximum documented decline in 20,000-year world economic trend: ‘The biggest documented decline in that trend was the 1300s Black Death that killed ~16% of world, and cut even less of its economy.’ This provides empirical baseline for growth trend’s resilience—across twenty millennia including numerous catastrophes, the worst global contraction reached merely 16% population with proportionally smaller economic impact (since survivors inherited capital, land, and knowledge). This seemingly supports optimistic interpretation: ‘The world trend suggests continued growth, with a decline of even 16% seeming pretty unlikely in the next few centuries.’ If history’s worst pandemic produced only 16% decline while world trend otherwise shows consistent growth, extrapolating forward suggests similar resilience against future shocks. However, Hanson uses this precisely to highlight framing’s insufficiency—world-scale analysis obscures civilization-scale catastrophes averaging 80% median decline from peak to trough. The Black Death hit different regions variably; treating it as merely 16% global decline masks regional collapses approaching civilization-ending severity in affected areas. Hanson’s methodological point: choosing world-scale framing (where 16% represents maximum historical decline suggesting future resilience) versus civilization-scale framing (where 80% represents typical collapse pattern) determines forecast, yet selection appears arbitrary without principled integration. The integrated model reconciles by showing both framings capture real patterns requiring simultaneous explanation, with today’s globally integrated structure meaning civilization-scale collapse dynamics now operate at world scale—making historical 80% civilization declines rather than 16% world dip appropriate precedent for contemporary forecasting.

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