It is not the end of the world just yet, but we all harbor the uneasy sense that we’ve reached the end of something, closed a chapter on our own history, arrived at a point where there is no turning back. The end of life as we’ve known it. The end of easily acquired stuff. The end of cheap, flourishing modern capitalism. The end of our every-day-in-every-way, easy-street Western life is getting better.
So if it’s all burning down, if we have to build over scorched ground again, what do we put in its place? What exactly does post-2025 evolution look like?
Why do societies fail?
To answer that question, some years ago, I read the work of Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning geography professor and erstwhile anthropologist, who built his reputation on asking the big questions of specific societies: why do some of them thrive while others make stupid, even disastrous decisions? What holds it together and what causes it to collapse?
I was specifically interested in an interview he gave about a course he ran on the collapse of societies. Why had some societies like the Mayans in the Yucatan or the Anasazi in the American Southwest or even the Easter Islanders brought about their own destruction by ceaselessly mining (and finally exhausting) their own resources?
What makes a society not realize that it is eating its own children?
The trouble with group-think
What Diamond’s UCLA students finally determined is that at the heart of these calamitous mistakes are failures in group decision-making, whether in entire societies, governments or even business. The group may not anticipate a problem before it arises; or fail to learn from earlier knowledge or mistakes; or even try to solve the problem by falling back on a false analogy.
After immigrating to Iceland, he writes, the Norwegian Vikings simply assumed that the light, ash-based Icelandic soil would be as heavy as the clay-based soil of their native Norway, and so they cleared the forests, as they had in the old country, to create pastures for their animals. A few generations later, half of Iceland’s top soil had blown away, and the Vikings were left with an agricultural crisis.
Creeping normalcy
A society’s downfall also occurs, Diamond’s students discovered, when it fails to identify a problem already there, or slow trend invisibly taking hold, what politicians call ‘creeping normalcy.’ Our best example, at the moment, is the inexorable rise of authoritarianism, both from the left and from the right in many societies. It all seems good at the time to hand all power to a relatively small group of people with questionable experience to make all the decisions for us, without the right of any sort of reprisal – other than being able to vote every four or five years for another group with the same shortcomings.
Finally, and something that speaks to all of us right now, is a society’s failure to even attempt to solve a problem it has identified, which largely has to do with clashes of self-interest, says Diamond.
Good for me, bad for you
Economists call this ‘good for me, bad for you rational behavior,’ and a perfect example, says Diamond, were mining companies in Montana, which were once allowed to dump toxic wastes of copper and arsenic into waterways with impunity.
After 1971, when Montana passed a law requiring mining companies to clean up after abandoning a mine, mining companies found a way around it, by declaring bankruptcy after extracting the ore but before engaging in their clean-up job. This good-for-me, bad-for-you stance is most often adopted by the decision-making elite against the rest of society, as occurred during the banking crisis of 2008 and now, through wars, calamitous approaches to Covid, international conflicts, and products produced by Big Food and Big Pharma, to name just a few, still carries on.
Another reason societies fail to solve clearly identified problems has to do with collective amnesia, which Diamond calls psychological denial: it just isn’t going to happen to me.
And finally, he says, societies collapse when they try to sort out a problem, and either don’t have the correct solution or are just too late.
All of these group-think failures are certainly the precipice on which we now sit: failing as a group to anticipate the problems we now face, to agree that we now have a problem, to identify successful ways to tackle the problem – above party political short-term gain – and to put those solutions into effective action.
But aside from all these failures, I would add that our biggest group delusion – the lodestone of faulty reasoning in our group decision-making – has to do with the collective assumption and acceptance of the idea that individual ambition serves the common good. That idea, which built modern capitalism, will be at the heart of its downfall. That thinking is our modern-day equivalent of eating our own children.
Many ‘primitive cultures’ studied by Diamond such as the New Guinea highlanders are far more successful than we are at many societal challenges, such as deforestation and even conflict resolution, by adopting a ‘good for me, good for all’ mentality. There is a great deal we can learn from them about a new type of group think. But it’s got to be a two-way process, not a ‘good for all, but not much good for me,’ either.
I, for one, believe that we will not begin to identify or sort our current crises or even begin a process of evolution without casting off that faulty group thinking. Everywhere I look people are identifying that the biggest action plan on our agenda for 2025 and beyond is returning to a sense of community.
A big autumn read recommended to us by David Lorimer (director of the Science and Medical Network) is The Mechanics of Changing the World by John MacGregor (Worldwork Press) – a doorstopper not for the fainthearted.
Or, another idea: Transform your life with a Power of Eight® in your community or even online. It will start healing your community from the ground up!
And for ways to get started, check out my 8 Revolution, free for all on my Community site:
- Register here
- Join ‘The 8 Revolution group‘
- The first post has a link to download all PDFs
