Complexity and Collapse

Modern techno-industrial civilization is running up against the law of diminishing returns - and societal collapse is inevitable. B, author of The Honest Sorcerer blog, reveals why our civilizational complexity carries the seeds of its own destruction. Highlights include:

• What led B (who also shares his reasons for remaining anonymous) from believing modern civilization would persist for centuries to recognizing collapse as inevitable;

• Why diminishing returns on energy, materials, and innovation are central to the collapse of complex societies;

• Why societal collapse is a long process taking place over decades or centuries rather than a single event, unfolding as a stair-step decline with sharp drops in complexity followed by brief recoveries and stabilizations;

• Why declining fertility rates should be embraced as a natural adjustment to overpopulation, rather than a cause for elite-driven panic;

• Why collapse will be liberating for some, devastating for most, and why adaptation to a simpler life will favor poorer communities that already know how to live simply;

• How and when to strategically leverage large-scale political change, and the role writers, thinkers, and local action can play in helping people face collapse more calmly .

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Blog: The Honest Sorcerer by B

• Article: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

• Report: Welcome to the Great Unraveling: Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown by Asher Miller and Richard Heinberg

• Joseph Tainter

• Jem Bendell

• Organization: The Global Tapestry of Alternatives

• Testimonials

• Share Your Thoughts With Us

• Support this Podcast

• Subscribe to our Newsletter

• TRANSCRIPT

  B (00:00:00):

  This is a growing realization among many people that we are going to have a massive dislocation, especially in the West, but also in the other parts of the world as growth turns into decline. And the only question remains how the things will play out and where the tower will tilt because we are really just building a Jenga tower and pulling out pieces one by one, one by one, and then it becomes obvious that there are no more pieces to pull out. The tower will somehow collapse in one way or another, and it doesn't mean that it'll collapse from one year to the next. It really means that it's going to be a long and arduous decline going down that hill of complexity and going back to a more simpler life.

  Alan Ware (00:00:39):

  That was our guest who, in his preference to remain anonymous, goes by the single initial B. B is the writer of the popular Substack blog called The Honest Sorcerer. In this episode of OVERSHOOT B guides us through the big picture dynamics of our energy and environmental crises and the increasing severity of societal and ecological collapse in the decades and centuries ahead.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:01:12):

  Welcome to OVERSHOOT where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with our life on Earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.

  Alan Ware (00:01:37):

  I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics, we examine the forces underlying overshoot - the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest.

  (00:02:17):

  B is an industrial design engineer by training specializing in the field of manufacturing technologies and innovation management. He has two decades of professional experience working with multinational companies both in the US and Europe. Over his career, he's taken on various roles in the field of manufacturing, sourcing, project management, and process improvement. He was born and still lives in central Eastern Europe. He's the writer of the popular Substack blog called The Honest Sorcerer, a blog, which in his words is "about critical and systems thinking, asking the right questions, even if they yield discomforting answers. It is about contemplation on the final stage of our civilization becoming fully aware of our predicament". And now on to today's interview.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:03:05):

  Hello B and welcome to OVERSHOOT. It is wonderful having you here.

  B (00:03:10):

  Thank you very much for the invite. It's nice to be here.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:03:13):

  Absolutely. And both Alan and I, we've been long-term readers of The Honest Sorcerer and deeply appreciate the clarity, courage, and insight you bring to the discussion of our planetary predicament. And you also write that your aim is to "dispel magical thinking patterns based on evidence, good old science, and a bit of common sense". That totally resonates with us. We're also committed to cutting through illusions - whether they are technological, economic or cultural, to get to the heart of why humanity has exceeded the limits of a finite planet and what are some of the more realistic pathways forward. So we're truly excited to have you as a guest to explore the big picture together. Thank you again for joining us, B.

  B (00:04:03):

  Thank you for the invitation and it's nice to be here and it's nice to have a bigger audience as yours and nice to be in a good company.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:04:11):

  Yes, we feel the same way. And so to start, all of us go through a period of discovery about the extent of our modern techno-industrial civilization's ecological overshoot. And the full picture often takes several years to develop. In a fairly short period of time, just a few years actually, you've quickly grasped the extent of our ecological overshoot, the limits of modernity and the likelihood of collapse of this modern global civilization as we know it. It's incredible how quickly you have gained all that knowledge and how wonderfully you're able to synthesize all of it for us as readers. So what was your perspective before you became aware of our predicament and what has that process of discovery of the extent of our overshoot been like?

  B (00:05:07):

  It's a very good question. So it's hard to think back before the time I came aware of this situation we are in as humanity or as a species actually. But as I remember back before the 2019 period when I discovered the article of David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, so before that article, I just was a regular common human in western civilization like thinking the business cycles will continue forever. There will be booms and busts, but usually nothing bad will happen, no material and energy limits will apply and we will continue living this comfortable life of ours for, I don't know, centuries to come. And as a kid, I used to have a dream that even if I die, my descendants will live to see the first person landing on exoplanets somewhere else in another part of the universe. And this was a very comforting thought and I thought that human progress cannot be stopped and we will populate the entire universe.

  (00:05:58):

  So this was my theory of everything or how I thought about the world back then. But then the process of discovery was really not figuring out what is going on, but it's really felt like falling through a rabbit hole. But it's not just going into a rabbit hole and going one direction, but just falling right through it like a meteor. For me the whole worldview of mine was just crashed into smithereens as I discovered that all what I have read in science and in the articles before was basically, not a lie, but a beautified version of the truth so to say. And there was a brief period before this article really hit me hard by David. In 2004 I was there in the peak oil movement, so I saw how it came to prominence, how the idea raised out of nowhere, and then I was really shocked.

  (00:06:42):

  I was a university student back then. I was an undergraduate student for technology and innovation management and things like that. And for me it was really shocking to see that hey, we could run out of a key resource and then this could cause huge problems. And it was really perplexing for me to understand how big the whole economy is and how everything works and how everything is connected. So I shove this idea aside and then decided, okay, let's go back to the work and let's go back to studying. Let's go find the job and then everything be sort out. People will find a solution. Lo and behold, there was a shale revolution and the Canadian tar sands were found and okay, no problem. We will have enough oil for another thousand years. No problem. We can continue as usual. So I then basically went back to sleep for another 15 years really.

  (00:07:28):

  So I really didn't know about the issue or grasp the gravity of the issue for that long. But then after this article, and then it's really amazing how the human brain works because you try to put a lid on things like a pressure valve and then pressure just builds up under this valve builds, builds. Things get rather interesting as the business cycles doesn't turn out as it used to be like in 2008. It was not a regular business cycle downturn. So it was a really shocking experience for me as a aspiring manager in a multinational company. So I think that this is really hard and this is really difficult times we are going through, it's really not normal. But then I shoved it aside again. Okay, maybe it's just a little business cycle, but then as things build up and then the temporary clues like 2019 as I read this article and I start reading about, okay, what comes next?

  (00:08:19):

  Okay, what if the climate science we have known so far is not so well established or not just 1.5 degrees till the end of the century? What happens then? And then I start reading articles and then went deeper, listened to podcasts like yours. And I learned that hey, the situation is more serious than I ever imagined. And then I discovered Jem Bendell's work and the Deep Adaptation Forum and their paper about a potential societal collapse. And that was really a shock to me. So it was just few months between discovering the issue and then getting to the work of Jem Bendell and then understanding that this could lead to societal collapse. So I really felt that sinking feeling in my stomach that hey, this is really not going in the right direction, but I could not stop trying to figure out what's going on in the background.

  (00:09:06):

  So I kept listening to podcasts, kept listening to scientists and read articles in a crazy speed. So I just really was devoted by this topic until I found Jared Diamond and then Joseph Tainter's work. I also listen to many podcasts with them, how they think, what they think. And then I realized that this is perfectly normal. This happens to societies all the time. We overshoot the limits of our environment and then fall into a black hole for a while and then recover after that. And this is what basically brought me to this point where I realized I have to somehow give it out and speak about it because this is something of a discovery for me. So this was not a usual experience, what everybody goes through as normal people.

  (00:09:54):

  And as I talk to my friends about this topic, they all look me in a very weird way that, Hey, are you crazy? Or what's wrong with you? Nothing is going to collapse here and a little warming will not kill any anyone. So this was the type of feeling. And then this made me feel that I'm a kind of a weirdo who thinks that things could collapse and things could go very wrong. And then since I was rather lonely with this topic, I decided I need to have an outlet valve. I need to have something to ventilate to give all this information which has accumulated during these one or two years basically to give out all that information and then decided to start the blog and then started writing. And it was immediately felt like a huge relief that I am just off the burden and this is why I decided to remain anonymous. I was not sure back then whether this is true or not, whether this makes sense or not, or can I make a good point on this topic or not. So it was really just an experiment for me at the beginning, but then it became a more serious hobby and then actually it has became a key aspect of my life to investigate and understand what's going on in the background and then how the puzzle pieces fit together and how do we fit into this big picture of the end of modernity.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:11:02):

  Thank you for sharing that. That was quite a journey. And even though you said you had these epiphanies a couple of times and then you decided to just kind of repress it and continue on with life as it was, I mean I think so many of us can relate to those experiences. You look at how many forces there are at play in modernity that want us to believe in that narrative, to just convince us that everything will be okay and we are progressing. And like you my background is in science and technology and engineering, and I was a hardcore believer of technological solutionism. And after I practiced engineering, I taught STEM courses for 10 years and I felt like I was brainwashing a lot of young students about the promises and science and technology in getting us out of all sorts of crises and how space exploration was going to transform our way of life, similar to some of the things you've shared.

  (00:12:03):

  And I can't say that my transformation happened as quickly as it did for you from reading one article. It has taken many, many years of gathering the kind of insights and knowledge that you've gained in such a short period of time, which is truly impressive. And we are glad, and I'm sure so many of your readers, that you decided to find an outlet for your ideas and synthesizing of those ideas because they are extremely helpful. And now that you've felt a little bit more validated, having found a community of people who read your stuff, are you finding, given the geopolitical situation, given where you live and the perspective that you hold kind of a threat to the work that you're involved in? Is that one of the reasons why you feel that you have to remain anonymous?

  B (00:13:00):

  Well, recent events and recent turns of world politics made me believe that it was a very good idea to start as anonymous site and then remain anonymous, because the company I've worked for is a really respectable company, but it's really sticking to the old narrative that progress is going to last forever. We will have solar panels, hydrogen, whatever, and then we will continue growing forever and more. And then as world politics turned out as it is, and geopolitics came into the picture and I realized, and I did not just went against the narrative of technology, but I went against the narrative of the power structure of what we have today and all the basic tenets we believe as a society about ourselves, especially in the West is really in question today. And I felt like a little bit threatened questioning these narratives as a politically unacceptable way of communicating.

  (00:13:52):

  Much of I write is about the predicament, but also I have this vein for politics and geopolitics which I cannot suppress in myself as the country which I live in has a really long history. And then it has a history of left and right and right or wrong. Everything has happened to us. And then for me, it's not that clear cut that we are on the good side and they are on the bad side. It can be the other way around. And then this really felt like, okay, maybe I'm just really not even popular, but even not acceptable as part of the society if I think or and if I write these things as I write on my blog, especially in the war in Europe. So this is really not an acceptable version of the story, so to say.

  Alan Ware (00:14:35):

  Yeah, you've mentioned your job provides you the money and the money is what we all need in our money economy since we don't really have the skills or the assets like land or anything else to get outside of the money economy. And Nandita and I are lucky to be doing this podcast where we can get paid to question the system, but that is vanishingly few people can do that. And of course, we're thoroughly dependent on the system to provide for all our needs and wants too, and we experience some of that same cognitive dissonance of being very critical of the system and yet utterly dependent on it.

  B (00:15:11):

  Yeah, it's basically the deepest form of cognitive dissonance - knowing that the system will end and then this whole way of life will cease to work for a lot of us. But still, you don't know when it will end, how it will end, how fast it will end. It might last decades. So how do I know just right now at the moment that 10 years from now we will be sitting here in the room relatively safe, relatively well-fed, electricity, everything working. Maybe 20 years from now there will still be electricity and still everything will be working fine. So I was not prepared to leave the life behind because it's so not only uncertain, but so hard to define what is the timeline of this collapse. And so you have to find a way to live through the collapse and also not isolate yourself from society. Because if you choose to isolate myself, point one, my family will not support me at all.

  (00:15:57):

  So I would be living alone in the hills somewhere. But part two is that really I will have no way of affecting how society works and how people will react. And I see people getting more open to this subject as things go, not as was planned by our leaders or by anyone in society. So as a recent events in the past five years from COVID to geopolitical situations to economic downturns, and people start to be open about this topic and start to realize, hey, things are not going as fine as it used to or as it was depicted by fantasy films that we will live forever and then we will find a way it slowly turns into a dystopia and slowly turns into something very different than what we imagined. And this is the moment that people become open to questions and then become open to other perspectives than the techno-optimist narrative.

  Alan Ware (00:16:46):

  Yeah, thinkers like you and your blog opened my mind to the extent to which the primary narrative of progress, technological and social, was breaking down over the past 15 years. And a key part of your argument is that modern techno-industrial civilization is likely to lose much of its complexity in the coming years and decades and undergo a collapse process towards a greater simplification in the coming decades or even centuries. And central to that argument is the critical role that you give to energy and materials in their role in supporting this civilizational complexity and the fact that the extraction of those energy and materials faces diminishing returns on the investment of that extraction over time. And you're deeply skeptical of the idea that technology can be used to just overcome the problems with resource depletion and environmental pollution from those energy and materials. So why is energy and materials so fundamental to your argument and why are diminishing returns so crucial to understanding our predicament?

  B (00:17:52):

  Yeah, it's a very good question because so many of us just see one tiny slice of the entire supply chain of raw materials, energy and everything. Even if I work from a multinational company, the colleagues who I work with see only a tiny slice of the whole process. So they do not see the mines, they do not see the foundries and the smelters blowing smoke in the sky and then smelting metals, which then will return into clean and nice products and electronics and other components. They just see that they design a component, a part, a vehicle component for example, and then it just somehow magically appears in the factory preassembled, then it'll go through some final assembly and then out to the customer. This is the only thing they see. And it's very important to understand that it's really not that simple. So the energy is really what drives us all and drives the whole economy.

  (00:18:42):

  And it used to drive it from the ancient times even. So even when we were hunter gatherers, we were hunting for energy. We had to get calories to continue hunting, and if we have less calories than it required to continue foraging, then we would starve to death. So that's simple. And the same goes for the modern economy. We have to have energy to continue what we do as an economy. And money is really just a claim on energy. So if you take a simple example, if I receive a dollar for my work and then I go to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread for example, then I pay this dollar bill to the baker so that he can buy energy. He can buy the natural gas or electricity to bake that bread and also pay for his labor and also pay for his raw material requirements, which then goes back to the field where the wheat was grown, where for example, tractors and combine harvesters burning diesel work all day and all night to harvest the wheat and then make it into flour and then get it to the baker's shop.

  (00:19:40):

  So there is a whole chain of events and whole chain of energy transmission through the system which have to be understood and not only just one tiny slice, I just paid the dollar bill to the baker and then he gave me a loaf of bread. So that's very simple understanding of how the economy works, but in reality, energy is everything. Without it there is no raw materials. And if you go a one level deeper, if you go to the modern techno-industrial economy where we have a lot of products made out of raw materials which are not renewable at all, like metal ores or other minerals which are mined using diesel and then smelted by coal and then reheated again by natural gas and then shaped into forms like solar panels or computers and laptops and everything. Everything is made with energy and also with raw materials. We mine with energy.

  (00:20:27):

  And the thing is that in order to get more energy, in order to get more even solar power or even oil, we need to mine materials and invest them into extracting that energy. Energy itself is unusable for humanity. We live off basically from the energy conversions which happen in our devices. So for example, solar light in and of itself cannot power civilization. It just, the sun is shining, everything is beautiful, plants are growing fine, but it's not enough power civilization. First we have to convert this solar energy into electricity. And in order to do that we have to mine materials like silicon. We have to mine quartz for the glass, we have to mine aluminum. We have to mine a lot of stuff to build a solar panel and make that energy conversion for us. And if you don't mine that stuff, then the energy will not be available for us.

  (00:21:18):

  That's simple. And in order to mine stuff, we also need energy. So we also have to reinvest some of the energy into mining that stuff. And in the end we'll have a feedback loop where everything is connected from energy to raw materials. And the problem is that we are facing depletion, which in a popular mind, it exists as a one-off event, an amount of stuff one day to the next and then we will be just starving to death. So this is the popular imagination of oil depletion, for example. But the reality depletion is a process, it's not an end state. It's really a state of running out of the high quality stuff, which requires little energy and little raw material investments to get, and this is the key point. So the growth, what we have experienced so far was enabled by materials which were easy to get, close to the surface, require very little energy and very little material investment to get. You just have to drill the hole, I don't know, 10 feet deep.

  (00:22:10):

  And then oil was gushing out. This is the magic which drove civilization to this state where it is. And this is the primary problem we are facing right now, especially with oil, which is basically the livelihood of civilization. It's a substance which we cannot live without at the moment, because even solar panels need oil to be built, to be harvested, to be manufactured and delivered to the location. Every single step of their lifecycle requires some form of fossil fuels. And then as fossil fuels gets harder and harder to get, we have to go deeper, we have to go further, we have to go beneath the ocean and then drill another a thousand feet deep. It's getting harder and harder to get these materials and we have to invest more materials into getting them. And this just basically acts as a brake in the system. It's a very gentle brake.

  (00:22:56):

  It's not an abrupt stop to the system. It's just really pressing the brake in your vehicle, just touching it slowly and then ever harder and ever harder. And then you start feeling that the vehicle starts to slow down. And this is what you feel at the moment - that this whole feedback loop of energy and materials which are feeding back into each other and then getting costlier and costlier with every year as we have to go deeper and further, and that as we have to mine poorer and poorer quality stuff, it simply slows down the economy and takes more and more energy to continue what we do. And this is what we experience. We suddenly realize that hey, we cannot continue growing this way. We have to somehow give up some part of the economy in order to continue growing or at least some part of the world has to give up growing in order for other parts of the world to grow. And this is the main issue behind the geopolitical tensions we face today - that the western world has grown so big and then consumes so much energy that the other part of the world simply cannot grow. This is a huge friction point in our societies today,

  Alan Ware (00:23:58):

  And as you've written quite a bit about oil being the master resource, and you've written about how the energy cost of extraction keeps rising to the extent that the suppliers need a certain breakeven price point to make it worthwhile on the low end. And on the upper end, consumers can only handle such a high price. And increasingly the projections you're showing show that the energy cost to get energy will just keep increasing in the coming decades to the point where something will break - either supply, they won't start looking for the hard to reach oil because they can't make any money off of it and/or consumers won't be able to afford higher-priced energy. So either way, right, the pinch of oil ends and stops economic growth to a large extent. And that same process happens with all the metals and minerals also, right? The suppliers need a certain minimal price. The consumers can afford a certain maximum.

  B (00:24:55):

  Exactly the same process affects minerals as well, and especially copper because copper is really a key essential mineral to everything electric because it has a very high electric conductivity. It is really the perfect material for building electrical stuff. And as opposed to old times when we used to find nuggets with 50% copper content, then we opened up mines with 10 to 15% copper content. That was really good stuff and it was really easy to work with. And then as we went deeper and deeper and found lower and lower quality materials, then we realized that hey, we have to implement another milling machine, then a flotation process and then add another machine to extract the floated material and then adding more complexity, more machines, more energy-hogging machines, which will take more and more of the stuff in order to get just basically at the end where we are right now, basically 1.5% copper. We are just digging up an entire mountain, which means practical example, if we bring up 100 tons of ore, we just get one and a half ton of copper out of it.

  (00:25:57):

  It is really not a good business. And in the meantime, you are burning diesel like crazy. And then at some point this will have to stop because either mines will go bankrupt in the energy bills they receive, in the energy they spend on all the activities I have explained, or they go bankrupt based on the upfront investment cost, because they have to dig really deep and dig a huge hole in the ground and then dig out the stuff from the bottom of the hole and then put that hole with a truck away into somewhere else and then leave a toxic pond behind. So this is really not a process which can be sustained for much too long.

  Alan Ware (00:26:31):

  Right, and the whole renewable energy relying a lot on copper as the major electricity conductive material. And I've heard estimates that we need to basically double the amount of copper that's ever been mined throughout all of human history by 2050 if we wanted to fully electrify the economy. So there's a lot of the technologists would hope that renewable energy can pull us out of this diminishing returns of energy and materials. But as we know, these renewables are rebuildables, the solar panels and the wind turbines have to be replaced constantly and maintained. And as you've probably written about Vaclav Smil writing about the fossil fuels needed for plastics, fertilizer, steel, and cement, that these are four fundamental kind of pillar materials of modern civilization that are very hard to replace or to continue without fossil fuels. And we had a historian, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz on talking about technology and resources and how we've continued to just add new resources.

  (00:27:35):

  Even if we're looking at renewable energy systems, they're using more and more energy amd materials. It's not a substitution for fossil fuels, it's just an addition to our total energy system. And you've also written that there aren't just diminishing returns on energy materials, but diminishing returns to the complexity itself that societies build up over time, and that eventually the society collapses or simplifies under the weight of that complexity. And here you're drawing on the work of people like Joseph Tainter in his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. How would you summarize that general historical pattern of how societies both grow more complex over time and then how they collapse or simplify under the weight of all that complexity?

  B (00:28:18):

  Well, societies invent new roles and new categories of workers for each and every problem they face. So let's start with a very simple society which just grows wheat, for example, for harvesting. And then as a society grows larger and larger, they have to keep track of wheat harvests. Then somebody issues a loan to the other farmer who has a bad harvest that year. And then that also had to be kept track of, and then these type of additional tasks just keeps piling on and piling on. And then at some point society realizes that, hey, we need to have a scribe or somebody who just keeps track of everything because we just can't keep it in our heads anymore. So we have to invent some kind of signature system which we use to signal to each and every one of us who owns what and when, and this is how scribes came to the picture.

  (00:29:02):

  And then as we grow larger and larger, we kept adding these roles like soldiers. Hey, we have so much wheat, but we have to protect it from the other tribe who's trying to get ours if they are in need and if they cannot pay for it. So we have to invent an army to come and protect us. Those who then came as administrators for those armies, then comes generals, and then comes kings who are leading those armies and those societies and just complexity just keeps building up and building up. But we have to keep in mind all the time that all these new roles are non-productive roles. So they're no longer growing food anymore, and so they're just sitting in their palaces or in the garrisons and then waiting for an attack or practicing for another attack or trying to take over somebody's land in the worst case example.

  (00:29:49):

  And that started growing empires. So these people are not growing food anymore. And this was a huge issue for ancient societies because growing food was very labor intensive and then taking out soldiers and taking out people from this labor intensive process meant that this labor has to be replaced somehow and this is how slavery began. And then you have to have merchants and then you have to have slavery administrators, everyone which is contributing to this ever-growing and ever-larger blob, which we call the society. And as we add more and more roles, we take away more and more energy, which we have to somehow replace. And this starts a virtuous cycle of growing and then growing ever more complex and also growing ever more in size and in complexity. But at a certain point, the whole thing becomes simply unmanageable at the point when we simply have to add more and more administrators to oversee the administrators.

  (00:30:47):

  And the whole thing becomes so unproductive that adding a new layer of administrators starts to generate a negative benefit. And I think that we can all associate that process with what goes in the universities where more and more administrators are added on top of administrators and then back in the day when a hundred students can be an administered by 3 administrators, now we have 18 administrators administering a hundred students. So this process has its own limits as the revenue-generating capacity of universities or even societies has a limit. It's limited by the land, limited by the labor available, limited by resources available because these old societies also used resources like copper and tin and other metals, which they used to build tools from and weapons from. And as they run out of resources and they outgrow the land they live in and then face difficulties maintaining that complexity, they simply collapse. But that's not a one day event, you know, just one day to the next they decide, okay, that's time to give up and then let's die and lay flat and collapse. It's a slow process. It's a very slow and very arduous process they go through. It usually takes 50 years, maybe a hundred or 120 years, which takes time to unfold because collapse itself is not a end state. It's really a process. It's really a process of simplification, giving up all that complexity because it simply doesn't work anymore.

  Alan Ware (00:32:00):

  And I like that you've written about the burden of maintenance in a society that's become enormously complex, that there's just so many roads to maintain and so many water systems and sewer systems. If one of those fails, you have to spend a lot of money to replace it. But the people get no additional benefit to their mind. They're just, oh, I'm the same as I was before. I still have my water, I still have my sewer. You didn't do anything for me. Even though that maintenance cost just keeps going up and up as the entropy, the decay of all the materials takes place and the fact that all those materials were built with cheaper mid-20th century often and much of the western world energy and materials, and now they have to be replaced with much more expensive energy and materials, but still people aren't appreciating maintenance as much as novelty and newness. Whether politicians can deliver the new bridge becomes a lot more important of whether they can replace a collapsed bridge, which is just an expectation.

  B (00:33:01):

  It's really interesting because when you build a new bridge or when you expand the sewage network, you add value to the society. So suddenly electricity becomes available in a new town where a new factory can be built, where new products can be produced, which is growing GDP and growing the economic output. But when you are replacing that same power line which just grow older and needs replacement, you are not adding new economic growth to that area. We are just maintaining that level of economic output and then this is an additional cost which produces no benefit, whereas in the beginning, the initial investment produced a huge benefit. And this is what we saw during the fifties and sixties in America and much of the Western world and even in China as well, that they were expanding the infrastructure network and then they were adding more productive capacity to the society. But that has a limit as well because eventually you'll electrify every single town, you'll build every single factory which can be built, and then, what? You run out of space and out of raw materials to put into those factories. And then growth simply stops.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:34:00):

  And also as you've demonstrated with the rise of civilizations, many millennia go, the formula really hasn't changed all that much in terms of the need for complexification. It's just taken different forms, it's much more technological. But population growth has remained from the very beginning the impetus to complexify civilization and whether it's the need for collecting more resources, food or protecting those resources. And that continues to be the narrative of the current civilization. And you can hear that in headlines every single day is declining fertility rates spell disaster. And you have to ask and wonder, well, we've got eight plus billion people. It's the most number of people we've ever had at any given time in our history. We're continuing to add 80 or so million people each year. We're expected to add 2 billion or more people this century. For whom does declining fertility rates spell disaster? And as you laid out the layers of all of these civilizations, the people at the very top who are benefiting from the proletariat class and the work of all of these people, that's where the population decline really starts showing up in terms of who it benefits and who it undermines.

  B (00:35:32):

  Yeah, exactly. It's really funny because it's never your neighbor who tells you that, Hey, we need more people here. Everybody is just fine as they are, and they don't want more neighbors or bigger neighborhoods. Everybody's just protesting if they want to expand the neighborhood because they like the way it is. And the only people who are, as you mentioned, propagate this idea to have more people and more consumers is really the head of corporations and that of governments who get more revenue based on the number of taxpayers or the number of consumers they have. And that's also, it has nothing to do with human wellbeing. It's not that we need 8 billion of us around us to feel good. We could feel just as fine with much fewer people. And I'm not saying that we should reduce the number of people. It's just really a natural process.

  (00:36:15):

  As you have mentioned that the falling fertility rate is a basic human response or a natural human response to this overpopulation that we are experiencing right now, this overcrowdedness and this really worsening economic situation which we face because of the end of growth because we have reached the limits of growth. Everybody fears that, hey, the situation is getting worser and worser every day and every year. And then they decide, okay, let's postpone the start of the family or let's have just one fewer kid. So that's not a one day to the next process as everybody imagines that when the economic collapse has done, everybody just dies off. It's really a very slow process and we are witnessing it. So it's really privileged to be in a place where we see the turning point from growth to contraction and to see how societies really end.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:36:59):

  Right. There's all this focus on innovation, more people is more innovation, but there seems to be a pretty stunted level of development in terms of our cognitive capacity to think of innovation in how to embrace a turning point in our civilization, to think beyond growth and acknowledge that this has happened before and we are in that same stage now as previous civilizations and how do we imagine different ways of being? But the innovation focuses almost entirely on how to maintain it, a suicidal civilization that we're in the middle of. And it just seems completely counterintuitive.

  B (00:37:44):

  It's really the ratchet effect where you just keep building higher and higher and higher and you can't give up. Civilizations collapse, not because they have to collapse, but because people cannot give up their way of life really. They just simply cannot let go that, Hey, things used to grow for so many decades or so many years. It just can't happen to me. I'm not willing to accept that we are going to enter a long decline. It's impossible. I would rather just dig in my heels and then continue innovating just to keep the stuff going a day further. And this is every one of us. It's not just the politicians and the big leaders, but it's really every people going into work deciding, Hey, this day is going to be the next day, which I'm going to collect more money and then have a bigger house or have a bigger car and then just keep working towards the goal and not willing to give up their dreams and not willing to give up their desires.

  (00:38:37):

  And the one thing that people do not realize that technology itself is the cause of collapse and it's the cause of overshoot and cause of basically everything bad because nobody sets out start innovating that, Hey, I'm going to use this innovation to destroy the world. They just want make things better or they just want to have a better steam engine. I've got a faster car and plane which flies higher. It's a normal human desire to be better at what we are doing, but we forget about those inadvertent side effects like CO2 emissions or algal blooms when it comes to mechanized agriculture and fertilizer use or the many other side effects of technology, which then requires another round of innovation to overcome. Then this is where we face the depletion of resources as well because this is also another hurdle which we don't think about because we always imagine that resources will be always available. They are infinite. We have a huge Earth which has a lot of raw materials inside. We just have to go and get them.

  (00:39:28):

  But we haven't calculated the necessary energy, necessary growth in areas which are needed to be invested in to get those materials. And somehow we feel reluctant to face this reality, and then we are just waiting to solve these issues and just kicking the can further down the road. We are going into debt, we are opening another mine, even if we know that it is going to be of poorer quality, even if we know it's going to cause more harm to nature than the previous one. Anyway we will open that because we need more raw materials, need to mine more copper, we need to mine more aluminum bauxite, whatever. We just can't stop growing because we are afraid of losing what we have.

  (00:40:11):

  We are just afraid of losing our status as a nation, as a company, as a human being, whatever, because we are not keeping up with the rest of the bunch. So we are just afraid of falling behind and then just keep on mining and doing and doing. But as we innovate, we just face hurdles which are just mounting up pollution, mounting up energy requirements of mining, mounting up difficulties with solving technical problems and even complexity itself. Our products become so complex that no one really understands how a computer works anymore. There are people who understand how the processor works or how the memory module works, but no one really understands how the whole system works and no one can design out of his head a computer so no one can sit out and okay idea, I design a computer from day one to the day next.

  (00:40:56):

  They need a bunch of people. And this is why people simply do not realize that technology itself and innovation itself is running into diminishing returns. And we have mentioned Tainter earlier in this discussion, and he and his team found an interesting pattern in technological innovation as they examined the number of people who are on the same patent. They realized that more and more inventors are needed to file a patent and this number kept growing and growing. So if you just think back a hundred years or more, we just needed one Bell to invent a telephone, but how many people are needed today to make another innovation on that telephone and then add another feature to that telephone? We just need tens, if not hundreds of people to find another patent. China alone produces 1.7 million graduates a year in STEM and sciences. They are simply circumventing this diminishing returns problem when it comes to innovation by adding sheer numbers. So they're just pouring in a huge number of engineers into every problem and they are making progress. So they're making progress in fusion technology, in battery technology, everything, but they do have a limited resource like human capital. Even the Chinese population stopped growing one or two years ago and they are now in decline. So they will not be able to continue innovating by adding more and more engineers and more and more graduates.

  Alan Ware (00:42:15):

  And I appreciate that you mentioned the diminishing returns of knowledge and technology. As we see, the frontier of knowledge gets harder to reach and now AI might be attempted to increase labor productivity, but of course all the energetic and material demands of AI are increasing exponentially and the desirability of an AI future is very suspect to the extent that de-skill a lot of humans and our cognitive work, creative work, it creates less connection, potentially socially, less connection with nature. So it becomes quite a dystopian view of technology seems to be ascendant.

  B (00:42:57):

  It keeps people in line. The same thing is going on as I have seen with manual labor. In effect the same thing goes on with mental labor, which is really affected by this AI revolution, the fear for their jobs. And they're really afraid that, hey, AI will take away my job. I'll be not necessary anymore because AI will design a product instead of me or AI will do the accounting instead of me, and I'm afraid I don't want to lose my job, so I will take on more tasks or accept no salary increase this year. So this is basically a tool to make people more cooperative.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:43:29):

  To squeeze more out of them with very little benefit for them

  B (00:43:33):

  And just use it as a stick instead of a carrot. It is used as a stick. Hey, I'm replacing you with AI if you're not doing your job well enough.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:43:40):

  You've also written some interesting essays on the nature of technology and that we need to focus our time and energy on supporting living things that can regenerate, not on building more megatons of the dead metals and minerals found in non-nonregenerative technologies. How would you describe the difference between regenerative and degenerative technologies?

  B (00:44:05):

  Well, regenerative technologies is what we used to have 200 years ago. So everything was built out of wood, clay, stones, really village life where most of the people lived in rural areas. Houses were built out of wood, built out of clay, built out of materials which are available locally. One of the benefits of using living materials is that they regenerate themselves naturally. So if you are taking care of your forest, it'll give you wood for hundreds or hundreds of years. If you are composting your waste, your food waste, or even if your house is demolished by an earthquake, you can compost it because it's made out of natural materials. Nothing gets lost, nothing is wasted, as opposed to modern world where we have a huge reliance on supply chains, with suppliers with exotic materials out of the other end of the planet in which we don't even realize that most of the copper is coming from Chile, for example, and then it is just 8,000 miles away. And if there is no shipping connection to Chile any more then what happens? Then we have no more copper and we cannot replace the wiring in the house and then we will lose electricity and so on.

  (00:45:13):

  This is an extreme example because it's not that simple. I was working for supply chain management for a couple of years. I realized that there is always a plan B, so no is not accepted as an answer in supply chain management. So there is no answer that, oh, my supplier went bankrupt or that the ship has sunk and now we are out of raw material. Sorry. So that's not an accepted answer. You have to find a way around and then you will find a supplier in Cambodia or whatever and then you will get that raw material no matter how. So I'm not that afraid that things will just break down one day to the next and then connection will be lost to, I don't know, South America and so this is you will require a meteor strike to have that kind of impact. These regular impacts, what we have, and this is most of things like COVID or like the war we have, they are having a huge impact, but they're not stopping the machine.

  (00:45:56):

  They're forcing the machine to adapt. And this is why I mentioned that we are living in this self-adaptive system which will simply adapt to this changing situation. And if complexity and if this whole dead material is becoming unsupportable, then we will switch to another way of working with these materials. Probably we'll not source new materials, but we'll start to repurpose materials. Just take a look around in countries which are less fortunate, let's say in Africa or in Southeast Asia where people have no accessories, kind of extra devices and extra stuff, they are just building stuff out of what they find. So I saw people building solar ovens from trash in Afghanistan. They're building wonderful devices out of trash. They're wonderfully inventive. So if I have to place my hope, I place it in human ingenuity, that we will find another way. So there is no way that we will give up and then lay flat and accept collapse.

  (00:46:47):

  We will find ways around, but that doesn't mean that we will reach the stars. That means that we will go back to a more sustainable way of life, which will then be more regenerative, which will gradually return to more natural materials. But since there are so many of us and there are so much demand on these materials, we'll be forced to use this, that matter around us. And if population trends continue as they are, even without collapse, then it means that we might find ourselves in a world where we have too much materials to handle. So we have so much depopulated cities and so many houses left to abandon and then so many cars lying around without fuel to run and without people to drive them that we will have no idea what to do with all these materials. They'll be just simply left to rot in the sun or in the rain.

  (00:47:36):

  They will just rust away. And then as the ... somehow struck in the next century, I hope so, it really means that we are not going nuclear and that we are not annihilating ourselves. What I am saying is really a best case scenario. Then probably we'll find a new balance between old material use, what we have already accumulated during civilization, and new materials from nature. It can be a mixed society or a mixed technology. It's really hard to figure out what will happen in the next century because there are so many moving things and things are moving in so crazy directions that it's really hard to see what's coming next. But I can imagine that this could be a direction which we're going.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:48:15):

  Definitely, and as you say, you're finding some of these really creative, innovative solutions coming out of countries where people don't yet have access to modern conveniences. We've also heard other social scientists talk about some of the communities and countries that haven't been brainwashed with this kind of global industrial ideal are probably the most well-equipped in terms of their own resilience and their own capacities, in terms of working with nature to kind of survive collapse, compared to people like us who every aspect of our lives depends on modern conveniences and we wouldn't know how to get our food if it weren't for the two or three day supply in grocery stores. I'm not trying to simplify the situation or over-generalize it, but in making a case for how do we start kind of turning our attention to people who have been living with different types of collapse and austerity situation so that we can actually learn something from them rather than trying to force this way of living on the rest of the world that is not there yet.

  B (00:49:33):

  One thing which will be really interesting, especially in Europe, we have so many people coming from these type of locations and these type of countries, maybe people will learn something from them in the end. Currently in Europe we loathe these people that, hey, they are coming in to take our wealth, but in the end, I'd say 50 years from now, we might be grateful that they come and teach how to grow food in our backyards because they still know how to do this.

  Alan Ware (00:49:57):

  So in today's increasingly turbulent world, the management concept that you've written about called VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, feels more and more like our daily reality. And from your perspective, how do these VUCA dynamics show up in our interconnected systems, particularly when we have political instability, economic disruption, the physical resource constraints all reinforcing each other and different feedback loops, and how does that affect our ability to maintain social cohesions, shared understanding politically and socially?

  B (00:50:37):

  Yeah, the past five years shown us that we really live in a VUCA world where volatility is all around us, and I'm really starting to have the feeling that we are at the tipping point of a complex system. And this is really like a rocking your chair. I use this example a lot in my blog - that we are just leaning back on the chair, pushing it further and further away until we reach the tipping point. But it's very hard to keep our balance, and it's very risky to make even a slightest move because the risk falling backwards and it's really hard to keep the balance. And this is where we are at the moment. Even a small move can make a huge change, yet still the world is progressing in this direction and is really somehow unable to stop it because it has a momentum of its own.

  (00:51:18):

  And I think that some of the people in ancient times also realized this. And then they also had similar feelings about the turn of the Roman empire, for example, the Mayan civilization. There was a turning point in their times, and I'm sure they also discovered that, hey, this is not going in the right direction, and probably we are going to contract from this point on and that's normal. And they died knowing that contraction will continue for the next generation and the generation after and after. We have reached so big heights during this 20th century. We have grown so big. We have grown so much infrastructure that we have plenty of material and plenty of stuff around us to last for another a hundred years to recycle and to work with. So I'm started to have the feeling right now that we are going past VUCA at the moment.

  (00:52:01):

  So we are just leaving behind this VUCA world where volatility and uncertainty are everywhere. We are stepping into a world where complexity is accepted as normal because our life is complex, but ambiguity from VUCA will be simply replaced with certainty - that we will certainly realize, and this is a growing realization among many people, that we are going to have a massive dislocation, especially in the West, but also in other parts of the world as growth turns into decline. And the only question remains how the things will play out and where the tower will tilt, because we are really just building a jenga tower and pulling out pieces, one by one, one by one, and then it becomes obvious that there are no more pieces to pull out. The tower will somehow collapse in one way or another, and it doesn't mean that it'll collapse again from one year to the next. It really means that it's going to be a long and arduous decline, going down that hill of complexity and going back to a more simpler life. And this is going to be more and more accepted and then turn into some kind of certainty that we are going to go through the simplification whether we want it or not.

  Alan Ware (00:53:06):

  Right. The V in VUCA, the volatility I've sometimes thought of it as the initial conditions of the system. Two events have very different outcomes, more than they used to. Say, the difference between Harris and Trump getting elected in the US. That event had very different outcomes, much greater than George HW Bush and Bill Clinton or any number of other presidential elections. That affects the next event, maybe the 2026 Congressional elections have a wider distribution, and that's how the system can become set in a very different place in a pretty short amount of time because each of those events have such different initial conditions they set for the next set of events. It feels like we're living definitely in that in the US context, and I think the uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity that you mentioned, we're definitely feeling and a common response, people wanting greater certainty that could be the rise of populist leaders, typically right wing. But that kind of more of a demagoguery, a simplifying of the complexity is a temptation to people to turn to in a VUCA kind of world.

  B (00:54:16):

  Yeah, this is the type of certainty I'm afraid of - that people will be certain that, hey, this outgroup or that outgroup is responsible for collapse or responsible for the malaise we are in, and then we have to hate them or we have to go war against them. And this is already the playing out without threatening or without voting for demagogues. Even normal politicians are turning into these type of monsters, picking up outgroups or picking up another country and blaming everything on that country and projecting all the bad decisions they made in the past on that country and then trying to force everybody into a war. And this is really a dystopian situation and I really don't like to be in this situation at all.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:54:54):

  And on that topic too, you've spoken about the value or not of political action, and we see a primary avenue for avoiding a more painful collapse scenario would be to work collectively in order to soften the decline, ease the suffering, and share the pain more equitably. Starting with what the three of us are doing is actually just finding partners in the larger community who understand what's going on. What do you think of our prospects for softening the harshest impacts of decline through collective action, including political action?

  B (00:55:32):

  I'm not the political activist type, so in my early days as I discovered the situation we are in, after reading that article from David Wallace-Wells, I had the urge to go out and then protest and then join the crowd wanting to have a change in climate policies and things like that. But then I quickly realized that politicians are not really in charge and this is what I'm afraid of, that we have no control over where the political system goes. Alan, you mentioned earlier that there was a big divergence, whether should Trump or should Harris be elected? But I think less and less, I think that there is a force in the background which moves us in the direction which they want to go. It's really in those corporate elite who are just driving the bus, and it's not the bus driver. The bus driver is really just sitting there knowing not where he's going or what he's doing.

  (00:56:20):

  Sometimes they just get hints from the people behind and then he seems to be driving the bus, but it's really not him. And I'm afraid if we are making a political rebellion out of this, we will be squashed like a bug because the people behind the bus driver doesn't want to change the direction. They want to go into that city no matter what, and then they push the bus driver to go into that direction. And while at this moment it took a little bit depressing and it looks a little bit disempowering, I would say that change is coming, whether through political action or whether through a financial breakdown or whatever, something will bring about change. The system is totally unsustainable as it is. It will collapse no matter what we do, whether we support collapse or work against it, it will just go on this trajectory. It is preset.

  (00:57:15):

  Political action comes into the picture when the system has started to show signs of weakness or has started to show cracks, like when the British Empire started to show cracks and Gandhi realized that this is, Hey, this is the moment to start a movement, and this is when they became successful in liberating India from the British rule. Because had Gandhi born 50 years before that, he would be scored like a buck and then he would end up in a prison and then no one would know his name. But he was born at the right time, he realized the right moment that hey, this is the point when the system is at the weakest point and then we can now make a change. Then we can make a peaceful change. And this is what happened across Eastern Europe when the Soviet bloc came apart. It happened really just one day to the next. But people who were on the watch for changes realize that, hey, this is the time to step up and this is the time to put pressure on the system because then it'll come down immediately as we put pressure. So this is basically the wisdom of rebellion, to find the right time to rebel not too early and not too late because if you are too late, then things already collapsed. Okay, everything is in chaos, but still collective action comes into the picture when the system's at the weakest.

  Alan Ware (00:58:15):

  Yeah, that makes me think of the Great Depression in a place like the US where FDR was responding to pressures from unions and from people just being put out of work and unemployment. So the element of crisis in creating the conditions for collective action to spring up, I have some hope in that. And yet if you look at that time, all those energy and materials were still extremely cheap. The US could look forward to this huge untapped element of resources. The crisis points over the last couple hundred years, really in most global civilization have had that growth to look forward to, whereby the elites can give up a little bit of their surplus to keep the masses generally complacent enough to keep the whole system going. But in a time of a declining pie overall, when the limits to growth really get met, it's hard to know what kind of collective action that crisis would give birth to.

  B (00:59:13):

  I think of it more like the Hunger Games. I know it again might sound disappointing, but there is still opportunity even in the Hunger Games, the rich people live in shiny cities and can still imagine that future that they will keep technology for themselves and that they'll live in gated communities. But it's really up to us normal people to find a better way of forming a community outside that shining city. So if we found ourselves outside those wealthy communities, we will have much more freedom to build up our own way of life or own way of organizing the community because as societies simplify, they will simply not have the resources to keep order everywhere around. And this is one of the key patterns in simplification, that the central control is lost, especially in the periphery or further away from big cities. There are no control left and there is anarchy from the standpoint of government, but from the standpoint of the everyday people, this is not anarchy. This is really the point of self-organization and then really making their dream society come true.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:00:15):

  And we had an environmentalist and social activist in India who along with a number of other activists are talking about radical ecological democracy, which is trying to create blueprints for a new kind of civilization that we want to live in with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. That includes social transformation, ecological restoration, the type of regenerative technology that you were talking about and revival and sustenance of multiple knowledge and cultural systems rather than this deeply globalized kind of development agenda or the linear story of progress that we've been sold.

  B (01:01:00):

  Everything we have talked about so far is really how things play out. So this is since neither the elites or the corporations or the governments who are running the system, nor the people who are feeding the system with their labor and with their work are willing to change and willing to accept change, nothing will change in the system. So it's really going to go into the same direction. The bus will go to the direction no matter what, until it gets a flat tire. And this is where the people will hop off the bus and then they'll say, hey, we were going in the wrong direction all the way, and let's go on foot, and then they will take a totally different direction. So this is again what I mentioned. This is the Gandhi movement, when the system somehow stops because of a financial crash, political crisis, war, whatever, then people suddenly realized that, hey, we can do this in a totally different way. And as we have seen after that great financial crash in 2008, many people, especially in Greece, which was really hard hit by this crisis, they started to develop their own currencies and started to use their own currencies in different cities and started to develop new social hierarchies and new social systems. But then they were ran back in and then they put back into the bus, back into the old system. But as soon as the old system fell apart, alternatives started to grow up like sprouts in spring.

  Alan Ware (01:02:18):

  Yeah, similar to Cuba, after it lost its Soviet subsidy, they lost a lot of weight and I'm sure that wasn't fun. And at first it was very hard for them to figure out how to survive. But they start a lot of community gardening and a lot of mutual aid. So people are innovative and can find their paths when the central authorities go down, which brings us to a question about how you think the collapse of modern techno-industrial civilization might play out. You've referred to the, at some point the central government fails, whether that's printing money, sending you checks to buy your food to survive, at some point there's a financial moment I would imagine, right, that comes out. But how do you imagine it playing out?

  B (01:03:05):

  That's the million dollar question. So I always try to put out some scenarios, but I never say that this is going to be the way how things play out. It's really hard to predict because as you mentioned, there are so many input parameters, things going so different directions. It's impossible to know how things will play out or how long modernity can stay and persist. It can be 10 years, 20 years, or maybe next year if we just simply collapse because of the financial burden will be just too great to bear. So it's really hard to tell, but what I can see is coming is that it'll not play out as the movies depicted. So not in a big zombie apocalypse for everybody at each other's throat or just trying to find food in the wasteland. I don't think that this is how collapse will play out. I'd rather think that collapse will be a very long and very slow process with a lot of pain also, because it's going to involve a lot of loss, a loss of nature, because we will burn wood for firewood.

  (01:03:48):

  So we'll burn forests, deplete soils even more as we try to find other ways to grow food. So this is going to be a lot of hardship. These hardships will arise day by day, year by year, and then might be periods where there will be some kind of a revival where things go again in the right direction. Maybe a new government comes into the picture, maybe the world government structure altogether collapses. But then a new government is raised to power through a different ideology or through a different type leader. And then they start to rebuild things and then things start to look again good. But then that government also collapses, and this is going to be this stepwise process, which where we have a small collapse in the beginning and then some kind of a revival, and then it collapse again, and then a deeper collapse again, and then some bigger revivals.

  (01:04:47):

  So this type of a undulating path downhill, which doesn't know where the next storm will take you. And also then we will have climate change in the process playing into the picture with ever-hotter summers, and there are dryer seasons which produce more difficulties for growing food. So a lot of difficulties will come into the picture, which can throw a spanner into the system and then will force it to adopt in a different way. And I mean the system is not just democracy itself or the liberal democracy what we have, but human societies together, as they work together, as they try to survive or as they try to thrive, even in these harsh conditions. So it can be happening that's familiar. Some parts of the world will keep growing and then will keep experiencing better living conditions. But other parts of the world, we are just simply sunk into a deep economic depression, what we have seen in the 1930s, while other parts will just try to survive as they is, and then they will keep the governance structure because they somehow managed to go on this fine balance and then find a way between expenses and then incomes. Maybe this is really hard to tell, but it's going to be a very uneven process, that's for sure. And it's going to be very unevenly distributed.

  Alan Ware (01:06:03):

  As you've mentioned, countries like Lebanon or Libya, Gaza, so many places are already in the form of collapse with a whole lot of suffering. And I agree with what you've written too, that you say there will be just one overarching goal remaining as this process of stair-step decline goes down. And that goal will be security. People will want physical, psychological security on the other side of that. And that's scary to some extent. They could turn toward right-wing authoritarians for that security, for certainty. But there is also a silver lining of mutual aid at a local level to really looking at when the central authorities fail and their ability to provide for you, and those larger central systems, people do get to know their neighbors, they get to know their local communities and how to help each other out.

  B (01:06:55):

  Collapse is in the eye of the beholder. So it really depends on where you are at the moment and how you look at things. So for example, for a government or for a corporation, collapse will be terrible because they'll lose their status, they'll lose their revenue, they will lose their income, their privileges, everything. But from a very poor people, for example, or very poor regions which were subjugated so far, it might be liberation day. We really cannot say.

  Alan Ware (01:07:19):

  Right. The loss aversion that we have to losing things that we might overvalue just because we have them and we've habituated to these conveniences or whatever, and losing them actually wouldn't be the end of the world. You've probably written about how a lot of the areas of the Roman Empire when they lost Rome were actually quite relieved to not be under Roman rule anymore. The taxation was not nearly as onerous. The new barbarian rulers were much more relaxed about a lot of things, and yet some of them might've thought before Rome lost that that would've been an awful event and it wasn't.

  B (01:07:56):

  Yeah. And that doesn't mean that there were no losses. So the population were really decimated by the loss of the central government and the central infrastructure of spreading the food across the empire. So that really led to a huge loss of population, but it also led to a loss of technologies, because then technologies could no longer spread or the roles necessary for those technologies could not be obtained. And then the whole simplification went through in waves through the system lasting again decades or even centuries. But then in the end, in the dark ages, people ended up in basically in empty cities or in empty lands, which basically regenerated on their own. So if we do not mess up the climate too bad or do not pollute the rivers and the atmosphere with a lot of forever chemicals and plastics, maybe nature will regenerate and then will give us much better conditions than what we have just 10 years ago or today. If going out in the future, the regeneration might happen and I'm sure will happen. And the question is how many of us will see it or how many people will live to enjoy it? That's the big question. Scientists are always surprised at how biodiversity regenerates immediately, as soon as they give up tilling that land or give up using that farm or that field.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:09:09):

  Right. In the shorter term of this kind of long decline that you've spoken about, which I appreciated that you said could be liberatory for a lot of people who are being exploited by the elite class, but also there will be a tremendous suffering across the classes. What do you think could help reduce the suffering that comes with societal collapse and what role do you see blogs like yours and podcasts like ours playing in that effort?

  B (01:09:40):

  Well, if we are leaving out all the bad things, which we have talked about so far, it'll be much easier for everyone of us if all world leaders, which shake hands and then sign peace treaties all across the world and then share resources and then voluntarily degrow. So that would help a lot. But realistically speaking, that is not something which will happen today or tomorrow or forever. So our job as bloggers or as podcasters remains informing people and then sending up stories about the future, which doesn't involve this much technology and this much type of government control, and then depicting a future where multiple things are possible. Bad things and good things are also possible, and then preparing them for a massive discontinuity, which will come as governments cease to function as they are today. And then complexity gives way to simplification because if they have to contend with all these feelings of loss and anger and depression at the point of time when the crisis really hits, then you'll be really hard pressed to find ways to survive.

  (01:10:44):

  Because if you're depressed or if you are angry, you will not be able to focus so much on, okay, what to do next, how to move on. If you go through these feelings beforehand, and this is the mental preparation part, then you are much better equipped. Even you have ideas what to do next, even if you are not doing anything actually preparing. So even if you're living in a flat in a big high rise building in the middle of the city, but you are aware of these things are going on and you are trying to build up skills, even be it repair skills or whatever traits which might be necessary for a survival in a less complex society, then it might come as useful for you versus the other person in your neighborhood, for example, who worked his entire life for big multinational companies in the accounting department and think that everything is going to last forever and more, then he or she will be shocked to death that, Hey, the system has collapsed, the company has been bankrupt, my government has been bankrupt too, what to do, I cannot access my money in the bank, and so on and so forth.

  (01:11:46):

  And then there will be panic and then the confusion, this is what we would like to avoid happening, and this is why we are working to avoid this type of confusion and panic when crisis really hits so that people will know that, okay, so this is how collapse might look like, and then this is perfectly normal. It is happening. It has happened to every other civilization before us, and this is what we must do right now because this is the time to do political action, because this is the time to self- organize. This is the time to try new skills or try to find a different type of job and things like that. So prepare people for the change and then not to have them shocked by the change.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:12:22):

  Yeah, that's a very helpful response, and I appreciated what you said about creating stories that show how to live in a different kind of a setting without reliance on so many of modernity's conveniences and technologies. And it reminds me of the episode that we did with our colleagues from Post Carbon Institute. They wrote this report called The Great Unraveling, and they talk about in the second part of the report, the kinds of things you're discussing is how do we start preparing ourselves in terms of our skills, but also our emotional and mental and psychological state to become more comfortable with what's coming. Because as you said earlier, we are so intertwined in every aspect of our lives that some of that suffering seems to be psychological, the loss of the things that we're used to, the loss of the life that we know. And then also maybe art and storytelling could play that role in helping people embrace that way of living before it's forced on them, and it feels like a loss more than a real gain.

  B (01:13:37):

  Yeah, everybody's good at something. So we might germinate an idea in someone's head to write a book or start a blog or start a poem or make a movie about this, or just initiate conversations between each other so that it's really, we do not know because we cannot interact with each and every one of our followers. But it's really like fertile soil, just sow the seeds and then something grows out, and then there are beautiful things growing out, and then maybe they take this seed to another soil, another place where a conversation leads to another type of idea or the spreading of the word that, Hey, this is how change works really. So this is really not trying to change the world all at once, but really one by one, bit by bit.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:14:19):

  Those are excellent words. We'd like to just wrap this up by saying how grateful we are to you for joining us today and for the incredible depth of knowledge that you've gained so quickly and that now are imparting to the rest of us through your synthesis and for such a great conversation today. Thank you very much. B.

  Alan Ware (01:14:42):

  Yes, thank you. I appreciate your description of the predicament of the problem, and that if we don't have people enlightening others about the nature of the predicament, we'll have very false solutions and false thinking instead of looking at potentially fruitful paths. So thank you for your full big picture.

  B (01:15:02):

  Yeah, these type of discussions and this type of search for meaning is really helpful for many people. So we do not know because we cannot get in touch with all of them, but I really believe that this can be helpful for many people, and probably we might prevent another crazy regime coming to power and then trying to destroy the world. Probably this will also help. Thank you very much for the kind words. The pleasure was mine.

  Alan Ware (01:15:23):

  That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you, and we hope you'll consider a one-time or a recurring donation.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:15:51):

  Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.

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