“If anyone tells you that there’s a single-factor explanation for societal collapse,” says collapse guru Jared Diamond, “you know right away that they’re an idiot. This is a complex subject.” So, forget about peak debt, peak oil, peak climate, peak Harry Potter or even peak everything as the single most important problem that could bring today’s whole pulsing, beaming and txt-mssgng mess down into a lifeless pile of shorted-out microchips, rusted carburetors and busted sporks from Taco Bell.
In a TED talk that Diamond gave in 2003 with eerie relevance for this very minute, the author of two books on collapse, the solid-gold hit Guns, Germs and Steel and the more recent Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, outlined five factors required for any advanced society to give up the ghost.
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Diamond thinks a big problem was that the rich and powerful were so into keeping up with the Joneses — “flogging” the land (that’s over-farming to you and me) to compete with other chiefs for who could bring in the most crops and support the biggest posse of loyal retainers — to do anything to stop the madness.
Or, as Diamond puts it, there was a conflict between the short-term interest of the elites and the long-term interest of the whole society. And, since the chiefs and bishops were largely insulated from the problems that their reckless consumption created, they didn’t see how messed up things were getting until it was too late.
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