Buy the Book: Immoderate Greatness summarizes the dynamics behind a civilization’s lifecycle, particularly its downfall. William Ophuls discusses the six common factors that drove the decline and demise of major civilizations throughout history.
The Notes
- “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.” — Edward Gibbon
- “Civilization is effectively hardwired for self-destruction.”
- “The book looks at six common factors throughout history that led major civilizations to decline and fall.”
- “Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.” — Niccolò Machiavelli
- Immoderate Greatness = hubris. Civilizations rise and fall because human nature — hubris — fails to let them see the flaws in their own system.
- “There is simply no escape from our all-too-human nature. In the end, mastering the historical process would require human beings to master themselves, something they are very far from achieving… Commanding history would also require them to overcome all of the natural limits that have defeated previous civilizations.”
- “My purpose is not to propose yet another theory of historical cycles but, rather, to isolate the ecological, physical, psychological, and practical factors that drive the cycles—that is, to show that the observable rhythms and structures of human history have demonstrable causes. I do not posit an absolute determinism.”
- “History repeats itself in the large because…man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex.” — Will and Ariel Durant
- “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” — Will Durant
- 6 Common Factors
- Ecological Exhaustion
- Exponential Entropy
- Expedited Entropy
- Excessive Complexity
- Moral Decay
- Practical Failure
- Ecological Exhaustion
- Natural resources are required to build and sustain civilization. The byproduct is the destruction of the environment and ecology. Civilizations grow by consuming and harming their surrounding environment.
- Civilization growth creates a positive feedback loop where readily available resources generate a wealthier population, increasing consumption, which increases demand for more resources. Increased demand leads to deforestation, overfishing, overfarming, hunting wildlife to extinction, depletion of natural resources, etc.
- “As a process, civilization resembles a long-running economic bubble. Civilizations convert found (or conquered) ecological wealth into economic goods and population growth. As the bubble expands, a spirit of “irrational exuberance” reigns. Few take thought for the morrow or consider that they are borrowing from posterity. Finally, however, resources are either effectively exhausted or no longer repay the effort needed to exploit them. As massive demand collides with dwindling supply, the ecological “credit” that has fueled expansion and created a large population accustomed to living high off the hog is choked off. The civilization begins to implode, in either a slow and measured decline or a more rapid and chaotic collapse.”
- Law of the Minimum = growth is dictated by the scarcest resource.
- Technology increases efficiency and extends a civilization’s life but eventually, diminishing returns kick in as resources dry up.
- Civilizations tend to overconsume and overdevelop when resources are plentiful which accelerates depletion, increasing the risk of its own downfall. Why?
- Ignorance is the primary reason. Humans realize the error too late.
- Ecological costs are not reflected in economic transactions.
- Humans overlook the consequences of most things including continuous growth.
- Exponential Growth
- “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” — Albert Bartlett
- We fail to understand the accelerating effect of compound growth in later periods.
- For example, compound interest can show how most of the growth in a $100 investment at 7.2% over 80 years occurs at the backend of the period to reach $25,600 (a 25,500% return). It also shows how quickly inflation devalues a dollar over several decades.
- “Exponential growth is both insidious and explosive. It sneaks up on you and then fulminates.”
- Technology can postpone the inevitable depletion of resources but it also increases demand as it enables growth to continue.
- “Human beings excel at concrete perception but are much less adept at abstraction. And they are quick to perceive the immediate and dramatic but likely to overlook long-term trends and consequences. They are therefore strongly present-oriented and tend to neglect or devalue the future.”
- Expedited Entropy
- Entropy is a measure of chaos, randomness, and disorder in a system.
- “One way of restating the Second Law, often called the entropy law, is to say that matter-energy transformations cannot be reversed; time’s arrow flies in only one direction… In short, over time energy moves inexorably downhill from a more useful or concentrated state to one that is less useful or concentrated. This movement is called entropy.”
- Entropy is a tax for converting one form of energy into another. It makes perfect efficiency impossible.
- “Looking at systems in general, a two-to-one ratio of loss to gain is actually quite good; a ratio of ten to one, as in industrial agriculture, is more typical in non-mechanical systems. And improvement in mechanical systems soon encounters diminishing returns (which means that it takes a leap to an entirely new technology to make substantial progress).”
- “The real concern for a civilization dependent on fossil fuels is not really the moment in time when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction is reached, after which production enters terminal decline, but rather the inexorable trend toward lower net energy and higher costs, both monetary and environmental.”
- What matters is not the quantity of a resource but the cost incurred to extract it. A billion barrels of oil reserves sound great unless it costs half a billion barrels to extract and refine it.
- “Nature operates what is, in effect, an extremely onerous tax system… For every matter-energy transaction has to pay a thermodynamic tax that is greater by far than the value of the transaction itself… However, the tax is for the most part unseen, and it is not usually paid immediately. Or, to put it another way, some reap the benefits of the transaction and succeed in shoving the costs off onto others: other species, other places, other classes, other generations pay the tax.”
- Excessive Complexity
- “Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way…. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty.” — Donella Meadows
- Civilizations become more complex as they grow, more unpredictable and uncertain.
- “Complexity is generally understood to refer to such things as the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organizing these into a coherent, functioning whole. Augmenting any of these dimensions increases the complexity of a society.” — Joseph Tainter
- Two problems of complexity:
- Overload = the more complex the system, the more likely it becomes overwhelming to control.
- Unpredictability = more complexity lead to systems that become harder to predict and manage.
- Ingenuity gap = the lag between the growing problems of society and humans’ ability to solve those problems. Of course, solutions to complex problems tend to be complex i.e. complexity leads to more complexity, resulting in a widening gap.
- “A system is characterized by so many feedback loops operating in a nonlinear fashion that its behavior becomes more and more impenetrable and unpredictable and therefore less and less manageable, because neither the timing nor the severity of specific events is foreseeable.”
- “Systems surprise us because our minds like to think about single causes neatly producing single effects. We like to think about one or at most a few things at a time…. But we live in a world in which many causes routinely come together to produce many effects.” — Donella Meadows
- “The financial system is the epitome of a chaotic system, and generation after generation of highly motivated, talented, and well-capitalized individuals in both the public and private sectors have time and again failed to prevent intoxicating booms from becoming devastating busts—and this despite the lessons of economic history, which are quite well understood. Of course, manias, panics, and crashes are the consequence not just of intellectual error but…of other human shortcomings as well. However, intellectual error alone is sufficient to cause practical failure.”
- Systems Traps = “mistaking symptoms for causes, bounded rationality, the blame game, tugs of war, policy resistance, the tragedy of the commons, a drift to low performance, escalation, competitive exclusion, addiction, and rule beating. One of the greatest traps of all is fanaticism: refusing to reconsider the values and goals of the system, even though they have now become perverse or even disastrous.”
- Small gradual changes to complex systems can have dramatic, swift effects.
- “From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.” — Will Durant
- Moral Decay
- Civilizations decline as they lose sight of their guiding principles.
- As civilizations rise and grow, each new generation has a different perspective than the prior generation, due to living under different circumstances, which changes how they think and act. It creates another feedback loop, where each new generation has a slightly different way of thinking than the last.
- Behaviorally, civilizations shift from service and duty to selfishness and greed (hubris, complacency, arrogance, self-righteousness, overconfidence…).
- “A crowd of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.” — Edward Gibbon
- Civilizations tend to sustain themselves with a strong commitment to their principles and institutions.
- Moral Entropy = civilizations are founded on a highly concentrated form of morale that gradually decays over time.
- “History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.” — Edmund Burke
- Practical Failure
- “For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end.” — Will Durant
- Human error is the final factor. Behavioral biases and suboptimal decisions are the drivers of decline.
- “Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change.” — Barbara Tuchman
- “To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states.” — Barbara Tuchman
- “Human societies are addicted to their ruling ideas and their received way of life, and they are fanatical in their defense. Hence they are extraordinarily reluctant to reform… Instead of changing their minds, leaders redouble their efforts to do what no longer works, wooden-headedly persisting in error until the bitter end.”
- Civilizations in decline hold dear their old ways when adaptation to the changing environment is needed most. The resistance to change is their downfall.
- Desperate leaders turn to the 3 stupidities to save society:
- War — unnecessary and costly.
- Debt — attempt to buy off the populace with food, entertainment (distraction), and entitlements.
- Inflation – currency debasement.
- “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth… As the inflation proceeds…all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.” — John Maynard Keynes
- “The fundamental quality of the disaster was a complete loss of faith in the functioning of society. Money is important not just as a medium of exchange, after all, but as a standard by which society judges our work, and thus ourselves. If all money becomes worthless, then so does all government, and all society, and all standards. In the madness of 1923, a workman’s work was worthless, a widow’s savings were worthless, everything was worthless.” — Otto Friedrich on hyperinflation in Weimar Germany
- “Sound money is practically synonymous with prudence, probity, self-restraint, and foresight—that is, all the political virtues needed for a civilization’s long-term vitality and viability. Unsound money is bound to produce the contrary.”
- “Civilizations are unnatural accumulations of wealth and power that cannot be sustained over the long term. Insuperable biophysical limits combine with innate human fallibility to precipitate eventual collapse.”
- The author’s solution to a civilization’s collapse — absent moderation — is to 1) recognize that the “deep structural problems” have no solutions and 2) preserve as much as possible to avoid losing knowledge, tools, etc. to history.
- “There are, of course, minor cycles of reform and revival within the larger historical cycle. Just as stocks do not go straight up or down, but oscillate within an overall trend, a civilization has its bull and bear moments, its little setbacks and resurgences, along the greater arc from conquest to decadence.”
