Societal Collapse: What's Past Is Prologue | Luke Kemp
https://youtu.be/7aFS0smroeg?t=1796The modern world in so far as our interconnectedness, our complexity is in
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many ways a buffer against small shocks. When a state begins to fail today, we
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can very easily send resources, aid, peacekeepers, etc. to prop it back up.
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And when you look at the best studies on state failure, they suggest that most states don't fail for anything longer
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than roughly 6 months. Within that period, you usually have some kind of new rough and ready government which can
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at least kind of try to impose rules, develop legislation, take taxes and extract resources and have something
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like a monopoly on violence. And that's a good thing obviously in
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many regards. But the problem of having this big interconnected complex system is that once the shock is big enough or
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it hits the right location, suddenly it it's amplified throughout the entire system. And a good example of this of
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course is the global financial crisis in 2008 where a housing bubble in the US
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suddenly becomes a financial crisis on a global scale. Similarly, Covid 19 what
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previous would have been potentially more of a local or regional pandemic that would have spread at the speed of a
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horse became a global pandemic in the space of months if not weeks. We see the
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same thing with things like ransomware attacks. They can travel at the speed of an internet connection. In short, our
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interconnected complex globalized systems are fantastic in some ways, but when they become too interdependent,
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they become transmitters and amplifiers of different shocks and risks. And that means that collapse
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going to the future is probably more likely to be global rather than local or regional. And it's probably likely be
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much worse than it was in the past.