If you look at the human history, it seems like every society always reach a top point of prosperity and then there’s always an unstoppable decline that culminate in some sort of war or traumatic change. Are we exactly at that point?
Is the fall of a civilization/society inevitable?
r/ask
Comments
📣 Reminder for our users
>1. Check the rules: Please take a moment to review our rules, Reddiquette, and Reddit’s Content Policy.
>2. Clear question in the title: Make sure your question is clear and placed in the title. You can add details in the body of your post, but please keep it under 600 characters.
>3. Closed-Ended Questions Only: Questions should be closed-ended, meaning they can be answered with a clear, factual response. Avoid questions that ask for opinions instead of facts.
>4. Be Polite and Civil: Personal attacks, harassment, or inflammatory behavior will be removed. Repeated offenses may result in a ban. Any homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, or bigoted remarks will result in an immediate ban.
🚫 Commonly Asked Prohibited Question Subjects:
>1. Medical or pharmaceutical questions
>2. Legal or legality-related questions
>3. Technical/meta questions (help with Reddit)
This list is not exhaustive, so we recommend reviewing the full rules for more details on content limits.
✓ Mark your answers!
>If your question has been answered, please reply with
Answered!!to the response that best fit your question. This helps the community stay organized and focused on providing useful answers.I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Hopefully, with technology and communication amongst countries, it can be avoided 🤞. Really, there are just a few main issues [select people] that need to be resolved for order to resume.
I try and stay positive even though it can be hard. There are great leaders out there and countries that work together well, and hopefully, they can find a way to sort out what is going on through the turmoil.
On a long enough timeline it is, but I do not think we are there yet
Yes.
Eventually? Yes. Everything is impermanent and withers away at some point. The big questions are “when, why, and how”
No.
I mean you can look at any civilization that ever stopped existing and find a peak and then an end. That doesn’t prove it is inevitable that a fall will happen soon. Also the peak often isn’t even towards the end. Some peak early.
We also see empires that seem to be on the brink of falling recover and continue for centuries. With hindsight you can always see that something bad happens and then things fall apart but often bad things happen and things survive.
Check the concept of anacyclosis. The Romans were thought to have solved it through their government institutions, but it was not the case, they just made the cycle last longer. In order to avoid it we would need to be able to observe a time windows longer than a human life (e.g., using historical data). I’m wondering if AI, when proper developed, could be active longer than a human life (kind of a long term AI) to support us in this task. If that was the case, there are many other questions and issues to solve.
No. Because you are using examples in retrospect. But life has a way of surprising you, and all of those “culminations” were surprises to people at the time.
What usually happens is just slow descent into instability and unpredictability.
Whatever you think is going to happen probably won’t. Maybe things turn out better than you expect, maybe worse.
On the other hand, prophets of doom are a permanent presence. There has never been a civilization which didn’t have people asking this question all the time.
Yeah but we will rise afterwards so no biggie. Life’s a circle.
It’s already here lol
It is inevitable. But I don’t think we are even close to that point now.
“Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph.” — Robert E Howard
If you mean USA when you say we…then yes, i think you may come up on a critical point in time.
I wish it would hurry up I’ve been ready to solve earths infestation of humans for decades now.
Sort of? Part of the issue is defining what a “civilization” or “society” even is. “Roman” Civilization for example could be argued to have ended either in 476 with the symbolic fall of Western Rome, but the East survived until 1453, so did Roman civilization end then?
But then what about culture and religion? The Roman Catholic church was part of Roman civilization and is still around and an incredibly influential group. So has Roman civilization never fallen?
What about going back? When did “Rome” stop being a simple city state or regional power and start being a “civilization”? Was it with Augustus? Julius Caesar? Sulla? The Social War? Was it with the defeat of Carthage in the 3rd Punic War?
Point is, it’s kinda an impossible question to answer since “civilization” and “society” are such vague terms. We can see the rise and fall of individual polities, but “civilizations” as a concept often include multiple vastly different polities like say including the Kingdom of Rome, the Republic of Rome, the Roman Empire, and the Eastern Roman Empire under the banner of “Roman civilization” and so is much harder to definitively say when a given civilization has fallen if ever.
Absolutely, The Roman Empire fell, even a simple modern democracy or dictatorship can fall too
Entropy
Obviously.
Sooner or later the sun is going to go super nova if we haven’t already done ourselves in, we’ll be vaporizing.
Climate change will really begin the process as large die offs occur due to starvation and lack of potable water, not to mention extreme weather events that take out populations who have nowhere to go.
It’ll just shift gradually. Some stuff will fade out, new stuff will take its place. It’s kinda like seasons, change is part of the cycle. What’s wild is that humans are super good at adapting. So even when stuff breaks down, we usually figure out new ways to live, build, and connect. It’s like we’re always remixing what came before.
Not sure. The US itself is declining but other countries like China are prospering and getting quite strong.
Depends on how you define inevitability. If humanity ends, all civilizations /society end.
If you believe in the loss of a cultural value system or of a societal norm, that is murkier.
Just as amny cultures before us, climate change will send portions of the world into (more) disorder
Hasn’t happened for 500 years, and there is no way it can now. The decline was always people with more population moving in and the “civilization” refusing to assimilate the new”barbarians”. This turned a corner when the Mongols were sinofied. Since then material culture has overwhelmed any challenges, only morphing to fit new terminology.
Someone needs to read some Spengler. “Inevitable” is such an absolute I can’t agree, but time after time it’s the outcome. One could call it “human nature” for society to collapse. By that I mean it’s possible to avoid, but improbable.
Yes. I just read a document that summarized a number of studies done by classicists and they all found about 20 different civilisations that fell into decay in the ancient world, ie BC500 to AD500. They all found that the start of civilisational decay was the rise of hedonism and the move away from monogomas coupling. Of the civilisations that failed they all did that. There were no exceptions. This is what is happening now.
Personally I think that what will happen over the course of the next 50 years is the people without the social training and discipline to reproduce will weed themselves out of the gene pool. Societies that turn themselves around and promote pair bonding and have sustainable economies that support families will survive and reproduce themselves. Before the haters try and flame me I am a complete hedonist and libertarian. Whatever floats your boat do it. But I also love reading history, and as Churchill says History may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes. In 50 years time, I will be in the ground but my son will see this planet have a couple of billion less people are a large number of countries have half their populations.
The Roman Empire lasted 1,962 years (the Byzantine’s were Roman), or 2,315 years if you count the Holy Roman Empire.
The Egyptian Empire lasted 3120 years.
The west simply has too much wealth to naturally collapse in our lifetime or even our great grandkids’ lifetimes, though that doesn’t mean hardship isn’t on the way. (Though a Yellowstone eruption or Coronal Mass Ejection could end any civilization at any point in time)
if you look at it, they were all social issues, yes we are due for another dark age
There are distinct aspects of cultures throughout history which seem to disappear but I think it’s more accurate to say that cultures absorb and are absorbed. It’s all a big murky soup of music and architecture and nothing ever really ‘falls’ in the sense that you mean. Levels of prosperity might change where you live but there will still be people and those people will still be connected to their past and future through a malleable, enduring culture. I don’t think there’s any kind of grand ‘fall’ when one people becomes another.
You might enjoy ‘A Short History of Decay’ by Emil Cioran.
I definitely feel like I’m in the series finale of America, if that’s what you mean.
Yes
In ‘Sapiens’ Harari gives our species less than 1000 years. So I guess there is a chance we are cooked. I mean looking at global affairs he might have a point. Maybe the new monkeys won’t fuck up in another 150k years.
I don’t think we’re there yet, but I do think we’re well on our way
Well primitive tribes from the past historically almost always came together when faced with a greater foe or adversity. If aliens would be discovered I think all the issues of countries with each other would seem trivial. Tribalism at its finest. Or maybe some world ending event like a asteroid heading towards earth.
I mean let’s take the “recent” example of Germany, modern germany is only 25 years old, before that it was two different countries, before that a dictatorship, before that a republic, before that an empire, before that it didn’t exist and all were basically towns that were their own countries, but they all spoke German (why they unified thanks to Von Bismarck). The spirit of my observation is, despite all this, the Germans have always had to get up and go to work and live their normal lives the best they could despite the drama of politics, so has their society really fallen in the grand scheme of things? I think not .
Sure, but so are most things. There are a lot of very different things that we now see as a civilization “falling”. The effort we put in determines how long it’s staved off and whether we get to bring a parachute. Many empires didn’t have any cataclysm but slowly faded in power with people returning to simpler lives. I’m not in love with a simpler life but I’d take it over a civil war or mass plague any day, we get to choose as the people living in civilization which one the people of the future will experience.
COVID, Y2K, nuclear weapons/Cold War, the ozone hole, the Global Financial Crisis, and countless other events triggered hyperbolic news headlines and doomers claiming that we were definitely at the doorstep of Armageddon because this time was different.
Yet here we are… mostly ok. Living in arguably the most peaceful and bountiful era of human history.
During none of those times did civilization, as a whole, fail
Read Ray Dalio. What is happening now has happened before. It is kind of normal, actually. Not fun, but part of living in the world.
The US jumped the shark in 2016, so not sure how much longer we’ll even be a superpower, much less who will fill the vacuum.