1/8 Why is the collapse of western civilization already happening, but few even notice? And why will none of us be Road warrior warlords in a Mad Max future? It's because the collapse of complex societies seldom happen that way.
2/ Getting into the weeds on the multiple reasons for decline would take a tweet thread a mile long. Suffice to say that complex societies seldom fall for a single reason. They can take an earthquake, corruption, inflation, war, or plague, but not several at once.
3/ But mainly they fall because the will to pay for its upkeep is no longer there. Most societies, like Rome, collapse when the collective weight of taxes, rules and regulations, originally implemented to make life better, become such a burden that collapse becomes preferable.
4/ But collapse is paradoxically seldom that. It's a gradual grinding, almost imperceptible string of things just degrading over time, until they're abandoned a good while before they are competely non functional.
5/ This is how the fall of the western Roman empire played out. Unless you lived in a major city when it got sacked, you could almost imagine nothing had really changed over a generation. Life in your villa carried on. But suddenly some trade goods were getting hard to come by.
6/ So now you were forced to rely more on local, simpler solutions. One day your water system fails, and the local craftsmen can only do a slap job. So now you fill in your pool and convert it to a pig sty. It makes sense. You can almost convince yourself it's an upgrade.
7/ Then that grand living room with the fancy mosaic floor makes more sense as a stable. And by the time you've gone truly Dark Ages everyone who remembered anything fundamentally different are long dead.
8/ This is precisely why the Roman collapse was was so complete, because it was so gradual. By the time it was over, the buildings and infrastructure had been canibalized for building stone, and the people with the know how to boot start an advanced civilization again were gone.
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