The Psychology of Collapse
by Jason GodeskyA crucial part of planning for collapse, and an objection that comes up in almost every other thread, is understanding the element that human psychology will play. Less important than the actual forces at play in collapse, are the perceived forces, and how people will react to them. If food is scarce, won’t people move into the countryside? Won’t the wilderness be overrun with others trying to do the same thing, desperately looking for food? Common sense would tell us just that. There’s certainly some evidence to cite for such a scenario, such as the migrations that followed the Roman Third Century Crisis–since we in the West look to the fall of Rome as our archetype of civilization’s collapse, it is a natural argument to make. But, I believe, it is still an incorrect read on Western psychology, and how it is likely to react to the unfolding reality of collapse.
The scenario above is outlined by the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt in “Corruption in North Korea’s Economy“:
Economic collapse is a very fuzzy, elastic sort of word. It can be defined in many different ways. I would offer you one very particular definition for economic collapse. That would be the breakdown of the food system in the country: more particularly, the breakdown of the ordinary division of labor by which ordinary men and women trade their work for food on a national basis. That trade happens in every country under ordinary circumstances, even in countries like Bangladesh or elsewhere where there are hungry people. Those who are hungry simply aren’t able to participate in the division of labor as effectively as they should.
There were a few instances in the 20th Century where an economic collapse of the sort that I just described actually took place. There was an economic collapse in Japan in the months before the end of World War II. There was an economic collapse, a breakdown of the division of labor and the food system, in Nazi Germany in the months before the Nazi defeat.
One of the things that happens when you have a breakdown of that sort, a breakdown of the national food system, is a massive deurbanization of the population. As might be imagined: the society breaks into individual family units, and these millions of family units move from cities to countryside in a desperate hunt for food.
Here we have two examples, one ancient and one contemporary, illustrating precisely this argument. How can someone reasonably argue that this is not a plausible scenario?
Both of these examples share a common thread: in neither the Third Century Crisis, nor in an economic collapse, is there an ecological component of collapse, but that is precisely what we face. Both are false analogies. Economic collapse is not the collapse of society, and in the case of both Germany and Japan in the aftermath of World War II, they remained complex societies. Rome faced a maintenance crisis (where collapse is brought about primarily by the weight of the society’s own complexity), not catabolic collapse (where collapse is brought about primarily by external factors which the society’s complexity is no longer sufficiently profitable to answer). We face the latter; Rome faced the former. They are very different things, with very different consequences.
For a model of what awaits us, we should look to those societies that did suffer catabolic collapse with an ecological component, such as the Maya. Jeremy Sabloff discusses the Maya parallel to our own predicament with, “The New Archaeology and the Ancient Maya,” where he notes:
At a time when population was growing, many Maya were leaving full-time agricultural production to become urban workers, deserting rural homes to live in the city.
More importantly, our attitudes towards cities and farming have changed over the course of the twentieth century, as the cities themselves have changed. In “Urbanization and Global Change,” an online lecture from the University of Michigan, the basics of rural-urban migration are outlined:
Typically, a pull factor initiates migration that can be sustained by push and other factors that facilitate or make possible the change. For example, a farmer in rural Mexico whose land has become unproductive because of drought (push factor) may decide to move to Mexico City where he perceives more job opportunities and possibilities for a better lifestyle (pull factor). In general, cities are perceived as places where one could have a better life, because of better opportunities, higher salaries, better services, and better lifestyles. The perceived better conditions attract poor people from rural areas.
With a quick collapse, the longest periods are those of recession, and then depression. As the process accelerates, a society moves very quickly to a complete breakdown over the period of only a few decades. In the particular case of the situation we face, we are likely to first see higher prices for fossil fuels, and thus, higher prices for fertilizer. Indeed, that is a problem we are already facing, as detailed in a report from Texas A&M, which also noted another problem we will face in this collapse: water shortages.
These are precisely the “push” factors mentioned above that traditionally motivate rural workers into the cities. The “pull” factor is psychological; we view cities as places of safety. We view the wilderness as a difficult and dangerous place.
They may not be entirely off-base. Toby Hemenway highlighted that cities could be more sustainable than farms in “Peak Oil and Urban Sustainability” and “Cities, Peak Oil, and Sustainability.” In “Changing Perspectives on Caracol, Belize: Long-Term Archaeological Research and the Northeast Sector Settlement Program,” Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase note that the Maya attempted the very same program:
The settlement archaeology undertaken at Caracol has also demonstrated how the site was a “garden city.” Agriculture was not outside the urban domain; rather it was an integral part of it. Regularly spaced markets, likel y occurring at most causeway termini, would have been integral to the city and centrally controlled. The more-or-less regular spacing of residential groups and their lack of aggregation is further reflection of Caracol’s strong bureaucracy. This bureauc ratic organization is also directly reflected in Caracol’s causeway system. What is surprising, and what was not expected at the start of the project, is the large scale at which the various Caracol systems operated.
The preferability of cities to farming does not mean that they are sustainable, though. When the Classic Maya collapsed, so did Caracol, and though our own cities may fare better than our farms, dead is still dead. These are the only options available to the civilized imagination, though; between the two of them, modern Westerners are much more likely to choose the city, even though it, too, is doomed.
Westerners have been trained to respond to collapse through a whole genre of disaster movies. Always, people turn to the cities for safety. In every zombie movie, in every disaster movie, the city is the goal–the shining beacon of stability, safety and prosperity that must be reached. This is the psychological background most Westerners share.
I live in Western Pennsylvania, an area that boasts some 1/4 of the NRA’s membership. I know many people who supplement their diet with hunted meat. Yet, invariably, they see this as supplemental–not primary. The idea of living that way never enters their mind. When it’s suggested, the most frequent response is to look at me as if I’ve suddenly grown a second, evil head. When the economy takes a downturn, these people hunt less, not more; they see their supplemental hunting as a primarily recreational activity, not as a viable source of food. They move closer to urban areas, so that they can work longer hours to make more money–a strategy that precludes the exploitation of alternative means of subsistence. Rather than lessen their dependency on complexity, they intensify it.
Ultimately, collapse always results in the “abandonment” of urban centers, but that abandonment can take many forms. Sometimes, it means just what the word implies–people move out of the cities. Other times, it means that everyone crowds into the cities, hoping to escape the poverty of the countryside, only to die in an orgy of violence, famine, disease and grisly cannibalism. As we saw in “Why People Starve,” a lack of imagination, rather than a lack of skills, is a far more critical distinction between survivors and victims.
There may be some that look to the wilderness to provide for them, but they will be the exception, rather than the rule. It is more likely that post-collapse foragers will have too few survivors, than too many. In the end, the city’s survivors may make a mad dash into the countryside to try farming, but that will not be possible. As we saw in thesis #29, there is little arable land left. There may be attempts, but what wilderness is left now is left for a reason; even at peak energy, we cannot convert that land into crops. How much less will it be viable for the few survivors from the cities? Post-collapse, it will be an impossible task merely to keep the land already under cultivation, much less to expand into new land.
In all, the uniquely urban mentality of the modern Western mind is more likely to draw people into the cities in times of want, rather than away from them. It will be a rare exception that defies that trend, an exception that will have little to no hope of establishing any kind of farm without industrial fertilizers, on land sucked dry by centuries of monocropping and soil depletion. The single greatest bottleneck in the human population will not be skill, but imagination. I suspect that in the first generations after collapse, there will be something of a baby boom, as the population corrects itself–I expect fewer to pass the necessary threshold of imagination, than could actually be supported by our ecology, however diminished by civilization’s abuses. Blessed are they who can imagine a world beyond civilization, for they shall inherit the earth.
Rome fell simply because it was taken over by Germans. I do not completely buy the complexity argument.
Depending on one’s neighborhood, the city may be safer than the countryside, where isolated homesteads can be overwhelmed.
Comment by Mark — 3 March 2006 @ 12:15 PM
No. Rome fell for all kinds of reasons that historians have been debating for quite some time.* But, more to the point … Rome repulsed much larger barbarian hordes than that which crossed the Rhine in 409 CE, so if Rome’s complexity (part of which was its ability to effectively maintain a military garrison and defend its borders) was just as effective in the fourth century as it was in the first, why did the smaller horde in 409 succeed, where the much larger hordes of earlier centuries fail? Rome withstood wave after wave of barbarian attacks over several centuries, but nearly all of them only began with the Third Century Crisis–the very archetype of a maintenance crisis.
The level of barbarian aggression wasn’t just constant, it actually dwindled. The problem is, Rome’s diminishing returns for complexity dwindled even faster.
Tainter deals with many of the alternative explanations for collapse, including the idea of invasion as you propose. Besides the evidence, it is not even logically sound, since defense against outside aggression is one of the primary reasons people develop complex societies to begin with.
* My first website was “The Saxon Shore,” dealing with Britain in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, so I spent a good decade up to my eyeballs in the fall of Rome. It’s one of the subjects I know really, really well. I went to academic conferences, I was awarded a fellowship in college to write a book in it. This is one of those subjects where I have more than just a prurient interest; I was “in the shit.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 March 2006 @ 12:23 PM
Why look at Rome when we have a perfectly good recent example - Russia and most of the rest of the Soviet Union (there’s a few pockets that are doing reasonably ok). The industry collapsed, population is plummeting at unprecedented rates (at least for modernity), young people are leaving the dead-end provincial cities/villages in droves. It’s pretty interesting what is going on there.
I want to nitpick a bit. I don’t agree that there’s no arable land left. A lot of farmland was lost to suburbs and surely the land that isn’t paved can still be farmed? There was also a lot of land set aside for preserves etc. that used to be farmland but isn’t needed with more efficient (in terms of land use) farming methods now. There are economic factors too. Farming is probably less profitable now than it ever was so a lot of marginal land is abandoned. It could still support people living on it but not if they want to use industrial methods to sell the produce on the market and be able to pay the mortgage. Since land prices will likely drop in a collapse situation that won’t hold people back anymore and as laws and property enforcement drop away it will be even less of an impediment. Of course this is all assuming that people want to go back to the hardlife of farming when they have hope of living the “easy” life in the city with (intermittently) running water.
Comment by DigitalDjigit — 3 March 2006 @ 2:16 PM
Jason, but what about the children?
Your neighbors who are hunters also teach their kids to hunt, right?
If they have to go to work more hours, won’t their kids go ahead and hunt some meat? After all, if economical depression sets in, there won’t be enough jobs left for the teenagers and their parents. And children in any culture have a lot of untapped imagination. Who knows what else they’ll come up with besides hunting to help out their families.
Children in collapsing societies will receive relatively little cultural indoctrination, and will be much less controlled by institutions.
Comment by _Gi — 3 March 2006 @ 3:56 PM
They move to the cities, so their children don’t have the opportunity to hunt. By the time they’d be able to transport themselves far enough out from the city to go hunting, they’re expected to instead start earning an income to support the family.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 March 2006 @ 4:34 PM
How are they going to move to the cities if the cost of living in the cities is so high compared to where they are now? I understand how the head of household might move to earn some money, but why would the rest of the family abandon the house where they live?
Comment by _Gi — 3 March 2006 @ 6:49 PM
Because the cost of living in the cities won’t be so high compared to where they are now. If you can find an apartment close enough to where you work, that’s a lot less expensive than having a car, paying for gas, paying for expensive fertilizer, etc. The restriction of fossil fuels will make things a lot worse for rural folk a lot faster than urban–see Toby Hemenway’s articles, as cited and linked above. Despite all the nasty things about them, cities are very good at leveraging economies of scale.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 March 2006 @ 6:57 PM
But only someone who actually works in the city has to be there. A single guy will have a much easier time finding space in the city than the whole family.
A logical choice would be to leave the family behind and share a room and expenses with someone just like you, exactly the way many undocumented workers are doing now. Then the kids are left where they are, the money is coming to them from the city and the kids are free to go hunting and foraging and grow things in the yard.
Comment by _Gi — 3 March 2006 @ 7:19 PM
The first wave of bankruptcies during the Great Depression was in the farming community. However, during the course of the depression, the farming community actually grew population while those in the cities suffered.
Check out this interchangeable rifle/shotgun:
http://thompsoncenter.primediaoutdoors.com/tcstory18.html
It’s lightweight and may be The tool for hunting as many calibers gives one an edge when needing to find ammo.
Comment by Rick Larson — 3 March 2006 @ 9:47 PM
Regarding Rome: I’ve read Tainter but I agree more with Peter Heather’s new book, “The Fall of the Roman Empire”.
To make a comparison: the US regularly defeated Mexicans for generations, but in the last 20 years, Mexicans have shown greater “will” or desire and are reconquering the Southwest. There is little, I believe, that “Anglos” can do about it. And it’s prbably not because of complexity (I think, anyway).
I’ve read Jared Diamond and think he’s full of nonsense. He has been discredited by someone, I forgot who, but I can look it up if need be.
Comment by Mark — 4 March 2006 @ 12:28 PM
This is my understanding too … I reread the referenced Thesis #29 which seems to suggest that horticulture, not agriculture, will be possible for many survivors.
I expect that many people will not move to the country and grow food because they will sit around starving and moaning that they want their job and green papers back… while I will be excited to be growing green vegetables rather than getting the silly paper from punching a time clock.
Comment by Ryvr — 4 March 2006 @ 7:34 PM
I find these debates over where it will be better to live during a collapse fascinating. They can be found on several of the top Peak Oil sites. Most people agree that the city will be a better place for survival due to the increased probability of finding work.
This is where the logic falls apart for me. My mind immediately asks, “What city-type work will be left in a bona fide collapse?” Think about that for a minute. Most of the work performed in cities consists of little more than shuffling paper–both actual and virtual. In a state of collapse, where people must refocus on the basics of survival: shelter, food, water, and safety, most of those big city job skills will become worthless over-night.
So what if you were a “master of the universe” Wall Street banker before the crash? If I control access to food, you may not have much to barter with after you have sold off all your furnishings and art at firesale prices in the initial stages of collapse.
The people who will survive will most likely be the ones with basic skills such as knowing how to grow/hunt food, repair generators, and salvage photovoltiac systems and other necessities.
A major currency in an energy-induced collpase will be your energy. If you need food but lack money to pay for it, then hop aboard that stationery bike connected to a generator and peddle for an hour to keep the merchant’s refrigeration systems running.
One more point: this debate always makes it sound as if the choice in residences is between Brooklyn and some isolated farm 30 miles outside of Hootersville.
Why not something in between these two extremes? Last summer I chose a small city of 165K people near prime agriculture country. This city is about 100 miles north of Seattle and 60 miles south of Vancouver. It’s an affluent hippie place so the people are to my liking.
If things get really bad, one of these farms may want to hire an extra hand with my business experience. If things become truly desperate, I’d happily work for food and a bunk-bed in lieu of a paycheck.
Comment by Peter — 5 March 2006 @ 2:39 PM
I hope this doesn’t get too technical, but Mark obviously knows something about the fall of Rome, so I feel obliged to get into the “nitty-gritty” here.
Even since Gibbon, all historians have noted that the Germanic invasions were a proximate cause of the Western Roman Empire’s collapse, but not its ultimate cause. The consensus is that Rome suffered from a number of internal problems that provided a situation where Germanic tribes were able to overcome the empire, despite having failed so many times before, even when they had greater numbers, and greater “will.”
The proximate cause of the Germanic invasions was not any kind of “renewed will” on the part of the Germanic tribes. Rather, a cursory examination of the course of the invasions shows that these were not so much foreign invasions as mercenary revolts. Hired as foederati, the Empire would regularly renege on payment after the fighting was done. Alaric, Odoacer, and nearly all the leaders of the Germanic tribes were leaders of such rebellions, where the mercenaries wanted to be paid.
Why didn’t the Empire just pay them? Roman ethnocentrism certainly played its role, but the reason they left the foederati out in the cold was because the Empire was facing a lot of problems–in most cases, the same problems that prompted the recruitment of the foederati(2) in the first place. First hired due to civil wars (1), it became difficult to pay the foederati in cash (3) or land (4).
(1) Civil wars. The Third Century Crisis was very clearly a problem of diminishing marginal returns on complexity, involving all the facets of complexity. The Empire survived primarily by Diocletion’s fissioning strategy, by creating two polities, thus creating a sort of controlled collapse where the level of complexity and problems of scale were artificially lowered to a more feasible level. By placing most of the resources in the East, and most of the defended borders in the West, this division also set the West up to fail from the start. The civil wars endemic to the Roman Empire since the major conquests of the Republic and the resulting problems of scale and complexity were a response along the same lines to that problem of scale and complexity. Civil wars moved the empire towards a more fractured state, where the problems of diminishing returns were smaller-scale, and thus, more easily dealt with.
(2) The foederati themselves were hired because of Rome’s increasing costs for agricultural production, and the increasing complexity of its legal system and entrenched aristocracy, allowing numerous loopholes by which Roman citizens could escape military service. Caracalla’s universal citizenship was a bold move that gave the Empire several more centuries by vastly increasing the scale on which the Empire’s subjects were willing to invest in complexity (in this case, by giving them a sense of Romanitas, and belonging to the Empire). This answer also made it more difficult to hire soldiers–particularly as the complexity of Rome’s agricultural systems became too much, and those citizens were more urgently needed for farming as productivity decreased. The Empire was thus forced to look outside its borders for military defense, and to rely more heavily on the strategy of foederati. While used from the earliest days of the Empire to one extent or another, it was an eventual over-reliance on that strategy that ultimately led to the end of the Western Empire. The East lasted for several more centuries, and its slow fall is even more illustrative of Tainter’s argument, but let’s stick with the West for the moment.
(3) Hyperinflation, coin clipping and other currency problems plagued the empire from the third century on. Worse, as Tainter explains, the bureaucratic cost of the empire’s increasing administrative complexity consumed larger and larger amounts of the empire’s productivity. This left little money on-hand to pay foederati, and represented something of an ongoing economic crisis.
(4) Rome was an agrarian society, where agricultural land was more valued than cash, and the Germanic tribes shared that worldview. More than cash, they wanted lands inside the empire. More than anything else, the “barbarians” wanted to be Romans. As agricultural productivity continued to drop due to the diminishing marginal returns on productive complexity, competition for the land that remained intensified, with existing citizens exerting pressure on the imperial government not to give precious arable land to “barbarians.” Though cloaked in ethnocentrism, like most ethnic conflicts, this campaign was motivated by basic material needs–in this case, the need for good, arable land to counteract the diminishing marginal returns on complexity that the empire faced.
In all of these cases, we see the root cause is, again and again, the diminishing marginal returns on complexity, operating on multiple, simultaneous levels that give rise to many different symptoms that ultimately combine to bring down the Western Roman Empire with Odoacer’s revolt in 476 CE.
American racism aside, I do not think there will be any Mexican “conquest” of the southwest so long as the United States government remains in power. There is migration, but that is a very different thing from conquest. The southwest will not secede to join Mexico, and the idea of an armed Mexican invasion at any point in the foreseeable future is laughable. Immigrants are, to one extent or another, “assimilated.” Mexicans migrating to the U.S., like Germanic tribes with Rome, want nothing more than to be “Americans.” Our reluctance to admit them is due to the same material needs, driven by the same diminishing returns on complexity (jobs, farmland, “water wars”) as with the Romans. We have yet to screw them over as the Roman Senate did the foederati, though, and until that occurs, they will continue trying to be American, and there will be no revolt. So, I fail to see how it has anything at all to do with “will.”
Diamond has done quite well for himself, but he’s suffered the price of academic fame: “disproving” him has become a cottage industry. His main points are extremely solid, consensus views. Some of his supporting details have drawn a lot more fire. A lot of people take issue with Diamond, but it’s usually on this or that detail; rarely does it address his main point, which are generally not at issue. So, lots of people disagree with him, but all the work done to “discredit” him is of a far more academically questionable level of quality than Diamond himself. He is sometimes controversial, but he is by no means discredited.
None. But people don’t recognize collapse when it’s upon them. They recognize an economic downturn, a recession, or even a depression. By the time Odoacer declared himself King of Italy in 476 CE, Rome had been sacked several times. No one thought it was the end of the empire at the time. As a catabolic collapse, ours will likely happen much more quickly, but I will be surprised if it happens so quickly that we don’t first see a surge of migration to the cities with rural folk giving up their farms and looking for work in the city. When they get there, they’ll likely find that there is no work, and perhaps be stuck there for the horrific orgy of violence to follow.
This is included when I mention a “city.” It’s still completely unsustainable and far beyond the limits of what the region could support without leeching resources from a much larger hinterland.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 March 2006 @ 10:30 AM
Jason,
I’m a 20 minute walk from the mountains where I can forage if need be.
Comment by Peter — 6 March 2006 @ 11:22 AM
You’re lucky, but I’d still maintain that it’s your quick escape that’s your best hope, and that small city that’s your worst danger.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 March 2006 @ 2:56 PM
my situation is odd but I think workable and pertains to this conversation. I live in huntinton wv with my wife in a rented 3 bdrm house with huge backyard. the house is a 1920’s bungalo with upgrades ect. we are starting a huge square foot garden in the huge backyard and seeing about a goat. the landlord loves this. being a small business man, he sees the writing on the wall and hopes I can agro-out the backyard so that if shit turns south I can share-crop it for him. His posisition is that most of his tennets are worthless urban poor, students, and crackheads/white trash ect. if shit goes south I can make a difference in his familys food budget/supply. we pay 475$ a month and around the time the Girl and I are having money probs in a collapse would be around the time that most of his tenets default therby making my food operation worthwile on his end. the soil is untouched yard, low clay, for 1.7 feet since 1920. oak tree for acorn flower and permaculture design should be the key for us. that and .22 poaching with the AR-7. Huntington is a former small city that just hit small town pop status in the ohio river vally. near a tri-state border and without suberbs. you are in city, in someones backyard, or in the middle of nowhere hill country.
so we are basically combining hunter/gatherer technoloy with horticulture. with a bugout plan to woods ninja mode should the need arise. the city violence thing is not a biggie unless its the govt doing the violence. we have 15,000 rds, good fences with armed friends and small to medium mob control perimeters set up in this quiet and poor community.
–john
Comment by frater_coyote — 12 March 2006 @ 2:31 AM
Peter commented:
Granted, Bellingham’s a nice town, but 165K is high for sustainability once things tighten up — though of course population decline will take care of some of that. Two years ago my spouse and I moved from Seattle to a small college town in Oregon, population 20K, located in an agricultural region with a lot of organic horticulture, 300+ miles and two mountain ranges from the nearest large city in any direction you care to name. To my mind that’s closer to sustainability.
Still, your basic point is valid. There’s a tendency to think in hard dualisms — megalopolis vs. wilderness — when there’s a lot of potential gradation between the two. Also, of course, what works in one place, or for one person, may not work elsewhere or for someone else.
Comment by John Michael Greer — 21 March 2006 @ 5:36 AM