Societal Collapse benefits 99% of people who survived
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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Unfortunately, I think this will not ring true in this case. Climate collapse is going to be rough for the 1-10 million people alive after the next 100 years.
...except for, you know, all the people that die.
And the people who survive but suffered during, it's not like societal collapse is a quick weekend activity.
Hey, let's be fair: to many, that is "better off". 🥹
Are we gonna pretend there's not a shit load of people dying right now as a direct result of our current system?
It is really nothing compared to what will happen if the current international infrastructure supporting hospitals and food delivery breaks down.
Most people don't grow their own food, they buy it from a store. There's about a week, maybe two of fresh food in the system, depending on local population density and available suppliers. Maybe a month or two of dry goods.
Hospitals are highly dependent on consumables to provide care. In a month they're out of exam gloves, masks, sample tubes, hand sanitizer, antibiotics - then sanitation starts to break down and hospital-acquired infections start to ramp up. Less time for high-value items like anesthetics, immune suppressants and other specialty drugs. The volume of chlorine and isopropyl needed daily just to keep things clean will be a problem. Anything less than immediate life-threatening conditions starts getting turned away because the hospital is a source of danger for otherwise healthy people, and they might not have the resources to provide care anyway. The emergency room runs out of blood bags.
In the present, the things that keep people alive are dependent on just-in-time logistics systems. There's very little inventory stored anywhere, because it's cheaper to not store stuff. If the trade relationships break down and the supplies become unreliable, it falls apart. And it doesn't have to all come to a complete halt for people to die, it just has to become unstable so that sometimes the right things don't show up at the right places at the right times.
Systemic collapse would lead to orders of magnitude more deaths.
Mortality rates are rock bottom by historical standards, if you want to bring the present into it.
I mean, you are right, but the media doesn't really like to cover those stories or their root causes so to the average uninformed person it can seem like that.
Yeah, I feel there's an "eventually" missing off the end of that.
You ignore the people dying or just withering away right under your nose in the current system.
Or worse, you demonize them.
Um, what's with the personal attack dude?
That's the editorial "you", not personal. Swap out for "they" or "the author". 🤗
Maybe for 99% of the next generation that grows up in a new society...
Definitely not for 99% of society when it collapses.
Yeah, when this society collapses, most of us will be dead. Maybe all, depending on how destroyed our biosphere will be.
Destroying society could actually save the biosphere...
The Mongol invasion of Asia in the 1200s took enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to offset a year's worth of the world's gasoline demand today, according to a new study. But even Genghis Khan couldn't create more than a blip in atmospheric carbon compared to the overwhelming effect of agriculture.
The study, published online Jan. 20 in the journal The Holocene, looked at land use and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between the years 800 and 1850. Globally at the time, humans were cutting down forests for agriculture, driving carbon into the atmosphere (vegetation stores carbon, so trees and shrubs are what scientists call "carbon sinks"). But in some regions during certain times, wars and plagues culled the population, disrupting agriculture and allowing forests to regrow.
https://www.livescience.com/11739-wars-plagues-carbon-climate.html
Sure, it would suck to live in Europe while it was happening, but if we didn't have that breathing room we'd really be fucked by climate change right now.
On a long enough timeline, there's very little "good" or "bad". Life, uh, finds a way.
Hmm, looks like this guy is an economist. The basic idea that collapse is redistributive has been kicking around for a while, so that's fine. The idea that collapse happens because of inequality has to deal with a mountain of counterexamples, and the idea that all leaders are evil has to deal with the fact most of them are just random people with the right family, historically.
Without buying his book, I'd love to know what the citation for the post-Roman thing is, and what area and period was being analysed.
It's good to be skeptical, so I'll apply the same to your comment. The idea that leaders aren't evil because they were selected based on genes/heritage relies on the assumption that being surrounded by power and examples of inequality working to your benefit as a child does not affect a person's character and that evil leaders are more often made evil either as a selection trait for, or a result of, having climbed social strata from a position outside of power to one inside of power. I find this assumption hard to accept, personally
It's fair to say there's cultural continuity, and the kid of a conqueror is unlikely to take issue directly with conquest, but then the generations roll by, and you get the people that seemed awful being more sympathetic in a later chapter of history. If, like me, you're a white person in North America, you probably try to be an example.
It's pretty easy to find examples of aristocrats sympathetic to the plight of the common people, like the left wing of Victorian politics, aristocrats who were any other flavour of ideological you want, or just ones recorded as personally kind. Raising bad kids isn't necessarily easier than raising good ones, as far as I can tell. People are just going to have their own story regardless of what their parents would like.
To be clear, are you also arguing all leaders are evil? I think that's actually a minority position which the author seems to be leaning on; most people have some leader they think was cool, or at least alright.
and that evil leaders are more often made evil either as a selection trait for, or a result of, having climbed social strata from a position outside of power to one inside of power.
What's so hard about that one? Really, I see it in person. The successful politicians I know aren't evil, exactly, but they're definitely pretty manipulative. Because if you aren't willing to play the game, you don't win. In less democratic countries, it's a whole different, more corrupt and violent game, and I can see how narcissism or psychopathy would be major assets.
If you're saying all leaders are influenced to be evil, you're either talking about an ancient global conspiracy, or you have to deal with the fact there's been a lot of history and a lot of totally different groups of people that ended up on top. It would be hard to explain how the chain was never broken.
Most of the world now lives in huge cities. A societal collapse probably would be devastating for a much larger proportion of the population than in previous times. A lot of dead people as well as lot of dog eat dog behaviour due to no food in cities.
And human eat dog. And dog eat human. Because of the no food. Maybe even human eat human!
yeah we have never had a global societal collapse.
It'd be pretty easy to migrate out of cities. And necessary, if we had to go back to more primitive, labour intensive kinds of agriculture for some reason (although I question how easy fully forgetting mechanisation would be, at this point).
Indeed, it's exactly what tends to happen after a collapse. Rome was whittled down to a minor center, almost a village, before it started to grow again IIRC.
We're talking about the breakdown of supply chains. Agriculture depends on those supply chains. Industrial agriculture, which relies on the mass manufacture of fertilizers, is the only way we are able to feed everyone on the planet. Sure, people would flee (literally flee) the cities - and then every country town and villiage would be filled with desperate people ready to slit your throat for an ear of corn because there literally is not enough food for everyone.
Yes, modern yields could not be sustained for long, that's true. If we assume whatever killed civilisation didn't kill a lot of people already, famine is guaranteed. You made it sound like everyone would stay put, though.
Our world depends upon fossil fuels to drive modern agricultural machinery, move fertilisers (mostly produced from fossil fuels) and transport produce. After a collapse there will be virtually no oil refining and fuel transporting going on. In a similar way there is no huge stockpile of food in the granaries of the more developed countries. If you live where it’s more subsistence based, you may not notice a collapse but elsewhere people will be walking for days before seeing the city edge.
Billions of people migrating to the country. Sounds like fun!
I mean, more like millions in every particular area, less if there's a lot of initial dead. But anyway, no, I don't think it would be.
Only problem is, we are by now in a technological position that the next collapse has a decent chance of being our last collapse.
So we’ll be healthy and egalitarian forever, hooray!
About 80 years.
Historically, the only thing we've learned from past events is that we can't ever learn from past events
History loves a rhyme.
"people in the post-Roman world were taller and healthier"
This is indicative of the timescale the researcher is examining. People don't grow taller after they're adults. Populations grow taller.
Societal collapse is bad, many people will die. It's just good after the fact, if you survive. Unfortunately, the bourgeoisie forces the dichotomy: socialism or barbarism.
Yeah, I wonder about that too. In Britain, at least, you see public buildings turn into feudal manors pretty quickly. It wasn't exactly a common people's free for all. So, is this like 300 AD Italy vs. 600 AD Italy, with a much lower population and migration of Germanic people that were maybe just physically larger?
Unfortunately, the bourgeoisie forces the dichotomy: socialism or barbarism.
Marx would have said most of these empires need more bourgeoisie, since they were run by aristocrats.
the words many and most are doing a lot of heavy lifting here
They're generally pretty smug about not being "always" or "never".
Except for nuclear bombs in the hands of a toddler with dementia.
Good news, everyone
It largely depends on us choosing to organize hegemony for more equality, or not.