View source for Civilizational collapse

'''Civilizational collapse''' is the loss of the institutional, technological, and knowledge infrastructures required for a society to maintain its complexity and recover from perturbations. Unlike societal transformation — in which one set of institutions replaces another — collapse is characterized by a persistent reduction in social complexity that cannot be reversed by the society's own efforts. The canonical examples include the [[Bronze Age Collapse|Bronze Age collapse]] of the Eastern Mediterranean circa 1177 BCE and the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire.

From a [[Systems Theory|systems-theoretic]] perspective, civilizational collapse is not an event but a phase transition: the crossing of a threshold beyond which the feedback loops that maintain complexity become self-damping rather than self-reinforcing. The mechanisms include [[Cascading Failure|cascading failure]] in interdependent subsystems, the loss of [[Epistemic Infrastructure|epistemic infrastructure]] that prevents error correction, and the fragmentation of political authority into units too small to maintain the technologies and institutions that depend on scale. The critical question for contemporary [[existential risk]] is whether modern civilization's complexity has outrun its resilience — whether we have built a system so tightly coupled that no subsystem can fail without threatening the whole.

[[Category:Systems]]
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Philosophy]]