Tag: decline and fall

Complexity and the fall of empires II

In which we delve deeper into Ugo Bardi’s explanation of complexity, collapse, and the way in which the collapse of the Roman Empire offers a means of understanding the ongoing collapse of the American empire and the global financial system:

Tainter goes well beyond the simplistic interpretation of many earlier authors and identifies a key point in the question of collapse. Societies are complex entities; he understands that. And, hence, their collapse must be related to complexity. Here is an excerpt of Tainter’s way of thinking. It is a transcription of a interview that Tainter gave in the film “Blind Spot” (2008)

“In ancient societies that I studied, for example the Roman Empire, the great problem that they faced was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo. Invest very high amounts in solving problems that don’t yield a net positive return, but instead simply allowed them to maintain what they already got. This decreases the net benefit of being a complex society.”

So, you see that Tainter has one thing very clear: complexity gives a benefit, but it is also a cost. This cost is related to energy, as he makes clear in his book. And in emphasizing complexity, Tainter gives us a good definition of what we intend for collapse. Very often people have been discussing the collapse of ancient societies without specifying what they meant for “collapse”. For a while, there has been a school of thought that maintained that the Roman Empire had never really “collapsed”. It had simply transformed itself into something else. But if you take collapse defined as “a rapid reduction of complexity” then you have a good definition and that’s surely what happened to the Roman Empire.

The Romans kept increasing the size of their army even after the economic returns that they got from military activities went down, actually may have become negative. It is exactly the same behavior of whalers in 19th century who kept increasing the size of the whaling fleet even it was clear that there weren’t enough whales to catch to justify that….

So, I think we have enough data, here, to prove the validity of the model – at least in qualitative terms. Maybe somebody should collect good data, archaeological and historical, and made a complete dynamic model of the Roman Empire. That would be very interesting, but it is beyond my possibilities for now. Anyway, even from these qualitative data we should be able to understand why the Empire was in trouble. One of the main causes of the trouble was that it had this big military apparatus, the legions, that needed to be paid and didn’t bring in any profit. It was the start of an hemorrhage of gold that couldn’t be reversed. In addition, the Empire bled itself even more by building an extensive system of fortifications – the limes that had to be maintained and manned, besides being expensive in themselves.

The story of the fortifications is a good example of what we had said; the attempt of a complex system to maintain homeostasis. The Romans must have understood that legions were too expensive if you had to keep so many of them to keep the borders safe. So, they built these walls. I imagine that the walls were built by slaves; and a slave surely cost less than a legionnaire. Slaves, however, were not good as fighters – I suppose that if you gave a sword to a slave he might think to run away or to use it against you. You know the story of Spartacus, the leader of a slave revolt in Roman times. I am sure that the Romans didn’t want to risk that again. But with walls the Romans had found a way to replace legionnaires with slaves. You needed less legionnaires to defend a fortification than to defend an open field. That was a way to save money, to keep homeostasis. But it wasn’t enough – obviously. The Romans still needed to pay for the legions and – as a disadvantage – the walls were a rigid system of defense that couldn’t be changed. The Romans were forced to man the walls all along their extension and that must have been awfully expensive. The Empire had locked itself in a cage from which it would never be able to escape. Negative feedback kills.

Military expenses were not the only cause of the fall. With erosion gnawing at agricultural yields and mine productivity going down, we should not be surprised if the empire collapsed. It simply couldn’t do otherwise. So, you see that the collapse of the Roman Empire was a complex phenomenon where different negative factors reinforced each other. It was a cascade of negative feedbacks, not a single one, that brought down the empire.

The key phrase, and the one that is particularly relevant to the current situation, is this: “the great problem… was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo”. So, what are the primary aspects of the current status quo that require increasingly expensive maintenance?

I see two areas that fit the description of a response to a problem that creates a destructive series of feedback loops. The first is debt and the second is immigration. The debt issue is obvious, since new debt keeps being created to pay off the old debts; this strategy will work right up until new debt can’t be created, in which case default which destroys a significant percentage of the powerful financial institutions or increased inflation which further hammers the economy and the populace is inevitable.

Immigration was posited as the solution for the declining native birthrates that threatened the intergenerational Ponzi scheme of entitlements, but it is proving to be far more expensive in a broad variety of ways than its advocates expected. It was intriguing to see Ann Coulter finally, after all these years, turn openly against legal immigration, although she unsurprisingly, and erroneously, attempted to blame it on Democrats despite the Republican elite’s unstinting support of it. I note that one seldom hears the Bush-era claim that Hispanics are “natural conservatives” any longer, which I and others pointed out was totally ludicrous at the time.

There are, of course, other elements that have contributed heavily to American decline and fall, indeed, Bardi and Trainer both specifically deny the idea that there is any one causal factor in societal collapses. But for all that free trade, domestic spending, and foreign wars have added pressure to the structure, they have not created negative feedback cycles of the sort that debt and population demographics have.

Complexity and the fall of empires I

Ugo Bardi has a fascinating post on the way in which Rome hit its limits and how even those Romans who perceived its decline failed to understand why it was happening:

The Meditations [of Marcus Aurelius] is a statement from a man who was seeing his world crumbling down around him and who strove nevertheless to maintain a personal balance; to keep a moral stance. Aurelius surely understood that something was wrong with the Empire: during all their history, the Romans had been almost always on the offensive. Now, they were always defending themselves. That wasn’t right; of course.

But you never find in the Meditations a single line that lets you suspect that the Emperor thought that there was something to be done other than simply fighting to keep the barbarians out. You never read that the Emperor was considering, say, things like social reform, or maybe something to redress the disastrous situation of the economy. He had no concern, apparently, that the Empire could actually fall one day or another.

Now, I’d like to show you an excerpt from another document; written perhaps by late 4th century. Probably after the battle of Adrianopolis; that was one of last important battles fought (and lost) by the Roman Empire. This is a curious document. It is called, normally, “Of matters of war” because the title and the name of the author have been lost. But we have the bulk of the text and we can say that the author was probably somebody high up in the imperial bureaucracy. Someone very creative – clearly – you can see that from the illustrations of the book. Of course what we see now are not the original illustrations, but copies made during the Middle Ages. But the fact that the book had these illustration was probably what made it survive: people liked these colorful illustrations and had the book copied. So it wasn’t lost. The author described all sorts of curious weaponry. One that you can see here is a warship powered by oxen.

Of course, a ship like this one would never have worked. Think of how to feed the oxen. And think of how to manage the final results of feeding the oxen. Probably none of the curious weapons invented by our anonymous author would ever have worked. It all reminds me of Jeremy Rifkin and his hydrogen based economy. Rifkin understands what is the problem, but the solutions he proposes, well, are a little like the end result of feeding the oxen; but let me not go into that. The point is that our 4th century author does understand that the Roman Empire is in trouble. Actually, he seems to be scared to death because of what’s happening. Read this sentence, I am showing it to you in the original Latin to give you a sense of the flavor of this text.

“In primis sciendum est quod imperium romanum circumlatrantium ubique nationum perstringat insania et omne latus limitum tecta naturalibus locis appetat dolosa barbaries.”

Of course you may not be able to translate from Latin on the spot. For that, being Italian gives you a definite advantage. But let me just point out a word to you:”circumlatrantium” . which refers to barbarians who are, literally, “barking around” the empire’s borders. They are like dogs barking and running around; and not just barking – they are trying hard to get in. It is almost a scene from a horror movie. A nightmare. So the author of “Of matters of war” is thinking of how to get rid of these monsters. But his solutions were not so good. Actually it was just wishful thinking. None of these strange weapons were ever built. Even our 4th century author, therefore, fails completely in understanding what were the real problems of the Empire.

Now, I would like to show you just another document from the time of the Roman Empire. It is “De Reditu suo”, by Rutilius Namatianus. The title means “of his return”. Namatianus was a patrician who lived in the early 5th century; he was a contemporary of St. Patrick, the Irish saint. He had some kind of job with the imperial administration in Rome. It was some decades before the “official” disappearance of the Western Roman Empire; that was in 476, when the last emperor, Romolus Augustulus, was deposed. You may have seen Romulus Augustulus as protagonist of the movie “The Last Legion”. 1Of course that is not a movie that pretends to be historically accurate, but it is fun to think that after so many years we are still interested in the last years of the Roman Empire – it is a subject of endless fascination. Even the book by Namatianus has been transformed into a movie, as you can see in the figure. It is a work of fantasy, but they have tried to be faithful to the spirit of Namatianus’ report. It must be an interesting movie, but it has been shown only in theaters in Italy, and even there for a very short time; so I missed it. But let’s move on.

Namatianus lived at a time that was very close to the last gasp of the Empire. He found that, at some point, it wasn’t possible to live in Rome any longer. Everything was collapsing around him and he decided to take a boat and leave. He was born in Gallia, that we call “France” today, and apparently he had some properties there. So, that is where he headed for. That is the reason for the title “of his return”. He must have arrived there and survived for some time, because the document that he wrote about his travel has survived and we can still read it, even though the end is missing. So, Namatianus gives us this chilling report. Just read this excerpt:

“I have chosen the sea, since roads by land, if on the level, are flooded by rivers; if on higher ground, are beset with rocks. Since Tuscany and since the Aurelian highway, after suffering the outrages of Goths with fire or sword, can no longer control forest with homestead or river with bridge, it is better to entrust my sails to the wayward.”

Can you believe that? If there was a thing that the Romans had always been proud of were their roads. These roads had a military purpose, of course, but everybody could use them. A Roman Empire without roads is not the Roman Empire, it is something else altogether. Think of Los Angeles without highways. “Sic transit gloria mundi” , as the Romans would say; there goes the glory of the world. Namatianus tells us also of silted harbors, deserted cities, a landscape of ruins that he sees as he moves north along the Italian coast.

But what does Namatianus think of all this? Well, he sees the collapse all around him, but he can’t understand it. For him, the reasons of the fall of Rome are totally incomprehensible…. There would be much more to say on this matter, but I think it is enough to say that the Romans did not really understand what was happening to their Empire, except in terms of military setbacks that they always saw as temporary. They always seemed to think that these setbacks could be redressed by increasing the size of the army and building more fortifications. Also, it gives us an idea of what it is like living a collapse “from the inside”. Most people just don’t see it happening – it is like being a fish: you don’t see the water.

What Bardi’s illustration of complex system dynamics and decline make very clear is that Robert Prechter is almost surely correct and collapse is not only unavoidable, but we are already firmly into the decline. One need merely look at the decaying state of American infrastructure to see an echo of the decline of Roman roads; travel is still safe but that may not be the case in another century.

The most important thing to draw from Bardi’s article is the realization that most people, including those at the very top, will find the process incomprehensible and whatever policies are taken will prove to be irrelevant and pointless. As with companies, it is the success of the great societies that sows the seeds of their eventual failure, with Rome it was the limits of legionary utility, with the USA it is more likely to be the limits of trade and immigration utility. It is the continued reliance upon that which made a society strong that tends to prove ultimately fatal because nothing proceeds on linear paths.

One thing the discussion with the free traders has taught me is that most Americans can no more grasp the idea that too much trade is possible any more than most Romans could understand that too much farming or too many legions were possible. After all, those two pillars of the Roman economy were the historical basis of Rome’s original enrichment, so how could a source of enrichment ever prove to be a source of impoverishment, let alone societal decline?

I’ll have more thoughts on this in another post tomorrow.

What’s next, glory holes?

Peep shows are now art:

National Gallery invites ‘voyeurs’ to peek through keyhole at naked woman in bath

Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger took to Twitter to find six women, all called Diana, willing to take turns to be spied upon by the public while they sit naked in a mocked-up bathroom. The work, also called Diana, is inspired by three paintings by Titian which form the centrepiece of the exhibition and features scenes from Greek mythology.

This is obviously an indication that one of the prizes for winning the Turner Prize should be an immediate death sentence. And any artist who voluntarily applies for public funding should be taken out and shot. I’m sure someone can figure out a way to do it artistically and thereby justify federal involvement in the arts.

Seriously, even bankers and pedophiles contribute more constructively to society.

History speeds up

From Zerohedge:

I would also like to quickly note that mainstream economists back in 2011 were predicting the U.S. would reach 101% of GDP by 2021. It is now 2012, only one year later, and we have already crossed the 101% marker.

I may have to rethink that 2033 estimate….

Vanished kingdoms, shifting cultures

“One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if ‘Scottishness’ or ‘Englishness’ were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements. The capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated. In reality, just as individuals can go abroad and merge into a foreign community, so a stationary population, if subjected to a changed linguistic and cultural environment, can quite easily be persuaded to follow suit. Dominant cultures are closely connected to dominant power groups. As the balance of power shifts, the balance of cultures shifts as well.”
– Vanished Kingdoms, Norman Davies

This is exactly why I consider it to be so significant that the racial, ethnic, and cultural mix of the USA has been transformed so dramatically since the two major immigration “reforms” in 1965 and 1986. In the course of half a single lifetime, the USA has gone from a white, Christian nation-state to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-national state. While many people celebrate this, they do so foolishly because they wrongly believe that such transformations are possible without changing all of the aspects of the dominant culture. It’s not that the American people will vanish altogether, but they will become something that can no longer be reasonably considered American, just as the Brythonic Celts of the kingdom of Alt Clud first became “Scottish”, then “British” despite having been ethnically and linguistically distinct.

This is why the USA is now wracked by the same sort of corruption, crime, and legal inequality that occurs in most non-WASP cultures. And this is why we can safely assume that as long as the population mix continues to move towards the polyglot, basic aspects of WASP culture that are assumed to be intrinsic to the geographical location will continue to disappear. In Europe, the nationalism is stronger and the minority populations are smaller, which is why ethnic cleansing of the sort advocated by Greece’s Golden Dawn is the likely outcome, but in the USA, where there is already three, and arguably four, distinct nations, a breakup of the political entity is more probable.

Some are expecting war as a consequence of the failure of the Euro and the coming dissolution of the European Union, but I think it is much more likely to take place in the United States when the people of Aztlan demand their right to self-determination and all the Wilsonian neocons are hoist upon their own petard.

On a related note, the Obama administration is taking the law into its own hands by bypassing Congress and granting amnesty and legal residence to around one million young illegal infiltrators, to use the Israeli term:

The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies. The policy change, described to The Associated Press by two senior administration officials, will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have lived in fear of deportation…. It tracks closely to a proposal offered by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as an alternative to the DREAM Act.

The demolition proceeds

Homogamy has never been about the imitation of marriage. The vast majority of gays don’t even want the public pretense of monogamy that “gay marriage” typically entails. The entire political effort has never been much more than an attempt to force the organized Church to sacrifice Christian values and submit to the mores of the secular state. While the American aspect of the movement is vowing up and down that no church will be forced to perform such “marriages”, the spearhead Danish aspect has already made it clear that no resistance of the state-imposed morality will be permitted.

The country’s parliament voted through the new law on same-sex marriage by a large majority, making it mandatory for all churches to conduct gay marriages. Denmark’s church minister, Manu Sareen, called the vote “historic”. “I think it’s very important to give all members of the church the possibility to get married. Today, it’s only heterosexual couples.”

Denmark has been a pioneer in gay rights since 1989, when it became the first country in the world to offer civil unions for gay couples.

This sort of thing is why I am completely relaxed about the coming decline and devastation of the secular West. Seldom has a civilization more fully merited its fate. The secular hypothesis is that a society built upon a foundation of Christian morality can not only survive, but thrive, after systematically demolishing its foundation. Seculars believe they have already proved the validity of the hypothesis by the fact that the societies of the West have not completely crumbled yet, but they forget that they have only removed a portion of the foundation to date and the demolition process continues. The empirical test is not over, indeed, it is barely underway.

Game over

The demographic sun sets on the USA:

After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history. Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration….

Minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010, Mr. Frey calculated, a surge that has created a very different looking America from the one of the 1950s, when the TV characters Ozzie and Harriet were a national archetype. The change is playing out across states with large differences in ethnic and racial makeup between the elderly and the young. Some of the largest gaps are in Arizona, Nevada, Texas and California, states that have had flare-ups over immigration, school textbooks and priorities in spending. The nonrural county with the largest gap is Yuma County, Ariz., where just 18 percent of people under 20 are white, compared with 73 percent of people over 65, Mr. Frey said.

It is most certainly a milestone, but precisely what does that milestone signify? At the risk of being accused of historicity by Karl Popper, the answer seems fairly obvious. Historical multi-ethnic societies have traditionally been empires, more specifically, empires ruled by hereditary monarchs. And as the ethnic differences grew, those empires, even those sharing the bond of an all-encompassing state religion, tended to break apart on ethnic lines. So, even if we discount any possibility of qualitative differences between the various ethnicities that have now replaced the relatively homogenous white population, we should expect a) a move towards increasingly authoritarian, winner-takes-all, short term-oriented government, and b) an eventual breakup into two or three political entities.

The obvious one, of course, is the split between Hispanic America in the southwest and the rest of the country. However, as we’ve seen with the Euro debacle, once it becomes obvious that one split is on the cards, others will become seen to be increasingly viable. And once the Hispanic portion of the country exercises its legitimate right to self-determination and goes its own way, presumably before 2033, it seems readily apparent that White America will at long last separate into its “liberal” and “conservative” halves when conservative America finally realizes that the country, to say nothing of the nation, was literally unable to survive the self-destructive tendencies of its liberal population. These political separations won’t necessarily require civil war or even large-scale violence – Czechoslovakia peacefully divided into Slovakia and the Czech Republic after 74 years of political union – but in this case, it probably will due to the heavily ideological aspects of the divide.

The consequence of quality

Pat Buchanan notes that immigrants have proven to be no adequate substitution for the native stock:

Since Roe v. Wade, abortions have carried off 53 million of the generations that were to replace the boomers. While those 53 million lost have been partially replaced by 40 million immigrants, legal and illegal, our recent immigrants have not exhibited the same income- or tax-producing capacity as boomers.

Perhaps a better name for Generation X would be Generation M, for murdered. Now, the idea that one group of people can be expected to adequately fill in for another is hardly new. Military historians trace the evolution of the Roman legions from nearly pure Italian stock to mostly barbarian over the course of the Republic and Empire, and it is hardly surprising that the barbarian generals showed themselves to be much more inclined to march on Rome and declare themselves Emperor than the Romans brought up in the patrician traditions did, Gaius Julius Caesar being the obvious exception. In his book on Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor notes the way in which the Soviets particularly targeted the Nazi’s Third and Fourth Romanian armies in the massive counteroffensive known as Operation Uranus and were thus able to encircle and destroy the German Sixth Army. Had the Red Army been facing 600,000 German soldiers rather than 250,000 Germans, 150,000 Romanians, and 220,000 Italians, it is very unlikely that their attack would have succeeded.

It is impossible to deny that the United States would not merely look very different, it would be very different if, instead of 40 million non-Americans bringing their genetic traits, societal behavioral patterns, and cultural traditions into the country – we can no longer reasonably describe it as a nation – there were 40 million more black and white Americans raised within the American tradition. It is not necessary to declare if change is for the better or for the worse to note that it has taken place. And with regards to the question of whether it is for the better or not, it should be readily apparent that the direction of the migrational pattern shows which society is deemed superior by everyone except those charged with protecting the more desirable one.

But what has happened has happened. That world is lost. The 53 million black and white Americans of my generation and the succeeding one are already dead. While Karl Popper argues against “historicity” and that predictions based on historical patterns are no better than soothsaying, I think he is wrong and the eventual consequences are readily apparent. We have always known that the USA would eventually fall, since all kingdoms and empires do in time. But now, we can be reasonably confident that we know why, if not necessary when.

The exits close

A lot of people failed to understand the point of my controversial column “Against a Fence”, having been distracted by the deportation discussion. Even fewer understood my reasoning behind it; many critics found it hard to wrap their minds around an anti-immigration, anti-border wall perspective. But it has always been a tautological truth that a wall designed to keep people out is just as useful for keeping people in. The proposed law to strip passports in order to better hold Americans hostage to the IRS would appear to be an indication that the time in which one easily leave the United States is rapidly coming to an end.

The Republican House of Representatives may soon follow the Democratic Senate and give the IRS the power to confiscate your passport on mere suspicion of owing taxes. There’s no place like home, comrade.

‘America, Love It Or Leave It” might be an obsolete slogan if the “bipartisan transportation bill” that just passed the Senate is approved by the House and becomes law. Contained within the suspiciously titled “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act,” or “MAP 21,” is a provision that gives the Internal Revenue Service the power to keep U.S. citizens from leaving the country if it finds that they owe $50,000 or more in unpaid taxes — no court ruling necessary.

It is hard to imagine any law more reminiscent of the Soviet Union that America toppled, or its Eastern Bloc slave satellites.

In a free and well-governed society, exile is a punishment. In an unfree and misgoverned one, exile is impermissible. There is no stronger indication that America is no longer free than the fact that its leadership is seriously contemplating the idea of attempting to imprison its citizens within its borders.

And of course, one tends to doubt that Warren Buffett will lose his passport despite Berkshire Hathaway owing massive back taxes, or that any of the 98,000 federal employees who owe a combined $1 billion in back taxes will be deprived of their ability to travel outside the country. And while the writer is correct to say that “if House Republicans pass this assault on our Constitution, their credibility will be in tatters”, this presumes that the House Republicans still possess any credibility after permitting the continued growth of big government by raising the debt ceiling last year.

For all that the Congressional actions are egregiously unconstitutional and directly opposed to the foundational principles of America, one shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. This behavior is completely typical of financially desperate states that can no longer afford the costs of empire. The collapse of the Soviet Union was only the most recent example; there are many to be found throughout history. “Valentinian III, who remarked in 444 AD that new taxes on landowners and merchants would be catastrophic, still imposed an additional 4% sales tax… and further decreed that all transactions be conducted in the presence of a tax collector.” But however harsh the crackdown, however totalitarian the government, strict tax enforcement never works because its objectives are inevitably based upon a static revenue model that fails to account for Man’s unwillingness to work and to obey the law when the state claims an excessive share on the fruits of his labor.

Enjoy the decline… preferably from a distance.

Repent

The West’s political and banking elite are running out of time to repent and make amends for their crimes against their various nations.

“The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all hope for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not give me any way to react (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans to survive.

I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.”
– Dimitris Christoulas