Gee’s Reviews > Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail > Status Update

Will and Ariel Durant note that, because political and economic expansion entails an increase in hierarchy and inequality, a society may find itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority of men and women too unfortunate by nature or circumstance to inherit or develop standards of excellence or taste

understanding that excessive complexity is both costly and perilous and that management in the sense of control is unachievable. This would lead us to see that the proper (or only) way to “manage” civilization is by not allowing it to become too complex—in fact, deliberately designing in restraints, redundancy, and resiliency, even if the price is less power, freedom, efficiency, or profit

civilizations enact a tragedy in which their raison d’être—the use of energy to foster the complexity that raises them above the hunter-gatherer level of subsistence—becomes the agent of their ultimate downfall

level of complexity through sheer scientific prowess. But this is at best a half-truth. It takes vast energy resources to implement the technological solutions that enable our complexity. For example, we have already seen that the enormous “productivity” of industrial agriculture is a sham. It is a machine for converting ten calories of fossil-fuel energy into one calorie of food.

The human mind is still fundamentally Paleolithic. That is, it was hardwired by evolution for the life of a hunter-gatherer on the African savannah, a life centered on day-to-day survival in small bands of intimates and kinsmen. In practice, this means that human beings excel at concrete perception but are much less adept at abstraction
it is singularly ill equipped to deal with the implications of exponential growth

There is simply no escape from our all-too-human nature. In the end, mastering the historical process would require human beings to master themselves, something they are very far from achieving. (This is why democracy, considered by some to be an asset in the struggle against the forces that challenge industrial civilization, is in fact a liability