Why civilisations collapse

Peak existential absurdism

WARNING: Do not read if you find pessimistic philosophy unsettling.

Look at the pattern of civilisations: the more they advance, the more they solve their survival problems, so they have time to think and ponder. They escape and ascend from primal animalistic urges, which, up until then, dictated how they should have spent most of their time; surviving, laboring, and striving each day for some calories, desperately trying to keep warm and fight off predators. In our primal animalistic state of survival, there is little time or energy left to reflect, analyse, and philosophise; no resource or hope or inspiration to aspire for greatness.

When we don’t know when or what our next meal will be, we cannot concern ourselves with intellectual pursuits; artistry, moralism, or the doomed act of philosophy that leads nowhere.

As civilisations advance, individuals in them are blessed with excess time and resources to achieve an awareness of being. In the beginning (the first few generations of an advancing civilisation), people are hopeful and overflowing with hope, faith, and morale. They get a taste of something more to life than just struggling to survive each day. They see the pattern of their steep progress, so they imagine endless heights to their potential; their projections of progress and discovery are linear - naively so.

In their enthusiasm for their newfound abundance and prosperity, they see a bright idealistic future worth creating for. They aspire to create art, architecture, engineering, philosophy. They believe there is something greater to discover, something higher to become.

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But after a few generations, it dawns on them. Their progress and discovery plateau. They lose momentum; they lose sight of what can be because they’ve reached all there is to be reached by the limited human potential. They realise that all the hopes and ideals of their ancestors were naive. Once they’ve discovered all there is to be discovered (at least for them at that place and time, with the resources they have), their indignant disillusionment kicks in: the disappointment feels like a betrayal - their ancestors lied to them with fairy tales and pipe dreams.

This is what is happening now to every single developed country that has “solved” humanity’s animalistic problems with abundance. Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, the USA… People stopped having children, stopped appreciating their culture. They even resent their forefathers for the implied false hope of better things to come. We were promised Star Trek, Back to the Future, and the Jetsons, yet we got uneconomical hybrid cars, social media censorship, and nightmarish ticketing systems for bullshit cubicle jobs. Nothing sparks more anger than the realisation that the hope on which you rested your entire being was false and unfounded.

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And what now? We see no reason to be hopeful; no greater thing to achieve. We may have ascended from the homo animalis (just surviving) to the homo philosophicus (actually living); but in the end, there is nothing else other than meaningless gratifications and deluded self-aggrandising.

After the peak of civilisation, we understand that we can’t actually finish building our tower of Babel, and we can’t escape the gravity of our limiting animalistic nature. The peak of civilisation is the stark realisation of our limits; running in the dark, only to hit our head on the final wall, which we never expected to reach (at least not so soon).

So, we lose our previous morale, the early motivation to excel, the fumes we still run on. That was just an initial confidence spike (akin to the Dunning-Kruger effect), simply because we first got hyped and high on our own sense of excellence for dominating our animalistic urges.

Once we we see that there is no further we can go, and once we get over our deluded self-aggrandising, we conclude that just being slightly higher than an animal is as good as it gets for humans. That’s it. We dared to dream too much. We foolishly let our reach exceed our grasp.

There is no higher thing to achieve: look at us! We still desperately need coercive “authority” to organise our societies, otherwise we can’t see how else to come together to organise society based on incentive and defense alone. We are too sensitive to being physically and emotionally abused that we carry decades of festering trauma with us; trauma which we then in turn inflict on others to mitigate our own. Despite our smartphones and space rockets that get us nowhere, we are still hopeless animals, assuming that “success” is measured by the random opportunities we just happened to stumble upon, or the genetics we were gifted without earning, or… the silliest of them all… having many children to supposedly spread “your” genes; as if performing the gross animalistic function of biological replicating (as your urges dictate) is somehow an accomplishment. If that were true, then nomadic gypsies with their 15-children-per-woman mass production, and their abusive neglectful parenting, would be peak success! Hell, if we want to go that route, a serial rapist could then be deemed “successful” for spreading “his” genes.

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As civilisations rush towards their plateauing prosperity, humans begin to gain awareness of their reality. They understand that this is as good as it gets for humans: abundance, automation, entertainment, and philosophy and moralism that get us nowhere. They then abandon their false hope, the deluded assumption that there was something vague and higher waiting for them still to achieve. They see their ancestors’ quest for idealism as a deluded crusade towards the unachievable and the non-existent; a hubristic pipe dream, a Sisyphean task, a flight of Icarus, a futile Gilgameshian hunt for self-deification.

As civilisations achieve all they can, and people lose hope of anything further to be achieved, they become cynical. They reject the higher values of their forefathers with the indignation of someone who’s just realised he’s been lied to his whole life. A lot of in-group self-hatred of the West comes from this disillusionment, the realisation that the “greatness” of our in-group wasn’t that great in the first place. The best of it wasn’t what it actually was, but what it anticipated to be.

But, unfortunately and inevitable, there comes a time to reflect and ask ourselves what we have actually achieved, how far we’ve come, and where we’re going; and this reassessment isn’t pleasant. Humans, despite their fancy gadgets, generative AI, and genetic manipulations, are still humans; animals in clothing, monkeys with iPhones. Just look around you… People are still driven more by short-sighted irrational emotion rather than true logic, and neither their art, engineering, nor philosophy can help them think logically longer than rare fleeting moments, at best. For all of man’s achievements, neither religion nor science of his civilisation can truthfully answer the unanswerable questions of ‘who’ and ‘why.’

Having reached the peak of their achievable “civility,” civilisations lose their momentum. Having realised it’s not even close to what was implied and promised to them, they become disillusioned and pessimistic. Civilisation reaches a plateau. And each generation becomes more and more cynical. They have seen the end of the tunnel, and there’s no light there. At least their ancestors had lots to discover still, and part of that unknown was the possibility of answers, of a positive truth. Once there are no frontiers to be discovered, we understand that we were always animals to begin with; the only difference was our curse to dream higher than we could go.

Every empire descends into existential nihilism and pessimistic hopelessness because it reaches a plateau after reaching its peak potential, after which there is nothing new to be accomplished, no hope for anything better. Its people wonder: “If this is the best we can hope for, if this is as good as it gets for humanity, then damned is our generation for having to come to terms with that. At least the previous generations were blessed with the hope of the unknown, the bliss of discovery. We are cursed with having to face the final wall, the realisation that we’ve come as far as humans can go; and it isn’t that far, not as far as our ancestors hoped we could go. And it isn’t fair.”

Without any hope for anything better, people become cynical, pessimistic, and self-loathing. They dared to dream, dared to fly close to the sun, but now they must come crushing down. Naturally, they then engage in self-destructive addictive behaviours; drugs, gluttony, infotainment, spectacles, obsessive ideologies, and Netflix-n-chill… Even “health and fitness” has become riddled with unhealthy obsessions, and deleterious drugs and supplements.

We don’t seem to value the arts anymore; don’t care about beautiful architecture. There is nothing there value, if there is no true hope. Whatever meaning we attribute to our creative work, it is arbitrary, and not for us to attribute for ourselves. It is all deluded self-aggrandising, anyway. What’s the point of making something that may outlive us? If our short existence is strictly bound by the stringent dictates of our nature, and if we and our works end up into the nothingness from where they happened to emerge, then there is nothing transcendently meaningful about this existence. This is the harsh realisation with which peak-civilisation generations are cursed.

If whatever made us and this reality doesn’t even grant us the courtesy of telling us why we’re here, then we must truly mean nothing, at least as individuals. We get gurus and false prophets telling us to “deny the self” and “reject ego” and “become detached” of a world that we were forced into, by-default attached with all the strength of a baby’s grip on its mother’s index finger. And then we realise that, whatever we gripped on was as frail as our infantile nature.

So, we descend into brutalist architecture and buildings deliberately made not to last, because we don’t see the point of idealism; we don’t see meaning in ourselves, let alone past ourselves. We no longer see any point to looking up, because we’ve already built the tower of Babel as high as it can go, and there is nothing higher to achieve. We will never know what we desperately need to know. We will never escape our nature, and we will never become anything greater. No tech implant can improve who we are. And if the dehumanisation of a cyborg’s semi-existence is our only hope, then we are truly hopeless.

We’ve reached peak civilisation, and we’ve realised that we cannot be demigods. All we can hope for is media improvements and innovative amusements, wittier generative AI, and cringier brain-rotting TikTok videos. We reject our morals, our dreams, our ideals… because we don’t see how they have meaning other than grant us an individual identity… and even that has no transcendent meaning at the end of the last day.

Why do civilisations collapse into degeneracy after they peak? Because, why bother..?

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