Sixth in a series on Civilization
What causes an advanced civilization to fail?
I’ve written about the importance of specialization and cooperation. Obviously, breakdown in civilization is likely also attributable to these two traits.
Cooperation without specialization leads to one form of failure, in which all participants do the same kind of work while sharing their results. This rarely happens. In my second essay, “What is Civilization?,” I stated that the first need of any civilization is to have a stable food supply. If all members are doing the same work, they must be working to produce food. If not, nothing else matters. Therefore, cooperation without specialization automatically produces a less advanced civilization, either hunter-gatherer or pastoral.
Specialization without cooperation, on the other hand, describes the most common type of breakdown. In any advanced civilization, the members have the basics of life: food, shelter, and companionship. Individuals are free to specialize on their personal interests (like lettuce?), and things outside their interest have little impact on them.
The more advanced the civilization, the more specialized interests can become. Example: I watched a teenage “influencer” try on different outfits and talk about them. Very specialized. (Please don’t ask me why I was watching…) Day by day, in such a civilization, individuals live within a narrow range of interests and interact mostly with others who share the same interests. Golfers like golfers. Activists like activists. People feel fulfilled by the immediate reinforcement. One unfortunate result is that they view things—and people—outside their enclave as being “less than,” perhaps even “wrong.” As in Maslow’s Hammer, every problem can be solved by the tools of their circle.
- To a watchmaker, precision is the most important attribute of anything.
- To an engineer, everything can be solved by building something new.
- To a scientist, the only important problems are related to underlying theory.
- To a traditionalist, things work better if people simply return to their roots.
- To someone concerned about the poor, everyone should share what they have.
- To climate activists, all human effort should be aimed at saving the planet.
Every one of these viewpoints is self-centered, ignoring the conflicts created for others who do not share the same view.
But how does “love yourself in diversity” contribute to the breakdown of an advanced civilization?
Specialization naturally leads to self-centeredness. The more specialized the society, the more fractured viewpoints exist. Each adherent believes their particular issue to be “the solution” for civilization, but few people take the larger systemic view. Only those few observe the reality of what actually matters to the civilization. Most others ignore the foreseeable, logical consequences of their ideas because those consequences happen outside their circle.
- Pure democracy has never worked well in history, except in very small populations like ancient Athens. If everyone can vote for bread and circuses…
- Socialism has also never worked well. It’s very attractive to enforce sharing, but someone always gets to wield the power of distribution. And power corrupts.
Ignoring such consequences, people selfishly neglect (or refuse) cooperation with others, except as necessary. The result is a destruction of one of the two important elements that make civilization work: cooperation.
The essence of cooperation is that each member provides something useful to others—but the measure of that usefulness is up to the recipients, not the provider. There are two aspects of that measure. First is how many recipients value the product. If no one wants what you do, and you do it anyway, you are not contributing. The entire mountaineering team wins when each helps the others ascend.
Second is the effect of that product on civilization as a whole. If what you do tears down the principles of your civilization, you are contributing negatively. If the solution to a laggard on the mountain is to shove him off a cliff, teamwork breaks down.
In the healthiest civilizations, each member’s products are valued by many people—and those products pull the civilization in an upward trend. I once hired a small construction crew and was amazed at the ethical standards of a ditch-digger who contributed by making his ditch straight and perfect.
History records the decline of advanced civilizations: Egypt, Ancient Greece, Rome, European monarchies, and more. They fall from inside, through the hedonistic self-interest of the well-to-do who control the society. Sometimes, they are conquered from outside—but even then, the decline was already evident on the inside. Edward Gibbon wrote about The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. William Shirer wrote a similar work on the Third Reich. In both cases, and in many more historical events, the decline happened due to a loss of moral standards, conflicting self-centered views, and fractionation among those who mattered.
Can today’s civilizations avoid this historical trend? Only history will tell.
As a systems engineer and system-thinking polymath, I find these large issues fascinating. As an author, I choose to write them into my stories. If you like to read visions of problem civilizations, I’ve joined with other authors to give you a free sampling of recent books about enduring apocalypse. You can find it at this link.
Doc Honour
November 2025
Doc Honour Books 