AND…Tips on how vigorous growth systems turn from multiplying to conserving their designs and places in the world around them.
The Bronze Age Collapse… Spiteful Grievances and System Betrayals arise from aggressive growth and severe natural limits – creating conflict and confusion and societal loss of meaning.
Then and now!
These are seen in the abrupt, destructive collapses of the world’s first exuberant, multicultural world economy in the Bronze Age, and also seen rising around the world today, seemingly for the same reason: attempting boundless growth as natural growth limits are faced, turning the parts to both intentionally and unintentionally attack each other.
The total collapse of civilizations, particularly those at the peak of their apparent success, is inherently complex and leaves a fragmented historical record of the causes. The similarity between our own world economy’s suffering from dangerously growing internal conflict, and the apparent explanation for the collapse of the lost civilization called “Atlantis” in the Bronze Age is uncanny.
My natural systems study tools help decode stories of natural transformations, providing a good starting point for a scientifically valid study of what may have happened, and identifying, confirming, or contradicting evidence. The book “1177 BC” by E.H. Cline organizes the hard data collected in anthropological digs.
My first talk on it was on Oct 5 for the General Semantics meeting in New York. The slide set is at https://bit.ly/BronzeAgeTalk-Slides , and Slide 12 is below, marking the burned-out cities with black flames.
The first thriving multicultural world civilization was the Bronze Age “Atlantis,” centered in the Eastern Mediterranean, much like a small early version of our own. It mainly destroyed the centers of its most prosperous ~43 cities over an ~80-year period, seemingly from the inside. Curiously, however, in most cases the assailants were unknown. In the end, Atlantis seemed to simply vanish, as if its advanced languages had become meaningless.
Pirate-like “Sea People” were often depicted as the assailants, as illustrated above, but in most cases, it was unknown who was responsible, though some seemed to blame it all on them. However, there appears to have been only one confirmed battle against them, which they lost to New Egypt.
So, you can begin to see the puzzle, the odd patterns that hide an extremely important story to us, about the way of life we seem to have copied. It appears they, like we, don’t see what in the world would cause our highly successful and mature societies to somehow suddenly be overtaken by conflict and lose meaning! In my view, the overall pattern seems to tell the real story: it was resentment from the betrayal of initial hope for boundless growth, as we’ve done. That caused the economic crisis for them, as it is for us, and pushed their societies, as ours is being pushed, to lose meaning, but that didn’t get recorded, only the destruction of the cities. I arrive at that by combining the key signals of direction change recorded in the Bible for the collapse of Babel and elsewhere. See what you think, yourself.
Another link to today is the sense of betrayal felt by large subcultures in the US, which has led to sneak attacks on the institutions and workplaces of highly successful cities. It seems the only explanation for the far right and government to explain the need to destroy things to save them, central to the US government’s current economic plan, for no immediately apparent reason, except the mysterious deep animosity felt. Other than it being a “shot across the bow” or “canary in the coal mine” – a sign from nature of much deeper troubles at work, just destroying things, of course, has little benefit!
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The tried-and-true natural way out of the growth traps emerging new systems can get caught in is visible all around us, throughout the living world, and in many other kinds. It applies to human efforts, plans, and productions too. New designs generally start with a period of opportunistic connection, producing compound growth (i.e., each stage of growth accelerating the next). What resolves that is the turn to maturation, also known as “growing up.” That changes the system’s growth feedback from multiplying to caring, responding to natural signals that it’s time to make good on what’s been achieved and not risk mounting conflict as growth increasingly interferes with how other things work
If you look closely, you can find more signs of that mysterious mid-course change of direction, as a change of purpose, from faster to slower change, from extending to discovering new patterns. The need for it comes from the system’s organizational steering, its deep compass, signaling a tipping point, triggering the main change of life transformation. Instead of multiplying growth shifts to reshaping the multiplied parts to work better together, an internal form of caring for them, like parenting, with increased patience, knitting neighbors together while adapting to and learning to engage with their new environment.
There are as many stages of gestation, in 9 months, as there are in the seven stages of growing up. For people, in 20-some years, we go from one to the next: Newborn, Infant, Child, Youth, Teen, Grad, Adult. That most fortunate of all ends of growth, new life and free agency for the new organism, the reward for finding its way. The challenge today is that our societies lost their way in life some time ago… seemingly back when people discovered how to make the period of multiplying infancy more or less permanent, forcing every age to multiply its designs ever faster.
As a result, endless growth becomes an ever more severe kind of creativity attack, blindly interfering with others’ resources and environments, which you’d mostly not see. It gives humanity its endlessly troubled world quite unintentionally. It overwhelms the relationships you need but don’t see. That is where the betrayals you don’t see coming will often come from. In “interesting times” like today, it keeps you from trusting what you see, as our words and relationships change meaning ever faster, making change hard to follow.
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The way to respond is to expand on your own better ways of sensing and responding. To get along in a world takes many kinds of sensors and an assortment of ways to respond, so one is ready when sensing to look for trouble, for example. With that work, we can navigate the weeds more effectively and engage collectively to better steer the whole, too. It’s always been how we came to peace with events and fulfilled life’s wonderful promises. But being forced to live in a world prevented from seeking peace and finding fulfillment is then a kind of betrayal.
Smashing broken things isn’t what needs attention, though. It’s finding ways to step out of the solutions that cause our problems. We might manage our savings and investments differently, tapering off compounding to see if that helps. The real benefit comes from what the profits are used for. to serve life rather than extract life, that matters, not just spending them.
It’s how the investment culture became organized around sustaining the most immature and disruptive stage of its growth, the endless doubling of its initial successful designs that becomes so creatively devastating for our societies and planet, a very odd sort of trap to be caught in!
The graceful way out of it is for the investment community to see the profit in helping things work more smoothly, looking for ways to secure or improve common systems, and to develop their operations, slower and slower on the way toward perfection. That then creates space for the more spontaneous and active engagements a society supports, adapting to and learning to work and creatively cooperate on new experiments.
The real danger is not responding to the signals of exponential reorganization, destabilizing all the systems of life and nature. Our continued rush to cash in on already profoundly broken promises is the real threat. It may not yet seem evident at this moment but just keep in mind how much has been evident about the change happening, even recently. I think it’s not exaggerating to say we’re risking our whole 10-thousand-year creative struggle to invent our own new kind of home. It could lose it all. Ouch!
That’s unfortunately clearly at risk now that we’re threatening to radically shift the eons of the evolutionary tree, perhaps leaving no calling card for ourselves behind but a gargantuan pile of trash, and to mysteriously disappear from history, as the brilliantly successful Bronze Age culture did too.
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JLH
