Whole Civilization Growth-to-Collapse Decoded

Greetings everyone,

I’m Jessie Lydia Henshaw, a New York senior physicist, architect & natural systems scientist, member of ISSS for decades, and long-time close observer of the amazing change-of-life our civilization is now in.

This is about our recurring growth-to-collapse of Western Civilizations, Babel, the Mediterranian Bronze Age, Classical Greece, Rome, and Us. The most useful and durable conclusion is that ~8,000 years ago our very first managed economy in the Fertile Crescent made a simple. mistake:

THEY CONFUSED PERFECTING THINGS
WITH PERFECTING THE GROWTH OF THINGS.
The latter regularly doubles the scale and complexity of life
making things unmanagable, AND ever more interdependent…
prone to collapse and erasing itself as a whole,
so people don’t learn from the experience.
We’ve even built Growth to Collapse civilizations repeatedly
tragic and brilliant, not knowing what we were doing.
Rather than use the profit from good organization mainly for good care.
NATURAL SUCCESS COMES FROM THE END OF GROWING UP
TO SPEND PROFITS ON CARING FOR THINGS.
AND AS the path for our going forward!

It’s become clear that for it to end well, it will need as many of us as can study, learn, and explain the truly unique global existential crisis our economy has led us into. It is even interfering with our understanding of nature and our own cultural relationships, with confusing rates and scales of change. It’s producing a dangerous loss of meaning for societal norms, environmental systems, and economic plans, a confusion we can all now see the clear fingerprints of. For the four great civilizations that ours descended from, it directly led to whole system collapse.

Technically, the cause is the compound feedback of money that has been everyone’s thrill to accelerate for so long; and now needs all of us to rise to the occasion today, and learn to tell it as a truly great story of profound change for Humanity as a whole, and, as there also is a clear escape route from the also profound collapses of our predecessors.

So, do read and think of how the world is seemingly spiraling out of control; double-check the details to filter out both what does, and does not fit the pictures of change you see in the life all around you. The story is full of familiar faces and circumstances we’ve both known forever and very new ones we’ll see differently in this new light.

The Slides: A New Language of History
The Paper: Meeting Humanity’s Greatest Challenges

Here the focus is on the leading Western Civilizations and the extraordinary challenges to their growth they failed to face as they rose from the late Stone Age, led by their recurring great creativity and collapse, as they led the creation of our modern world. In the first economic civilization, two highly creative neighboring cultures combined to face the threats of dramatic climate change: the period of the Younger Dryas.

Our story focuses on how the people of the Northern and Southern Levant regions of the Middle East were forced to change from skilled hunter-gatherers to invent new ways of living. Combining their well-matched special talents, they joined as they faced the challenge of a sharp climate change, the Younger Dryas of 12,500 to 12,500 years ago, a sudden chill that forced them to rethink.

The emerging new ways of living shared around the greater Levant began with a very long successful collaborative of creative redesign in how our their tribes lived, but failed to make the natural turn for healthy growth systems, of slowing their creativive innovation, and instead begin perfecting their new ways of living at their peaks, so… solutions keep expanding and multiplying, in confusion, ending in tumultuous collapses, followed by multi-century Dark Ages, again and again – our living history.

That was the dawn of modern civilization, a very moving story of how brilliantly they succeeded, also ending in repeated catastrophic failure, basically from not understanding how natural growth alternates between growth and maturation, and so repeatedly growing to collapse. They did it well enough, though, to creatively spread their misguided model around the world, and its consequences, for life on Earth.

That’s how modern civilization emerged; our home on Earth now in increasingly desperate straits, needing to restart something, but confused by the situation. It’s really a small error, overlooking one of nature’s most firm laws: to stop growing things and change to maturing them, in time to climax at or near its peak.

We do it all the time, too, in most things we do: start with positive feedback to grow things, then switch to negative feedback to mature and perfect them. Oh, we don’t call it by those terms. We just call it “care.”

So, this is the story of the recurrent growth and failure of our heritage to produce a stable civilization, humanity’s six main stages of growing our civilizations, one about every 2,000 years for the past 12,000 years, that all but the first failing dramatically from success, the story of:

1. The emergent northern and southern Natufian Levant cultures, as the first great organizers of their homes on earth, taking ~4,500 years of advancing shared tribal life sharing, the Northern the great stone monument and wild game herding culture at Gobekli Tepe. The southern was the perfecter of farming and accounting methods.
2. Then there was the great northern spread of that common culture to become the first managed “great world economy”: a) organizing the Fertile Crescent, b) then the Akkad and Summer regions of Mesopotamia and the collapse of its city-states, called the collapse of Babel, and c) followed a long Dark Age. They didn’t know what hit them, sort of like we don’t either.
3. The revival of a second great world growth economy, the Mediterranean Bronze Age, produced an exceptionally prosperous and creative multicultural world, much like our own in many ways: a) its tragic collapse and b) long following Dark Age
4. Then that of Classical Greece, and a) its following Dark Age
5. Then Rome, and a) its following Dark Age
6. And now what I’ll call EU/US-World, or “us” for short, the leaders of the present world growth-maximizing economy — presently destabilizing.

A quick 12,000 year primer on who we are and what we’ve been doing!

So, dear reader, the above is the introduction to my Plenary talk for the ISSS.org-2026-Annual meeting, this year in Cyprus on Thursday, June 2026. See Links Above

Please leave questions and comments below if you like. I may be slow in replying, but I hope to respond to all of interest.

Below is the first slide from the talk.

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A New Language of History
Meeting Humanity’s Greatest Challenges