When societies rise, fall, and face catastrophe

When the United Nations emerged from the rubble of two world wars 80 years ago, it represented humanity's most ambitious attempt ever to turn catastrophe into cooperation. But while the scarred world of 1945 had hope following the Allied victory, that optimism has since curdled. The UN today is underfunded, risk-averse, and paralysed.

- Antara Haldar

Meanwhile, Al, crypto-finance, and climate breakdown are jostling to define this century, and wars continue to rage. Against this backdrop, the UN's 80th birthday commemorations reminded one of the statues on Easter Island: grand but futile gestures of a desperate society on the brink of collapse.

But what, exactly, leads to civilisational collapse? There is no shortage of theories. The geographer Jared Diamond argues that societies as sophisticated as the Maya or Norse Greenlanders ultimately imploded when they failed to adapt to ecological stress.

Similarly, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown that complexity itself can become a liability: when the costs of coordination outstrip the returns, institutions unravel. Alternatively, Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov contend that “secular cycles” of rising inequality and elite overproduction have perennially brought social and political upheaval. And Vaclav Smil warns that no system — biological or social — expands forever.