Is civilization inevitable?

Civilizations don’t collapse the same way they start, but the seeds of collapse are there from the beginning.

A group finds a way to defer natural consequences by storing surplus, centralizing control, pushing ecological costs elsewhere, and inventing narratives that justify it all. There’s a perceived solution (to scarcity, conflict, unpredictability). But that solution involves suppressing or overriding immediate feedback from the environment or community.

What begins as a trickle becomes a system. Civilization grows through abstraction (money, law, religion, bureaucracy), extraction (from land, people, animals, future), and simulation (symbolic authority replaces direct experience). These allow expansion…but only by removing consequences from perception. The forest is gone, but we import lumber. The soil is dead, but we buy fertilizer. The people are angry, but we broadcast unity.

Eventually, the deferred feedback piles up. The buffers and simulations fail. Aquifers dry up, crops fail, and the dominant narrative becomes even more performative than usual. Collapse isn’t the reversal of civilization’s birth. It’s the reassertion all at once of real conditions that had been suppressed for generations. What was delayed arrives, compounded.

So it begins with the severing of feedback loops and ends when those same loops snap back into place…violently, suddenly, and usually too late to adapt. You might ignore the soil for 300 years…but not for 301.

And whereas the rise of a civilization is cumulative and self-congratulatory, its collapse is rapid, cascading, and disorienting. Because civilized systems depend on delayed feedback, they can’t detect failure until it’s already terminal. The signals that might have saved the group were suppressed by the system. Not incidentally…the civilizing process IS suppression. It can’t be tweaked or repurposed.

The conventional view is that civilizations rise because of progress (agriculture, technology, governance, and trade). They bring order to chaos, domesticate nature, and elevate humanity. They fall due to external shocks (invasion, drought, plague) or internal corruption (moral decay, bad leadership, inequality). Their collapse is usually portrayed as a breakdown of order, requiring some sort of reform. This is a linear, human-centric narrative…civilization as a heroic ascent occasionally interrupted by tragedy.

But civilization clearly doesn’t emerge from progress. It emerges from disconnection…a break from ecological and social feedback loops. It thrives by delaying, distorting, or outsourcing consequences. It doesn’t solve problems. It manages perception and concentrates control. And collapse isn’t a fluke…it’s the logical outcome of the system’s internal logic reaching its thermodynamic and informational limits. Not bad luck or bad people, but a system that treats feedback as an externality.

What do you believe? That the most advanced societies in history collapsed by accident? That despite their power, intelligence, and complexity, they simply had some unfortunate lapse in judgment? In mismanaging resources? By ignoring obvious problems? By overreaching a little? And, oops!, collapsed? And that we’re smarter now? More self aware and made better by the lessons of history? Let’s think about that.

The idea that civilizations “accidentally” overshoot, centralize too much power, or destroy their ecologies…every…single…time…is absurd, unless that pattern is intrinsic. If every plan crashes after 300 kilometers, you don’t need better pilots, you need a new kind of plane. But the civilizational narrative blames the pilot. Every time.

Blaming barbarians, climate, disease, natural disaster, or Donald Trump ignores that systems capable of adaptation should adapt. Resilient systems bend…only brittle ones break. So if collapse keeps happening, the system simply isn’t resilient. It’s designed to avoid adaptation until it’s too late. We use our intelligence to formulate brilliant ways of resisting feedback. But resisting feedback is suicidal.

The conventional story of civilization is weirdly moralistic. Rome fell because of decadence. Egypt succumbed to opportunistic invaders. But we’re exceptional and immune? It’s a childish blurring of causality with character, turning collapse into some sort of cautionary tale rather than a systems failure. They bad / we good.

If collapse is a repeated outcome across cultures, time periods, continents, and resource bases, it’s not an exception. It’s a rule. Look at actual system, this process we call “civilization”…not the environment. Not leaders. Not outliers. Not comforting nonsense.

Forget you even know the word “civilization” for a moment. You just have a pattern. What is that pattern?

A group discovers how to buffer feedback. They find a way to delay or distort the natural consequences of their actions. Storing food beyond the season. Building structures to insulate from climate. Using tools or fire to override bodily limits. Creating language or ritual to manage fear and uncertainty. It feels like control and progress.

Then they scale the buffer. More buffering means more predictability. Population growth, specialization, hierarchy. But the buffers aren’t neutral…they begin to shape the system. Authority centralizes, roles solidify, and the environment is seen as raw material instead of relationship.

Symbolic structures replace direct experience. Land is replaced by maps, relationships by law, patterns by gods, and functionality by performance and titles. People start responding to the simulation rather than the world.

People who remain sensitive to real feedback are suppressed. If you can’t ignore real signals, question too much, or resist simulation, you’re sidelined (at best). Deviant. Sick. Subversive. Disposable. A system of feedback suppression enforces coherence by silencing signal. Sensitivity is a threat to its structure.

Consequences accumulate outside awareness. The environment is sucked dry and so is social cohesion. But warning signs are noise. Reaction is blamed. If you suffer, the problem is you.

Reality reasserts itself when accumulated feedback overwhelms the civilized system’s capacity to manage it. And that’s all collapse is…it’s the return of feedback.

Is this pattern inevitable? This particular (and exceptional) form of human stupidity? Maybe not, but it’s highly probably under certain conditions.

The impulse to buffer feedback is natural…all organisms buffer. A bear builds fat before winter. A bird builds a nest. A human puts on a raincoat. That’s adaptive buffering. That’s survival in a fluctuating world. But buffering becomes dangerous when it’s no longer a response to feedback, but a way to avoid it. Less “how do I stay warm?” and more “how do I avoid ever feeling cold again?”

Once buffering becomes centralized and scaled, surplus becomes status, control becomes virtue, symbols become sacred, and feedback becomes a threat. At that point, the system protects itself instead of life. Any signal that challenges its narrative is neutralized, pathologized, or hidden.

But there are cultures, both historical and current, that didn’t follow this path. Where feedback is revered (through ecology, ritual, and story), where people live with limits, and where lifeways use buffering as a temporary strategy, not an overarching structure. It’s about constant relationship with feedback and avoiding permanent insulation.

But in what we call modern systems, the pattern is inevitable. Because now we’ve added fossil fuels (infinite buffering, for a while), digital simulation (infinite symbol manipulation), globalization (outsourcing all consequences), institutions that treat feedback as failure, and a cultural narrative that equates comfort with success. At this level of complexity and detachment, feedback has no way in except collapse.