SS: Instead of summarizing or explaining how Trump's move towards isolationism is part of the collapse, I thought I would share a passage from John Michael Greer's book The Long Descent that stuck with me. It emphasizes how relatively slow—from the perspective of a single lifetime—the process of collapse was for historical empires. It helps to add perspective to the myriad crises we are experiencing today, the death by a thousand cuts that is catabolic collapse.

It’s unpopular these days to suggest that we have anything to learn from the past. Possibly this is because history holds up an unflattering mirror to our follies...One highly relevant example is the ancient Maya, who flourished on the Yucatan Peninsula of Central America while Europe struggled through the Dark Ages. Using only a Neolithic stone technology, the Maya built an extraordinary, literate civilization with fine art, architecture, astronomy, and mathematics, and a calendar more accurate than the one we use today. None of that saved it from the common fate of civilizations. In a “rolling collapse” spanning the years from 750–900 ce, Mayan civilization disintegrated, cities were abandoned to the jungle, and the population of the lowland Maya heartland dropped by 90%.

The causes of the Maya collapse have been debated for well over a century, but the latest archeological research supports the long-held consensus among scholars that agricultural failure was the central cause. Like modern industrial society, the Maya built their civilization on a nonrenewable resource base. In their case it was the fertility of fragile tropical soils, which couldn’t support the Mayan version of intensive corn farming indefinitely...

The Maya decline wasn’t a fast process. Maya cities weren’t abandoned overnight, as archeologists of two generations ago mistakenly thought; most of them took a century and a half to go under. Outside the Maya heartland, the process took even longer. Chichen Itza far to the north still flourished long after cities such as Tikal and Bonampak had become overgrown ruins. Some small Mayan city-states survived in various corners of the Yucatan right up to the Spanish conquest.

Map the Maya collapse onto human lifespans and the real scale of the process comes through. A Lowland Maya woman born around 730 would have seen the crisis dawn, but the ahauob and their cities still flourished when she died of old age seventy years later. Her great-grandson, born around 800, grew up amid a disintegrating society, and the wars and crop failures of his time would have seemed ordinary to him. His great-granddaughter, born around 870, never knew anything but ruins sinking back into the jungle. When she and her family finally set out for a distant village, leaving an empty city behind them, it likely never occurred to her that their quiet footsteps on the dirt path marked the end of a civilization.

Another relevant passage from John Michael Greer's book

Sooner or later in the process, we’ll see the breakdown of existing social, political, and economic forms and the rise of transitional structures. At some point, continental governments such as the United States and Canada will come apart, in fact if not in name, to be replaced by regional and local governments cobbled together on an ad hoc basis; the global corporate economy will be replaced by jerry-built local exchange systems, and so on. The more sustainable, stable, and effective these transitional structures are, the more people, technology, knowledge, and culture will make it through the couple of centuries that this whole process will take.

That last is the detail that has to be remembered. Nobody now alive will see the end of the process that’s now under way. The challenge we face in the short term is how to weather the next round of crises when it arrives. In the long term, the challenge is to get through the Long Descent with as much useful information and resources as possible, and to transmit them to the successor cultures that, to judge by past models, will begin coalescing sometime in the 23rd and 24th centuries. That means making sure that people right now have the information and connections they need to adapt constructively to the changes brought by the decline of our civilization, rather than backing themselves into one blind alley or another. It also means taking a hard look at some of the most fundamental ways people in today’s industrial societies think about the world.