Catabolic Collapse: Why Civilizations Eat Themselves (And How To Read The Signs)

Posted by timothy-ventura@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 63 comments

Civilizations don't explode, they erode—in a stairstep descent into chaos. John Michael Greer calls this process "catabolic collapse", and it's happening today.

We tend to picture collapse like a Hollywood jump cut: one day a humming empire, the next day goats in the forum. John Michael Greer’s model of “catabolic collapse” argues for something subtler—and eerily familiar. Civilizations don’t usually explode; they erode. They wear themselves down in economic steps: crisis, partial recovery, crisis, partial recovery—each step lower than the last. “We’re looking at decline,” Greer says, “a process that unfolds over decades and in many cases, centuries.”

At the center of his theory is a deceptively simple budget problem: maintaining the stuff you already have—roads, bridges, buildings, data centers, skilled workers, knowledge networks—costs real resources. When the total maintenance bill exceeds what a society can reliably produce, something has to give. Capital gets abandoned, stripped for parts, or left to rust. That forced “conversion of capital into waste,” Greer says, is the signature move of catabolic decline....