In the beginning, I got this book "Surviving Progress" by Ronald Wright. Just the whole idea of civilization collapse was unbelievable to me. Then I started researching it, and I started gathering data, and looking more into it. I got more and more ideas about the scope of the problem from multiple sources. It wasn't just one source.
It was all these different sources, from all these disciplines. All pointing in the same way. The sources weren't necessarily concerned with civilization collapse, but their results pointed that way.
The first stage was acquaintance. Getting introduced to it. The second step was validation, and verification, and research. Confirmation.
Then the third stage was depression, after realizing what would be lost. What it would mean for families. What it would mean for all the things. Also depression about what was being lost. Not just for humans, but for resources, and for plants and animals. That was the depression part.
The next stage was acceptance. Just that this was going to happen. It had happened before. People basically, a lower level of complexity had been established.
People and races continued to survive and live under these new economic conditions. That would happen. That took a while just to get that acceptance. Then I was trying to look at...actually I forgot a phase. Before depression and after validation there was the bargaining phase. Where I was looking at how it could be avoided or how it could be saved, or how you could bargain with it to avoid it. After the bargaining phase ended, it went to the depression.
Then after the depression came the acceptance of this is going to happen, and that we can live with it. Yeah, lots of bad things are going to happen but we'll continue. Then I started trying to think of things that would be useful in the new economy. What would work well? It's like making bikes, or what jobs would be good? What things you should invest in. Should you invest in coal, oil, oil production, or waste reclamation. How to basically turn lead into gold? What's the future?
I was thinking about that and the next phase is looking at... I don't have a name for the phase yet, but basically looking at the collapse, for example, the Maya, you might think, who was able to leave? During the collapse the elites where able to leave first because the settlement records show that farming continued for a couple hundred years after the collapse, even when civilization complexity levels had dropped quite significantly.
That seems to indicate that the white flight or whatever, the elites were able to leave and take their resources and that the poor stayed behind. Just looking at that, what would that look like? Where would elites leave to? Then, what skill sets? Elite's treasures, what would they actually be able to take with them? Well, their assets would typically be an army, peasants, or maybe land.
Basically control of things that don't really move easily, in terms of their wealth that they could carry. Well, they're not going to be able to carry gold, and even if they were carrying it, how valuable would it be in a neighboring civilization that operated at a lower level of complexity. So it's what I'm thinking about now, the stages, and those last days of the collapse, what was actually happening?
The building was on fire, and everybody could smell the smoke. How were people leaving the building? And what did they take with them? And as they left the building, where did they go?
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