In Part 1 of this series of Contemplations on the typical responses of a society’s ruling elite to societal collapse, I discussed the problem of diminishing returns on investments in complexity–perhaps the central tenet of archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s thesis regarding societal collapse. Basically, as a society grows increasingly complex, it encounters diminishing returns on the investments necessary to maintain its complexity–rising costs paired with declining benefits. Inevitably, the consequence is social unrest. But rather than respond by simplifying society, the ruling elite usually double down on the strategy that created the crisis: greater complexity. I then outlined five recurring responses that a society’s elite make during this situation: squeezing the masses tighter; ideological justification; military expansion; scapegoating; and techno-fixes. These responses tend to reinforce each other and lead to a self-perpetuating cycle that accelerates society’s decline. Finally, I noted that voluntary simplification would be the most rational response, but it is one that is structurally impossible for the elite to pursue since their power, prestige, and wealth are embedded in the complexity they would need to dismantle in order to simplify.
This Contemplation serves to explore the first and most common response that the elite tend to make: squeezing the population even tighter. I will examine how the elite attempt to do this and why this short-term “fix” almost always backfires.
Squeezing the Masses Even Tighter
The most commonly used and seemingly automatic response to diminishing returns on investments throughout history and across most complex societies is to squeeze revenue from the populace. This is also the one that often pushes a teetering society most firmly towards collapse. To better understand this I will now look at why the elite tend to implement this response, how they do this, and why it backfires.
Tainter’s thesis involving diminishing returns on investments in complexity is relatively straightforward: problems that a society faces are met with the easiest- and least-expensive-to-implement solutions; these always require resource inputs–especially energy–and can, when first put into place, increase benefits for society; as time passes, solutions not only compound the complexity of society but give rise to additional problems requiring further solutions, increasing the costs in terms of energy and other material resources; eventually, the benefits from problem solving begin to decrease as their efficacy wanes and their costs increase; and finally, by the time diminishing returns turn negative, the surpluses of resources that once supported a society’s complexities have been degraded to the point where they are no longer present. This is the point when a sudden stress surge can be the tipping point for families or communities to withdraw their support for the sociopolitical organisation they find themselves in and society then begins to simplify/collapse rather quickly.
The surpluses that maintained complexity have long since disappeared by the point of collapse, being used up for problem-solving and to support the ruling elite. Prior to collapse, in order to maintain the sociopolitical organisation that provides their wealth and power, the elite must continue to pay its military, bureaucrats, monument builders, and ensure bread and circuses for all. Framing the squeeze as emergency fiscal policy–as opposed to oppression–the elite have found this response to be the one that most quickly raises revenue and helps to plug the monetary gap that has arisen, arguing that this “temporary” tax/tribute will help to address the current crisis and give governing institutions the time to make corrections and reform so as to avoid such situations in the future.
Tainter notes that the temporary measure put in place tends to mutate well beyond a simple one-time tax. Taxes are rarely scaled back and they are often accompanied by less obvious but just as oppressive policy shifts.
Currency Debasement
The money-makers found early on that when the precious metals typically used in coinage were scarce but payments had to be made, mixing in cheaper metals could greatly extend the amount of currency on hand. Soldiers, supportive bureaucrats, and builders could be paid the same amount of money, but many more could be employed and for longer with this expansion of currency. This can be seen as an invisible tax since everyone’s purchasing power declines as price inflation results from the increase in the quantity of currency. This hidden aspect of currency debasement is leveraged by the ruling elite to avoid blame and point the finger at others, such as the money-changers or speculators. In the short term, however, this is standard operating procedure to sustain complexity and appease the masses just a bit longer.
Corvée Labour
Another standard and long-running response was for the elite to demand physical labour in place of currency taxes. Military service, mine work, or road repair would be demanded in place of coinage. Unfortunately, this tended to pull peasants away from their typical life of food production and harmed the most important surplus: agricultural products.
Confiscation and Forced Loans
It is not uncommon during such times for the ruling elite to seize goods, especially from wealthy landowners. They do this often under the framing of “patriotic donations” or “wealth taxes”. Seizures of grain stores, livestock, and precious metals have been carried out by governing institutions throughout recorded time.
Sale of Offices
Another avenue often pursued is to sell the wealthy bureaucratic titles or honorary positions. This generates revenue immediately for the governing, but can also benefit those wealthy who tap this opportunity via predation upon the population they are put in charge of. This particular response, then, creates an expanded chain of predation.
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The Devastating Backfires
These various extraction methods tend to trigger some unfortunate reaction chains.
First, as a result of knowing that any surplus that they might produce will simply be taken by the ruling elite, the peasantry become reluctant to invest in improving their production methods. Better tools, new crops, and expanded fields are avoided in favour of subsistence-level production. Subsequently, surplus actively shrinks rather than grows in the face of being squeezed by the elite.
Associated with this pressure of additional “taxes” upon food producers is the option to abandon their farms and fields in order to migrate to urban centres. This leads to an increase in urban poor–who depend upon grain doles–or bandits that disrupt trade routes and highways. Either choice further erodes the tax base.
This shrinking surplus leads to provincial aristocrats being squeezed by those further up the food chain. These elite respond to this pressure by insulating themselves via fortified villas, private armies, and wealth hoarding while at the same time reducing cooperation with the governing elite. Territorial disputes begin to increase in frequency and tax collection from these regions becomes almost impossible.
All of the above serves to intensify currency debasement and cause periodic price spikes. Pricier food especially leads to greater social unrest and demands from soldiers and other bureaucrats to increase pay in light of price inflation and the increased demands upon them. This all results in even more debasement–a vicious inflation spiral that is next to impossible to stop.
This extraction response is exceedingly unpopular amongst almost all of society outside the elite benefitting from it. It causes a significant erosion in the legitimacy of the governing institutions, particularly when the elite fail to protect its people from invaders or famine while at the same time demanding its surplus food. There comes a point when the moral contract that has held the various societal systems together can be interpreted as breaking or broken, leading to laws no longer being obeyed, military service being evaded, and invaders becoming seen as liberators.
The Cruel Irony
At the beginning, intensified extraction is viewed as a strength as opposed to a weakness for it signals that the state has the reach and power to collect taxes everywhere and whenever it wishes. It too, however, encounters diminishing returns which eventually flips this script. The costs of collecting taxes–enforcers, prisons, and the suppression of revolts–end up equalling or exceeding the benefits that are gained.
What began as a net gain turns into a net loss. The elite, however, continue to pursue the policy in the belief that there really is no other adequate mechanism to sustain their lifestyles and the state’s security apparatus–which is increasingly having to protect the governing from the governed. Institutionally and psychologically, the elite are incapable of reversing course and cutting their budgets and allowing societal wealth to be shared more justly amongst all and quelling the growing social unrest.
The Classic Maya (c. 250–900 CE)
Not having coinage or a centralised emperor, extraction amongst the Classic Maya was in the form of tribute, labour, and food surpluses that got funnelled to a divine king and associated governing elite. As society grew, the king demanded greater food surplus and forced labour to construct ever-grander buildings and monuments. The elite also required the population to participate in military service to wage the wars needed to maintain the cosmic order and political prestige.
Pollen cores have found that massive deforestation took place over the years, probably in response to attempts to meet these growing food tribute demands. The result of this clearing of trees was a shift in rainfall patterns and increased topsoil erosion, leading to a decline in food surplus. In response, the king intensified the extraction process, demanding even more food tribute from soils already showing exhaustion.
The citizenry responded as many do in such situations: they left. The peasantry upon which the elite depended began to vacate the cities and hinterlands, moving to communities and unexploited lands mostly out of the reach of their elite.
Rather than recognise the predicament and reverse their tightening grip and expenditures, the elite accelerated certain aspects–such as monument building–apparently in the hope that the gods would be pleased and restore the abundance of the past. What this accomplished, however, was a quickened consumption of the final surpluses on non-productive displays during a time when commoners were starving. This final splurge can be seen in the archaeological record where palaces appear to have been abandoned rather hastily with partially-finished sections and unburied royalty. Everything seems to have just suddenly stopped midstream.
The Western Roman Empire (c. 3rd-5th Century CE)
The extraction spiral is seen clearly in the latter stages of the Western Roman Empire. In order to help fund its bureaucracies and armies, the silver denarius was debased fairly regularly as the chart below shows.
On top of this currency debasement, repressive taxes were imposed upon peasants. Land-and-head-taxes (capitatio-iugatio) were put in place and payment made via livestock, wine, and/or grain. In the latter stages of this tax, entire shiploads of Egyptian grain were seized and used to feed the military, especially those along the frontier.
These taxes were too much for many peasants. In Spain and Gaul many formed rebel bands (bagaudae) that were for all intents and purposes a society parallel to the state-controlled Roman one; others simply fled, abandoning their farms and shrinking the tax base even further. Even many provincial elites found the taxes overburdensome and stopped paying them, instead paying barbarian chieftains (e.g., Visigoths, Vandals) to protect them from the Romans–this was a more reliable and less expensive option.
Rather than curtail their exuberant spending habits, the empire created new bureaucracies (i.e., magistri officiorum, rationales) to chase down the tax evaders. These additional complexities required additional resources and payment, and by about 400 CE the costs of these bureaucracies were in excess of what was being retrieved from taxes in the form of grain. Yet, the tax court in Ravenna continued to demand the payments be made right up until the Goths arrived and knocked on its gates.
The Shared Signature
Archaeological evidence suggests that the urban centres that display the most wealth through its monumental architecture also show the fastest collapse during the empire’s final phase. The reason for this is likely because the wealth that was being used to support the cities and their elite was not surplus in nature–but extracted from a shrinking base–and records of the time showed stability right up to the very end. The numbers appeared normal because they were measuring inputs and not the most important variable: net energy. Although the method and scale have changed, this pattern–extraction from a shrinking base masked via misleading metrics–can be seen in our modern world as well.
The Modern Twist
Now let me turn to an analysis of modernity through the lens that Tainter’s thesis provides. The differences are noteworthy to consider, but the structural trap is similar. Modern states extract wealth from the masses via debt, energy, data, and financialisation–not collections of grain–and on a scale unimaginable to ancient societies. But as with any society of the past, diminishing returns build with the elite doubling down on extraction that serves to accelerate the growing instability.
There are four modern areas in which this pattern plays out.
Financialised Extraction
Modern states tend to extract wealth through money creation and debt. Near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, and bond purchases pump the financial markets full of liquidity. This inflates asset prices immensely (e.g., real estate, stocks) while also diminishing the purchasing power of wages and savings. This is a stealth tax that few, if any, realise.
What this serves to do, however, is concentrate wealth amongst the elite–who are the overwhelming holders of financialised assets–while the lower and middle classes experience stagnant wages, out-of-reach shelter prices, and ever-more price inflation on everything. Eventually, this situation leads to social unrest, populist backlash, political gridlock, and a true legitimacy crisis not too dissimilar to what Rome experienced with its eroding social contract. We can see this situation growing in most, if not all, nation states where national debt servicing is consuming more and more of federal budgets, while less is left for such areas as healthcare, education, and infrastructure. For the most part the elite have been able to avoid blame when burdens increase on the broader population through price inflation; it is masked through technical complexity, not unlike the currency debasement that Ancient Rome used repeatedly.
Energy and Resource Extraction
Virtually all modern extraction is fuelled by hydrocarbons–oil, gas, and coal. The state tends to subsidise heavily and greatly protect the energy corporations, even as the energy-return-on-investment of them declines and requires ever-more energy to extract the energy resources. As hydrocarbons become scarcer and cost more to extract, the cost of everything rises given how fundamental energy is to production.
Rather than confront the overconsumption taking place, states intensify extraction through such things as deep sea and Arctic drilling, extensive pipelines, and military intervention in resource-rich regions. This intensification also prompts geopolitical conflict, supply chain fragility, and expanding ecosystem destruction, all of which help to further shrink the surplus that the extraction itself depends upon. This is not unlike past societies that demanded more tribute despite exhausted soils; and an intensified extraction from a diminishing resource base serves to accelerate the depletion it depends upon.
Surveillance and Data Extraction (The New Corvée)
While labour is important to modern states and corporations–although decreasingly so thanks to financialisation of the economy and technology–they are increasingly extracting personal data and people’s attention. Surveillance capitalism has been exceedingly successful in harvesting individual and group behaviour, location, and preferences in order to market products and services, train artificial intelligence, and help predict social unrest.
Unfortunately, this data harvesting has led to massive distrust, social fragmentation, and an epidemic in mental health issues. Many people have become disengaged from society, far more polarised in opinions and beliefs, and have retreated into echo chambers. As a result of this increase in surveillance, states are far less capable of coordinating collective action. This is a clear example of a type of extraction yielding negative returns. Not unlike corvée labour that pulled peasants from their productive agricultural work, modern workers are having their attention pulled and extracted in a manner that degrades their capacity for collective action.
Military-Industrial Extraction (The New Conquest)
Modern states spend trillions of dollars on warfare, especially on hi-tech products, despite being as overstretched as Rome was when it was continuing to engage in efforts at territorial expansion. The United States, for example, expends more than the next 10 countries combined on their military in a quest to maintain global hegemony and secure trade routes.
This expenditure, however, has been extremely costly with rare net resource gains. Instead, military adventures tend to result in significant blowback such as refugee crises, terrorism, and increased peer rivalries that require even greater resource inputs. In the meantime, the domestic US is experiencing degrading infrastructure and services, weakening internal resilience, and growing social unrest. The benefits of maintaining global hegemony are being overwhelmed by the costs associated with it–not unlike the overextended legions of Rome–while domestic decline accelerates as a result of the apparatus’s resource consumption.
Squeezing the masses even tighter as diminishing returns bites into surpluses is perhaps the first and most automatic response of the elite; but it is only one of several. In part 3, I will explore the elite response of investing more heavily in ideological justification for their rule and decisions. As with the squeeze just analysed, this next response is no less self-defeating and consumes resources while failing to address the underlying fundamentals.
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What is going to be my standard WARNING/ADVICE going forward and that I have reiterated in various ways before this:
Only time will tell how this all unfolds but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by ‘collapsing now to avoid the rush’ and pursuing self-sufficiency. By this I mean removing as many dependencies on the Matrix as is possible and making do, locally. And if one can do this without negative impacts upon our fragile ecosystems or do so while creating more resilient ecosystems, all the better.
Building community (maybe even just household) resilience to as high a level as possible seems prudent given the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. There’s no guarantee it will ensure ‘recovery’ after a significant societal stressor/shock but it should increase the probability of it and that, perhaps, is all we can ‘hope’ for from its pursuit.
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"People of privilege will risk their complete destruction rather than relinquish any material portion of their advantage", John Kenneth Galbraith.
More on Joe Tainter below.
https://kevinhester.live/2017/08/08/the-myth-of-human-progress-and-the-collapse-of-complex-societies-chris-hedges/
"I noted that voluntary simplification would be the most rational response, but it is one that is structurally impossible for the elite to pursue…"
But for the non-elite, it should be thoughtfully and carefully pursued!
I think it is important to do this at least a half-tank of gas away from the nearest population centre. The further out you get, the number of closer targets squares — if you assume that small, sustainable places will be attacked.
But don't do it alone. Start gathering "your tribe" *now*. Don't wait until you actually *need* them! Then, incorporate as a co-op and buy land. Then, you can build with natural and recycled materials for a fraction of what a typical new house costs. Every house doesn't need its own washer and dryer.
https://youtu.be/slIJWCgvwJ4
It would be best to do this before you need to, while you can still get things delivered.