Civilisations have life cycles, akin to biological animals. What it means for a civilisation to become old has little to do with its age in years. It has a specific meaning.
There more more ways to be wrong than right
Consider four cards marked “1” “2” “3” and “4”. There are 24 ways to order the cards and only one of them is correct. The correct order is therefore likely to be produced by a random shuffle only 4% of the time. Conclusion: There are more ways for things to be wrong than right.
Our genetic code is an ordering of chemical base-pairs. Like the cards, there are more incorrect orderings than correct orderings. Some orderings are a matter of life and death. Others merely fine-tune some capability.
Evolution is dependent on the random mutations that occur between generations. Most mutations are disadvantageous (more ways for things to go wrong), and if they are disadvantageous enough, they are removed from the gene pool by natural selection.
Successful civilisations
A successful civilisation is one that that removes its citizens from the forces of natural selection. Citizens do not make life-and-death decisions. The are not put in physical jeopardy that they must escape through agility and cunning. All those born can expect to reach adulthood, and nearly all do. That means that the genetic errors are rarely removed from the gene pool, and with each successive generation, the errors compound themselves.
Citizens are increasingly unable to cope with the requirements of advanced civilisation. However complex it might be, their ability to understand it drops with each generation. Ultimately, a generation arrives which prefers conspiracy theories that they can understand to complexity that they cannot. They prefer political leaders who propose simple solutions to simple problems, even though nothing about advanced civilisation is simple. In short, such citizens fight the complexity of civilisation, without which, their existence would be impossible. This is a logical dead end.
Whatever solutions be possible in one generation become less possible in successive generations because fewer people understand how the solutions work. Conclusion: There is no future brighter than the present.
The future is now
In 2008, Western civilisation underwent a collapse of its financial system, and that collapse was due entirely to mismanagement. An extensive bail-out was required, and that bail-out has never quite ended. The reason is that few citizens were able to understand “quantitative easing,” “over-the-counter swaps” and “short-selling.” They preferred to allow the architects of the collapse to also design the rescue plan. The rescue unsurprisingly made the guilty unimaginably wealthy and it did not heal the fundamental weaknesses of the system. Citizens concluded that their countries had too many foreigners.
Try this experiment: ask the next person you meet to explain the difference between amperage and voltage. We live a civilisation that simply could not exist without electricity, yet vanishingly few citizens know what electricity is, to the extent of being able to explain its basic properties. It is then no wonder that citizens doubt the warnings and explanations of science, which have played a critical role in the climate change crisis and in the rejection of vaccination.
A doom-horizon
Western civilisation cannot continue with a predatory and unstable financial system. Civilisation cannot make meaningful decisions about technology without a general understanding of technology. The advice of scientists cannot be taken by people who ridicule science. It is no longer possible to explain to a majority of citizens the nature of the problems they face exist and which solutions exist. The events of 2025 are evidence that Western civilisation has already crossed one doom-horizon.
There is no linear progression of Western civilisation, as it existed in 2025, that shall see the end of the century. The humans who witness it shall be in a very different social order. It is arguably the duty of every activist today to engage in discussion with other activists regarding the possible outcomes. The only way to work toward one is to know one.
The Activersity is in the business of preparing activists to have that discussion. It does not promote any particular social order, but does teach about the history of social change and how to think about social orders. Explore this blog for inspiring ideas.
