I find your framing of collapse as an emergent consequence of scale and complexity deeply persuasive, and it aligns closely with my own thinking about digital technology as a parallel emergent phenomenon. At sufficient scale, the technosphere no longer functions merely as a set of tools but as a behavior-shaping environment that further overwhelms our Paleolithic cognitive capacities and distances us from biophysical reality. In that sense, digital systems may be understood not as a separate crisis, but as one of the cultural pathways through which overshoot and fragility now express themselves.
Yup. This is how I've framed my thinking for a few years now, and it has really clarified a lot of previously confusing points for me. I appreciate you articulating so well, doc.
“The collapse of complex societies results from a mismatch between the innate cognitive capacities of the growth-oriented human genome (in whatever culture-specific guise of perceiving the world) and the systemic surprises that emerge from excessive scale.”
I agree with your observations, although I find the claim that a growth imperative is encoded in the genome somewhat overreaching. Growth is a sensible survival strategy until it isn’t any more. I have heard claims that humans in resource poor environments (think hunter gatherers in the semi desert) kept population down by design.
I agree with this. The problem is the lag time between ecological harm and feedbacks, especially when crossing bioregions. We *need* the feedback from spoiling our own nest to correct for the apparent "growth imperative", which is actually an evolutionary strategy driven by the Maximum Power Principle when we discover technologies which unlock entropy gradients.
Doesn’t this pose a chicken and egg problem? Does language precede behavior? Or does language follow behavior? Either way, any suggestions how the cognitive mismatch might be reduced?
Yes, yes, and yes. But perhaps what we think of as the innate disposition of the human animal is itself an evolved phenomenon, an evolutionary spandrel that fundamentally changed our brain structure and hence who we 'are' as a species, divergent from bonobos and chimps and even H Neanderthalis.
Julian Jaynes work got me thinking about this possibility, which I've called the Entanglement Hypothesis (https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2023/11/11/the-entanglement-hypothesis-revisited/). While it doesn't change our current predicament or prognosis, it raises, I think, some interesting possibilities about whether any human society that emerges after this likely centuries-long collapse, might not be the inherently destructive and fearful Homo Rapiens that John Gray writes about, but rather a quite passive and peaceful creature reconnected with the rest of life on Earth and hence not inspired or fated to repeat the current disastrous human experiment.
What we habitually call civilization, Kemp calls Goliath.
In order for an actual Civilization to rise from the ashes of the current global Goliath, we need a Goldilocks collapse that neither exterminates h. Sapiens nor leaves what Kemp calls Goliath fuel around for the taking.
The only other preventative measure involves telling new stories.
A nice follow-up to Part 1 that described the multiple interacting global problems, on emergence in operating systems. I wish this discussion could get into mainstream media. A lot of the examples you give of ‘problem solving’ (e.g. DDT) is typical narrow boundary thinking that partly comes from our education system. Although the growth and collapse process is likely ‘natural’ or partly so, we are aware it is happening. This gives us the opportunity to act. But will we do it? Can we give up 24 hour ice cream to save the planet? It needs collective action. We certainly won’t get anywhere with “Hope”, a word that is commonly used when facing global issues. Derrick Jensen once said: “Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless”.
I really like this article. The logic is clear and objective. The supporting evidence and examples seem solid. And the whole framework addresses systems thinking, which is my preferred forum. I entirely agree with your fundamental conclusions:
“I am arguing that H. sapiens does not evolve socially stable, eco-compatible large-scale complex societies because we cannot evolve socially stable, eco-compatible large-scale complex societies. Such societies simply do not ‘emerge’ from the neuro-cognitive algorithms that help determine unnaturally large-group human behavioural-dynamics, particularly the dynamics of generated by global [modern techno-industrial (MTI)] society.” “The evidence suggests that [MTI] societies have been irreversibly expelled from the sustainability Garden of Eden and are in danger of being ‘selected out’ altogether.”
Yes. So, where does that leave us? I believe that convincing people of the inevitability of the collapse of the current global modern techno-industrial (MTI) society is an important (albeit seemingly fruitless) endeavour. I fear that, for the very reasons that got us here, there is no way to convince a critical mass of MTI population that the end is nigh until the end is upon us. (This is in some ways analogous to my Value Change Conundrum - https://TheValueCrisis.com/the_value_change_conundrum.htm.) If that is indeed the case, then there does not seem to be high value in setting that lesson as your ultimate purpose. I suggest that it’s a worthwhile pursuit *only* if it convinces a small section of society (ecological philosophers?) to begin working on what happens next.
If H. sapiens goes extinct, then there is not much to be done except to adopt the standard palliative care doctrine of making our remaining days as comfortable as possible. (And folks could quite nobly work towards that end.) However, let us presume that extinction does not happen. Let us presume that enough humans remain such that the pieces can be picked up and our evolution might continue. What then?
Is there equal inevitability that we will do it all again? THAT is the question worth exploring. Based on your other writing, I’m going to guess that your conclusion would be: “Yes, humans will repeat the same rise and fall, as they have done for millennia. We can’t help it.” I disagree. No matter how many civilizations have risen and fallen in our past, none of them have had the impact that ours has had on our one and only planet. Nor have any of them (I suspect) had such a detailed (but tragically ignored) awareness of their fate well in advance. This time, it will *have* to be different. How different? I don’t know, but I know that the basic starting parameters will have changed. There is no second planet for the next iteration to start from.
I choose to live and write with purpose. To that end, I’ve chosen to devote what’s left of my years to the study of what could be done differently - what systemic change has to take place in order to make things better - even assuming civilizational collapse (and I mostly do). I choose this because I believe such study (even if isn’t mine) can have a positive impact, regardless of the ultimate outcome. If extinction is our lot, it becomes part of that palliative care. If we are to repeat the rise and fall, it might help the next civilization navigate the very changed circumstances. And if we are actually evolving to the next plateau of life on Earth, it could help define what that might look like.
The macro-predicament, and its various interdependent sub-predicaments reduce to a single form: Scale-dependent maximization of narrow-boundary, negative-sum game theoretic outcomes.
In principle* such a form can only be countered by an equal and opposite form that contains the above within a bounded range of homeostatic dynamic equilibrium. Such a form must, in principle*, be grounded on two mutually dependent elements: 1) Scale optimization, and 2) A wide-boundary, mutually enforceable, social contract, that wields the precautionary principle in a proactive manner that subsumes the particular wills of all selfish agents, under a general will that seeks to maintain the universalizable, wide-boundary conditions for particular wills to survive and prosper at all.
The macro-predicament, is largely based on the evolutionary dominance of narrow-boundary thinking over wide-boundary thinking, memetically, culturally, and demographically.
Wide boundary versus narrow boundary definitions with respect to the one-many, whole-part, and universal-particular dialectic and spatio-temporal scale are critical for the inter-subjective agreement, and mutual reciprocity necessary for establishing a social contract described above.
Narrow boundary thinkers invariably restrict themselves and their thoughts, to their local, finite sphere of influence and existence. They focus on themselves, their in-group, their family, their religion, and possibly, for the slightly less narrow minded, their nation and future generations one or two steps removed. They discount almost entirely, other humans outside their narrow boundary and discount almost entirely the ecosphere, and non-human lifeforms. Narrow boundary thinkers subscribe to major world religions that promise a utopian afterlife that fundamentally disincentivizes immanetizing the eschaton on this planet.
Narrow boundary thinkers exhibit a will to non-reason, culminating in irrational willing, which destroys the foundation on which inter-subjective agreement and mutual reciprocity can be had.
Wide boundary thinkers, conversely, go beyond their local sphere of influence and existence, some in the limit, even viewing the universe sub-species aeternitatis. Wide boundary thinkers recognize that the absolute worth of civilization is its propulsion toward the universality of thought. They account for the interdependency of all lifeforms in a macro-systemic manner and subordinate the particular to the universal, at least in the general sense. For wide boundary thinkers there is no misalignment between metaphysical or religious claims and immanetizing the eschaton on this planet. Wide boundary thinkers exhibit a will to reason, culminating in rational willing, which is the foundation of inter-subjective agreement and mutual reciprocity.
Here we observe a fundamental inference pattern, psychological, and semantic mismatch between two cognitive species with respect to the one-many dialectic and spatio-temporal scale. Hitherto, the narrow boundary species has competitively excluded and dominated the other.
From the wide-boundary perspective of an advanced Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) in planetary orbit:
What would you do?
What must be done?
What can be done?
Would disclosure of NHI be sufficient to tilt the scales toward our wide-boundary evolution?
Thank you very much for sharing this text. I admire your work. However, on this occasion I find your approach excessively deterministic. I have the feeling that you assume our brain is a fixed piece of hardware that doesn’t change. However, modern neuroscience emphasizes directed neuroplasticity. Epigenetic studies suggest that we can inherit certain abilities. We aren’t born knowing “systems thinking” (I wish we were!), but perhaps we could be born with a brain that’s more “predisposed” or better suited to acquiring it.
I think individuals may be non-deterministic. For example, I've pretty much eschewed consumption beyond the necessary.
But I'm probably a sigma-3 outlier. The other 99.7% of people behave more-or-less by dissipating as much power as they possibly can.
In theory, we may well all be neuro-plastic enough to resist our biological imperative. But in practice, can you point to any evidence that we are able to?
I've gone way beyond worrying about this. We are simply one more organism, behaving like organisms do. I only hope our surviving artifacts might serve as warning signs to whatever creature might follow in our path.
We don't know that other organisms don't have existential angst.
In particular, whales are thought to be fairly intelligent. Don't you think they were wondering why humans were focused on exterminating them fol so long? (And even now, we're still reducing their numbers by disrupting their food chain.)
We humans are so full of assumptions about creatures that we simply do not understand.
Agree to "we don't know". I believe evolution has allowed "us" to think abstractly and to codify our existence, to name a few. Life, in my worldview, is a pyramid scheme, building on the past to better reduce the energy gradient.
I'm not so sure about this quote, "The repeated cyclical collapse of large-scale human societies does not mean there is something fundamentally ‘wrong’ with most individual human beings. People behave naturally (do they have any choice?) as best they can in their particular type of unnatural cultural circumstances throughout the cycle." I love your work but I don't think we can minimize the patriarchal influences of repeated collapse.
According to Luke Kemp, the Holocene provided the necessary fuel to give rise to Goliaths. It seems to me that a Goliath inverts the proper relationship between Iain Mcgilcrest's master and emissary, which becomes infectious via the Goliath game theory trap of a race to the bottom.
If the threats that force arms races could be abated, could the relationship between the master and the emissary be set right, enabling survival of our species?
Dr. Rees is among the finest communicators of the human predicament. But critics find his arguments over-deterministic or, at the very least, missing what Stu Kauffman calls "the adjacent possible." I agree, and I believe your comment here hints at a way to build a more comprehensive and more contingent narrative.
Rees writes, "... as tools improved (stone to metal weapons, for example), many hunter-gathering tribes over-harvested or over-hunted their home ranges. To overcome the problem of food shortages, some were able to adopt agriculture." To my understanding, our best archaeology tells a slightly different story. While some tribes over-harvested, nomadic foraging bands tended not to do so. And tribes that did overshoot typically became subject to (and often learned from) negative eco-feedback within fairly local measures of time and distance. What changed, as Kemp and a few others are pointing out recently, is the Holocene climate shift. It appears that sedentism and agriculture were adopted somewhat regretfully in widespread geographies where nomadic foraging became near impossible. James Scott's and Andrea Matranga's work are persuasive here.
In these places where, as Kemp points out, there's a lot of "lootable resources" and few to no exit options, the resulting conflict focused cultural innovation toward out accumulating / out growing out-group threats, the left-hemisphere dominance hierarchical multi-polar arms race trap dynamic set in, and the tendency for these competing sedentary populations to cyclically experience excessive overshoot and collapse also set in.
This story has a degree of contingency built-in. While one could say that the human capacity to overshoot its carrying capacity is hard-wired; one could also say that capacity only tends to be expressed when there exists a group-level selective advantage to organize as hyper-competitive hyper-extractive dominance hierarchies. Overshoot is a consequence of cultural evolution. We learned our way into this predicament as a species, and we can learn our way out of it when those advantages literally dissipate. Does that mean we can avoid a massive contraction in energy and material throughput? No. But I think it does mean there must be some flexibility in the way that contraction plays out. The system is sputtering. The signals are everywhere. Are we able to read the signals as a species and figure out how to exercise some collective right-hemisphere mastery of the emissary? I suppose that would constitute what evolutionary biologists call a "major evolutionary transition" of sorts. Hopefully we wouldn't lose too much of our individuality, or too many individuals for that matter, in the transition. It would likely be both tragic and beautiful at the same time.
But keeping thoughts like these in mind gives me hope when the inevitability of overshoot's consequences, which Dr. Rees explains so unbelievably well, start to weigh on me.
You would enjoy Nate Hagens’ latest post on his substack, Behavioral Thermodynamics, Part I.
After laying out the three classic laws of thermodynamics, he explains the Maximum Power Principle in layman’s terms. Dr. Rees appears to treat the MPP as a genuine fourth law of thermodynamics, but Dr. Hagens shows counter examples that prove it is not a law in the same sense as the three classic laws.
Dr. Hagens then proceeds to offer a fifth principle, organization for endurance. Power misses the crucial concept of “move quality.” A snake exerts little power but great strategy in striking far higher-power prey. Hibernation and the above-ground appearance of death among perennials and trees are examples of move quality for endurance. The question is what the human superorganism can learn from trees and snakes.
I am well acquainted with Joe Tainter 's brilliant work as he co-authored a book for Springer when I was his editor. Bill's superb and expansive summary with its emphasis on emergent properties raises an important question. How do you convince people that we are on a path to collapse when modern technology itself is regarded, consciously or not, as an emergent property of a civilization that is unprecedented in many respects? Cruise missiles and atomic bombs could never have been predicted from the simple, hand-held tools and projectiles that were in use for millions of years, yet these modern weapons did ultimately emerge as a result of early hominids having crossed the 750 cc "rubicon" of brain size and complexity. So I think many would argue that modern technology itself is an emergent property that will somehow keep us ahead of the problems that civilization creates (the Star Trek scenario).
Great comment. Craig Dilworth's epic historical book of quite a few years ago "Too Smart for Our Own Good" supplies much of the answer to your plaintive questions.
And Gerard de Groot's "The Bomb" gives the details on the ultrasocial non-thinking that went into the savage politics of the Bomb and mega-bombs that we are living under today.
Convincing humans of anything is fruitless - those with social power pay no heed to the distracted inclinations of their victims. Maybe Bill Rees is now understanding this?
Great comment. Craig Dilworth's epic historical book of quite a few years ago "Too Smart for Our Own Good" supplies much of the answer to your plaintive questions.
And Gerard de Groot's "The Bomb" gives the details on the ultrasocial non-thinking that went into the savage politics of the Bomb and mega-bombs that we are living under today.
Convincing humans of anything is fruitless - those with social power pay no heed to the distracted inclinations of their victims. Maybe Bill Rees is now understanding this?
Reading this from the Warby Ranges, it lands less as an abstract systems argument and more as something you feel in the ground.
What you describe as emergent dysfunction shows up here as mismatched rhythms — soils asked to perform like factories, water expected to behave like infrastructure, humans organised as economic units rather than seasonal organisms. From a Human Systems Ecology lens, what we often label as collapse arrives less as a single event and more as a long unravelling of fit between human behaviour and the living systems that host it.
I’m struck by your point about cognitive limits. In practice, it isn’t just that we can’t understand complex systems — it’s that modern cultures have systematically trained us out of embodied, place-based knowing. We outsource perception to abstractions, dashboards, markets, models. The feedback still arrives — but often too late, too amplified, and too far removed from lived agency.
From where I stand, accounts of systemic breakdown become most useful when they’re read not as prediction but as diagnosis. In HSE terms, this looks like a loss of coupling: humans decoupled from ecological feedback, from seasonal constraint, from cultural memory of limits. Re-coupling doesn’t “solve” complexity — but it can soften trajectories, localise failure, and restore adaptive capacity at human scales.
On our farm, resilience doesn’t look like optimisation or growth. It looks like redundancy, slowness, observation, and humility. It looks like relearning how to read weather, noticing how children respond differently to land than to screens, watching what happens when systems are allowed to behave rather than perform. None of that scales neatly — and that may be the point.
So while large-scale industrial systems may continue to encounter hard limits, at smaller scales — human, ecological, cultural — there is still meaningful work in remembering how to belong inside systems rather than trying to dominate them. If nothing else, that remembering changes how disruption is lived, and what becomes possible in response.
Curious how others here are experiencing this — especially where you’re noticing loss of fit, or moments of re-coupling, in your own places.
Appreciate this piece. It feels like an honest naming of limits — and limits, properly held, can still be generative.
I suggest socially constructing the memetics of the Balance Imperative in contrast to the genetics of the Growth Imperative and socially constructing the memetics of ecospheric rights and responsibilities in contrast to the epigenetics of human rights and responsibilities ☺️🦎
I find your framing of collapse as an emergent consequence of scale and complexity deeply persuasive, and it aligns closely with my own thinking about digital technology as a parallel emergent phenomenon. At sufficient scale, the technosphere no longer functions merely as a set of tools but as a behavior-shaping environment that further overwhelms our Paleolithic cognitive capacities and distances us from biophysical reality. In that sense, digital systems may be understood not as a separate crisis, but as one of the cultural pathways through which overshoot and fragility now express themselves.
Yup. This is how I've framed my thinking for a few years now, and it has really clarified a lot of previously confusing points for me. I appreciate you articulating so well, doc.
Hardly a surprise, is it?
“The collapse of complex societies results from a mismatch between the innate cognitive capacities of the growth-oriented human genome (in whatever culture-specific guise of perceiving the world) and the systemic surprises that emerge from excessive scale.”
I agree with your observations, although I find the claim that a growth imperative is encoded in the genome somewhat overreaching. Growth is a sensible survival strategy until it isn’t any more. I have heard claims that humans in resource poor environments (think hunter gatherers in the semi desert) kept population down by design.
I agree with this. The problem is the lag time between ecological harm and feedbacks, especially when crossing bioregions. We *need* the feedback from spoiling our own nest to correct for the apparent "growth imperative", which is actually an evolutionary strategy driven by the Maximum Power Principle when we discover technologies which unlock entropy gradients.
The cognitive mismatch is ultimately a linguistic one. Please see my recent post, Fascia to Fascism
Doesn’t this pose a chicken and egg problem? Does language precede behavior? Or does language follow behavior? Either way, any suggestions how the cognitive mismatch might be reduced?
Yes, yes, and yes. But perhaps what we think of as the innate disposition of the human animal is itself an evolved phenomenon, an evolutionary spandrel that fundamentally changed our brain structure and hence who we 'are' as a species, divergent from bonobos and chimps and even H Neanderthalis.
Julian Jaynes work got me thinking about this possibility, which I've called the Entanglement Hypothesis (https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2023/11/11/the-entanglement-hypothesis-revisited/). While it doesn't change our current predicament or prognosis, it raises, I think, some interesting possibilities about whether any human society that emerges after this likely centuries-long collapse, might not be the inherently destructive and fearful Homo Rapiens that John Gray writes about, but rather a quite passive and peaceful creature reconnected with the rest of life on Earth and hence not inspired or fated to repeat the current disastrous human experiment.
Read Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp.
What we habitually call civilization, Kemp calls Goliath.
In order for an actual Civilization to rise from the ashes of the current global Goliath, we need a Goldilocks collapse that neither exterminates h. Sapiens nor leaves what Kemp calls Goliath fuel around for the taking.
The only other preventative measure involves telling new stories.
A nice follow-up to Part 1 that described the multiple interacting global problems, on emergence in operating systems. I wish this discussion could get into mainstream media. A lot of the examples you give of ‘problem solving’ (e.g. DDT) is typical narrow boundary thinking that partly comes from our education system. Although the growth and collapse process is likely ‘natural’ or partly so, we are aware it is happening. This gives us the opportunity to act. But will we do it? Can we give up 24 hour ice cream to save the planet? It needs collective action. We certainly won’t get anywhere with “Hope”, a word that is commonly used when facing global issues. Derrick Jensen once said: “Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless”.
I really like this article. The logic is clear and objective. The supporting evidence and examples seem solid. And the whole framework addresses systems thinking, which is my preferred forum. I entirely agree with your fundamental conclusions:
“I am arguing that H. sapiens does not evolve socially stable, eco-compatible large-scale complex societies because we cannot evolve socially stable, eco-compatible large-scale complex societies. Such societies simply do not ‘emerge’ from the neuro-cognitive algorithms that help determine unnaturally large-group human behavioural-dynamics, particularly the dynamics of generated by global [modern techno-industrial (MTI)] society.” “The evidence suggests that [MTI] societies have been irreversibly expelled from the sustainability Garden of Eden and are in danger of being ‘selected out’ altogether.”
Yes. So, where does that leave us? I believe that convincing people of the inevitability of the collapse of the current global modern techno-industrial (MTI) society is an important (albeit seemingly fruitless) endeavour. I fear that, for the very reasons that got us here, there is no way to convince a critical mass of MTI population that the end is nigh until the end is upon us. (This is in some ways analogous to my Value Change Conundrum - https://TheValueCrisis.com/the_value_change_conundrum.htm.) If that is indeed the case, then there does not seem to be high value in setting that lesson as your ultimate purpose. I suggest that it’s a worthwhile pursuit *only* if it convinces a small section of society (ecological philosophers?) to begin working on what happens next.
If H. sapiens goes extinct, then there is not much to be done except to adopt the standard palliative care doctrine of making our remaining days as comfortable as possible. (And folks could quite nobly work towards that end.) However, let us presume that extinction does not happen. Let us presume that enough humans remain such that the pieces can be picked up and our evolution might continue. What then?
Is there equal inevitability that we will do it all again? THAT is the question worth exploring. Based on your other writing, I’m going to guess that your conclusion would be: “Yes, humans will repeat the same rise and fall, as they have done for millennia. We can’t help it.” I disagree. No matter how many civilizations have risen and fallen in our past, none of them have had the impact that ours has had on our one and only planet. Nor have any of them (I suspect) had such a detailed (but tragically ignored) awareness of their fate well in advance. This time, it will *have* to be different. How different? I don’t know, but I know that the basic starting parameters will have changed. There is no second planet for the next iteration to start from.
I choose to live and write with purpose. To that end, I’ve chosen to devote what’s left of my years to the study of what could be done differently - what systemic change has to take place in order to make things better - even assuming civilizational collapse (and I mostly do). I choose this because I believe such study (even if isn’t mine) can have a positive impact, regardless of the ultimate outcome. If extinction is our lot, it becomes part of that palliative care. If we are to repeat the rise and fall, it might help the next civilization navigate the very changed circumstances. And if we are actually evolving to the next plateau of life on Earth, it could help define what that might look like.
The macro-predicament, and its various interdependent sub-predicaments reduce to a single form: Scale-dependent maximization of narrow-boundary, negative-sum game theoretic outcomes.
In principle* such a form can only be countered by an equal and opposite form that contains the above within a bounded range of homeostatic dynamic equilibrium. Such a form must, in principle*, be grounded on two mutually dependent elements: 1) Scale optimization, and 2) A wide-boundary, mutually enforceable, social contract, that wields the precautionary principle in a proactive manner that subsumes the particular wills of all selfish agents, under a general will that seeks to maintain the universalizable, wide-boundary conditions for particular wills to survive and prosper at all.
The macro-predicament, is largely based on the evolutionary dominance of narrow-boundary thinking over wide-boundary thinking, memetically, culturally, and demographically.
Wide boundary versus narrow boundary definitions with respect to the one-many, whole-part, and universal-particular dialectic and spatio-temporal scale are critical for the inter-subjective agreement, and mutual reciprocity necessary for establishing a social contract described above.
Narrow boundary thinkers invariably restrict themselves and their thoughts, to their local, finite sphere of influence and existence. They focus on themselves, their in-group, their family, their religion, and possibly, for the slightly less narrow minded, their nation and future generations one or two steps removed. They discount almost entirely, other humans outside their narrow boundary and discount almost entirely the ecosphere, and non-human lifeforms. Narrow boundary thinkers subscribe to major world religions that promise a utopian afterlife that fundamentally disincentivizes immanetizing the eschaton on this planet.
Narrow boundary thinkers exhibit a will to non-reason, culminating in irrational willing, which destroys the foundation on which inter-subjective agreement and mutual reciprocity can be had.
Wide boundary thinkers, conversely, go beyond their local sphere of influence and existence, some in the limit, even viewing the universe sub-species aeternitatis. Wide boundary thinkers recognize that the absolute worth of civilization is its propulsion toward the universality of thought. They account for the interdependency of all lifeforms in a macro-systemic manner and subordinate the particular to the universal, at least in the general sense. For wide boundary thinkers there is no misalignment between metaphysical or religious claims and immanetizing the eschaton on this planet. Wide boundary thinkers exhibit a will to reason, culminating in rational willing, which is the foundation of inter-subjective agreement and mutual reciprocity.
Here we observe a fundamental inference pattern, psychological, and semantic mismatch between two cognitive species with respect to the one-many dialectic and spatio-temporal scale. Hitherto, the narrow boundary species has competitively excluded and dominated the other.
From the wide-boundary perspective of an advanced Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) in planetary orbit:
What would you do?
What must be done?
What can be done?
Would disclosure of NHI be sufficient to tilt the scales toward our wide-boundary evolution?
Thank you very much for sharing this text. I admire your work. However, on this occasion I find your approach excessively deterministic. I have the feeling that you assume our brain is a fixed piece of hardware that doesn’t change. However, modern neuroscience emphasizes directed neuroplasticity. Epigenetic studies suggest that we can inherit certain abilities. We aren’t born knowing “systems thinking” (I wish we were!), but perhaps we could be born with a brain that’s more “predisposed” or better suited to acquiring it.
Again, thank you.
I think individuals may be non-deterministic. For example, I've pretty much eschewed consumption beyond the necessary.
But I'm probably a sigma-3 outlier. The other 99.7% of people behave more-or-less by dissipating as much power as they possibly can.
In theory, we may well all be neuro-plastic enough to resist our biological imperative. But in practice, can you point to any evidence that we are able to?
I've gone way beyond worrying about this. We are simply one more organism, behaving like organisms do. I only hope our surviving artifacts might serve as warning signs to whatever creature might follow in our path.
“one recent study found that modern human brains contain about 7 gm of microplastic particles (the equivalent of a plastic spoon)”
I’m guessing this isn’t the kind of neuro-plasticity you mean
LOL!
"We are simply one more organism..."
Yet this organism spends an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how "we" can guide our trajectory, our path along the Seneca Cliff?
We don't know that other organisms don't have existential angst.
In particular, whales are thought to be fairly intelligent. Don't you think they were wondering why humans were focused on exterminating them fol so long? (And even now, we're still reducing their numbers by disrupting their food chain.)
We humans are so full of assumptions about creatures that we simply do not understand.
Agree to "we don't know". I believe evolution has allowed "us" to think abstractly and to codify our existence, to name a few. Life, in my worldview, is a pyramid scheme, building on the past to better reduce the energy gradient.
I'm not so sure about this quote, "The repeated cyclical collapse of large-scale human societies does not mean there is something fundamentally ‘wrong’ with most individual human beings. People behave naturally (do they have any choice?) as best they can in their particular type of unnatural cultural circumstances throughout the cycle." I love your work but I don't think we can minimize the patriarchal influences of repeated collapse.
Collapse is patriarchal
Matriarchy is characterized by repair
According to Luke Kemp, the Holocene provided the necessary fuel to give rise to Goliaths. It seems to me that a Goliath inverts the proper relationship between Iain Mcgilcrest's master and emissary, which becomes infectious via the Goliath game theory trap of a race to the bottom.
If the threats that force arms races could be abated, could the relationship between the master and the emissary be set right, enabling survival of our species?
Dr. Rees is among the finest communicators of the human predicament. But critics find his arguments over-deterministic or, at the very least, missing what Stu Kauffman calls "the adjacent possible." I agree, and I believe your comment here hints at a way to build a more comprehensive and more contingent narrative.
Rees writes, "... as tools improved (stone to metal weapons, for example), many hunter-gathering tribes over-harvested or over-hunted their home ranges. To overcome the problem of food shortages, some were able to adopt agriculture." To my understanding, our best archaeology tells a slightly different story. While some tribes over-harvested, nomadic foraging bands tended not to do so. And tribes that did overshoot typically became subject to (and often learned from) negative eco-feedback within fairly local measures of time and distance. What changed, as Kemp and a few others are pointing out recently, is the Holocene climate shift. It appears that sedentism and agriculture were adopted somewhat regretfully in widespread geographies where nomadic foraging became near impossible. James Scott's and Andrea Matranga's work are persuasive here.
In these places where, as Kemp points out, there's a lot of "lootable resources" and few to no exit options, the resulting conflict focused cultural innovation toward out accumulating / out growing out-group threats, the left-hemisphere dominance hierarchical multi-polar arms race trap dynamic set in, and the tendency for these competing sedentary populations to cyclically experience excessive overshoot and collapse also set in.
This story has a degree of contingency built-in. While one could say that the human capacity to overshoot its carrying capacity is hard-wired; one could also say that capacity only tends to be expressed when there exists a group-level selective advantage to organize as hyper-competitive hyper-extractive dominance hierarchies. Overshoot is a consequence of cultural evolution. We learned our way into this predicament as a species, and we can learn our way out of it when those advantages literally dissipate. Does that mean we can avoid a massive contraction in energy and material throughput? No. But I think it does mean there must be some flexibility in the way that contraction plays out. The system is sputtering. The signals are everywhere. Are we able to read the signals as a species and figure out how to exercise some collective right-hemisphere mastery of the emissary? I suppose that would constitute what evolutionary biologists call a "major evolutionary transition" of sorts. Hopefully we wouldn't lose too much of our individuality, or too many individuals for that matter, in the transition. It would likely be both tragic and beautiful at the same time.
But keeping thoughts like these in mind gives me hope when the inevitability of overshoot's consequences, which Dr. Rees explains so unbelievably well, start to weigh on me.
You would enjoy Nate Hagens’ latest post on his substack, Behavioral Thermodynamics, Part I.
After laying out the three classic laws of thermodynamics, he explains the Maximum Power Principle in layman’s terms. Dr. Rees appears to treat the MPP as a genuine fourth law of thermodynamics, but Dr. Hagens shows counter examples that prove it is not a law in the same sense as the three classic laws.
Dr. Hagens then proceeds to offer a fifth principle, organization for endurance. Power misses the crucial concept of “move quality.” A snake exerts little power but great strategy in striking far higher-power prey. Hibernation and the above-ground appearance of death among perennials and trees are examples of move quality for endurance. The question is what the human superorganism can learn from trees and snakes.
I love Nate Hagens! Great examples. Thank you
I am well acquainted with Joe Tainter 's brilliant work as he co-authored a book for Springer when I was his editor. Bill's superb and expansive summary with its emphasis on emergent properties raises an important question. How do you convince people that we are on a path to collapse when modern technology itself is regarded, consciously or not, as an emergent property of a civilization that is unprecedented in many respects? Cruise missiles and atomic bombs could never have been predicted from the simple, hand-held tools and projectiles that were in use for millions of years, yet these modern weapons did ultimately emerge as a result of early hominids having crossed the 750 cc "rubicon" of brain size and complexity. So I think many would argue that modern technology itself is an emergent property that will somehow keep us ahead of the problems that civilization creates (the Star Trek scenario).
Great comment. Craig Dilworth's epic historical book of quite a few years ago "Too Smart for Our Own Good" supplies much of the answer to your plaintive questions.
And Gerard de Groot's "The Bomb" gives the details on the ultrasocial non-thinking that went into the savage politics of the Bomb and mega-bombs that we are living under today.
Convincing humans of anything is fruitless - those with social power pay no heed to the distracted inclinations of their victims. Maybe Bill Rees is now understanding this?
Great comment. Craig Dilworth's epic historical book of quite a few years ago "Too Smart for Our Own Good" supplies much of the answer to your plaintive questions.
And Gerard de Groot's "The Bomb" gives the details on the ultrasocial non-thinking that went into the savage politics of the Bomb and mega-bombs that we are living under today.
Convincing humans of anything is fruitless - those with social power pay no heed to the distracted inclinations of their victims. Maybe Bill Rees is now understanding this?
Reading this from the Warby Ranges, it lands less as an abstract systems argument and more as something you feel in the ground.
What you describe as emergent dysfunction shows up here as mismatched rhythms — soils asked to perform like factories, water expected to behave like infrastructure, humans organised as economic units rather than seasonal organisms. From a Human Systems Ecology lens, what we often label as collapse arrives less as a single event and more as a long unravelling of fit between human behaviour and the living systems that host it.
I’m struck by your point about cognitive limits. In practice, it isn’t just that we can’t understand complex systems — it’s that modern cultures have systematically trained us out of embodied, place-based knowing. We outsource perception to abstractions, dashboards, markets, models. The feedback still arrives — but often too late, too amplified, and too far removed from lived agency.
From where I stand, accounts of systemic breakdown become most useful when they’re read not as prediction but as diagnosis. In HSE terms, this looks like a loss of coupling: humans decoupled from ecological feedback, from seasonal constraint, from cultural memory of limits. Re-coupling doesn’t “solve” complexity — but it can soften trajectories, localise failure, and restore adaptive capacity at human scales.
On our farm, resilience doesn’t look like optimisation or growth. It looks like redundancy, slowness, observation, and humility. It looks like relearning how to read weather, noticing how children respond differently to land than to screens, watching what happens when systems are allowed to behave rather than perform. None of that scales neatly — and that may be the point.
So while large-scale industrial systems may continue to encounter hard limits, at smaller scales — human, ecological, cultural — there is still meaningful work in remembering how to belong inside systems rather than trying to dominate them. If nothing else, that remembering changes how disruption is lived, and what becomes possible in response.
Curious how others here are experiencing this — especially where you’re noticing loss of fit, or moments of re-coupling, in your own places.
Appreciate this piece. It feels like an honest naming of limits — and limits, properly held, can still be generative.
Great to read you, Great William Rees who began in the 1970's and stands with William Catton of "Overshoot" fame! (ironic understatement)
What’s striking here is that collapse isn’t framed as moral failure or bad incentives, but as a coordination breakdown driven by scale and emergence.
Once systems generate effects faster than shared understanding can stabilize, collapse stops being a choice and becomes a timing problem.
I suggest socially constructing the memetics of the Balance Imperative in contrast to the genetics of the Growth Imperative and socially constructing the memetics of ecospheric rights and responsibilities in contrast to the epigenetics of human rights and responsibilities ☺️🦎