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As outlined in the previous examples, societies sometimes fail to solve a problem – even though it's been recognised – because maintaining the status quo is good for the perpetrators or the power brokers, even if it's not so good for everyone else.
In contrast, there are also failures to attempt to solve perceived problems that are clearly harmful for everybody. This 'irrational behaviour' often arises when we are torn by clashes of values: we may be strongly attached to a bad situation because it is favoured by some deeply held value that we admire.
Religious values are especially deeply held and often the cause of disastrous behaviour: much of the deforestation of Easter Island had a religious motivation – to obtain logs to transport and erect the giant stone statues that were the basis of the island's religious practice.
Today, one reason why people in Montana have been reluctant to solve the obvious problems accumulating from mining, logging and ranching is that these industries were formerly the pillars of the local economy, and as a result they became bound up with the pioneer spirit and with Montanan self-identity.
Irrational failures also frequently arise from clashes between short-term and long-term motives. Billions of people today are desperately poor and able to think only of food for the next day. Poor fishermen in tropical reef areas use dynamite and cyanide to kill and catch reef fish, in full knowledge that they are destroying their future livelihood. They continue to act in this way because they feel they have no alternative food source in the struggle to meet the short-term needs of their children.
Governments also regularly operate on a shortterm focus: they feel overwhelmed by imminent disasters, so that they pay attention only to those crises that have reached flashpoint, and feel that they lack time or resources to devote to long-term problems. I've heard it said that political leaders in Washington now have a '90-day focus': they only talk about those problems with the potential to cause a disaster within the next 90 days.
Economists rationally justify these irrational focuses on short-term profits by 'discounting' future profits: that is, they argue that it may be better to harvest a resource today than to leave some of the resource for harvesting tomorrow, because the profits from today's harvest could be invested, and the accumulated interest between now and a harvest of exactly that same quantity of resource in the future would make today's harvest more valuable than the future harvest. This may well work in investment-banking circles but is it any guide to running a sustainable society?
A further possible cause of failure to attempt to solve a problem can be found in a particularly human trait: psychological denial. It's a technical term with a precise definition in individual psychology, which has since spread into pop culture.
If there's something that arouses an unbearably painful emotion, you may subconsciously suppress it or deny perception of it in order to avoid the unbearable pain – even though the practical results of ignoring your perception may prove ultimately disastrous, even fatal. The emotions most often responsible are terror, anxiety and sadness. Typical examples include refusing to think about the likelihood that a loved one may be dying, because the thought is so painful.
It happens in whole populations too. Consider a narrow deep river valley below a high dam; if the dam burst, the resulting flood would drown people for a long distance downstream. People living downstream have been polled about their feelings: are they concerned about the dam bursting? It's not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam.
Surprisingly, though, in populations that live within a few kilometres of the dam – where fear of the dam's breaking might be highest – pollsters find that the concern falls off to zero! That is, the people living immediately under the dam – who are probably most certain to be drowned – profess no concern.
It's a classic case of mass denial: the only way of preserving one's sanity while living immediately under the high dam is to deny the finite possibility that it could burst. Psychological denial may also explain why some collapsing societies fail to face up to the obvious causes of their collapse – even when the causes are plain to see and tower above them.
great article sir
Mr. Diamond,
Thank you for such a great article. I believe you are very accurate in your conclusion that since we became a civilized society (or so the records show) we have had a ruling elite that has used the land and the common people as a resource and they have extracted every molecule of wealth and power from those resources and not cared about the consequences.
I hope that someday our species will evolve to a level where we don't live like this.
kmichaels
Loggers in the USA continue to plant more trees than they chop down. I guess we learned. Liberals however are running short of illegal drugs, and have to import them.
Failure of society
Although all of Jarod's reasons for failure of society are valid - of particular importance in todays society is the rich elite who manage to insulate themselves from the rest of society and make some very selfish and short sighted decisions (viz American oil politics) instead of instigating long term plans for an electricity based sustainable solar-thermal/geo-thermal future.
One particular area that he did not mention, and is of major significance with respect to the failure of society, is natural catastrophic events. Ice cores and tree ring analysis are showing some major interruptions in solar radiation and precipitation throughout the history of man. Volcanic ash mixed with iridium in ice cores shows that meteors appear to have precipitated volcanic eruptions, blackening the atmosphere and causing some major earth dimming events, causing drought and famine. This along with meteor strikes in the ocean producing tsunamis, (such meteor strikes are now being found to be far more common than previously thought), would also have caused some major interruptions in the development of society - especially amongst the seafaring nations of the world. Our ignorance of the seafaring capability of previous civilizations over the last 20,000 years is testimony to such societies being repeatedly erased from the history books by such events.
Peter Marsh
www.polynesian-prehistory.com
Natural disaster possibility
A friend who specialises in Oceanography, particularly the study of under sea volcanoes,has an alternative hypothesis for the demise of the people of Rapa Nui, more in line with Peter Marsh's comments.
His idea is that the sudden disappearance of dolphin bones and other evidence of seafood in middens is not due to the islanders running out of wood by cutting the last tree and being unable to fish. Instead, the sudden interruption of an undersea fumarole close to the island could have stopped the churning of water layers with a sudden drop in ocean fertility near the island. This would cause a sudden drop in available seafood and require fishing trips to be made farther from the island, an inefficient and more hazardous endeavour.
It is the collapse of fish stocks that led to a break down in society in which destructive acts like cutting the last tree makes more sense. This still fits with Jared's ideas of a combination of man made and natural events that diminished the environment and lead to societal collapse. Perhaps in the case of Easter Islanders, they were less foolhardy and more victim of natural events than is hinted at in this article and in Collapse.
Michael G