The Social Death Spiral Hypothesis By Brian Simpson

An article has just appeared by M. C. Schippers et al., "Is Society Caught Up in a Death Spiral? Modeling Societal Demise and its Reversal," Frontiers in Sociology, 9 (2024): 1194597. This shows that mainstream academics are now addressing issues of collapseology, the study of the breakdown and collapse of societies and civilisations. The idea of a death spiral is as follows: "Just as an army of ants caught in an ant mill, individuals, groups and even whole societies are sometimes caught in a Death Spital, a vicious cycle of self-reinforcing dysfunctional behavior characterized by continuous flawed decision making, myopic single-minded focus on one (set of) solution(s), denial, distrust, micromanagement, dogmatic thinking and learned helplessness."

Schippers et al., detail this idea of a Death Spiral with a discussion of how this occurs in firms and corporations, but they also devote some attention to present macro-sociological issues, such as the state of the West. Interestingly enough, there are some mild criticisms made of the Covid mandates, and the lockdowns, which did not adequately consider the economics, and socio-psychological effects. And they discuss as well large-scale collapse. Here they write, the key marker of social decline is rising inequalities, with the elites having plenty of resources, and the ordinary people struggling to survive. Rising inequalities at this level affects social cohesion, and if it continues is one factor leading to breakdown, they allege. Their response to this is, logically enough, to reduce, or eliminate such inequalities.

That seems to me to sneak in a Leftist assumption of socialism. Societies often tolerate vast inequalities without collapse, such as slavery in ancient Rome, the Middle East, China and Africa. People will put up with a surprising amount of social pain before objecting - just look at contemporary Australia. And as the Covid lockdowns showed, people will be compliant with tyranny up to some ill-defined point.

Thus, the main hypothesis of societal decline and breakdown by Schippers et al., is limited in my opinion. Factors such as mass migration, rising crime, and the breakdown of core social and moral values, seen with a decline in religion, are not considered, but are more important than issues of equality. The mere mention of that word, "equality," puts me on guard.