What do you think about when you hear the term revolution? Likely, you think of the French Revolution and things like the Storm of the Bastille, the Guillotine or Louis XVI’s execution. It is on the forefront of our minds, because the French Revolution escalated so quickly and so violently that it left a permanent mark on the world.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Imagine a row of dominoes where knocking over one piece triggers a cascade that topples them all. This is systemic risk - when a single failure can bring down an entire system. Now imagine several such cascade failures happening simultaneously at a global scale and making each other worse.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. While writing this living literature review on societal collapse, one topic that keeps popping up again and again is economic inequality. It seems that this inequality makes societies inherently less stable and less able to internally coordinate and thus more vulnerable to collapse.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. What would we eat if the sun disappeared tomorrow? Or if our electrical grid collapsed worldwide? This is a topic I am quite interested in, because many of the facets of societal collapse are quite intimately linked to the food system.

It has been a while since the last update post. Since then I have come across a lot of interesting papers and also changed some things around this blog here. I now keep both the Substack as well as the archive up to date, so you never have to wonder if you are reading the most recent version of a post. Due to popular demand (one person asked for it) I now also provide a list of all references used in the writing.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Reflecting about the end of our modern civilization requires counterfactual thinking, because fortunately it hasn’t happened yet. But this is not the only way counterfactuals help us understand collapse better. We can also create counterfactuals to reflect about past events.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Electricity is essential for the functioning of our modern society, as nearly everything we do depends on the electrical grid in some way. While this reliance provides significant comfort and convenience, it also makes us vulnerable if the grid fails. But what happens when the grid stops working?

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. While we generally aim to avoid a collapse, it is crucial to understand the potential recovery time if one occurs. Assessing this is challenging, as it depends on the starting level of complexity, the extent of the loss, and the desired recovery level.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Many articles highlight famine as a major issue for societal collapse, emphasizing the overall vulnerability of food production and trade. The speed at which such events affect us depends on our food reserves.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Democracies have a stronger incentive to keep their general population content compared to authoritarian regimes, as the political elite’s survival is more directly linked to the general population through elections.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Historical evidence shows that human civilizations repeatedly engaged in self-destructive behaviors in the past, especially in terms of resource overuse (1). Today, we could point to climate change, as a clear example of self-destructive behavior.