Even the historic concept of "collapse" is ill-defined. It's widely accepted today that the Western Roman Empire (probably the most written-about "collapse" event) didn't really collapse at once as much as it slowly changed from within and without. Is this "linear collapse"? I mean maybe, but it may just be the process of change itself.
This entailed most urban centers in the Eastern mediterranean (besides Egypt and Mesopotamia) being violently destroyed, and writing completely disappearing in large regions. And all this happening over the course of maybe 50-100 years.
Arguments can be made for the declining Western Roman Empire, and collapse of some of the Chinese dynastic states. But as you point out, one can rather easily counter argue that this wasn't collapse of civilization but rather the collapse of a specific hegemonic state and its replacement by several smaller competing powers. Civilization still remained: urban center and writing didn't disappear. These were collapses of states not of civilization.
Literate secular class, including Roman state bureaucracy, disappeared as well, and with it large scale planning, monetary economy, large construction projects or most of long distance trade. Only the Church still maintained reading and writing, but that was a very small group of people.
All of this may not fulfill your definition of collapse of civilization, but I believe that a Roman citizen of 2nd century AD, suddenly transported to the 8th century, would be aghast seeing what became of his former home. Even cattle shrunk to half its former size and crop yields diminished, as agricultural best practices were forgotten.
I love to point out how the symbolism of many modern governments is the result of a sort of cargo cult of Roman Republican culture. Government buildings to this day copy the dull gray ruins of Roman buildings, just as many 18th/19th century governments declared popular authority from a Latin-imitating "Senate", filled to the brim with Roman symbolism.
With that in mind, it's not surprising that many today believe the 18th/19th century's "fall of Rome" and "barbarian invasion" myths as a sort of predictive weak-spot of modernity. If you view civilization as a linear path, a story of how the intrinsically superior empires of the Greek/Macedonians and Romans successively lifted the world out of its natural, primitive barbarian state, and the shifting power centers of the 3rd-8th century as a "turning back of time to the Dark Ages" or linear regression along the same path, then the "collapse" narrative is as plain as day. This view on history is pure fantasy, of course, which is why the collapse narratives set in modern days seem so fantastic as well.
> The West _is_ going through a lot of change/political soul searching right now
I believe that you're understating the situation a bit - at least, here in the United States, we're beginning to see markers of the kind of "cultural revolution" that happened in Russia in the 1910's and China in the 1960's - and while neither of those states have collapsed, exactly, tens of millions of innocent people were killed and rather unpleasant governments installed as a result.
While categorically different from total civilization collapse, I don't blame my fellow Americans for starting to get nervous and start prepping like a high-school senior.
If that's what you legitimately think of the developing world, then no wonder you believe in collapse so strongly (almost like the inverse of the "noble savage"; a fear of letting go of the "Western enlightenment" even if it comes from critics of modern Western regimes). Please, go outside and experience the world. Life has fundamentally changed for most of humanity, except for the occasional isolated remote community, over the last 50 years. I urge you to define what "peak prosperity" is and how developing nations lack it before we discuss what "collapse" is and the loss of "peak prosperity".
I have lots of family in developing nations and their lives have absolutely, fundamentally changed. It's borderline insulting to imply that developing nations still live like they did in the past.
Prosperity is always relative to the system you're immersed in and in a globalist world, your prosperity is defined by the prosperity of how people on the other side of the world live. Americans can believe they have the best living conditions in the world and same can do northern Europeans and maybe Japanese too. Let's throw in urbanized chinese middle class too. But in developing countries they don't have the privilege to believe they are in that competition. They are always a province of the empire and living in scarcity.
This says nothing about the enormous changes that went on pretty much everywhere in the rural parts of every country with very few, isolated exceptions.
I expect that, much like every other community, the loudest “collapsers” are merely an embarrassing minority, and certainly I hear that the people who stockpile food and maintain a strong relationship with their neighbours roll their eyes at those who stockpile ammunition and do nothing else.
If the same happened to New York, with the subway abandoned, whole neighbourhoods overgrown by poison ivy and the skyscrapers collapsing from lack of maintenance, "post-apocalyptic" would probably be a fitting word.
I am not sure how you can call such a massive loss of complexity and population something else than a collapse.
It’s the timescale that makes it. I’m thinking Methyr Tydfel in the UK as a point of reference for similar fractional change in the first roughly century of decline, but peaking in the Industrial Age.
If this happened in NYC, I’d expect (say) Queens to turn to rubble while (say) Manhattan is getting freshly built skyscrapers. Plucky adventurers with assault rifles and bows looting tinned food from a suddenly abandoned Whole Foods is more of what I expect during hurricanes than as a standard result everywhere all at one.
While I think it's useful to think about mechanisms of collapse, the author seems to have a clear bias towards the belief that collapse will happen which feels very non-objective.
In my experience, the vast majority of people I interact with (maybe 90%+) fall into the author's categorization of "radical denier" or "partial denier".
I don't think there's anything "radical" about the belief that while things will change, society will go on. But calling the belief radical and suggesting that this is a belief only shared by Very Evil People (e.g. Koch Brothers) is a disingenuous straw man.
For the record, if I had to put myself into this unscientific taxonomy, I might be somewhere between a technological and economic optimist.
The article later refers to an ideology of "eco-fascism" which is even more problematic. That seems like a name that detractors would apply to a group, not a label that someone would self-apply. I don't know what a neutral name would be, though.
I disagree. This may be a problem, but I think the bigger problem is one that was described in a post on HN a few weeks back. Namely, that most of the folks advocating for action and sacrifice on climate change are themselves unwilling to lead by example, e.g. stop using air travel, give up or very sharply reduce automobile usage, etc.
This leads a lot of people to either 1) Write the whole thing off as some BS cooked up by elites or; 2) conclude that no one, including those who claim to care most about the issue is actually going to do anything about the problem.
You can't have Congressmen and Senators calling climate change an "existential threat" while they're hopping on a commercial airliner every week to fly back home from DC. While these folks may be correct in their assessment of climate change, their own behavior completely destroys any credibility they may have had on the issue.
The post you replied to isn't talking about the science, but rather the politics. Humans tend to respond badly to authority figures saying but not doing, and this is a real problem that we need to fix (by electing/creating better leaders) in order to meet the requirements of the moment.
So yeah, the total Congress emissions are tiny scientifically, but they're rather large politically.
Also, someone I once read highlighted that political polarisation increased when Reps could fly back home every weekend. Maybe one should require that Senators maintain their primary residence in D.C.?
Oh, it's there, believe me. Just wasn't part of that particular post.
And the "another problem" is to misunderstand the way that money influences PR statements from powerful entities (politicians or otherwise). This part isn't illogical but just ignorant/mis-educated about wealth and power.
Maybe it would convince folks, maybe it wouldn't, but you'd have a chance. By contrast, any effort that involves "Do as I say, not as I do", is pretty much guaranteed to fail, and rightfully so. Trying to force others to do something that you yourself are unwilling to do voluntarily is the exact opposite of leadership.
"All of a sudden" was not claimed.
> There's just no evidence that's an effective way to have societal impact.
No evidence, or none that you are aware of? Also, evidence is not required for something to be true.
> and it doesn't mean that if they did pay more others would follow.
It could be achieved via legislation, which is to some degree influenced by public sentiment, which is to some degree influenced by the manner in which we discuss and conceptualize reality.
Don't really care much for it.