When Civilizations Collapse

[Bill Ryan]

Starting this new thread with a copy of a new post by grapevine on the Hodgepodge thread. This is a huge topic, linking a number of serious issues regularly discussed on the forum.

~~~

Civilisation Collapse

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gReFRmoaVdQ

A somewhat sobering heading for a very interesting conversation between John Campbell, Neil Oliver and Tim Kelly. What is particularly interesting, imo is the "great forgetting", which has dogged several previous ancient civilisations.

"In this wide-ranging, three-way discussion, I sat down with two guests who come at the big questions from very different directions. Neil Oliver trained as an archaeologist and is widely known as a broadcaster and author. Many people still stop him in the street as "the Coast guy". Dr Tim Kelly is a medical doctor, computer scientist and systems analyst. My own background is 28 years as a nurse teacher, with a long-standing interest in science, research and writing.

The conversation started from a worry I've had for some time. With artificial intelligence, demographic change and growing social strain all arriving at once, could we be heading into a kind of dystopian dark age?

From there we covered a lot of ground. We talked about how civilisations collapse and forget, how fragile digital knowledge is, the limits of what we really know about the ancient world, the puzzle of consciousness, how complex systems go wrong (with medicine as the main example), fear as a tool of power, the cost of dissent, and whether this moment is just another turn of history's wheel or something new.

This is a summary of the main arguments. The views are the speakers' own.

Do civilisations survive their crises?

I opened by asking how earlier civilisations faced existential crises. Neil's answer was blunt: none of them responded successfully, because they are all gone. Ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Romans and the British Empire all rose and fell.

Whether or not they saw the threat coming, they didn't survive it.

He compared this to the boom-and-bust cycle in economics. Growth breeds confidence, which breeds more growth, until inflation and loss of confidence bring recession and collapse. He thinks civilisations follow a similar pattern.

Neil cited two classical models of this cycle. The first is Polybius's anacyclosis. A good king is followed by a weaker heir, and monarchy decays into aristocracy, then oligarchy. The people overthrow that and create democracy, which degenerates into mob rule. A demagogue rises and falls, a good king returns, and the cycle begins again. The second is the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico's four ages. In the age of gods, fearful people think the thunder speaks to them. In the age of heroes, knights fight the common people. In the age of men, you get republics and democracy. Then comes chaos, and the cycle repeats.

The "great forgetting"

Neil's own contribution was the idea of a deliberate forgetting, which he called a "great forgetting" or a kind of great reset. Humanity keeps rediscovering things it already knew. He recalled a university field trip to Stonehenge, where he asked a lecturer: who forgot what this was for? For centuries everyone must have known what you did at Stonehenge, just as we know what a cathedral is for even if we no longer go. The same goes for the pyramids. At some point a generation simply stopped knowing.

He doesn't think this is accidental. He pointed to the Library of Alexandria, a cosmopolitan centre of learning that held the works of Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy and others, and was burned more than once. He also pointed to the lost knowledge of other great civilisations, and to centuries of book burning, including in the Holy Roman Empire long before the Nazis. His view is that those in power at a given moment decide it would be better if people forgot certain things, and that this drives the cycle.

The fragility of digital knowledge

Neil argued the danger is sharper today than ever. When a library was burned in the past, other copies usually survived in private hands or other collections, so it was very hard to wipe out a work completely. Now so much is held centrally and streamed: books on Audible, films on Netflix. Whoever owns that platform could delete a title, whether To Kill a Mockingbird or the Bible, and if nobody owns a physical copy, it is gone for good.

Tim said his bigger concern was censorship rather than a technical failure. Knowledge doesn't need to be taken offline; a small change to an algorithm can make a position hard to find, so people only see a skewed picture. He also pointed out that AI companies are buying up huge numbers of second-hand books, cutting off the spines and scanning the pages, which destroys the originals. Tim has stopped throwing books out, and Neil regularly urges people on social media to buy old books and keep them. If he were rich, he joked, he would fill climate-controlled aircraft hangars with them."

[petra]

I'm surprised there was no mention of Atlantis! Apparently some people still think it was a myth.

[onawah]

Also no mention of the solar cycles and the regular global natural disasters created by them, which alters the entire perspective radically, even given how radical it already is.
It's curious how that information gets injected into widely viewed conversations like the OP featured one sometimes (though it wasn't introduced in this one), and then there is a kind of very precise amnesia that blocks that one colossal bit of subject matter, and the conversations go on as if it was never introduced.
Gradually however, the communal denial will wear so thin that it will no longer be treated as a kind of novelty topic, and hopefully people will begin to deal with it more on a personal level.
Because not much can be done to escape the consequences of the solar cycles, and nothing can be done to prevent them at this point.
It's definitely still the hugest elephant in the room.
It's psychological and spiritual preparation that will have to be the focus ongoing for most people.
Preppers will likely still be a small minority, but the scramble to find new havens in "safety zones" will increase, as will the market for survival goods.
The scientific data is being gradually leaked in the mainstream, but is often obfuscated or altered in various ways.
Presumably the Controllers want the subject to be noticed but not clearly understood yet, with the object being to initially create more confusion and fear, but not to hide the subject completely, as that would create too much backlash once the truth is finally clear enough for most to understand.

[Ravenlocke]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Tim said,
He also pointed out that AI companies are buying up huge numbers of second-hand books, cutting off the spines and scanning the pages, which destroys the originals. Tim has stopped throwing books out, and Neil regularly urges people on social media to buy old books and keep them. If he were rich, he joked, he would fill climate-controlled aircraft hangars with them."

Destruction of antique, rare books also mentioned here,

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...=1#post1728141


“ Jul 28
🚨AI companies are bulk-buying antique books, scanning every page to train their models, and destroying the originals in the process.

Booksellers reported sudden orders for thousands of pre-2022 physical books that are being pulped after digitization, with some rare and out-of-print titles among those lost forever.”

[shaberon]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
What is particularly interesting, imo is the "great forgetting", which has dogged several previous ancient civilisations.

That's why it is difficult to suppose anyone carried much particular knowledge that spanned thousands of years.

My suggestion is that in a spoken society, the oldest type of knowledge you might have is what you could get from your grandparents when you are young, talking about old things they remember when they were young, and you might get a type of knowledge base that goes maybe two hundred years. Under ideal circumstances, you might realistically know a few things about that, but then if there are breakdowns and destruction, we might expect that to contribute to memory loss.

Seizing upon that vulnerability, then what we might call "literature" begins slightly before 2,000 B. C. E. as the Sumerian King List:

In its best-known and best-preserved version, as recorded on the Weld-Blundell Prism, the SKL begins with a number of fictional antediluvian kings, who ruled before a flood swept over the land, after which kingship went to Kish. It ends with a dynasty from Isin (early second millennium BC), which is well-known from other contemporary sources.

In the past, the Sumerian King List was considered as an invaluable source for the reconstruction of the political history of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia. More recent research has indicated that the use of the SKL is fraught with difficulties, and that it should only be used with caution, if at all, in the study of ancient Mesopotamia during the third and early second millennium BC.

The Flood Myth is an evident fiction.

If we look at several other cultures, it can always be found as an add-on, it is not in the Gathas but it is in Zoroastrianism, it is not in the Veda but it is in the Puranas, it is not in the religion of the Psalms but it is in the Torah. Conveniently, "scripture" in this usage has the meaning of "hymns".

On the other hand, we know of a good example, but "they" don't.

You can be pretty sure a volcano caused tremendous harm to Crete, maybe 1,600 B. C. E., maybe a little after that, but you can find in the archeological layers a distinct Cretan civilization whose relics rapidly declined and were replaced by Myceneans.

I've never been able to find anything that remembers it happening.

It's suggested that prayers about Poseidon becoming angry were inspired by it, but that doesn't tell me the briefest story.

Then -- after the Myceneans, who, as far as we know, ran an international oligarchy that collapsed for a number of reasons -- the Greeks say it was the land of Minos, another apparently fictional figure, as most of the regions known to Greeks have a fantastic beginning tacked on to something objectively real in the ca. 800 B. C. E. range. But none of that stuff is in Hesiod's Cosmogony; and you can sort of track when various stories may have been added over the centuries.

And I'll have to say -- it is mostly discoveries and finds that have happened after I was in school -- that in many ways some very specific and objective things can be said that, I don't think, have been said yet. None of the "literature" is accurate to whatever may have happened, for example someone recently started a thread on Bahrain or Dilmun, which would be amazingly relevant to whatever Sumerian myths are about, a massive necropolis with the use of Indian writing.

India and Iran then arguably become distinct cultures, by means of disposal of bodies, rather than shipping them to an international grave, which perhaps was a valuable service for sanitation purposes. It's really big, it is so big it is hard to imagine only locals winding up there. Until useful genetic material is found you just don't know.

[onawah]

All "myths" aside, there is plenty of evidence now from experts in various fields from "forbidden" Archeology to Astrophysics demonstrating there were indeed great floods that wiped out whole civilizations, and that in itself adequately explains humanity's "forgetfulness", as so many records were destroyed and survivors were forced to focus on just eking out an existence.
There is a new source now of where the global "safety zones" will be after the coming pole shift, micronova disasters, expected to culminate sometime in the 2040s here:
https://havenbound.co/

Posted by shaberon (here)

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
What is particularly interesting, imo is the "great forgetting", which has dogged several previous ancient civilisations.