The lure of imperial dreams: What are our leaders going to do to us?

Donald Trump is often represented wearing some kind of imperial garb. Actually, his presidency may have been less imperial than that of his predecessors. Yet, his style as president is very much "imperial" and his winning slogan in the 2016 elections, "MAGA," (make America great again) has a deep imperial ring to it. Earlier on, Benito Mussolini, the leader of the Italian government between the two world wars, was destroyed (and with him Italy and not just Italy) by his Imperial ambitions.

 

When things get tough, people seem to think that they need tough leaders and this is a clear trend in the world, nowadays. It is a deadly mechanism that tends to bring dangerous psychotic personalities to the top government positions. I already noted in a previous post how imperial ambitions coupled with incompetence (both common conditions in high-level leaders) can destroy entire countries. 

Here, let me examine an interesting feature of how Benito Mussolini (1883 -1945) ruled Italy. Despite his warlike rhetoric, during the first phase of his government he pursued a moderate foreign policy, avoiding wars. Then, the second phase of his rule was characterized by a series of disastrous wars that led to the destruction of Italy (and not just of Italy) and to the downfall of Mussolini himself. Whether this story can tell us something about a possible second term for Donald Trump as president, is left to the readers to decide. 

Benito Mussolini and the Italian Empire: How Leaders' Absurd Decisions Lead to Collapse.

Benito Mussolini ruled Italy for 21 years after the "March on Rome" of 1922. Many things happened during those years but, on the whole, you could think of the Fascist rule as having two phases: one before and the other after the turning point that was the invasion of Ethiopia, in 1935. 

During his first 12 years of rule, Mussolini pursued a relatively moderate foreign policy, carefully avoiding major conflicts. He didn't even increase the military budget that the previous government had slashed down after that WW1 was over. Things changed abruptly in the early 1930s. Maybe it was because of the financial crisis of 1929, maybe because the British coal production was starting to show signs of decline -- and Britain was the main exporter of coal to Italy. Or maybe it was something else that went on in the high ranks of the Fascist Party, or perhaps inside Mussolini's head. In any case, the government started increasing the state budget, and that involved doubling the military expenses that reached over 20% of the government budget. The government was putting the economy on a war footing.

Preparing for war usually leads to starting one. It happened with a bang (literally) when Italy sent a large contingent of troops to attack Ethiopia, in the Horn of Africa. It was no minor affair: the sources speak of more than half a million troops engaged in the campaign. After a few months of war, a few hundred thousand civilians exterminated, and various war crimes on both sides, (all things we don't do anymore, as we all know). Ethiopia was defeated and annexed. The King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III was proclaimed "Emperor of Ethiopia," and the "Italian Empire" was born. As you can see in the image, the Italian propaganda of the time wasn't too shy in showing that chemical weapons had been used against the Ethiopians  (of course we don't do that anymore), even though that was never officially admitted.

What's written in history books acquires a certain aura of inevitability and that's true for Italy conquering Ethiopia. It happened, so there had to be a reason for it to happen. But let's pause for a moment to consider the logic of the event. Why exactly did the Italian government take this decision? That's not an easy question to answer. Take a look at the map below, and see how the Italian Empire was arranged in the years that followed the Ethiopian conquest:

The first thing you note is how the Italian Empire was formed of two chunks of land not connected to each other. In between, there was the Sahara desert, practically impossible to cross. By sea, Ethiopia was reachable from Italy either by going through the Suez Canal or by circumnavigating Africa, both impossible if opposed by the main naval power of the time: Britain. And it was not just a question of distance: the Italian colonies in the Horn of Africa were part of a puzzle of different regions controlled by potentially hostile, and surely more powerful, empires: the British and the French. Setting up a major colony in that region was risky, to say the least. More correctly, it was a completely stupid idea, as it was to be clear in a few years.

Let's take a look at the situation from the viewpoint of Britain. At that time, the British Empire was the largest and the most powerful in the world, but it was not unchallenged. The rivalry was especially strong with the French, who maintained a smaller empire and who never had completely renounced to their dreams of world domination. In the Horn of Africa, France controlled an area, French Somaliland, that was strategically crucial for the control of the maritime traffic in the Red Sea. That, of course, could negate the advantages that the British had with the control of the Suez canal.

So, the Horn of Africa was a three-player strategic game involving Italy, France, and Britain (Ethiopia had no outlet to the sea). The British traditionally excelled in this kind of game and their strategy, in this case, was to play Italy against France. It was a strategy that had already worked in stopping the French expansion into the Mediterranean Sea. For the British, the best way of ensuring that the ports on the Red Sea stayed out of French hands was by having the Italians move in. 

One further reason for this attitude was that the British tended to see Italy as their traditional ally. Probably, in 1935, they couldn't imagine that Italy would turn on them just a few years later, but they may have reasoned that even if that were to happen, that couldn't have been a big problem. By far, the Italians were the weakest player in the game being played in the Horn of Africa. Their colonies there could continue to exist only as long as the British navy allowed them to be resupplied from the mainland. They were, at all effects, hostages to the British. That explains why, in 1935, Britain didn't do anything to stop Mussolini's plans of conquest, except engaging in a series of ineffective economic sanctions that only succeeded in enraging the Italian public and strengthening the Italian resolve to defeat Ethiopia. 

Did the Italian government, and Mussolini in particular, realize that they were being played by the British as an anti-French tool? Probably not, but it is also possible that they did, but they greatly overestimated the advantages of the Ethiopian conquest.

Reviewing this story nearly one century later, it is impressive to see how naive and overoptimistic the Italian expectations were. Incredibly, Ethiopia was expected to produce precious metals and even crude oil -- but it was pure illusion. Even more incredibly, Italy was sitting over the petroleum resources of Libya that years later were to become among the most abundant of the world -- but these resources were not exploited at that time. As a further layer of incredibility, the existence of these Libyan resources was at least suspected in the late 1930s. It is an interesting speculation to think of what the history of the world would have been if the Italian government had dedicated to Libyan oil just a one-hundredth of the resources it had wasted in Ethiopia. The concept of the "Italian Empire" would have been completely different (and maybe you would be reading this post in Italian). 

But the Italian government, and Mussolini in particular, were stuck in an obsolete view that saw Italy as the "Proletarian Nation," perpetually in need of a "Place in the Sun" to host its burgeoning population. Even worse, most people in Italy seemed to be affected by a collective form of delusion that made them believe that, somehow, Italy was actually rebuilding the ancient Roman Empire. No joke: everybody loved the idea. The enthusiasm was nothing less than stellar and the documents of that time are still widely available for us to look at and scratch our heads about. 

It goes without saying that Italian peasants never flocked to Ethiopia to build a new imperial province there. Even though the land may have been free, setting up farms in a foreign country requires economic resources to invest in the task, and those resources just weren't there. The Ethiopian conquest remained a horrendous burden for the Italian state that was forced to keep there an army of more than 100 thousand troops to "pacify" the region, plus an even larger number of civilians to take care of the administration. 

The whole madness came to an end when Italy declared war on Britain in 1940. Did the Italian government realize that they were condemning to death or captivity the whole army of Ethiopia? Didn't they realize how badly they would have needed 120 thousand fully-equipped troops closer to home? One can only imagine that if these troops had been available in North Africa, maybe the Italian defeat at El Alamein wouldn't have taken place (and, again, you might be reading this post in Italian). 

As things stood, the British were surely happy to see that the Italians had renounced to a sizeable fraction of their armed forces just when they badly needed them. The British could simply have starved the Italians in Ethiopia. But let's say in honor of the Perfidious Albion that they allowed to the Italian troops a chance of a honorable fight before surrendering. It was hopeless anyway: it was over in just a little more than one year. The Italian Empire disappeared just about five years after its creation. At least, it may have gained a place in the historical records as the shortest-lived empire ever. 

What did Mussolini have in mind that led him to such a monumental mistake? What we can say is that the Ethiopian campaign was just one of the several mistakes that followed: afterward, Italy's armed forces intervened in Spain, in Albania, in France, in Greece, in North Africa, in Russia, in England and, in a final disastrous mistake, Italy declared war on the United States in 1941. Too many wars for a small country that dreamed to be an Empire, but wasn't one.

What was going on in Mussolini's head at that time? From what we know from the documents available, Mussolini was a lone man in power. He had no friends, only adulators. No collaborators, just yes-men. No disciples, only adorers. And no close family, except his lover, Claretta Petacci, a woman of honor who was the only person faithful to him up to the last moment of his life. 

It may well be that, already in the 1930s, Mussolini had passed the "criticism barrier." No one could contradict him and what he said was supposed to be obeyed without questions. Over the years, that was enough to turn a shrewd politician, as the young Mussolini had been, into a bumbling idiot. I wrote in a previous post about Mussolini that:

There is the possibility that his brain was not functioning well. We know that Mussolini suffered from syphilis, an illness that can lead to brain damage. But a biopsy was performed on a fragment of his brain after his death and the results were reasonably clear: no trace of brain damage. It was the functional brain of a 62 year old man, as Mussolini was at the time of his death. . . . the case of Mussolini tells us that dictators are not necessarily insane or evil in the way comics or movie characters are described. Rather, they are best described as persons who suffer from a "narcissistic personality disorder" (NPD). That syndrome describes their vindictive, paranoid, and cruel behavior, but also their ability of finding followers and becoming popular. So, it may be that the NPD syndrome is not really a "disorder" but, rather, something functional for becoming a leader. . . . An NPD affected leader may not be necessarily evil, but he (very rarely she) will be almost certainly incompetent. . . . The problem with this situation is that, everywhere in the world, NPD affected individuals aim at obtaining high level government positions and often they succeed. Then, ruling a whole country gives them plenty of chances to be not just incompetents, but the kind of person that we describe as "criminally incompetent."

Translating all this to our times, the impression is that we are watching a horror movie in which you don't know exactly who can turn into a monster as the story unfolds. We elect leaders on the basis of what they did in the past and on what they tell us they will do. But of what they'll decide to do once they are in power, what can we say? And the Titanic keeps steaming ahead in the night. 

 

 

The Triumph of Catastrophism. How Greta Thumberg Carried the Day

Disclaimer: I am NOT saying here that the Covid-19 does not exist nor that people didn't die because of it. If you react with the term "denialism" you are only showing that you have no rational arguments to produce.

Do you remember that weird girl from Sweden? Yes, the one with the braided hair. What was her name? Greta something.... It is strange that so many people seemed to pay attention to what she was saying about things like climate change. Why should anyone be worried by that? Nobody cares about climate change anymore when there are much more important matters at hand with the great pandemic sweeping the world? And yet, strangely, nowadays people are doing exactly what Greta had told them to do.

 

Not long ago, I published on Cassandra's Legacy a post titled "The Great Failure of Catastrophism." In it, I argued that some 50 years of warnings from scientists had been completely ignored by the powers that be. I also argued that a relatively minor perturbation, as the one caused by the Covid-19 epidemic, had been enough to consign all worries about climate to the dustbin of the silly ideas that nobody should care about. 

But things keep changing and I am now amazed to see that humans are acting exactly as if they had listened to Greta Thunberg. Do you remember? She said we shouldn't use the plane, that we should travel less, use less energy, consume less. Exactly what's being done.

People are not flying anymore so much, they stopped most of their long distance traveling, the mass migration called "international tourism" seems to have disappeared for good. Some of the most polluting manufacturing operations are slowing down, and with that the exploitation of natural resources. The shale oil industry is dead and the whole extractive industry is going down the drain, too. Humans seem to have largely abandoned their beloved ritual of daily commuting and even professional sports have disappeared beyond the horizon of the events (although they weren't the most polluting activity around).

It is incredible: people would be howling their displeasure all the way to the moon if they had been asked to fly less for the benefit of the ecosystem and themselves, but now they are meekly doing exactly that out of fear of the coronavirus. 

You see, the young lady, Greta Thunberg, had been able to move a few things, but she was still operating within the old paradigm of communication. She was a leader in the same way as Joan of Arc was, long ago. The problem with leadership is that it attracts love and hate at the same time. Sometimes, a lot of hate. And the way to neutralize a successful leader is to pour hate on him or her. Do you remember what happened to Joan of Arc? That was what Greta Thunberg was risking and it is good for her that her cycle has been so short -- now she can be a normal girl for the rest of her life. 

But now, it is no more the time of leaders. The change we are seeing is being created by impersonal forces. There is nobody to hate about the coronavirus: you can't hate a small chunk of RNA that you can't even see. Viruses have no leaders, they don't care about anything, they are impervious to love and hate. What moves things onward nowadays is not hate, it is pure terror and you can't hate terror, you can only resist it or be crushed by it. And it seems clear that most of us are being crushed by terror. Terror is a primal force, almost impossible to resist.

The overall impression is that we are seeing enormous forces stirring. Forces that will change the world so deeply that, right now, we can't even vaguely imagine how. If you have time, do read the book by Shoshana Zuboff "Surveillance Capitalism." She correctly points out how the new technologies called "profiling" and "targeting" are generating a level of control over individuals that never existed before in history. So far, these technologies have been used for relatively harmless purposes such as sales and influencing electoral votes. What we see now is deeper and wider: it is raw power over people's minds. The enormous creature that's raising its ugly head has a name, and it is the World Wide Web. 

It is a huge beast we have nurtured and raised. Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Gates, or some of their colleagues may still think they can control it, but it is too late. Nobody who is human can control this thing anymore. We'll go where "it" will take us. And maybe, just maybe, this thing perceives that humans need to stop destroying everything on this planet, including themselves. Perhaps the head of the beast is not so ugly, after all? Who knows?

Then, of course, all what I said up to now will turn out to be wrong if we see the famed "recovery." Most people seem to think that once we have a vaccine for the dreaded little monster, everything will return to normal in the best of worlds. But that's questionable, to say the least. Someone who understands that there won't be a "normal" anymore is Charles Hugh Smith of the "Of two minds" blog. Below, let me report an excerpt from one of his recent posts where, among other things, you can find an excellent illustration of how the Seneca Effect works.

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The New Normal is De-Normalization

excerpt from Charles Hugh Smith's blog

 

What I mean by Denormalization is the complete dismantling of what was taken for granted as normal and the loss of any future version of normal. Consider sports as an example. We all know the Old Normal that millions hope will magically return: $100 million player contracts, millions in TV ad revenues, pro franchises worth billions of dollars, NCAA playoffs, etc.: a dominant kingdom in the nation's media and mindshare.

 

The dirty little secret that troubled the kingdom long before Covid-19 was a steady erosion in attendance at live games and in the viewing audience. Younger generations have relatively little interest in all the trappings and habits of Boomer sports manias. They'd rather watch the 3-minute highlight video on their phones than blow half a day watching games that are generally lacking in drama and are largely replaceable with some other game.

 

What few seem to notice is that the Old Normal had become insanely expensive, irksome and boring, activities that were habits coasting on momentum. Those embedded in the Old Normal acclimatized to the absurdly overpriced seats, snacks, beer, parking, etc. of live events and the insanely long commutes required to get to the venue and then back home, as their happy memories of $5 seats decades ago is the anchor of their lifelong devotion and habits.

 

The old fans coasting on ritual habituated to the cookie-cutter nature of the games, while those who never acquired the habit look with amazement at the seemingly endless dull progression of hundreds of interchangeable sporting events.

 

Advertisers will eventually notice that younger generations never acquired the habit of worshipping sports and so there is nothing to stem the collapse of the Old Normal but older fans, some percentage of whom will find they don't miss it once they fall out of the habit.

 

Some other percentage will find they can no longer afford to attend live games, or they'll realize they no longer feel it's worth it to grind through traffic or public transit just to sit for additional hours and then repeat the entire slog back home.

 

Another percentage will suddenly awaken to the artifice of the whole thing; they will simply lose interest. Others will finally realize the corporate machine (which includes college sports) has long since lost any connection to the era that they remember so fondly.

 

This same Denormalization will dismantle fast food, dining out, air travel, healthcare, higher education and innumerable other iterations of normal that have become unaffordable even as the returns on the lavish investments of time and money required diminish sharply.

 

How many of you deeply miss air travel? You're joking, right? Only certifiably insane people would miss the irksome hassle and discomfort, from the endless delays due to mechanical problems (don't you people keep any spare parts, or is it all just in time like every other broken system in America?), the seats that keep getting smaller as the passengers keep getting larger, the fetid terminals, and so on.

Like all the other iterations of normal, the entire experience has been going downhill for decades, but we all habituated to the decline because we were stuck with it.

 

What few seem to understand is all the Old Normal systems can't restabilize at some modestly lower level of diminishing returns; their only possible future is collapse. Just as fine-dining restaurants cannot survive at 50% capacity because their cost structure is so astronomical, the same is true of sports, airports, airlines, cruise lines, fast food, movie theaters, healthcare, higher education, local government services and all the rest of the incredibly fragile and unaffordable Old Normal.

None of these systems can operate at anything less than about 80% of full capacity and customers paying 80% of full pop, i.e. full retail. Since their fixed cost structures are so high, and their buffers so thin, there's nothing below the 80% level but air, i.e. a quick plummet to extinction.

 

The End of an Age: The Great Failure of Catastrophism

Colin Campbell, the founder of the association for the study of peak oil and gas (ASPO). 

The considerations I develop below originate from a post by Michael Krieger where he describes how he is so dismayed by the reaction of the public to the current epidemic that he is closing his blog to rethink the whole matter over. You can read similar feelings in a post by Rob Slane of the "Blogmire" and of Chris Smaje on "Resilience." Many others are dismayed at how badly the COVID-19 crisis was managed: a threat that was real but, by all measures, not so terrible as it was described. Nevertheless, it generated an overreaction, more division than unity, political sectarianism, and counterproductive behaviors, and it ultimately led people to accept being bullied and mistreated by their governments and even to be happy about that.

by Ugo Bardi

The "peak oil movement" was started by a group of retired geologists around the end of the 1990s. It grew to include many kinds of scientists, including physicists, chemists, biologists, and others. You could call us "catastrophists," but catastrophe was not our goal. We were not revolutionaries; we never thought of storming the Bastille, giving power to the people, or creating a proletarian paradise. We were scientists; we just wanted society to get rid of fossil fuels as soon as possible, although we thought that the final result would be a more just and peaceful society. 

But how to reach this goal? Of course, we understood that humankind is a vague term and that people tend to seek for their personal well-being, rather than that of their fellow human beings. But we saw no reason why the people in power shouldn't have listened to our message. After all, it was in their best interest to keep the economy alive. So, the plan was to diffuse the message of resource depletion as a scientific message, not a political one. We did our best to produce models, to make studies, to convene meetings, to publish scientific papers. The very fact that our main talking point was a bell-shaped graph meant that we were speaking to the tip of the social pyramid. We knew (or at least we should have known) that most people cannot understand a Cartesian graph. There is a reason, after all, why in Excel the default graphical representation of data is a bar chart.

It was an utter failure. We might have expected it, but we were much better as scientists than as politicians. We thought we could speak to "the ear of the prince" as Niccolò Machiavelli had tried to do, centuries ago. He discovered, as we did, that the prince doesn't want counsel, he only wants obedience. The prince operates according to a time-tested strategy that goes as "scare them, then force them to obey." The commoners operate on an equally time-tested strategy that goes as "be scared and obey," or, at least, "pretend to be scared and pretend to obey."

So, what happened is that some threats were just ignored: peak oil, resource depletion, and now climate change. Instead, other threats were amplified beyond recognition and some elites used them as a chance to reinforce their power on other elites or on the commoners. That was the case of the recent coronavirus epidemic.

As a combination of overreaction and non-reaction, we are now facing the downward slope that I had termed the "Seneca Cliff," the start of a probably irreversible descent, at least for several decades. No wonder that many of us are dismayed. But how is it that the human society either overreacts or doesn't react to external perturbations? Compare with the behavior of a system such as a forest. It is a system in many ways as complex as the human economy (quite possibly, more complex) but it tends to reach and maintain a certain level of stability. Forests manage and conserve their resources, maintaining an incredibly complex diversity. And when a fire starts, the forest waits for it to burn out, and then it patiently re-colonizes the burned area. It is the way natural systems work -- today we tend to define with the term of holobionts. 

Why can't human systems behave in that way? Clearly, we have a lot to learn, especially on how natural holobionts evolved and attained their stability. Perhaps we are moving in that direction in any case. It is a question of natural selection, those entities which are unstable tend to disappear in favor of the more stable ones. Maybe human society naturally evolves in this direction, even though it will involve a lot of suffering and it will take a lot of time before we arrive there. Perhaps, we could think of some kind of "directed evolution," with the human intelligence used to turn society into a societal holobiont. But that's exactly what the catastrophists, peakers and the others, failed to attain -- evidently it is not easy. Whatever we do, in any case, we keep marching toward the future. And so, onward, fellow holobionts!

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The doom that came to Florence

Where once had risen walls of 300 cubits and towers yet higher, now stretched only the marshy shore, and where once had dwelt fifty millions of men now crawled only the detestable green water-lizard. Not even the mines of precious metal remained, for DOOM had come to Sarnath. -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Doom that Came to Sarnath"


Before:

After:

Images courtesy Miguel Martinez

The Greatest Extermination in History: How Humans won the war on Whales

Image from the NYT. This dead whale on a California beach and the man taking a selfie in front of it symbolizes the war of humans on whales. The whales lost in what was probably the largest extermination of a non-human species in history. You'll find more details on this epic story in the upcoming book by Ugo Bardi and Ilaria Perissi "The Empty Sea" to be published by Springer

With the start of the 19th century (according to the human calendar), the lines were drawn: the two major vertebrate groups on Earth were squaring off against each other. On one side, the homo sapiens, the last survivor of the hominin genus, a bipedal primate with remarkable technical abilities. On the other side, the 89 species of the Cetacea order, known to humans as "whales," large aquatic animals that dominated the marine trophic chain.

When the war began, there were some 4 million whales in the Earth's ocean, for a total mass of some 120 million tons. On land, humans numbered about one billion individuals, but their total mass was less than 100 million tons. It looked like a fair fight but, in reality, the whales never had a chance.

The whales probably never understood what befell them: their powerful sonar systems worked only underwater and couldn't tell them of the menace that was coming from above the surface. Their sophisticated brains were unable to devise strategies to fight a threat that they had never faced in the tens of millions of years of their existence. Their stupendous bodies weighing tens of tons were of no use against small creatures using super-charged metabolic mechanisms. Their magnificent insulation system, that humans called the "blubber," made whales able to survive in icy waters but it was blubber that sent whales in hyperthermia when they tried to swim away from their human nemesis.

Image from Christensen 2006-  The Y-scale reports the estimated total mass of whales in the Earth's oceans. The X-scale goes from 1800 to 2000. It is a "Seneca Cliff," typical of the overexploitation of economic resources.

It was a war of extermination. In quantitative terms, it was possibly the largest extermination of a non-human species carried out by humans over their existence. And also the fastest one: commercial whaling started in the early 19th century, by the late 20th century it was basically over and the true collapse of the whale populations had lasted no more than a few decades. Afterward, one whale in four was still alive, and the large ones had been wiped out. Maybe 20 Million tons of whales remained out of an initial total of some 120 million. Whales are still hunted and killed, nowadays, although pollution and the keel of boats may be more effective extermination weapons than harpoons used to be (but harpoons are still used, too).

It is done, now, and the ocean is bereft of whales: it is not the same ocean anymore.  Humans are clever monkeys and they are good hunters, but they don't understand the results of their actions. Everything on this planet is connected and it is well known in biology that you can't do just one thing. So, the elimination of the top of the marine trophic chain is going to have unpredictable and probably disastrous effects on the whole ecosphere -- it will also have bad effects on the stability of the Earth's climate.

Some humans understand the danger of what they did, but most of them don't and don't care. They seem to think that exterminating whales is a right given to them by their God (maybe an evil deity going under the sacred name of MSY - maximum sustainable yield). About what the whales may have thought of their disgrace, we'll never know. But, if whales have a God or a Goddess, there may come a time for revenge, and humans will fully deserve whatever befalls them.





h/t Daniel Pauly

The Art of War According to the Science of Complex Systems: The Seneca Cliff as a strategic weapon

Music has always been part of the war effort: a way to build up network connections in such a way to make the fighting system more resilient and more effective. Here, an especially effective version: "The Sacred War" sung by Elena Vaenga. I wouldn't say that the Soviets defeated the Germans in ww2 because they had better music, but it surely it must have helped.

On military matters described in terms of system science, see also the post on drone warfare published last week on "Cassandra's Legacy" and also our study on the statistical patterns of conflicts in history




The science of complex systems turns out to be especially interesting and fascinating when applied to one of the most complex activities in which human beings engage: warfare. Below, you'll find a revised and condensed excerpt from my book "The Seneca Effect" (2017). A more detailed and in-depth discussion of how the concept of Seneca Collapse may affect war is part of my new book "Before Collapse: A Guide to the Other Side of Growth" that should appear in print and on the web before the end of the year.


From "The Seneca Effect" (Springer 2017)
by Ugo Bardi
(revised and condensed)

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. (Sun Tzu, the Art of War)

The idea that collapse can be a tool to be used in warfare may go back to the Chinese historian and military theorist Sun Tzu in his “The Art of War” (5th century BCE), where he emphasizes the idea of winning battles by exploiting the enemy’s weakness rather than by brute force.

It is a normal feature of warfare that conflict ends with the collapse of one of the two sides but, in some cases, the collapse takes place without extensive fighting or even none at all. An especially impressive example is that of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that followed several decades of "cold war" that never erupted into open conflict. As Sun Tzu had already noted, the capability of triggering the collapse of the enemy’s military or socio-economic structure is possibly the most effective conflict-resolving strategy of all. But how to attain this result? The modern science of complex systems can tell us many things about the factors involved in the collapse of complex systems, although it cannot provide recipes good for all situations.

Collapse is a characteristic of systems kept together by a network of relationships involving feedback: societies, economies, groups, companies, armies, and more, systems that we call “complex.” Feedback enhances or dampens the effect of perturbations on the various elements of the system and it may generate the kind of collapse called “Seneca Collapse” or “Seneca Cliff.” This collapse occurs when several elements of the system act together in such a way to enhance a perturbation that, eventually, brings down the whole system.

Warfare is, after all, mostly a question of feedback between fighting entities. Armies maneuver, clash against each other, retreat or advance, but the final result is always the same: the struggle ends when feedbacks accumulate in such a way that one of the sides collapses. Then, the battle is over.

We can see armies as networks of soldiers, each one connected to the nearby soldiers. In a military struggle, the loss of a single node, that is of a single soldier, in itself has little effect on the performance of the system. But it may be devastating if the deadly feedback mechanism kicks in. One soldier runs away, another soldier sees him running he does the same. Others follow. That may cause the whole army to melt away – a typical example of feedback-generated collapse and the nightmare of commanders all over history. Of course, things are not so simple in real armies but it is true that ancient armies often had a poorly defined chain of command. That made them susceptible to abrupt collapse. For instance, at the battle of Manzikert, in 1071 AD the Byzantines were defeated by the Turks because - among other factors – some sections of the army panicked and ran away.

Once we start seeing see warfare in terms of complex systems interacting with each other, we can understand how the natural selection on the battlefield led to the evolution of armies into structures that made them resistant to collapse. In the 1800s, the Prussians had developed an army where each soldier was supposed to keep reloading and shooting, oblivious to what was happening around him. Ideally, he would keep shooting even if he was the last one left standing. Basically, the Prussians had severed the horizontal connections of the army network, leaving only the "vertical" ones connecting soldiers to their officers. It was the concept, attributed to Frederick the Great, that common soldiers should fear their own officers more than the enemy. That made the network resilient toward collapse: losing one node would not lead to an avalanche of node losses generated by feedback

The Prussian idea was successful and it is still the way modern armies are organized. But if it made "bottom-up" collapse more difficult, it increased the chances of a top-down" collapse. A vertically structured army is vulnerable to a “decapitation strike,” a concept already well known to those who, long ago, invented the game of chess. A modern occurrence of this kind of collapse took place in Italy in September 1943. After the earlier removal of the charismatic Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, Italy's armed forces virtually disintegrated when the King of Italy fled the capital, Rome, leaving the army without command and without clear instructions. In this way, he brought to real-life the concept of “checkmate” of chess. Other examples of decapitation collapse exist in history, one was the collapse of the Albanian forces against the Italian invasion in 1939. It was a hopeless fight in any case, but the flight of the king of Albany, Zog, led to the total cessation of all resistance -- another case of a chessmate in real life.

Other cases of decapitation strikes failed. An example is the attempt of some German officers to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944. They failed, so we will never know what would have happened had Hitler died that day. Another example was the strike against Iraq in 2003, which aimed at killing most of the members of the Iraqi government. Alalso that attempt failed.
The problem with the idea of destroying a military structure by decapitation is two-fold: the first is that the enemy knows that its leadership is a good target and therefore it works at hardening it as much as possible. One is reminded here of the kagemusha the “shadow warriors” of Japanese military history, whose task was to impersonate a military leader, having the enemy wasting their efforts on them rather than on the right target. Then, it is also true that in modern times armies have developed a less rigid structure in which small units can continue fighting even if they lose contact with their command center. It is a way of fighting that was pioneered by Edwin Rommel during the First World War and extensively used by Heinz Guderian during the Second. Another recent example of resilience in an armed conflict is the 2006 confrontation between Israel and the Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Hezbollah’s fighting machine was far from being a traditional army: it was a highly resilient system based on small units weakly connected to each other. In the end, it was successful against a theoretically much more powerful adversary. Giving a certain degree of freedom to small units is risky, since the units may not behave the way the central control wants them to. But it seems to pay handsomely in modern times, also because of the development of modern propaganda techniques. Today, soldiers don’t normally fight for money, they are heavily conditioned by propaganda or by religious beliefs.


In the end, waging a war is mainly a question of command and control and there exist many possible interpretations of how to control an army in such a way to make it resilient against collapse. To this day, propaganda remains the main tool motivating soldiers to fight but, as I argued in a previous post, modern warfare seems to be more and more based on remote-controlled, or even autonomous, robotic weapons.

A concept related to the rise of military robots is that of “Network Centered Warfare” also called, sometimes, “Effect Based Operations.” The idea is to transform an army into a single weapon using sophisticated communication techniques. The question, then, is who controls that weapon? If there is a single central control system, the whole system becomes again vulnerable to a decapitation strike. An attack on its operational center that might leave it as useless as the chess pieces on the chessboard after that their king is checkmated.
 
But it is also perfectly possible to organize military robots in small, relatively independent units. It doesn't change the main question: who controls the military robots? It is a question that, so far, has found no simple answer. Obviously, the robots themselves are not sensitive to propaganda, but their controllers are still human beings. But propaganda is a tool developed to control infantrymen facing the enemy while stuck in a trench, now we need tools to control the robots' controllers who are specialized professionals operating from the safety of remote locations. Appropriate techniques have not been seveloped yet and we don't know what shape they could take and how they will affect the way warfare is conducted.

So, it is difficult to predict what the future of war will be but, clearly, nothing changes in its basic features: war is a struggle that can be fought in real space, in virtual space, or both. We'll probably see a remarkable shift to virtual war, but it is a tortuous path that we are following. As always, the future will be what it had to be.

What can we Learn From the Middle Ages About Collapse? The Great Challenge of the Seneca Bottleneck

The idea that a collapse is awaiting our civilization seems to be gaining ground, although it has not reached the mainstream debate. But no civilization before ours escaped collapse, so it makes sense to think that the entity we call "The West" is going to crash down, badly, in the future. Then, just as it happened to the Romans long ago, we are going to enter a new world. What will it be? Will it look like the Middle Ages? Maybe, but what were exactly the Middle Ages? It may well be that it was far from being the age of barbarism that the name of "dark ages" seems to imply. The Middle Ages were more a period of intelligent adaptation to scarce resources. So, can we learn from our Medieval ancestors how to manage the coming decline?

Aa some moment during the 2nd century AD, the Roman mines of Northern  Spain ceased to produce gold and silver, depleted after some three centuries of exploitation. The Roman Empire lost its main asset: its currency, the money used to pay for the troops, the bureaucracy, the court, the nobles, and everything else. Without money, there was nothing that could keep the Empire together and, following the great financial crash of the 3rd century AD, the Western Roman Empire faded away into a galaxy of statelets and kingdoms. By the 5th century, Europe was officially in the period we call the Middle Ages and that would last for about a millennium.

Today, we tend to regard the Middle Ages as a period of Barbarism and superstition, truly a dark age of witch hunts and religious wars. But are we sure that it was so? Actually, the Middle Ages were a period of intelligent adaptation to the scarcity of resources, a society that may anticipate our future.

First of all, the people of the Middle Ages faced the problem of the lack of currency. Without currency, there can't be commerce, there can't be a government, and the economy is reduced to local exchanges. But, without a good supply of gold or silver, there was no way to maintain a metal-based currency system. Here, we see a clever invention: a virtual currency based on relics. Relics were mostly human bones that the Church, acting as a bank, would guarantee having belonged to some holy man of the past. That ensured the scarcity and the value of the relic-based currency. Relics also solved a basic problem: convertibility. Any currency, to be of any use, must be exchangeable into goods of some kind. With the economy having crashed, there was little in terms of goods to be purchased during the early Middle Ages. But relics could be redeemed in terms of personal physical and spiritual health. People were eager to have or to be in contact with relics as much as in earlier times they would seek for gold and silver.

If relics solved the currency problem, an economy needs also roads: goods must be transported. We know that the Roman system of military roads had mostly collapsed during the 5th century, as Namatianus tells us in his "De Reditu Suo," and, with the Roman state gone, there was no government that would take care of maintaining the roads. Here, we have another clever invention of the Middle Ages: pilgrimages. People would travel all over Europe and even farther away in order to worship the most precious relics stored in churches and monasteries. Pilgrimages were said to be good for one's spiritual health and well-being, but also created a form of non-monetarized economy. Pilgrims needed food and shelter, and that generated a whole system of support for the travelers, monasteries, hotels, shelters, and the like, in large part based on charity. The local lords were encouraged to maintain the roads going through their domains, again in the form of the prestige they gained by favoring pilgrimages and the associated movement of goods.

Then, of course, if people can travel and exchange things they also need to speak to each other. Here, we have another success of the Middle Ages: keeping Latin alive as a European lingua franca. It was not everybody's language, it was reserved to the clergy, but it was truly universal. An Irish monk could converse in Latin with a Sicilian abbot and both would be able to understand a German priest. That prevented Europe from becoming an unmanageable Babel of languages (any reference to the current state of the European Union is intentional).

Keeping Latin, of course, meant to keep the Roman law codes and, as a consequence, maintain the rule of law, one of the greatest conquests of the Roman civilization. Ah... but you are thinking of witch hunts, aren't you? Weren't Medieval people dedicated to burning poor women all the time? No, that's part of the bad press surrounding the Middle Ages. Witches were NOT, emphatically not burned during the Middle Ages. Look at the data from a recent paper by Leeson and Russ. You see that trials and executions of witches were basically non-existent during the Middle Ages. The age of Witch hunting was the so-called and, - oh, so civilized - "Reinassance".

The use of Latin as not just a lingua franca but also a sacred language meant to create a body of European intellectuals, part of a network of monasteries, all managed by the Roman Church. That network kept alive the body of knowledge that had been gathered during the Classical Antiquity. But weren't people burning books during the Middle Ages? Well, no. Book-burning was not an especially Medieval thing -- you can see in the article by Wikipedia on the subject that book burning is mostly a modern thing. Besides, books written by hand were so expensive during the Middle Ages that nobody sane in his or her minds would engage in burning them.

The Middle Ages also saw an effort to control the violence of the military. During Roman times, soldiers would fight because they were paid and that allowed the government a tight control of the army. But, with the disappearance of currency, armies started fighting in order to loot, creating all sorts of disasters. One attempt to control them was the creation of military orders of warrior monks. During the early times of Christianity, the idea took the form of the militia of the Parabalanoi. They turned out to be unruly and violent, among other things they are said to have killed the Pagan intellectual Hypathia in 415 CE. They were disbanded and disappeared from history after the 6th century or so. Later on, after the year 1000, military orders were created during the late Middle Ages and employed mainly for the Crusades. The Teutonic Knights, the Templars, the Knights Hospitallers, and several others, don't seem to have been very effective as a fighting force since they failed to avoid the Holy Lands to be retaken by the Moslem states. It was a good attempt, but this one failed.

Finally, the Medieval society tried to reduce the oppression of the poor and people such as Benedict and Francis of Assisi made it clear that material wealth was not the only goal worth pursuing. The Middle Ages never were a proletarian paradise, but inequality was probably lower than it is in our society, today. It was also an age of much better gender-equality than anything seen in Roman times.

Then, of course, we know how it ended: with the great economic expansion that followed the Black Death in Europe, currency returned from new silver mines in Eastern Europe: the Medieval cult of relics became just a funny superstition. A metal currency meant new empires and new armies sent to conquer the world that the new European galleons were discovering. The invention of the printing press created National languages and ended forever the role of Latin as lingua franca. National languages also generated nation-states, aggressive and powerful entities that still dominate Europe today. And that created the world of today: aggressive, violent, destructive, unsustainable, and rushing at the fastest possible speed toward its own destruction -- the Seneca Collapse of our civilization.

How about our future? Can we imagine a return to something similar to the Middle Ages, the "New Middle Ages"? It is a widely debated concept, often seen in strongly negative terms because people still see the historical Middle Ages as a "dark age." More than that, most people today seem to find inconceivable that any kind of complex society could exist in the future without fossil fuels. In this view, whatever would emerge out of the coming collapse would be something like "peasants ruled by brigands" or, worse, a new Olduvai world of hungry hunters and gatherers, if not the total extinction of humankind.

Maybe. But it may also be that thisnegative attitude is just as wrong as it was the inability of the ancient Romans to conceive any kind of society without Rome as the capital of an empire. Rutilius Namatianus wrote something like that in his De Reditu, during the early 5th century AD. But he was wrong, the example of the Middle Ages tells us that it is possible to keep a sophisticated civilization despite the dearth of material resources available.

It is likely that the old world can't be saved anymore, and probably it doesn't deserve to be. But, even without the abundant mineral resources that we used to create our current situation, we could be able to emerge out of the Seneca Bottleneck and build a sustainable society based that maintains at least some of the current scientific and literary knowledge by using renewable energy and by means of a careful management of the remaining mineral resources of the Earth -- mining our ruins could help, too, just as Medieval people did with Roman ruins.

We cannot say if our descendants will be able to create such a world, but they will have a better chance if we help them. That means sowing the seeds of a renewable energy infrastructure based on sustainable resources, and to start doing that before climate change destroys everything. We can do that, but we need to start now.




After having written this post, I just discovered a 2013 post on the "American Conservative" about Christian Monasticism that was commented just today by Alastair Crooke. It seems that the idea that we can learn something from the Middle Ages is spreading.

What Will Climate Deniers say When the Climate Disaster Arrives?

Image from a fellow Cassandra

It is all the fault of the scientists, they didn't explain to us clearly enough what the problem was.

I am sure you alarmists will take this as an excuse to raise new taxes.

I couldn't detect any sea level rise. It was the city that sank.

Socialism is bad anyway.

It is all a fault of those Russians. They can do much more than just troll the Internet!

Al Gore is fat.

Now, what did Greta Thunberg do to avoid this?

I think that shouldn't prevent us from bringing democracy to Iran.

C'mon! Just a planetary catastrophe is enough for you to forget the Climategate mails?

Well, maybe the cost of cleaning up will make the GDP grow.

Tell me again about this "Seneca Cliff". . .?

I bought myself a Prius, why wasn't that enough?

Don't worry! We'll make America great again!

Eric the Red was right. Greenland is really green!

Why can't you see the good points of it? Think of how many jobs we can create with building dams!



Protect the Earth, you say? Silly! Look at what she did to us!

The Seneca Cliff According to H.P. Lovecraft

It is strange how sometimes fiction manages to catch human feelings and ideas in ways that are not easy to articulate in terms of facts and models. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) has been one of the world masters of the horror genre, managing to flesh out some of our deep fears.

We can read Lovecraft's story "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" as an allegory of our times. The prosperous and shiny city of Sarnath had a dark origin, the violence against the previous inhabitants of the region. The drama unfolds with all the characters mentioned in the story aware that they'll have to face some kind of retribution for what they did and yet refusing to admit that. And the retribution came to Sarnath in a form not unlike what the Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca had noted when he said that "growth is sluggish, but the way to ruin is rapid," the Seneca Cliff.

In our case, we know what we did to the Earth's ecosystem. We know about the greenhouse gases, we know about the slaughter of other species, we know about the pillaging of the Earth's resources. We know all that but, like the inhabitants of Sarnath, we refuse to admit it. What kind of retribution can we expect in the future?

It is curious how the knowledge of the horror we did to our planet takes the shape of the tales of the horror genre. It is something modern, the ancient just didn't have it. Think of Dante Alighieri: his Comedy is all about ghosts, but there is no horror anywhere in modern terms. Think of Shakespeare's Hamlet, there is a ghost, a skeleton, a dark castle, but no horror elements. Why?

But, if it is true that for everything that exists there has to be a reason, there has to be a reason also for us being obsessed with horror and monstrous creatures. And I think it is because we are creating them. Just turn on your TV and watch the news, don't you have the sensation of living a horror story written by H.P. Lovecraft?

Yes, the news looks today like a horror story, complete with eldritch monsters, dark creatures from the abyss, Cthulhu, Nyarlatothep, Azhathot, Shub-Niggurath, and all the others, coming from the lost city of R'lyeh. And you wouldn't be surprised to see that the tv announcer looks like one of the inhabitants of the destroyed city of lb that once stood in front of Sarnath, screaming at you from the screen, Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! 
 

And we will be forever prisoners of the monsters we ourselves created.




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The Doom that Came to Sarnath
by H.P. Lovecraft - 1920

There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream and out of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.....

Read the whole text on the blog "Chimeras".

And now we are officially starting to slide down the Seneca Cliff for the airlines: The A380 goes the way the Concorde went

And there goes the A380, too. You would think that the European aerospace industry wouldn't repeat the mistake they made with the Concorde, would they? But they managed not only to repeat it, but too make it bigger.

At the time of the Concorde, everyone said that the future was with supersonic passenger planes. At the time of the A380, everyone said that the future was with large wide-body planes. Now, I wonder what else they could concoct if someone doesn't stop them, and I can easily think of them doing something even worse. Fortunately, with the EU in the sad state it is, maybe they won't have that chance.

In any case, a just punishment for those who think they can predict the future by extrapolating the past.

Why do Societies Collapse? Diminishing Returns are a key Factor, a new Study Says

In 1988, Joseph Tainter published a fundamental study on the collapse of societies, proposing the existence of a common cause, diminishing returns, for the fact that all past empires and civilizations had eventually collapsed. Recently, myself and my coworkers Sara Falsini and Ilaria Perissi performed a system dynamics study that confirms Tainter's ideas and goes deeper into the origins of the diminishing returns of civilizations. It was published now on "Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality"

Why do civilizations collapse? It is a question that has been haunting the nebulous entity we call "The West" from the time when Edward Gibbon published his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," in 1776. The underlying question in Gibbon's massive study was 'are we heading for the same destiny as the Romans?' A question that generations of historians have tried to answer, so far without arriving to answer on which everyone would agree.

There are, literally, hundreds of "explanations" for the decline and fall of empires, and the same confusion reigns for the fall of the past civilizations rising to glory and then biting the dust, becoming little more than ruins and footnotes in history books. Is there a single cause for these collapses? Or is collapse the result of many small effects that, somehow, gang up together to push the great beast down the Seneca Cliff?

One of the most fascinating interpretations of the collapse of civilization is Joseph Tainter's idea that it is due to "diminishing returns." It is a well-known concept in economics that Tainter adapts to the historical cycle of civilizations, focusing on the control structures designed to keep together the whole system, the bureaucracy for instance. Tainter attributes these diminishing returns to an intrinsic property of control structures to become less efficient as they become larger.  Below, you can see a rather well-known graph taken for Tainter's book "The Collapse of Complex societies." (1988)

Tainter's idea is fascinating for several reasons, one is that it generates some order in the incredible confusion of hypotheses and counter-hypotheses of the debate on societal collapse. If Tainter is right, then the many phenomena we observe during the collapse are just a reflection of an inner sickness of the society undergoing it. Barbaric invasions, for instance, are not the reason that led the Roman Empire to fall, the Barbarians just exploited the chance they saw to invade a weakened empire.

A problem with Tainter's idea is that it is qualitative: it is based on the available historical data, for instance, the debasing of the Roman currency, but the curve of the diminishing returns is just drawn by hand. One question you might want to ask is: fine, there are diminishing returns, but where is the collapse in the curve? Another one could be: if the system experiences diminishing returns, why doesn't it just retrace the curve to go back to where it was before?

These and other questions are examined in a system dynamics study that myself and my coworkers, Ilaria Perissi and Sara Falsini, performed. The idea is that if a civilization is a complex system, then it should be possible to model it using system dynamics, a tool specifically designed for this purpose. So, we built a series of models inspired by the concept of "mind-sized" models. That is, models that don't pretend to be a detailed description of the system but try to catch the basic mechanisms that make the system move and, sometimes, go through tipping points and collapse. We found that on the basis of some simple assumption, it is possible to produce a curve that qualitatively looks like Tainter's one

The system dynamics model tells us that the origin of the diminishing returns lies in the gradual depletion of the resources that flow through the system. It is not so much an effect of increasing complexity in itself, the problem is sustaining that complexity.

Then, the model also tells us what happens on "the other side" of the curve. That is, what happens if the system continues its trajectory beyond the point where Tainter's curve stop. The curve shows a clear hysteresis, that is, it doesn't follow the earlier path, but it remains always on a low-benefit trajectory. It means that cutting on bureaucracy doesn't make the system more efficient.

These results are not the final word on the question of societal collapse. But they do provide some fundamental insight, I think. It is the fact that the system is "alive" as long as its resources provide good returns -- in terms of energy resources, it means they have a good EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). If the EROEI goes down, then the system falls into the Seneca Cliff.

Of course, since our society depends on fossil fuels, we are bound to go that way because the depletion of the best resources is progressively lowering the EROEI of the system. If we want to keep alive some kind of complex society, we can't do that by scraping the bottom of the barrel, desperately trying to burn what we can still burn. But, unfortunately, it is exactly what most governments in the world are trying to do. It is a good way to speed up toward the impending cliff.

What we should do, instead, would be to move as fast as possible toward a renewable-based society. We are lucky that we have energy technologies efficient enough in term of EROEI that they could support a transition to a better, cleaner, and more prosperous world. Too bad that nobody seems to want them.

There has to be something in the concept of "BAU" that makes it one of the most powerful attractors you can simulate in a system dynamics model. And so we are moving toward an uncertain future, but one thing that we can be sure of is that fossil fuels will not accompany us there.


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Our complete paper can be found here. You can also find an abridged version on ArXiv.

And here are the authors

Ugo Bardi

Sara Falsini

Ilaria Perissi








Note: an earlier version of this post was destroyed by the evil minions of the Great Satan -- that is by Google Blogger.