Moral Decay and Civilizational Rebirth
John Robb at Global Guerrillas:
Moral decay is often cited as a reason for why empires/civilizations collapse. The slow failure of the US mortgage market, the largest debt market in the world and the shining jewel of the US economic/financial system, is a good example of moral decay at work.
Why is this market failing? It’s being gutted — from wholesale fraud and ruthless profiteering at the bank/servicer level to strategic defaults at the homeowner level — because a relatively efficient and effective moral system is being replaced by a burdensome and ineffective one. What shift? Our previous moral system featured trust, loyalty, reputation, responsibility, belief, fairness, etc. While these features were sometimes in short supply, on the whole it provided us with an underlying and nearly costless structure to our social and economic interactions.
Our new moral system is that of the dominant global marketplace. This new system emphasizes transactional, short-term interactions rather than long-term relationships. All interactions are intensely legalistic, as in: nothing is assumed except what is spelled out in the contract. Goodness is solely based on transactional success and therefore anything goes, as long as you don’t get punished for it.
In this moral system, every social and economic interaction becomes increasingly costly due to a need to contractually defend yourself against cheating, fraud, and theft. Worse, when legalistic punishment is absent/lax, rampant looting and fraud occurs.
Given the costs and dangers of moral decay, it’s not hard to see why it can cause a complex empire/civilization to collapse.
John is drawing on an intellectual tradition goes back to Gibbon, Ibn Khaldun, Polybius, Confucius and Mencius but is mashing it up with modern concepts of social complexity, such as is found in Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies
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