Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (80 page)

the governing elite in Haiti, are becoming increasingly frequent in the mod
ern U.S., where rich people tend to live within their gated compounds
(Plate 36) and to drink bottled water. For example, Enron's executives cor
rectly calculated that they could gain huge sums of money for themselves by
looting the company coffers and thereby harming all the stockholders, and
that they were likely to get away with their gamble.

Throughout recorded history, actions or inactions by self-absorbed
kings, chiefs, and politicians have been a regular cause of societal collapses,
including those of the Maya kings, Greenland Norse chiefs, and modern
Rwandan politicians discussed in this book. Barbara Tuchman devoted her book
The March of Folly
to famous historical examples of disastrous deci
sions, ranging from the Trojans bringing the Trojan horse within their
walls, and the Renaissance popes provoking the Protestant succession, to the
German decision to adopt unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I
(thereby triggering America's declaration of war), and Japan's Pearl Harbor attack that similarly triggered America's declaration of war in 1941. As Tuchman put it succinctly, "Chief among the forces affecting political folly
is lust for power, named by Tacitus as 'the most flagrant of all passions.' " As
a result of lust for power, Easter Island chiefs and Maya kings acted so as to
accelerate deforestation rather than to prevent it: their status depended on
their putting up bigger statues and monuments than their rivals. They were
trapped in a competitive spiral, such that any chief or king who put up
smaller statues or monuments to spare the forests would have been scorned
and lost his job. That's a regular problem with competitions for prestige,
which are judged on a short time frame.

Conversely, failures to solve perceived problems because of conflicts of
interest between the elite and the masses are much less likely in societies
where the elite cannot insulate themselves from the consequences of their
actions. We shall see in the final chapter that the high environmental aware
ness of the Dutch (including their politicians) goes back to the fact that much of the population
—both the politicians and the masses—lives on
land lying below sea level, where only dikes stand between them and
drowning, so that foolish land planning by politicians would be at their
own personal peril. Similarly, New Guinea highlands big-men live in the
same type of huts as everyone else, scrounge for firewood and timber in the
same places as everyone else, and were thereby highly motivated to solve
their society's need for sustainable forestry (Chapter 9).

All of these examples in the preceding several pages illustrate situations in
which a society fails to try to solve perceived problems because the mainte
nance of the problem is good for some people. In contrast to that so-called rational behavior, other failures to attempt to solve perceived problems in
volve what social scientists consider "irrational behavior": i.e., behavior that is harmful for everybody. Such irrational behavior often arises when each of us individually is torn by clashes of values: we may ignore a bad status quo because it is favored by some deeply held value to which we cling. "Persis
tence in error," "wooden-headedness, "refusal to draw inference from negative signs," and "mental standstill or stagnation" are among the phrases that
Barbara Tuchman applies to this common human trait. Psychologists use
the term "sunk-cost effect" for a related trait: we feel reluctant to abandon a
policy (or to sell a stock) in which we have already invested heavily.

Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent
causes of disastrous behavior. For example, much of the deforestation of
Easter Island had a religious motivation: to obtain logs to transport and
erect the giant stone statues that were the object of veneration. At the same time, but 9,000 miles away and in the opposite hemisphere, the Greenland
Norse were pursuing their own religious values as Christians. Those values,
their European identity, their conservative lifestyle in a harsh environment where most innovations would in fact fail, and their tightly communal and
mutually supportive society allowed them to survive for centuries. But
those admirable (and, for a long time, successful) traits also prevented them
from making the drastic lifestyle changes and selective adoptions of Inuit technology that might have helped them survive for longer.

The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of ad
mirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no
longer make sense. Australians brought from Britain a tradition of raising sheep for wool, high land values, and an identification with Britain, and
thereby accomplished the feat of building a First World democracy remote from any other (except New Zealand), but are now beginning to appreciate that those values also have downsides. In modern times a reason why Mon-
tanans have been so reluctant to solve their problems caused by mining,
logging, and ranching is that those three industries used to be the pillars of
the Montana economy, and that they became bound up with Montana's
pioneer spirit and identity. Montanans' pioneer commitment to individual
freedom and self-sufficiency has similarly made them reluctant to accept their new need for government planning and for curbing individual rights.
Communist China's determination not to repeat the errors of capitalism led

it to scorn environmental concerns as just one more capitalist error, and
thereby to saddle China with enormous environmental problems. Rwan-dans' ideal of large families was appropriate in traditional times of high
childhood mortality, but has led to a disastrous population explosion today.
It appears to me that much of the rigid opposition to environmental concerns in the First World nowadays involves values acquired early in life
and never again reexamined: "the maintenance intact by rulers and policy
makers of the ideas they started with," to quote Barbara Tuchman once again.

It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one's core
values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what
point do we as individuals prefer to die than to compromise and live? Millions of people in modern times have indeed faced the decision whether, to save their own life, they would be willing to betray friends or relatives, ac
quiesce in a vile dictatorship, live as virtual slaves, or flee their country. Nations and societies sometimes have to make similar decisions collectively.

All such decisions involve gambles, because one often can't be certain that clinging to core values will be fatal, or (conversely) that abandoning
them will ensure survival. In trying to carry on as Christian farmers, the
Greenland Norse in effect were deciding that they were prepared to die as
Christian farmers rather than live as Inuit; they lost that gamble. Among
five small Eastern European countries faced with the overwhelming might
of Russian armies, the Estonians and Latvians and Lithuanians surrendered
their independence in 1939 without a fight, the Finns fought in 1939-40
and preserved their independence, and Hungarians fought in 1956 and lost
their independence. Who among us is to say which country was wiser, and
who could have predicted in advance that only the Finns would win their
gamble?

Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core
values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change. In the last 60 years the world's most powerful countries
have given up long-held cherished values previously central to their na
tional image, while holding on to other values. Britain and France aban
doned their centuries-old role as independently acting world powers; Japan
abandoned its military tradition and armed forces; and Russia abandoned
its long experiment with communism. The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial
discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and
sexual repression. Australia is now reevaluating its status as a rural farming

society with British identity. Societies and individuals that succeed may be
those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have
the luck to win their gambles. The world as a whole today faces similar deci
sions about its environmental problems that we shall consider in the final
chapter.

Those are examples of how irrational behavior associated with clashes of
values does or doesn't prevent a society from trying to solve perceived prob
lems. Common further irrational motives for failure to address problems
include that the public may widely dislike those who first perceive and
complain about the problem
—such as Tasmania's Green Party that first
protested foxes' introduction into Tasmania. The public may dismiss warn
ings because of previous warnings that proved to be false alarms, as illus
trated by Aesop's fable about the eventual fate of the shepherd boy who had
repeatedly cried "Wolf!" and whose cries for help were then ignored when a
wolf did appear. The public may shirk its responsibility by invoking ISEP
(p. 430: "It's someone else's problem").

Partly irrational failures to try to solve perceived problems often arise from clashes between short-term and long-term motives of the same indi
vidual. Rwandan and Haitian peasants, and billions of other people in the
world today, are desperately poor and think only of food for the next day.
Poor fishermen in tropical reef areas use dynamite and cyanide to kill coral
reef fish (and incidentally to kill the reefs as well) in order to feed their chil
dren today, in the full knowledge that they are thereby destroying their future livelihood. Governments, too, regularly operate on a short-term focus:
they feel overwhelmed by imminent disasters and pay attention only to
problems that are on the verge of explosion. For example, a friend of mine
who is closely connected to the current federal administration in Washington, D.C., told me that, when he visited Washington for the first time after
the 2000 national elections, he found that our government's new leaders
had what he termed a "90-day focus": they talked only about those problems with the potential to cause a disaster within the next 90 days. Econo
mists rationally attempt to justify these irrational focuses on short-term
profits by "discounting" future profits. That is, they argue that it may be bet
ter to harvest a resource today than to leave some of the resource intact for
harvesting tomorrow, on the grounds that the profits from today's harvest
could be invested, and that the investment interest thereby accumulated be-

tween now and some alternative future harvest time would tend to make to
day's harvest more valuable than the future harvest. In that case, the bad consequences are born by the next generation, but that generation cannot
vote or complain today.

Some other possible reasons for irrational refusal to try to solve a per
ceived problem are more speculative. One is a well-recognized phenome
non in short-term decision-making termed "crowd psychology." Individuals
who find themselves members of a large coherent group or crowd, espe
cially one that is emotionally excited, may become swept along to support the group's decision, even though the same individuals might have rejected
the decision if allowed to reflect on it alone at leisure. As the German
dramatist Schiller wrote, "Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable
—as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead."
Historical examples of crowd psychology in operation include late medieval Europe's enthusiasm for the Crusades, accelerating overinvestment in fancy
tulips in Holland peaking between 1634 and 1636 ("Tulipomania"), peri
odic outbursts of witch-hunting like the Salem witch trials of 1692, and the
crowds whipped up into frenzies by skillful Nazi propagandists in the 1930s.

A calmer small-scale analog of crowd psychology that may emerge in
groups of decision-makers has been termed "groupthink" by Irving Janis.
Especially when a small cohesive group (such as President Kennedy's advisors during the Bay of Pigs crisis, or President Johnson's advisors during the
escalation of the Vietnam War) is trying to reach a decision under stressful
circumstances, the stress and the need for mutual support and approval
may lead to suppression of doubts and critical thinking, sharing of illusions,
a premature consensus, and ultimately a disastrous decision. Both crowd
psychology and groupthink may operate over periods of not just a few
hours but also up to a few years: what remains uncertain is their contribution to disastrous decisions about environmental problems unfolding over
the course of decades or centuries.

The final speculative reason that I shall mention for irrational failure to
try to solve a perceived problem is psychological denial. This is a technical
term with a precisely defined meaning in individual psychology, and it has
been taken over into the pop culture. If something that you perceive arouses
in you a painful emotion, you may subconsciously suppress or deny your perception in order to avoid the unbearable pain, even though the practical results of ignoring your perception may prove ultimately disastrous. The
emotions most often responsible are terror, anxiety, and grief. Typical

examples include blocking the memory of a frightening experience, or re
fusing to think about the likelihood that your husband, wife, child, or best
friend is dying because the thought is so painfully sad.

For example, consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a con
siderable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people down
stream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam's bursting, it's not
surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after
you get to just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam's breaking
is found to be highest, the concern then falls off to zero as you approach
closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the
ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That's
because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one's sanity
while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could
burst. Although psychological denial is a phenomenon well established in
individual psychology, it seems likely to apply to group psychology as well.

Finally, even after a society has anticipated, perceived, or tried to solve a problem, it may still fail for obvious possible reasons: the problem may be beyond our present capacities to solve, a solution may exist but be prohibi
tively expensive, or our efforts may be too little and too late. Some at
tempted solutions backfire and make the problem worse, such as the Cane Toad's introduction into Australia to control insect pests, or forest fire sup
pression in the American West. Many past societies (such as medieval Iceland) lacked the detailed ecological knowledge that now permits us to cope better with the problems that they faced. Others of those problems continue
to resist solution today.

For instance, please think back to Chapter 8 on the ultimate failure of
the Greenland Norse to survive after four centuries. The cruel reality is that,
for the last 5,000 years, Greenland's cold climate and its limited, unpre
dictably variable resources have posed an insuperably difficult challenge to human efforts to establish a long-lasting sustainable economy. Four succes
sive waves of Native American hunter-gatherers tried and ultimately failed before the Norse failed. The Inuit came closest to success by maintaining a
self-sufficient lifestyle in Greenland for 700 years, but it was a hard life with
frequent deaths from starvation. Modern Inuit are no longer willing to sub
sist traditionally with stone tools, dogsleds, and hand-held harpooning of

whales from skin boats, without imported technology and food. Modern
Greenland's government has not yet developed a self-supporting economy independent of foreign aid. The government has experimented again with
livestock as did the Norse, eventually gave up on cattle, and still subsidizes
sheep farmers who cannot make a profit by themselves. All that history
makes the ultimate failure of the Greenland Norse unsurprising. Similarly,
the Anasazi ultimate "failure" in the U.S. Southwest has to be seen in the perspective of many other ultimately "failed" attempts to establish long-lasting farming societies in that environment so hostile for farming.

Among the most recalcitrant problems today are those posed by intro
duced pest species, which often prove impossible to eradicate or control
once they have become established. For example, the state of Montana con
tinues to spend over a hundred million dollars per year on combatting
Leafy Spurge and other introduced weed species. That's not because Mon-tanans don't try to eradicate them, but simply because the weeds are impos
sible to eradicate at present. Leafy Spurge has roots 20 feet deep, too long to pull up by hand, and specific weed-controlled chemicals cost up to $800 per gallon. Australia has tried fences, foxes, shooting, bulldozers, myxomatosis
virus, and calicivirus in its ongoing efforts to control rabbits, which have
survived all such efforts so far.

The problem of catastrophic forest fires in dry parts of the U.S. Inter-
montane West could probably be brought under control by management techniques to reduce the fuel load, such as by mechanically thinning out new growth in the understory and removing fallen dead timber. Unfortu
nately, carrying out that solution on a large scale is considered prohibitively expensive. The fate of Florida's Dusky Seaside Sparrow similarly illustrates
failure due to expense, as well as due to the usual penalty for procrastina
tion ("too little, too late"). As the sparrow's habitat dwindled, action was
postponed because of arguments over whether its habitat really was becom
ing critically small. By the time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed in
the late 1980s to buy its remaining habitat at the high cost of $5,000,000,
that habitat had become so degraded that its sparrows died out. An argu
ment then raged over whether to breed the last sparrows in captivity to the
closely related Scott's Seaside Sparrow, and then reestablish purer Dusky Seaside Sparrows by back-crossing the resulting hybrids. By the time that
permission was finally granted, those last Dusky captives had become infer
tile through old age. Both the habitat preservation effort and the captive
breeding effort would have been cheaper and more likely to succeed if they
had been begun earlier.

Thus, human societies and smaller groups may make disastrous decisions for a whole sequence of reasons: failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been
perceived, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it. This chapter began
with my relating the incredulity of my students, and of Joseph Tainter, that
societies could allow environmental problems to overwhelm them. Now, at
the end of this chapter, we seem to have moved towards the opposite ex
treme: we have identified an abundance of reasons why societies might fail.
For each of those reasons, each of us can draw on our own life experiences
to think of groups known to us that failed at some task for that particular reason.

But it's also obvious that societies don't regularly fail to solve their prob
lems. If that were true, all of us would now be dead or else living again un
der the Stone Age conditions of 13,000 years ago. Instead, the cases of failure are sufficiently noteworthy to warrant writing this book about
them
—a book of finite length, about only certain societies, and not an en
cyclopedia of every society in history. In Chapter 9 we specifically discussed
some examples drawn from the majority of societies that succeeded.

Why, then, do some societies succeed and others fail, in the various ways
discussed in this chapter? Part of the reason, of course, involves differences among environments rather than among societies: some environments pose
much more difficult problems than do others. For instance, cold isolated
Greenland was more challenging than was southern Norway, whence many
of Greenland's colonists originated. Similarly, dry, isolated, high-latitude, low-elevation Easter Island was more challenging than was wet, less isolated, equatorial, high Tahiti where ancestors of the Easter Islanders may have lived at one stage. But that's only half of the story. If I were to claim that such environmental differences were the sole reason behind different
societal outcomes of success or failure, it would indeed be fair to charge me
with "environmental determinism," a view unpopular among social scien
tists. In fact, while environmental conditions certainly make it more diffi
cult to support human societies in some environments than in others, that
still leaves much scope for a society to save or doom itself by its own actions.

It's a large subject why some groups (or individual leaders) followed one
of the paths to failure discussed in this chapter, while others didn't. For instance, why did the Inca Empire succeed in reafforesting its dry cool en
vironment, while the Easter Islanders and Greenland Norse didn't? The

answer partly depends on idiosyncrasies of particular individuals and will
defy prediction. But I still hope that better understanding of the potential causes of failure discussed in this chapter may help planners to become
aware of those causes, and to avoid them.

A striking example of such understanding being put to good use is pro
vided by the contrast between the deliberations over two consecutive crises
involving Cuba and the U.S., by President Kennedy and his advisors. In early 1961 they fell into poor group decision-making practices that led to
their disastrous decision to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion, which failed ig-nominiously, leading to the much more dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis. As
Irving Janis pointed out in his book
Groupthink,
the Bay of Pigs delibera
tions exhibited numerous characteristics that tend to lead to bad decisions,
such as a premature sense of ostensible unanimity, suppression of per
sonal doubts and of expression of contrary views, and the group leader
(Kennedy) guiding the discussion in such a way as to minimize disagree
ment. The subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis deliberations, again involving
Kennedy and many of the same advisors, avoided those characteristics and instead proceeded along lines associated with productive decision-making,
such as Kennedy ordering participants to think skeptically, allowing discussion to be freewheeling, having subgroups meet separately, and occasionally
leaving the room to avoid his overly influencing the discussion himself.

Why did decision-making in these two Cuban crises unfold so differently? Much of the reason is that Kennedy himself thought hard after the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and he charged his advisors to think hard, about
what had gone wrong with their decision-making. Based on that thinking,
he purposely changed how he operated the advisory discussions in 1962.

In this book that has dwelt on Easter Island chiefs, Maya kings, modern
Rwandan politicians, and other leaders too self-absorbed in their own pursuit of power to attend to their society's underlying problems, it is worth
preserving balance by reminding ourselves of other successful leaders be
sides Kennedy. To solve an explosive crisis, as Kennedy did so courageously,
commands our admiration. Yet it calls for a leader with a different type of
courage to anticipate a growing problem or just a potential one, and to take
bold steps to solve it before it becomes an explosive crisis. Such leaders expose themselves to criticism or ridicule for acting before it becomes obvious
to everyone that some action is necessary. But there have been many such
courageous, insightful, strong leaders who deserve our admiration. They in
clude the early Tokugawa shoguns, who curbed deforestation in Japan long
before it reached the stage of Easter Island; Joaquin Balaguer, who (for