The Riser of the New World Order

 

Chapter 1: The Riser of the New World Order

One of the questions that I think is extremely relevant today comes in the sequel that I wrote, After 1177 BC, which simply asks the question, what do you do if your society collapses? If the globalized network that you’re a part of collapses, what do you do? How resilient are you? Now, resilience is a word that’s bandied about today by lots of people, and that’s part of the problem. It has different meanings for different people and in different situations. For me, resilience is how well you do in the face of adversity.

How do you bounce back when something has gone wrong, sometimes very wrong? And I think there are basically three ways you can deal with it. And I get these from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They won the Nobel Prize back in 2007. They are the ones that put out reports on climate change every year or every couple of years. And they put out something back in 2012 that was dealing with resilience and mitigation that what do you do after disasters? They’re more looking at things like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

But in that publication, they had some definitions that I thought fit very well with the late Bronze Age collapse and its aftermath. And what they say is that when you have such an event, there are basically three things you can do. You can either just try to survive until tomorrow, which basically means that you’re coping, right? You’re trying to make it until the sun comes up again. But you could also do a little bit more. You could adapt. You could be looking to next week or next month and just saying a little bit longer term survival. So coping is just tomorrow, adapting is a little bit further out.

But they also said there’s a third thing. If you were to say this can never happen again, we can’t let New Orleans be flooded by the next hurricane. We have to transform. We have to do something about it. They said that’s the top of the heap, basically. Yeah, you can cope. Yeah, you can adapt. If you transform, that’s now, that’s where we’re talking. And so I think that we can take a look at the G8 that was affected by the collapse and ask, how well did each of them do? Did they simply cope? Did they adapt? Or did they go the extra mile and transform? Or did they do none of the above and they disappeared?

So I think we can actually rank them and then try to ask, although this gets very difficult, try to ask what made each of them resilient or not? What made them be able to transform, cope, adapt or not? And that’s where it gets down into the nitty gritty and the weeds, but it’s hypothetical. But I think it’s worth exploring because again, I think that’s where we have lessons that might still be viable for us today.

The new world order after collapse

One of the things that we see in the aftermath and the collapse is basically a new world order. As each of the societies does or does not deal well in the aftermath, we can see new political systems popping up, for example. We can see new economic systems as they try and either grow back up from the ground like the Mycenaeans had to do - and again, we don’t have Mycenaean society after about 1050 BC, we now have the Greeks going back to ground zero and trying to build everything back up.

In other places, the huge empires that had been around, the Hittites, the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, some of them go away and are replaced by a new world order. The Hittites, for example, up in Anatolia, they’re replaced by smaller city-states and kingdoms. We’ve got some survivors whom we call the Neo-Hittites, the new Hittites in North Syria, but we’ve also got new groups, the Uratians, over in the eastern half of Türkiye and the Phrygians over in the western half of Türkiye. They come on in and establish new, albeit smaller, kingdoms in the Iron Age.

I think we see this especially though, down in the southern Levant, the area that today would be Israel, Palestinian territories, Jordan, part of Lebanon, because where we had the Canaanites in the Bronze Age and the Egyptian overlords, if you will, because the Egyptians basically ruled that area as part of their kingdom or empire, that all goes away at the end of the Late Bronze Age and it’s replaced with much smaller city-states and kingdoms, which will sound familiar because we know them from the Hebrew Bible.

We now have, after the collapse in the Iron Age, we now have the northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah. We’ve got the kingdom of Edom, the kingdom of Moab, the kingdom of Ammon. All of these areas that we know from the biblical stories, they come into existence during these 400 years after the collapse. They are a reaction to what had just happened.

In fact, some scholars have suggested that maybe that’s more than natural order of things, to have smaller city-states and smaller kingdoms and that the empires of the Late Bronze Age were, as one person has put it, a failed experiment that they tried and it didn’t work all that well. I think I would disagree with that. I mean, that system survived for 500 years. I think that was pretty good, but it has no place now in the aftermath and we get all of these smaller city-states that are now flourishing.

On the other hand, again, it’s not all that cut and dried because what about the Assyrians and the Babylonians over in Mesopotamia? They’re still there. They’re now called the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians, the new ones, but they have survived the collapse, pretty much intact. They didn’t do as well as the Phoenicians and the Cypriots who I would give a gold star rating to, number one, in my book, but I would give the Assyrians and Babylonians number two. They adapted, they almost sort of transformed, but at least adapted, they’ve still got their government, they’ve still got writing, they’re still writing, they’ve still got their religion, they’ve still got the king and all the government and all that, still got the economy. It’s just things have changed slightly.

In fact, one of the things I think changed and I explore this in the sequel After 1177 BC is that they’ve lost their trading partners because that globalized network has broken down and some of the people with whom they’d been interacting are now basically gone. Like they can’t interact with the Hittites anymore ‘cause they’re not there, there’s no big Hittite king. Instead, what the Neo-Assurians do after it took them a little while to come back also, they do have drought there for a while, but when they bounce back by the 10th and certainly by the 9th century BC, like halfway through the Iron Age, the Neo-Assyrians take over pretty much the entire ancient Near East. Basically all the areas they had been trading with and had commercial and diplomatic and marital ties back in the late Bronze Age, they’ve now just conquered. It’s now part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire that stretches all the way to the Mediterranean Sea and down to Egypt in fact at one point.

We see things change and we do now see empires growing again, but for a different reason. The Neo-Assyrians are now taking what they need rather than trading for it. And this is when we also begin to see the rise and fall of civilizations. I mean in Hamilton, it talks about oceans rise, empires fall, that’s basically what we’ve got here because yes, the Neo-Assyrians rise up and they’re dominant for a while, but then they go down and collapse and the Neo-Babylonians take over for a while and then they collapse and turn and we’re off and running with the Persians and then the Greeks and then the Romans and follow us up until today.

But that’s in part why I would again argue that the collapse of the late Bronze Age is so important and what happened after the collapse of the Bronze Age is perhaps even more important because it shows what happens if you are or not resilient, but it also set us on the path for what we’ve got today in the Western world. That is where everything comes from that we’ve got. I mean, yes, you can look back to Mesopotamia and Egypt and all that for some of the things that we’ve still got today, but out of the collapse of the late Bronze Age is gonna come Greece, archaic and classical Greece with the invention of democracy and so on. So we’re gonna be on a, I wouldn’t call it a straight path, but we can trace ourselves back to what happened 3,000 years ago to what we’ve got today.

Chapter 2: The winners and losers

If we’re ranking these societies as to how well they did in the aftermath of the collapse, I would put the Cypriots and the Phoenicians in the top category. They not only transform, but they’re actually anti-fragile. Now, this is a phrase that Nicholas Nassim Taleb has used. In fact, it’s the title of one of his books. And what he says is that anti-fragile is something that actually flourishes in an age of chaos. It takes advantage of the chaos. So one might actually say, you know, collapse is not always terrible for everyone. For some people, it’s an opportunity.

In this particular case, for example, we see the Phoenicians from central Canaan. They spread out across the Mediterranean - one of my colleagues has called it a Phoenician lake - they take advantage of the fact that Ugarit has been destroyed and that the navies of some of the others, like the Hittites and the Egyptians, have either been destroyed or are not what they once were. So I would say both the Cypriots and the Phoenicians are actually anti-fragile. They are flourishing in this age of chaos. They do better than anybody else. So I put them up in my top category.

The Assyrians and the Babylonians, they adapt, but they don’t really transform that much because they don’t need to. They simply carry on as they were, but they are better than the Egyptians, for example. Now, I would put the Egyptians in my category three. They are adapting a little bit, but more they’re just coping, if you will. They don’t go down, they don’t disappear. And in fact, that was one thing that I changed from book one to book two. And the end of book one, I was like, “Ooh, Egypt is the only one that really survived.” And then book two, I’m a bit more nuanced. And like, no, actually there are others that survived better than Egypt. And I would put Egypt in the middle category three.

They didn’t do wonderfully, but they didn’t do terribly. They’re still there, but they have now withdrawn a bit from the international world because they are having problems back home, if I can put it that way. So this is into the third intermediate period, as Egyptologists call it. And at one point, we’ve got not just one, not just two, but three, and sometimes even four, people all saying that they are the pharaoh of Egypt at the same time, but in different areas of Egypt. Now to my mind, that’s not a good system. Egypt is supposed to be one king, one ruler, one country.

We look back to the new kingdom period. King Tut, Akhenaten, Amitoah the third. And so in comparison to the way it had been, in what I would say is the glory days of the 14th and 13th centuries, Egypt in the 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th centuries is not even really comparable, but it’s not terrible. And we do have some highlights.

For example, there’s one guy Psusennes I who is known as the Silver Pharaoh. His tomb was found in 1939, right before World War II. If it had been found at any other time, it would have made worldwide headlines because it’s, I believe, the second wealthiest tomb in Egypt just behind King Tut’s. But most of the stuff in the tomb is silver rather than gold. So that’s a high point. We also have one of the pharaohs, a guy named Shoshenq I, Shishak of the Bible, probably, he’s Libyan, he’s the founder of the 22nd dynasty, and he actually tries to recreate the good old days, leaves us an inscription where he went up to Israel and Judah and campaigned up there. And may have even conquered, for example, Megiddo where we find an inscription with his cartouche up there.

It’s not terrible in Egypt, but it’s not like it used to be. One Egyptologist said to me, actually, when I gave a lecture there, that that’s not a fair comparison, that it’s like apples and oranges. And you can’t compare third intermediate period to the new kingdom period. And I’m like, well, maybe not, but I’m comparing the iron age to the Bronze Age in all the other societies. So I do think it’s a fair comparison, but- so it turned out what I said to them is, these categories I’m putting the societies in, ranking them one, two, three. I said, it’s just my gut feeling based on everything that I’ve studied, but, you know, I’m not the be-all and end-all here. You wanna present data that would persuade me to move them up or down. I’m quite happy to do that.

I will say now that you could put Egypt up in category two with Assyria and Babylon, and I’d still be able to sleep at night. But I’d also be quite happy to put them down into category four where they were like with the Mycenaeans and Minoans. So it’s all fluid. And, you know, that’s the beauty of archeology in ancient history, is we put out a hypothesis and then we try and test it, and then we go and excavate and find something completely new next week that makes us rearrange it. And that’s all good. It’s called science. That’s how we advance. That’s how we progress. But for now, I’m gonna keep Egypt in category three.

The Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, and Canaanites

Category four, as I’ve just mentioned, is Minoans and Mycenaeans. They are just barely coping. They’re not adapting. They’re just coping. We see all the big palaces in mainland Greece. And even on Crete for that matter: Mycenae, Tyrans, Pilos, or Cominos, Knoosos, they either are burned, invaded, internal rebellion, earthquake, you name it, they’re all basically abandoned. And with them goes the writing system. Linear B, which we now know, is an early form of Greek that ceases to be used by about 1050 BC, because it was only being used by the scribes in the palaces to create inventories. What came into the palace, what went out of the palace? Though surprisingly, they never mentioned overseas.

The linear B never mentions contacts with Egypt or the Hittites, whatever. It’s a big problem, because I know from the archeology that they are in contact. At any rate, what we would have called the Mycenaeans and Minoans, it comes crashing down. And as I’ve mentioned, they had to rebuild from the ground up. They do it successfully, but it takes quite a while. And that’s why I end After 1177 BC with 776 BC, which is the first Olympics. And by that point, everything in Greece is back up and running, and we’re very quickly going to get them using the new Greek alphabet. We’re gonna get Homer, we’re gonna get Hesiod, we’ll get Sapho, we’ll get the Archaic poets and Greece is off to the races, but it has taken 400 years. So I put them in my category four, because they did just about as badly as you could possibly do and still survive.

And then the last category, that’s the Hittites. Don’t be a Hittite. The Hittites do not do well at all, in part ‘cause they’ve already got internal problems. We know that there was a schism in the royal family and that one part moved. We also know that the Hittite capital city, Hattusa, was actually already abandoned before the end came and that it was only partially destroyed afterward and probably from people that otherwise had nothing to do with anything, the Kashka from the Northwest that had already destroyed Hattusa a couple hundred years earlier, they came back.

I think the Hittites probably did it to themselves anyway, though it certainly didn’t hurt that the Sea Peoples were on the shores of Anatolia. And they would have been a primary example of the domino effect. And remember that the Hittites and Ugarit going down at the same time may have been what caused the collapse of absolutely everything. So I put the Hittites down there. I also put the Canaanites in Southern Canaan into that lowest category, because we really don’t see them again after the collapse of the late Bronze Age.

We do not refer to the Canaanites in the Iron Age by that name, we now call them by other names, the Judahites, the Israelites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Edomites. And so I’m of two minds, either they were wiped out or they assimilated one of the two. And we’ve got both stories in the Hebrew Bible, look at the book of Judges versus the book of Joshua, is it a genocide or is it assimulation? Either way, I don’t think the Canaanites in Southern Levant, coped or adapted or transformed or anything like that. And so I put them down in my bottom category.

On the other hand, if you were to argue, as some of my colleagues have done, that the Edomites, the Israelites, the Ammonites and all those guys are actually Canaanites who have transformed, then I would say, okay, in that case, they should be up in category two. You know, again, it’s all flexible. I only put this out as a suggestion for what we might think about doing.

I fully expect that my suggestions hopefully will start the discussions rather than end it. And I think that the new discoveries that we’re making every day, every week, every month, every year, especially in biblical archeology, are going to get us to alter things just like we’ve altered. Now what we think caused the late Bronze Age collapse will be able to fine tune how everybody did in the aftermath. But I wanted to start the discussions and I think they’re pretty interesting discussions, which again, have some bearing on us today when we are grappling with some of the same things that brought down the late Bronze Age network and that the survivors had to deal with in the aftermath. And look around today, we’ve got the same things here.

Chapter 3: How to avoid civilizational collapse

This is where we have room to maneuver and where I think investigations are going to go in the future, because even though I think we can rank these societies as to how well they each did, one of the difficulties is to try to figure out why they did, like why were the Cypriots and the Phoenicians able to be that much more successful than the Hittites, for example. So archeologists and ancient historians are now starting to try and answer these questions to grapple with the concepts.

We’re getting a couple of interesting things. For example, it’s now been suggested that maybe some of the societies were more fragile than they appeared and that they might have been more vulnerable to the stresses than they appeared to outsiders. Like the Mycenaeans, they had been over exploiting the lower classes and those lower classes might have been quite happy to see the palaces fall and even cheered and they may have been in all part of the internal rebellions. So it may be that something that looked very strong like the Hittites was actually weakened internally and the first big gust of wind came and knocked that tree over and boom, no more Hittites.

But it also might have just been the luck of the draw. It might have been geographical luck. So I think that’s where water comes into play because the Assyrians and the Babylonians are in my category two and they’re right by the Tigris and Euphrates. And the Egyptians, of course, have the Nile.

Now, those are three of the big four in the ancient world. I mean, my poor Mycenaeans and Minoans, they’re not quite up there with the others. You know, the big two in the late Bronze Age are the Egyptians and the Hittites, but then Assyrians and Babylonians. So of those four, Egyptians, Hittites, the Syrians, Babylonians, the Syrians and Babylonians have the Tigris and Euphrates. The Egyptians have the Nile. The Hittites are the only one of those four without a major water source. They’re also the only one of those four that go down completely. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

In fact, in talking to various people, I’ve heard time and time again that wars over water are gonna be what are fought in the coming century. And we can already see that in California with water, with Colorado, with Mexico and all of that. So I think in some ways, the fact that the Assyrians and the Babylonians were able to maintain their government and their religion and their writing systems and all of that might’ve been just luck of the draw. That they were so far inland that the Sea Peoples didn’t get to them and they were on the two rivers, Tigers and Euphrates, so that the drought didn’t impact them as badly as it did others. But having said that, we have written texts from the Assyrians that do talk about period of drought. They are hit. It’s not that long though. It’s like less than a century.

It came well after everyone else had been hit. So there is something there to be said for where you happen to be. So again, I think this is where we’re gonna be looking in the future is how did these people manage to survive? Or why didn’t they survive? Were they not aware that they were collapsing? And again, we have to keep in mind and actually say this at the beginning of the sequel. Most of our records are from the 1%. They’re from the elite. We know how the kings did and the central authorities that were living high. We don’t know as much about the 99% if you wanna call them that, about the farmers and the peasants out in the fields in Messenia in Greece or the Hinterlands in Anatolia.

We don’t really know their story that well, but we’re learning it because archaeologists are now moving out and excavating the little villages, the little towns that are inhabited across the divide, Bronze Age and Iron Age. And so we’re gonna get more evidence. We’re gonna get more answers. And again, that’s what I love about archeology. It’s not cut and dried. And if you will pardon the pun, it’s not set in stone. It changes depending on the new discoveries.

So everything you’re reading in the books, not just my books, but the history books and all that, it’s gonna be different to a certain extent within five years, 10 years, 50 years. I’ve already come out with the revised version of my first book and I have a folder in Dropbox of new articles that have already come out since 2021 that I need to take into account if we’re ever able to do a third edition. It just keeps coming. It doesn’t stop. And that is what is absolutely wonderful about it.

Leadership and resilience

In addition to all the other factors, whether it was luck in the draw, where you were situated or anything like that, the other factor to bring into account is how good were your leaders? That is, were they able to lead you through this time of turbulence and catastrophe? Did you have the right people in the right place at the right time or not? Now, I suspect that contributed a lot to this as well. So for example, when Egypt had three or even four people all saying that they were the Pharaoh at the same time in different parts of the country, that’s not good leadership. It’s not how you’re gonna get through this.

Similarly, the Hittite royal family had a schism at exactly this time and parted the waves. That was exactly the wrong time to do that. You needed a strong leader in place at that time. Now, the one or the two societies that do seem to have had the right people at the right place at the right time are the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The Neo-Assyrian rulers and the Neo-Babylonian rulers seem to have been the ones that got their societies through this.

In fact, a couple of fairly well-known scholars, a seriologist, have said that that is why the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians held on for about a hundred years before everybody else, before they were impacted to a certain extent by the collapse. They said it was because they had strong rulers in place that they were able to stave this off for a couple of decades or a century at most. So I do think that leadership is incredibly important because in part that leadership will determine how well you respond.

Seven lessons for today

Having studied all of this, what happens in the aftermath and all of that, I was again wondering what lessons could be learned from the late Bronze Age collapse and the aftermath. Was there anything that is of use to us today? And I did come up with seven things that I think are common sense, if I may, that are things to remember, things to live by, things that will help us if we’re ever going down that same path.

1. Have multiple contingency plans in place

So I think the first one is pretty obvious, that you need to have redundant systems in place. We talk about that all the time today, but I think it’s incredibly important. You need to have a plan A, and if that somehow doesn’t work, you need a plan B. And if that doesn’t work, you need a plan C. I just like having a generator in place in case your electricity goes out.

But I would say not just a plan A, B and C, you need a D, E and F as well. You need multiple redundancies in place and plans that you can go to if all of your major ones fail. And I think that is something that they needed to do back then and that we would still need to do today.

2. Cultivate resilience to invasion

The next couple I would say are, again, common sense. Be strong enough to resist invasion if you can. Know who your friends are and who they aren’t. And also be resilient enough to go with the flow as you need to be. Don’t be rigid, don’t be just, you know, no, this is how we’ve always done it. But be prepared in case you’re invaded. Be prepared to reach out to allies.

3. Be self-sufficient but avoid alienating allies

And in that same tone, try and be as self-sufficient as you can, but not to the detriment of alienating your allies, I would say, because you’re gonna need each other. So if you’re gonna make it through this crisis, it’s gonna be because you’re leaning on each other.

4. Be Innovative and Inventive

The other lesson that I think has a major takeaway from the Iron Age, and I will deliberately call it the Iron Age rather than the Dark Age, is to be innovative and inventive, right? The fact that in the aftermath of the late Bronze Age, they were innovative and inventive with Iron and the alphabet, I think, is precisely what we would need to be again here today.

This is what evolutionary biologists and others would talk about in terms of the adaptive cycle, that when you have a crash in one area, you then have an immediate era afterward where you are innovative and inventive. It’s basically the rise and fall of empires, but here we’ve got a Mobius strip on its side, I would say, and I think that’s where this would come into place. If you are crashing, if your society is coming down, one of the ways you can best be resilient is to be innovative, is to be inventive.

So back in the Iron Age, what they did was turn to iron when they were having trouble making bronze. That actually, tin back then has been compared to oil today, petroleum gasoline, and their need for tin back then is much like our oil today, but I actually think it’s changing now. So just like in the Iron Age, they change to iron. So what we need to be more worried about, I think in this day and age, are rare earths like lithium that are used in chips in computers and cars and microwaves and everything else.

If something happens to the supply chain and we are not able to get that - I mean, and remember what happened during the pandemic, during COVID, which wasn’t that long ago, that we had such supply chain issues, and all of a sudden there was problems getting everything from computers to cars, and we need to be innovative and inventive. We need to be looking already for substitutes that can take the place of lithium or whatever. This needs to be not another dark age.

When we go down, if we go down, and I actually think it’s gonna be when we go down, we need to be prepared to turn on a dime and be innovative and see what we come up with next. If we’re gonna survive the collapse of our society, which I do think is coming, I don’t know when, but I don’t think it’s are we gonna collapse, I think it’s when are we gonna collapse? And in this case, we’re gonna need to be innovative and inventive.

5. Prepare for extreme weather conditions

The other thing we need to do, and again, I think this is very relevant to today, is to prepare for extreme weather conditions. Now back then in the late Bronze Age, I was talking about a mega drought that lasted 150 to 300 years. That I believe would qualify as an extreme weather event. Today, we are also having extreme weather events. We see it almost on a daily basis now.

What I would say here, my rule of thumb is, look, prepare for extreme weather events, because then if they come, like intense hurricanes, then you’re prepared. And if they don’t come, what have you lost? Not much. So I would say one of the big lessons from antiquity is prepare for extreme weather conditions.

6. Have a secure water supply

And along those same lines, I would say one of the other lessons is to really be careful of your water resources. Be very careful of where your water is gonna come from, whether it’s from a river or elsewhere, but we saw what happened in the late Bronze Age, and we’re seeing what’s happening today, where people are already fighting over water resources, and especially rivers. So I would say that that’s another takeaway from the late Bronze Age collapse and its aftermath.

7. Keep the working class happy

And then the last thing that I would add, the last common sense thing is keep the working class happy. I mean, any historian from any period of history will tell you that that’s essential. Keep the working class happy or there will be consequences to pay. And I think we see this in the late Bronze Age collapse, especially if internal rebellions are a greater factor than we have thought even till today. And even now, I would say we need to look around and ask, are we keeping the working class happy? And if not, what’s gonna happen?

If people point to all sorts of things, like the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution and all of that, we’ve seen what happens if the working class is not happy. So I think that that is, again, that would be my last of the common sense takeaways, but surely we can add to it. I mean, I think we could probably easily get up to a top 10, but for right now, I’ve got a top seven.

Tipping points and warning signs

One of the things we need to be worried about is the tipping point. When are we gonna reach the point of no return for ourselves? Are there warning signs? I do think there were warning signs back in the late Bronze Age. We know that the Egyptians, for example, were trying to cross-breed their cattle. Their normal cattle was Zebu or Zebu cattle who thrive better in arid conditions. Is there anything we can do today if we notice signs warning us that we may be approaching a societal collapse, that there might be a tipping point coming up soon? I think we’ve already got some of the signs out there. Not everybody believes them, but I do think they are there.

I think the extreme climate, the weather conditions, is one of the signs that we’re approaching, possibly a tipping point. But we’ve also got other things that some may or may not remember, back during the pandemic, when we had all sorts of supply chain issues and had trouble getting toilet paper, right? That was a systemic problem, and I think a warning of what might come. The ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal for five or six days, that I think was also a problem. And it really drove home the fact that one ship stuck in one canal can affect people worldwide for a week or more. And imagine if you had that at the same time as some of the other problems. We might have been looking at a systems collapse very quickly.

And in fact, one of the things I am now wondering about, back in 2008, we had the Wall Street financial crisis. What if that crisis had happened 10 years later or a dozen years later? What if we had had the Wall Street financial problems at the same time that COVID was hitting or beginning to hit? What if they had both happened in about 2020? I’m not so sure that we would be sitting here today. I think we might be scrambling in the ruins of our globalized network. I think we might have come this close to our tipping point and we’re lucky that they were 10 or 12 years apart.

So I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet. And I really do think that when people say to me, “Oh, we can’t collapse. We’re too big to collapse. We’re too big to fail.” And I answer it, “no, we’re not.” That’s hubristic. Every society in the history of humankind has either collapsed eventually completely or has transformed so much that they’re almost unrecognizable in their new form. And to say that that’s not gonna happen to us, I think is just foolish, hubristic for sure. So when people say to me, are we gonna collapse? I look at them and I say, “Yes, we are gonna collapse. The question is when are we gonna collapse?” And for that, I don’t have an answer. It could be next week, it could be next year, could be 10 years from now, could be 50 years from now. But I am sure that at some point we are gonna collapse or have to transform. I mean, maybe AI is gonna create it and cause it right now, but who knows?

Final reflection

My big question to those that are asking me is to ask them back “When we collapse, how are we gonna deal with it?” Are we gonna be fragile? Are we gonna be vulnerable? Are we gonna be anti-fragile? In the aftermath of our society collapse, are we going to be Phoenicians? Or are we gonna be mycenaeans? And I personally am a bit worried. As an archeologist, I look back. And when I tell my students that they’re the next generation and they’re gonna be inheriting all of the problems we’ve created, we know that.

I’m not saying anything new, but this is where archeology, I think, can be of use. And especially archeology when it’s applied to ancient history. Because if we’re willing to listen and to learn from the past, then we can deal with what’s happening in the present and that will affect our future. So you need to know the past, to deal with the present and go into the future. Otherwise, we’re just doomed to repeat the past again and again and again. And personally, I think we’re smarter than that. But I may be wrong. Let’s hope I’m right.