There’s a pattern in how civilizations collapse that historians have documented for decades, and it has nothing to do with invasion, disease, or natural disaster. Every major civilization collapsed at the peak of its complexity. The Bronze Age, Rome, the Maya, the Indus Valley, most advanced they’d ever been, most powerful they’d ever been, and then gone within a generation or two. The thing that killed them wasn’t an outside force. It was the system they built to make themselves great. A historian named Joseph Tainter spent his career mapping this mechanism and came to a conclusion that’s hard to walk away from: complexity doesn’t just fail. It fails in a predictable way, at a predictable point, for a predictable reason. And a 5th century Roman priest named Salvian documented what that looks like from the inside, educated Romans abandoning their citizenship and fleeing to barbarian territory because the tax burden of the empire had become worse than the alternative. That account is 1,600 years old. It reads like it was written last week.
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