I read Future Shock by Alvin Toffler with a feeling of fear and challenge back in the 1970’s. And the pace is accelerating. Many preppers urge us to prepare for the coming collapse, and sell exorbitantly priced freeze-dried food, fancy do-everything tools and back-to-nature courses. They are wrong, according to survival expert and archaeologist Chris Begley. He postulates that a societal collapse will not focus on individuals hiding in the woods, but rather millions, billions of people dealing with rapidly changing situations. It will not be about regressing to a mythical past, complete with swords, but rather on societies cooperating, on learning kindness, cooperation and fairness.

Throughout history social groups were faced by five problems: hierarchy, identity, trade, disease and punishment. Technology has undermined the accepted structure of societies through the ages, causing societies to fracture and disappear. Paper, the printing press, radio, the internet: each of these caused a step up, but also resistance by the established order. The Catholic establishment tried to suppress the printing of translated Bibles, for instance.

 
We are in the middle of the latest change, a more dramatic convulsion of our accepted societal structures than ever before. Or maybe it just feels like it. Greta Thunberg can play the modern media despite Heads of State objecting and patriarchal establishments having collective conniptions due to technology and a popular desire for societal and environmental change. Because hierarchies, bolstered by vested interests, are being challenged, people's sense of identity is changing (I'm a citizen of the world) trade is changing (think bidorbuy, Amazon). 
 
Perhaps the reaction of outdated political establishments worldwide to children (Girls, imagine!) telling politicians, mostly men, that they have failed the next generation, that they have mismanaged the heritage of future generations, is telling. Please do watch a satirical video on the Greta Thunberg helpline for some light relief. The telling punchline is: children acting like adults make adults act like children.

A little aside: Is there a deep atavistic male-female divide here? Did the old Mother Goddess religions teach harmony with nature, and patriarchal religions domination and conquest of nature?

Political development has been a thrust from anarchy and individual existence to cooperation, integration, trade and development of partnerships. Historians point out the swinging of the pendulum, and how developments like the Peace of Westphalia brought increased cooperation, but also destruction of hierarchies and so resistance and a desire to go back to the ‘good old days’. Westphalia brought its own set of problems, and a logical development, in time, was the concept of the United Nations, with its ringing preamble: We, the Peoples of These United Nations…

And we have the backlash: A retreat behind sovereignty, nationalism, suspicion. The coming collapse will not favour those who hunker behind walls, but those who go out, cooperate, use technology to make partners.