Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCLXII–Elite Responses to the Architecture of Collapse, Part 3: Investing More Heavily in Ideological Justification

This Contemplation explores the second response: investing more heavily in ideological justification for the decisions made and policies put in place by the ruling elite. I will examine why and how they do this, and why it also ends up accelerating societal decline.

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Ideological Justification: The Narrative Response
When surpluses begin to shrink, taxes have to grow much more than when surpluses were plentiful. Ever-increasing taxes with marginal or no associated benefits ultimately become oppressive to a population, bring social unrest bubbling to the surface, and cause society’s ruling elite to face a legitimacy crisis. These elites cannot and will not admit that their decisions have led to failing policies as it would undermine their authority–although they will, depending on the type of sociopolitical system, point to the failed policies of the previous “leaders”. What they do instead is create and disseminate narrative frameworks that serve to justify their decisions and policies, and also to mask the conflicts and deterioration taking place behind the curtains.

This approach is quite logical given regime maintenance cannot be achieved by coercion alone–a majority of a society can subvert the rule of a powerful minority regardless of the type of sociopolitical system and the use of force and intimidation. However, if the oppressed hold that their subservience is in some way justified, a ruling elite can sustain power and authority without extensive effort and costs. Ideology is a strong and persuasive force, and can transform extractive policies into duty or obligation and resistance into betrayal and treason which serve to keep the masses mollified and compliant.

This narrative management is another appealing response that the elite engage in as societies increase in complexity, and the integrative mechanisms and ideological doctrines used have been with large, complex societies since they emerged some 6000+ years ago. The ruling elite found they helped to create the necessary functional structures that served to coordinate collective action, maintain social cohesion, and helped to legitimise and sustain the hierarchical systems that benefitted the elites.

These structures may indeed serve some collective coordination functions early on as complexity increases, but as diminishing returns are encountered and surpluses begin to be overused they serve a different purpose: the justification of expanded extraction to support the elite. This creates a cost to society rather than a benefit, which leads to the erosion of elite rule legitimacy. Unity and authority can shatter under such circumstances, and the elite find that they need to work harder to sustain these. Doing so, however, accelerates the decline that the structures are meant to maintain.

How Elites Deploy Ideological Justification
While the forms of ideological justification vary by society, there appear to be a number of patterns that show up across time and culture.

Divine Sanction and Sacred Authority
The oldest and perhaps longest-lasting form of justification is that of divine sanction whereby rulers are presented as chosen by the supernatural, an embodiment of a cosmic order, or a conduit between the sacred and profane. This tends to place any ruler beyond criticism as challenges are perceived as akin to questioning the gods or the cosmic order itself, something humans simply don’t do.

We can see this in Near Eastern societies where kings were perceived as god-chosen shepherds caring for their flock. Also in China, where the Mandate of Heaven supported imperial rule; or the revocation of it should the emperor fail to maintain cosmic harmony and avoid natural disasters or famine. And yet another example was evident in Egypt where the pharaohs were viewed as living gods that maintained truth, balance, and the cosmic order (Ma’at); when this order was out of sorts (e.g., flood, drought) ruling legitimacy was challenged, with intensified rituals as the elite response.

Not to be outdone, our modern leaders–especially those authoritarian in nature–cultivate cults of personality that help them to avoid standard political judgement. Within this justification narrative, they are portrayed as visionary, paternal in nature, or even a divine figure; they’re not simply some ordinary politician, so challenging them is almost sacrilegious in nature.

Noble Lineage and Aristocratic Virtue
Some societies have used the idea that the elite deserve to rule due to their family lineage or natural fitness for leadership. The hereditary aristocracies of medieval Europe grew from this narrative framework, as has the “manifest destiny” ideology of the United States.

In others, political power has been based upon control and manipulation of luxury goods, especially those exotic and/or imported. Elite status is maintained and on display through this control, helping to create a self-reinforcing structure where elites justify their rule through such control and this control in turn reinforces their power. This approach, however, can be quite unstable given the competition that arises between the elite themselves, leading to a see-saw battle between centralised power and its decline.

Nationalism and the “Other”
Leveraging basic tribal instincts, the elite will oftentimes turn towards ramping up a sense of nationalism–along with the vilification of external others–when unrest is apparent and material conditions continue to deteriorate. Zimbabwe has been a prime example of this where the long-standing ruling party (ZANU-PF) has tied itself to a sense of national liberation whereby–despite obvious signs to the contrary–its interests are identical to those of the masses. Citizens are made to believe that there is only a single option to the return of British colonial domination: the status quo, ruling party; and this narrative has taken on a stronger and more emphatic tone as the gap between the rulers and the ruled widens.

This response appears to be a common one wherever elites face a crisis of legitimacy due to diminishing returns on investment. The social unrest that arises due to a breakdown in the material conditions of living–that has been sustaining legitimacy–can be directed, through narrative management, towards others who threaten society and are the cause of declining living standards. The elite then also shift their stories from being leaders that bring economic prosperity to being leaders that provide safety and sovereignty from the barbarians at the gate.

Meritocracy and the Blame of the Victim
In a number of our modern societies, the idea of meritocratic claims for elite power and prestige have arisen whereby because of hard work and talent, the elite deserve their place at the top of sociopolitical and socioeconomic hierarchies. This narrative framing not only helps to legitimise inequality but serves to place responsibility upon the disadvantaged for their lower status within society. It also shifts the perception from one of justice being about fair distribution of resources to being about the moral rectitude of the individual: victims are moral delinquents, whereas the elite are virtuous.

Because the oppressed tend to internalise the norms of a society, this can be a very powerful mechanism to control society. As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the patterns of obedience become habitual through lived experience, and thus are perceived as completely expected behaviour by the masses. The norms that in another time and place may be seen as exceedingly oppressive are considered natural, with recognition and worth being gained by following them. Modern neoliberal ideology can be seen in this light where the rules and laws created by the elite to sustain modernity’s sociopolitical and socioeconomic hierarchies are not only governed by legal sanctions but via a moral code internalisation.

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The Costs of Ideological Justification
There is a cost in the form of resource use that accompanies ideological justification, just as there is for all elite responses to diminishing returns. The costs can at times be significant and serve to exacerbate the underlying material issues.

Monumental Architecture
From the Egyptian pyramids to the medieval European cathedrals to the stadiums and towers of modernity, the elites have poured massive amounts of resources into architectural signals of power and permanence. These projects are typically to demonstrate the elites’ power and ability to command labour and resources, as well as awe the masses and project strength. And while the elite frame such projects as beneficial for society at large, they do little if anything to add to food production or the procurement of important resources; in fact, these consume resource surpluses that could provide a buffer in a time of crisis.

Ceremony and Ritual
Less visible and common, but just as costly in terms of resources, are elite investment in ceremony and ritual. To please the gods, the Maya built temples; to appease the masses, the Roman emperors put on massive spectacles; and not to be outdone, modern states host elaborate parades, political inaugurations, and state funerals. Not only do these performances help to reinforce ruling order legitimacy, they consume significant resources that could be directed towards decaying infrastructure or shrinking surpluses.

Narrative Management and Surveillance
Modernity has taken this approach to a whole new level where its investment in media, propaganda, and surveillance has been massive. Funding of state news outlets, manipulation of social media, and monitoring of dissenting voices has become standard fare across all nations on the planet. All of these require significant bureaucratic infrastructure and technical expertise, and add complexity at a time when society needs the exact opposite.

The Failure to Adapt
It could be argued that the largest negative aspect of ideological justification is the effect it has on elite decision-making. By crafting and massively investing in supportive narratives to justify their rule and policies, the system and its elite becomes trapped by the story. It’s not possible to acknowledge failure and reverse course in light of the constant framing of policies as being positive solutions lest their legitimacy be undermined. This type of rigidity–institutional and psychological–prevents the ability to pursue adaptations that might help address diminishing returns more appropriately.

The Devastating Backfires
The costs associated with ideological justification do not just accumulate passively but activate reaction chains that speed up decline.

The Legitimacy Spiral
A vicious cycle is created by the deterioration of material conditions: to maintain legitimacy, elites invest greater resources in ideological justification→material conditions deteriorate further due to additional resource drawdown→more ideology is then required→more resources are expended→and so on.

The Gap Between Narrative and Reality
The widening gap between elite narratives and reality pushes credibility to the limit; citizens are told they are prospering while their lifestyles stagnate or contract; and they experience price inflation everywhere, with basic necessities becoming increasingly unaffordable. The masses begin to not only question the narratives but the ruling elite themselves. Such criticism may be private and hesitant at first but as the gap widens it shifts to a more public and forceful display. The unrest that the ideology is aimed at avoiding can in many instances erupt and threaten the entire society.

The Scapegoating Trap
The identification of scapegoats–from foreign enemies to domestic “others”, such as minorities or political rivals–can for a short time serve to unite a population against a single, common threat. But like the other responses above, this serves to misdirect resources away from more substantive issues and concerns. Even more problematic, especially when the scapegoats are domestic in nature, the elite make societal compromise and cooperation virtually impossible due to the polarising nature of their finger pointing–society becomes far less resilient when this occurs.

The Classic Maya Revisited
The Maya kings interpreted their crisis through a cosmological lens that made the abandonment of further complexity unthinkable. The ontological framework of the Maya–rulers and ruled–saw the elite as divine intermediaries whose ritual performances maintained the cosmic order and thus the movement of celestial bodies, arrival of rain, and fertility of maize. When agricultural yields began to decline because of drought and soil exhaustion, the legitimacy of the king was threatened since he was not meeting his duty to sustain order–his failure was quite visible in the failing harvests.

The king could not acknowledge that his rituals were failing as this would undermine his rule. And he could also not reduce his demands on the masses or scale back monumental construction since this would show that the gods were not being properly honoured. As is typical in such situations, the king doubled down on ceremonial rituals and monumental architecture construction. This intensification consumed the surpluses that might have sustained society while adapting to environmental changes. Rather than their ideology helping to sustain society–as the Maya believed their ceremonies and architecture helped to do–it accelerated its collapse.

The trap established by their ideology is clear in the archaeological evidence: monumental construction was most intense in the decades just prior to widespread abandonment of their cities. The Maya elite weren’t necessarily blind to the crisis, they were trapped by the ideology that had made them powerful and prestigious. And like many rulers before and after, they ended up acting in ways that made their society’s situation worse.

The Western Roman Empire
The Roman Empire followed a slightly different path than the Maya one did. Roman leaders didn’t see themselves as divine intermediaries that maintained cosmic order; they believed their systems were the embodiment of civilisation itself: their imperial pursuits brought law, order, and peace to a barbarian world.

When fiscal crises, civil wars, and external threats from Germanic and Persian tribes coalesced to challenge their rule, they never thought to question their expansionist dreams; they intensified the imperial cult that had arisen with Augustus’s rule instead. Their claims to divine sanction and universal authority grew in proportion to their waning power: the more they failed in their duties to protect the citizenry from famine and invasion, the more they insisted on their absolute authority.

The costs for this ideological justification went beyond finances for it made compromise with external competitors virtually impossible: the empire’s mission to civilise the world would be betrayed by any attempts to negotiate with “inferior” others. In addition, the systems that had been a strength for the empire during its glory years–legal and administrative–turned rigid and inflexible, and completely unable to adapt to circumstantial changes. As the empire continued to try and conquer others and grow their surpluses, Rome’s entire ideology of exceptionalism–that had brought supportive loyalty and sacrifice–morphed into complacency and resentment, especially as diminishing returns began to be experienced by the masses.

The ideological narrative that had sustained the Roman Empire for centuries had collapsed as quickly as the material one by the time the Goths arrived at the gates of Ravenna. The idea that “Rome is eternal and civilisation itself” proved unable to protect it from resource exhaustion and ongoing military defeats. The emperor’s divinity and the universality of its civilisation could not counter diminishing returns on investments in complexity, and Rome passed as just another regional power whose collapse was inevitable.

Modernity: The Ideological Intensification
Ideological justification continues to this day. It may appear in different forms and it may be much more sophisticated, but it is likely also much more costly to pursue–in both financial and ideological terms–than in the past.

The Meritocratic Narrative
Many modern elites rationalise their positions via meritocratic narratives where their hard work and talent serve to justify their status. This story asserts that wealth differentiation motivates the creation of wealth and such wealth inequality, therefore, leads to the maintenance of high living standards for the majority. Despite a decline in social mobility and increase in wealth inequalities, this narrative has for some decades helped to legitimise status quo hierarchies.

Relatively recently, however, reality on the ground has caused the credibility of the “anyone can make it” storyline to falter significantly. Wages have stagnated for years. Housing has become unaffordable for most. Social mobility has basically stopped. By insisting that individuals have simply not worked hard enough or been virtuous enough, the elite are showing themselves to be increasingly out of touch with the lived experience of most of the populace. While this narrative may not consume resources to the extent of others, it has forestalled changes that could help to make societies far more equitable and resilient.

The Security Narrative
Many modern states justify power and wealth structures, as well as state expenditures, through narratives of providing security to citizens–and this one has been on the rise in recent years. It is necessary, they argue, to invest massive amounts of resources in the military and surveillance technologies to keep the population safe from increasing threats, both foreign and domestic.

As an example, the United States spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined and seeks massive injections of additional resources in order to–according to the elite narrative–protect not just the US but the entire globe from those who threaten the international order and rule of law. This is an extremely costly narrative, and in a number of different ways. Financially, the more the state pushes this storyline the more that must be invested in security measures, leaving less for other purposes. On a sociological and geopolitical front, civil liberties, political trust, and international relations tend to get negatively impacted. The narrative creates a self-reinforcing cycle where the expanding security system consumes the resources it is supposedly protecting, and more so the longer and greater the potential threat is pushed by the elite.

The Cultural War Narrative
Both sides of the political spectrum engage in cultural warfare as a form of ideological justification. The narratives differ, of course, but the pattern that underpins them is identical: elite legitimacy is challenged as diminishing returns are experienced and material conditions erode; opposing bases are rallied to deflect attention away from political and economic failures; and rule by the elite continues to be justified.

The far-right tends to cultivate distrust towards globalist institutions, framing political issues as “malicious” elite versus “benign” citizens with their representatives defending the population from all enemies–foreign and domestic. Such narratives intensify political polarisation making compromise or collective action less likely.

On the other side of the aisle, the far-left tends to push the idea of systemic oppression being the major issue for people to be concerned about. Their purpose is to defend the marginalised against an entrenched ruling class. As with the framing by the far-right, the far-left’s framing increases societal polarisation and makes working with others who hold different views much less likely.

While the content of these two very different ideological narratives is enormously opposed, both offer similar explanations for complex problems: the world is divided into the villainous (them) and virtuous (us); loyalty to the cause is paramount; and compromise with the “others” is impossible. Both also consume energy and attention away from far more practical concerns, intensify polarisation in society, and erode the trust necessary for collective action. The costs of this narrative war are significant: political dysfunction and human capital expenditures that do nothing to address the issue of diminishing returns.

The different claims have different relationships to empirical reality, so the content within each is not necessarily equivalent. Regardless of the content each claims to have authority on, there exists a structural similarity in that they both end up consuming attention, polarising society, and forestalling any collective action that might help to mitigate diminishing returns.

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The Costs of Modern Ideological Intensification
The expenditure of resources upon modern ideological intensification is, like similar expenditures in ancient societies, substantial. Media manipulation. Political propaganda. Mass surveillance. Security apparatus. The erosion of trust and the polarisation that the narratives create greatly reduce the resources available for collective action and adaptation. This, in turn, undermines the capacity to mitigate diminishing returns.

At some point, the narratives will lose their effectiveness. The gap between the story being sold by the elite and reality will be too wide and too incredible for a growing percentage of the populace to continue being convinced that the status quo ruling class is deserving of endless support. The end result is not the stability needed but a legitimacy crisis that can trigger sociopolitical collapse.

The Shared Signature
Archaeological and historical evidence point to a shared signature across time for societies that rely upon ideological justification in times of diminishing returns. Narratives intensify most significantly–as evidenced by monumental architecture, ceremonial elaboration, and growing legitimacy claims–in the period just prior to societal collapse. And the societies that seem to have experienced the fastest collapse were the ones that displayed the most ideological wealth.

It would seem that the more resources that are diverted towards ideological justification, the fewer remain for any adaptations that might help to mitigate societal decline. Any ideology that is intensified to justify elite rule serves as an accelerant to decline through its sped up consumption of resources and the elimination of surpluses that might also help overcome sudden stress surges that typically lead to more sudden collapse.

Like extraction, ideological justification is subject to diminishing returns with the easiest and most effective forms (i.e., claims of divine sanction, assertion of noble lineage) being used first. As diminishing returns bite into surpluses causing material conditions to deteriorate, the narratives to justify elite rule lose their persuasiveness and more elaborate–and thus costly–ideologies must be established. With narrative framing becoming evermore expensive in terms of societal resources, the decline they are meant to forestall actually accelerates.

Modernity demonstrates this pattern through its intensification of meritocratic narratives, security justifications, and polarising cultural warfare with each of these consuming more and more of the world’s finite resources and speeding up the instability of our global, industrial civilisation and its decline. Like other responses to diminishing returns, ideological justification serves to intensify the decline being experienced–it completely ignores biophysical reality in favour of human storytelling. Like any investment in complexity, ideological intensification runs into the law of marginal returns with a loss of persuasiveness, increasing costs, and the consumption of surpluses. Ideology, however, unlike irrigation or agriculture, produces no material benefit for society–not even in the short term. It is a resource sink.

In Part 4 I will explore the third type of elite response: military expansion and the attempt by states to solve resource issues through geopolitical conquest.

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What is going to be my standard WARNING/ADVICE going forward and that I have reiterated in various ways before this:

Only time will tell how this all unfolds but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by ‘collapsing now to avoid the rush’ and pursuing self-sufficiency. By this I mean removing as many dependencies on the Matrix as is possible and making do, locally. And if one can do this without negative impacts upon our fragile ecosystems or do so while creating more resilient ecosystems, all the better.

Building community (maybe even just household) resilience to as high a level as possible seems prudent given the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. There’s no guarantee it will ensure ‘recovery’ after a significant societal stressor/shock but it should increase the probability of it and that, perhaps, is all we can ‘hope’ for from its pursuit.

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