{"id":19458,"date":"2016-04-03T12:05:05","date_gmt":"2016-04-03T17:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19458"},"modified":"2016-04-03T12:05:05","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T17:05:05","slug":"donald-trump-and-the-collapse-of-the-western-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19458","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump and the collapse of the Western Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump and the collapse of the Western Empire<\/a><\/h3>\n
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In this post, I argue that the ascent of Donald Trump in the US presidential race is a symptom of the ongoing breakdown of society, in turn caused by the loss of control generated by resource depletion. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find a simple system dynamics model describing the situation and generating another example of “Seneca Collapse<\/a>”\u00a0<\/i><\/div>\n
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Donald Trump seems to have taken everyone by surprise. Whether or not he gains the Republican nomination, and whether or not he becomes president, he took the media by storm: people writing on blogs and newspapers are reeling from the impact, asking themselves: where the heck did\u00a0this<\/i>\u00a0come from? What is he?\u00a0A God<\/a>? The reincarnation of\u00a0Hitler<\/a>? Or of\u00a0Mussolini<\/a>? The\u00a0devil<\/a>? Or what? Personally, I don’t claim to have been less surprised than most by Trump but, rethinking about the situation, I think it is reasonable to say that something like Trump was unavoidable. He is, really, best defined as the visible effect of the ongoing social\u00a0phase transition.\u00a0<\/i>A discrete change in our path in the direction of collapse.<\/p>\n

For a good number of years, I have been studying the reasons for the collapse of societies. And, at the beginning, I tended to explain it as mainly the result of the depletion of crucial resources; crude oil, in our case. But, the more I think about that, the more I understand that the relation between depletion and collapse is far from being straightforward.\u00a0\u00a0A society can very well collapse without running out of anything; think of the case of the Soviet Union. When it collapsed, the Union had still plenty of mineral resources, but it couldn’t find a way to exploit them in a convenient manner.
\n…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Donald Trump and the collapse of the Western Empire \u00a0 In this post, I argue that the ascent of Donald Trump in the US presidential race is a symptom of the ongoing breakdown of society, in turn caused by the loss of control generated by resource depletion. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[10777,150,5338,7844,5923,1024,13247,1266,2692,13246],"class_list":["post-19458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-survival-2","tag-cassandras-legacy","tag-collapse","tag-collapse-of-empire","tag-donald-trump","tag-roman-empire","tag-rome","tag-seneca-collapse","tag-social-collapse","tag-ugo-bardi","tag-western-empire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19459,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19458\/revisions\/19459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}