The Multiplier Effect

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated by Eric H. Cline documents what is probably the first collapse of what we now call a world order, the Bronze Age.  In the past, scholars looked for one reason for this collapse and usually hung the blame on the so-called Sea Peoples and their seemingly omnipresent invasions.  

Now history and historians are pivoting and realizing that it is usually a bundle of factors that produce societal collapse, as events like climate change, warfare, migrations, earthquakes, pandemics, and volcanic eruptions, interact to create multiplier and domino effects. 

This sounds a great deal like our world, does it not?  This appears to be Cline’s thesis. Is our world too “complex” to survive?  Have our multipliers gotten out of hand?   Are dominos starting to fall?  We really won’t know until we can’t read anymore, and new Homers are singing of a lost golden age.