These are the signs a civilisation is about to collapse – and they’re here now

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Could our civilisation be heading for a collapse – or, even worse, already be collapsing, and we don’t know it?
Yes, says an expert on Mayan civilisation – and what’s even scarier is how quickly everything could fall apart.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Arthur Demarest, a professor at Vanderbilt University who specialises in the end of civilisations, says that we could already be seeing the signs now.
Scarily, the rise of politicians like Donald Trump isn’t the problem – rather, they’re a symptom of an ongoing collapse.
Demarest says, ‘Trump is a symptom more than a cause. It’s the pressure for shorter and shorter term results. What happens when things not keep up, and people get dissatisfied. The problem is that it can’t be done quickly.
Demarest says that even when a civilisation seems to be flourishing, it can be sowing the seeds of its own destruction – as happened with the Mayans.

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Demarest said, Things are not going well, you have to build more temples, make the gods happy, take more energy out of the environment. It’s going on, pretty obviously right now in business.
‘You see it in bubbles – the hi-tech bubble – something that’s been successful, but that’s already beginning to undermine the system, leading to collapse
‘It’s more and more expenditure, it’s leaders competing with other leaders, it makes everything more and more fragile.’
Demarest says that the collapse, when it comes, can be very quick indeed – with Mayan civilisation going from a relative peak in 790AD to being ‘in pieces’ by 810AD.

Could our civilisation collapse in the 2020s?

A researcher who uses maths to analyse patterns of human behaviour says our civilisation is heading for a worrying ‘peak’ of instability in the next decade.
Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut uses mathematics to analyse historical events – a discipline he calls ‘cliodynamics’.
Turchin says he doesn’t know what will happen when instability ‘peaks’ – but says that the signs are already here.
The turmoil is being driven by ‘elite overproduction’ – where the number of rich elites in society grows larger, and more distant from the poor.
He also blames, ‘the stagnation and decline of living standards and declining fiscal health of the state, resulting from falling state revenues and rising expenses’.
Turchin says, ‘Cliodynamics is a new ‘transdisciplinary discipline’ that treats history as just another science. My model indicated that social instability and political violence would peak in the 2020s.
‘The presidential election which we have experienced, unfortunately, confirms this forecast. We seem to be well on track for the 2020s instability peak.’
‘The descent is not inevitable. Ours is the first society that can perceive how those forces operate, even if dimly.
‘This means that we can avoid the worst – perhaps by switching to a less harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the rollercoaster altogether.’
(Metro,UK)