The Decline of the West According to Seneca

“Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid” is a sentence written by the Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca during the 1st century AD. It seems that we are on the cusp of the red curve, that moment of madness that precedes collapse.

The “Seneca Effect” takes its name from a statement by the Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca, who was perhaps the first to note that things fall apart much faster than they grow. It describes the trajectory of a system that grows by transforming natural resources into capital, then rapidly declines and collapses because of the combined effect of depletion and pollution. Applied to the human systems we call “Empires,” resources are typically in the form of minerals, while pollution may take various forms, including bureaucracy. When these factors are simulated using a modeling procedure called “system dynamics,” the results are seen in the figure at the beginning of this post. It is a qualitative plot, but it describes the general features of these systems. The Seneca model is described in detail in a post from a few years ago.

So, what’s happening now? Our modern empire, which we may call “Globalization” or the “Western Empire,” is following the Seneca curve, as it was already shown more than 50 years ago in the calculations reported in the study titled “The Limits to Growth.” That was a quantitative study based on the data available at the time, but it correctly evaluated that the cusp of the curve would arrive during the first two decades of the 21st century.

The system dynamics modeling generates smooth curves, but, in practice, the system starts becoming unstable at the cusp. The first victim of the reduced availability of resources and the increasing pollution is the system's control. In other words, it is governance that suffers the most at the beginning of the collapse. It seems to be what’s happening right now.

The system may react to the crisis by lashing out madly in search of new resources, or it may “eat itself,” with some sectors of the system finding a temporary respite by attacking and cannibalizing other sectors. Corruption becomes rampant, and the central government becomes a puppet in the hands of the powers that be: warlords, financial tycoons, local potentates, and various lobbies, all fighting each other for a larger slice of the rotting pie called “the state.”

We can see these factors unfolding long ago in the Roman Empire, mainly a predatory empire based on military might and precious metal mining. The first century BC saw the first evidence of the depletion of the Empire’s mines. There followed a phase of loss of control with warlords fighting each other or engaging in reckless military attacks on the Empire’s neighbors. You may remember their names: Marius, Silla, Lepidus, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, and others. Some of them were successful in conquering new lands, but, on the whole, they were bleeding the Empire to death with their huge military expenses. To say nothing about corruption, which became a major force in the decline of the Roman government.

In time, the Romans found some relief in the crisis by giving all the power to a single person, the Emperor, who soon acquired a semi-divine status. Roman emperors have a bad fame nowadays, but they rarely were the depraved monsters described in fiction. Normally, they identified with the state, and they had all the interest in defending it (including its citizens) to ensure their personal survival. And, of course, Emperors could not be corrupted: they already owned everything! Emperor Marcus Aurelius left us his diary, clearly showing that he was working exactly in that way.

Semi-divine emperors were not the perfect solution, but they reduced the ambitions of the local warlords and could obtain a certain strategic control of the empire. By the time of Augustus, (63 BCE -14 CE), the first Emperor, the Empire started abandoning its attempts at expanding and concentrated on defense and stabilization. With Emperor Hadrian (117 to 138 CE), the border fortifications were strengthened and expanded. For a few centuries, the strong central government succeeded in keeping the empire alive behind its border walls. Then, destiny took over, as it always does, and the empire waned in the 5th century AD.

Fast forward to our times, and our empire is in a parallel situation. Our economy is not so purely military-based as it was the Roman one, but it is also crucially based on depletable mineral resources — fossil fuels rather than gold and silver. Pollution is starting to take a heavy toll in the form of global warming. Our warlords take the shape of financial tycoons (you know their names, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and many others) who vie against each other to control the various lucrative markets in the globalized economy: drugs, health care, mineral commodities, commerce, communications, social media, outer space, and others. At the same time, the obscure powers that control the Western military apparatus tend to engage it in reckless wars without caring too much about who wins and who loses as long as they can make money in the process. And caring even less about who lives and who dies. It is a dangerous game that may explode in their hands, taking the world to a new world war from which the Western Empire is unlikely to survive (and maybe no one will survive it).

If we keep following the path that the Ancient Romans followed, our next historical phase will be a centralized imperial government that will rule on the fragments of what was once called the “Western Civilization”. It will clamp down on corruption and reckless warlords, impose some order in the markets, and stop the destruction of the ecosystem that’s killing everything and everybody. Nobody likes to have a semi-divine emperor around who has the power of life and death on all of his (rarely her) subjects, but something like that seems to be an unavoidable phase in the evolution of large human societies.

In our times, a strong, centralized state may not need to identify with a semi-divine emperor as it was in Roman times. It may be a different construct, maybe an impersonal system based on artificial intelligence. It may be similar to the current strongly centralized Chinese government system. Or it may be based on some new kind of religious belief. Or something completely different. As usual, the future will build itself according to its own rules.

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For a more extended discussion of the current plight of the Western Empire, you may read Chandran Nair’s book “The Sustainable State” (2019). Nair has the privilege of seeing the debate in the West from an external viewpoint, being based in Malesia. In this book, he argues that only a strong, Chinese-style, centralized government can obtain what the weak Western governments feebly claim to be aiming to obtain. That is, stopping wars and the destruction of the ecosystem, all for the benefit of citizens.