Three Civilisations That Didn't See It Coming

Civilisations don't announce their endings. They optimise themselves to death.

Rome didn't fall to barbarians. It fell to administrative overhead.

By 400 CE, the empire required more energy to maintain its systems than those systems could generate. Tax collection cost more than taxes collected. Border defense demanded more soldiers than the economy could support. Every solution created two new problems.

The Romans saw the symptoms - inflation, corruption, military strain. They missed the meta-problem: their civilization had become too complex for its resource base. Each crisis response added another layer of bureaucracy, another special case, another exception that became the rule.

Sound familiar?

The Classic Maya achieved something unprecedented: a rainforest civilisation supporting millions through pure intellectual leverage. Their mathematics, astronomy, and agricultural optimization were flawless.

Until they weren't.

Maya cities fell not to conquest but to cascade failure. Eight centuries of optimization had eliminated every buffer, every inefficiency, every redundancy. When climate shifted slightly, not dramatically, just persistently, their perfectly tuned system had nowhere to adapt.

They had engineered out anti-fragility in pursuit of efficiency. When efficiency broke, everything broke.

Modern supply chains exhibit identical characteristics. Just-in-time everything. Zero inventory. Perfect optimization. One virus, one ship stuck sideways, and global commerce fractures.

Around 1200 BCE, the most sophisticated trade network in human history simply stopped functioning. Cities across the Mediterranean went dark within decades. Writing disappeared for centuries.

No single cause. No dramatic invasion. Just interdependency collapse.

The Bronze Age world had become a single system. Tin from Britain, copper from Cyprus, silver from Spain, luxury goods from Egypt. When any critical node failed, probably multiple nodes simultaneously, the entire network unraveled.

Specialists couldn't survive without the network. Local knowledge had been abandoned for global efficiency. When the global broke, the local was gone.

Today's internet exhibits the same structure. Critical infrastructure, concentrated dependencies, specialists who couldn't function if the network failed. AWS goes down and half the internet disappears.

Three civilisations. Three different failure modes. One underlying dynamic.

Success creates the conditions for its own destruction.

Optimization eliminates resilience. Specialization creates brittleness. Interdependence amplifies single points of failure. Each civilization solved immediate problems by creating systemic vulnerabilities they couldn't perceive.

The Romans couldn't see their complexity overhead because it accumulated gradually, each piece reasonable in isolation. The Maya couldn't see their anti-fragility deficit because their optimisation worked perfectly; until it didn't. The Bronze Age couldn't see their interdependency risk because global trade had only benefits—until it became their single point of failure.

We are all three civilisations simultaneously.

Our administrative overhead grows exponentially. Every new technology requires new regulations, new institutions, new specialists to manage the specialists. Like Rome, we're optimizing for local efficiency while creating global complexity debt.

Our systems have no buffers. Supply chains, financial markets, infrastructure - all tuned for perfect efficiency with zero redundancy. Like the Maya, we've eliminated every inefficiency except the inefficiency that would keep us alive when things break.

Our dependencies are invisible and total. Food, energy, information, security. All dependent on networks we don't understand, controlled by others, with no local alternatives. Like the Bronze Age, we've traded resilience for efficiency and can't see the trade-off.

The greatest risk isn't any specific failure. It's our inability to see systemic risk while we're creating it.

Every civilization believes it's different. Every civilization believes it has solved the fundamental problems that destroyed others. Every civilization optimizes for the last crisis while creating the next one.

We see AI alignment risk, climate risk, pandemic risk, economic risk. We miss civilisational optimisation risk. The risk that our solutions to individual problems are creating systemic brittleness we cannot perceive until it's too late.

Build redundancy. Maintain local capabilities. Question efficiency optimization. Practice civilizational humility.

Not because catastrophe is certain. Because the pattern suggests we can't see it coming.

The civilizations that survive aren't the most optimized. They're the most adaptable.

History doesn't repeat. But human nature rhymes.

And the rhyme scheme is getting shorter.