Let’s cut through the noise: the ultra-wealthy are not just accumulating wealth; they are hoarding it, stockpiling fortunes at a rate so obscene it makes the concept of money itself feel ridiculous. While the rest of us get lectured on cutting back — drive less, eat less meat, recycle, make do with less — they are securing their bunkers, buying up remote islands, and building escape plans for the very collapse they are accelerating.
And make no mistake, collapse is not just some distant dystopian fantasy. We are already deep into a polycrisis — climate change, biodiversity loss, resource overshoot, economic instability, and **authoritarian creep all feeding into one another like an unstoppable chain reaction. Meanwhile, banks and corporations, who could be funding solutions, are instead dragging their feet or outright obstructing progress, ensuring the system remains tilted in favor of those who already have everything.
That’s actually another thing Toynbee talks about, except in more general terms.
The broad concept is that early in a civilization’s life, it’s growing and expanding - building principles and values as well as infrastructure and industries, all with the goal of making life better and/or easier.
Then a successful civilization enters a stage of passive neglect - the earlier generations built a system by which people could live lives of relative ease and comfort, so that’s what the later generations do.
But then things start to wear out and break down and fall apart and rot, and the current generations are neither inclined nor equipped to build from scratch, so they instead start cannibalizing parts of the system to maintain other parts of the system. And so on…
Yes I heard an anecdote that describes this trajectory well on a podcast recently: when a society or economy is at the beginning of a development arc, each mile of sewer, road, power, rail, etc can be justified, as it leads to economic growth that was not possible yet. But like you say, 50-100 years later all of that infrastructure requires replacement, maintenance . And the problem is, that investment does not deliver growth, it simply maintains the economic base you already have. So you’d have to be a really long term thinking society and factor in replacement costs in upfront somehow, which would make development substantially more expensive, all for a population that doesn’t exist yet, that you won’t know… a staggeringly difficult ask.
Ah - thanks for that.
The specific reason why it works out that way is somerhing I understood on essentially a gut level (as I would assume many do), but I hadn’t framed it in specific terms. And that summed it up neatly.