#2 Why Every Civilization Thinks It's the Exception
The same blind spot appears in every civilization, including our own.
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”
John Maynard Keynes
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology.”
E. O. Wilson
If you read the last essay, I made a claim and then immediately moved on. I said that every civilization believes it understands the world better than the ones before, that this confidence is one of the most reliable features of any society, and that it is reliably wrong.
Now reliable is a strong word because it implies a mechanism. If the confidence were random you would expect some societies to be admirably humble about their own fragility and others deluded, scattered across the entire range. But actually, when you study it, that is not what the record shows at all. Instead we see the same overconfidence, again and again, in cultures with nothing else in common, and that are separated by thousands of miles and across thousands of years. When something recurs that reliably, it prudent to discuss it as structural. There is a reason it has to happen, and this essay is about the reason.
I’m going to start with the deepest mechanism (I think mechanism is the correct word), because it is the one almost no civilization notices in itself.
You only ever experience the stable version
A civilization that has lasted long enough for you to be born into it is, by definition, one that has not collapsed…