ABSTRACT
In his chapter, “From Wild West to Mad Max: Transition in Civilizations,” Richard Bookstaber outlines many of the “grand answers” that historians have presented for the failures of ancient civilizations and counterposes these explanations with a modern systems theory approach. Analyzing collapse through the lens of complexity, he presents a framework that has the insightful benefit of explaining both the creative and destructive processes in the lifecycle of civilizations. During the rise of a civilization, network connections form through which interdependence emerges in the nascent stage, which he likens to the “Wild West,” where towns and trade routes evolved in the western territories of the 1800s United States, in an era of risk-taking, danger, and reward. The downhill phase of civilization is the reversal of this process—network connections break down and only the independent and self-reliant can survive. He characterizes this as “Mad Max,” the dystopian vision of humans fighting to survive on the margins. Modeling civilizations as multilayer networks, Bookstaber simulates the random processes underlying the emergent aggregation and disintegration of societal network complexity to capture how civilizations can fall victim to the inherent uncertainty of complex systems.
