When the United Nations emerged from the rubble of two world wars 80 years ago, it represented humanity’s most ambitious attempt ever to turn catastrophe into cooperation. But while the scarred world of 1945 had hope following the Allied victory, that optimism has since curdled. The UN today is underfunded, risk-averse, and paralysed.
Meanwhile, AI, crypto-finance, and climate breakdown are jostling to define this century, and wars continue to rage. Against this backdrop, the UN’s 80th birthday commemorations reminded one of the statues on Easter Island: grand but futile gestures of a desperate society on the brink of collapse.
But what, exactly, leads to civilisational collapse? There is no shortage of theories. The geographer Jared Diamond argues that societies as sophisticated as the Maya or Norse Greenlanders ultimately imploded when they failed to adapt to ecological stress.
Similarly, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown that complexity itself can become a liability: when the costs of coordination outstrip the returns, institutions unravel. Alternatively, Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov contend that “secular cycles” of rising inequality and elite overproduction have perennially brought social and political upheaval. And Vaclav Smil warns that no system — biological or social — expands forever.
The historian Arnold Toynbee believed that civilisations rise through creative responses to shared problems, and then fall through inertia. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West treated civilizational senescence as destiny, implying that cultures age like organisms. In The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy tied imperial collapse to military overreach. William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples reminds us how pathogens shape history, and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail reframes the story around extractive elites.
But where do these analyses leave us? According to the existential-risk researcher Luke Kemp, globalisation has produced a planetary “Goliath.” Unlike Rome or Rapa Nui, today’s world is integrated through and through, which means that any new stressor — a climate shock, a pandemic, a financial crisis — can trigger a sudden, irreversible, global cascade. Worse, with seven of the climate scientist Johan Rockström’s nine planetary boundaries having been breached, Earth has already thrown down the gauntlet for our civilisation.
Yet ruin is not destiny. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2022 book, The Dawn of Everything, challenged the deterministic view of civilisational evolution. Collapse is not a matter of fate, but a failure of imagination. Despite writing during the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, within a century, technology could solve the “economic problem”, leaving humans free for the “art of life” as work commitments shrank to 15 hours per week and inequality receded.
Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance, revives this sensibility. They argue that politics today is unnecessarily mired in scarcity thinking — with endless fights over housing, energy, and other resources leading to gridlock and polarisation. The situation demands what they call a politics of building: expanding capacity, not just slicing a shrinking pie.
While Mr Kemp believes that civilizational “self-termination is most likely”, there are in fact three paths before us. The first is collapse. In this scenario, climate change spirals out of control, AI is rapidly weaponised, crypto destabilises fragile economies, and the UN ossifies into irrelevance.
A second scenario is characterised by drift. Here, scarcity politics continues, regulation of new technologies is incremental, policymakers pursue endless crisis management, and the UN still convenes, but without any authority or vision.
The third path is toward renewal. AI would be harnessed to expand knowledge and reduce drudgery. Blockchain would be redeployed to manage commons transparently, rather than to create new markets for speculation and outright gambling. And the UN would evolve into a 21st-century platform for stewarding planetary data, regulating global public goods, and convening not only states but also cities, firms, and citizens.
Renewal requires not just optimism but institutional imagination. The most valuable currency of the 21st century is not oil, gold, or even data. It is trust. The most important variable is whether and how our institutions adapt. As Toynbee put it, “Civilisations die from suicide, not by murder.” The choice between abundance and apocalypse is still ours to make. ©2025 Project Syndicate
