The Future is Fiction

On Progress, Decline and the need for active hope

Reading time: ca. 18–28 minutes

By Levien van Zon

We are so often presented with predictions for our future, that it’s easy to forget that the future hasn’t happened yet. By definition, all stories about the future are fiction. Yet we need expectations about the future, if only to plan ahead and coordinate with others.
In this article, I argue that the future is still undetermined and mostly unknown. Contrary to what many stories suggest, progress isn’t assured and decline isn’t inevitable. We should avoid prophecies and instead build a capacity for active hope. Hope is not passive wishful thinking or blind optimism. It requires agency, engagement and a willingness to confront obstacles. In the face of uncertainty, hope offers a constructive way forward, one that counters both resigned pessimism and uncritical faith in progress. As Rebecca Solnit puts it, hope is not a lottery ticket; it is “an axe you break down doors with” in times of crisis.

Black Swans and future blindness

As a Danish politician quipped in the late 1930s: It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.¹ It is notoriously difficult to predict how well an organisation or an economy will do in the near future. Unexpected things can and do happen. Yet this rarely deters us: businesses and governments produce a relentless flow of forecasts, acting as though we can see into the future. But these predictions actually mean very little, by definition they exclude the unpredictable. And it is the unforeseen that usually has the biggest impact.

Consider Jaguar Land Rover (JLR). At the close of 2024 the British car manufacturer projected a bright outlook for the coming year. Sales were climbing, particularly in the US, and profits were exceptionally high. Two months later, Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president brought immediate tariff hikes on imported vehicles. Not long after that, a cyberattack crippled JLR’s production lines for weeks. Within half a year, the 103-year-old manufacturer swung from record profits to substantial losses. Unsurprisingly, neither shareholders nor management had anticipated this reversal.

What happened to Jaguar Land Rover may seem exceptional, but it is not. The thinker and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out that unexpected things happen constantly, and we mostly fail to anticipate them. He coined the term Black Swan to describe an unexpected event or trend that ends up having a significant impact, precisely because most people did not see it coming.² Examples include the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks, the 2008 financial crisis and the recent wars in Ukraine and Iran. More gradual examples are the actual long-term impacts of technologies such as the Internet, smartphones and AI, rather than the effects that we imagine beforehand.

Of course there are always people who correctly predict the unexpected, or who cause it to happen. The European powers were surprised when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, but presumably Adolf Hitler was not. “Unexpected” and “unpredictable” are relative terms. Also, they are mostly about the timing and impact of events or trends. We can be certain that recessions, earthquakes, epidemics and armed conflicts will occur, just as they have throughout history. But we cannot know the specifics: where, when and how they will happen, and what their effects will be. We know with certainty that the global climate is changing, but we can’t really predict precise regional impacts, let alone the cascading effects on societies and communities. Similarly, we know that the current military conflict between Iran and the US and Israel will have significant effects, both in the region and on the global energy system and world economy. But at the time I write this we cannot know precisely what the effects will be.

In an earlier article I discussed complex adaptive systems, emphasising their inherent unpredictability.³ Our economies and societies are such systems. We cannot predict their future very well, yet we often behave as if we can. Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this epistemic arrogance: an overconfidence in our knowledge, especially our “knowledge” of the future. This arrogance also leads us to rationalise surprises after the fact, often insisting, “We should have seen this coming!” While correctly predicting the future is very hard, explaining events in hindsight is easy. We convince ourselves that what happened was obvious all along, a phenomenon known as hindsight bias.

Simulating the future

When we think about the future, we mentally simulate it by imagining “possible worlds”. We draw on selected trends or examples from the past and present, and we project these into imaginary future scenarios. This remarkable human ability is known as mental simulation, mental time travel or mobile consciousness. We construct scenes in our imagination and transport ourselves within them, either as observers or participants.⁴

The scenarios we use to simulate the future are usually based on our experiences, and on the stories we have been exposed to. Our culture and social groups provide a wealth of “grand narratives”, stories that we share and consume, and which act as templates for our mental simulations. Such stories can be about the past, the present, the future or about entirely fictional realms. In every case, they shape our expectations.

Futures better or worse

When envisioning our collective future, we broadly use one of two story templates. One is the narrative of Progress, in which our future will be better than the past. The other is the narrative of Decline, in which the past was better than the present or the future.⁵ The human mind, however, is far from consistent, so we can shift between these perspectives, depending on mood, social context, subject matter, age, etc.

Perhaps the most common expectation we have about the future is that it will more or less resemble the present. But this isn’t really an interesting narrative, so it isn’t shared much.⁶ Of the future-oriented narratives we do share, that of Decline has historically been the most prominent. The Ancient Greeks believed that their society was in decline after a golden age.⁷ Many of the great religions centre around a story of moral decline, and therefore a necessity for saviour, redemption or enlightenment. In 18^th century Europe, Romanticism emerged as a response to perceived social decline driven by the growing influence of money, profit, and trade. Some Romantic thinkers imagined a further genetic and cultural decline due to racial mixing, fueling the 20^th century rise of fascism and ultimately the Holocaust. Today, narratives of Decline remain prominent, focusing on issues such as climate change, mass immigration or artificial intelligence.⁸

Optimism and negativity

In my previous article I explored some of the unconscious mental biases that influence our perceptions and expectations. These biases can profoundly shape our views of the past and the future. For instance, we tend to think more in terms of decline as we get older. Our physical state deteriorates, and we may start to idealise memories from our past. Rapid changes in the world around us fuel uncertainty about what lies ahead. Moreover, negative emotions (such as fear) capture our attention more effectively than do positive emotions. This is known as negativity bias or the negativity effect. It causes us to pay more attention to negative events than to good news. We therefore tend to overestimate the probability of bad things happening. At least, when it comes to the actions of other people or external forces beyond our control.⁹

Interestingly the negativity effect does not apply (strongly) to our own actions. When we feel in control, we actually tend to underestimate the probability of bad things happening.¹⁰ We overestimate our chances of success, and underestimate the risk of setbacks. This is known as optimism bias. It is especially pronounced in children, peaking around ages 8–9, though even adults remain relatively blind to potential obstacles. This helps explain why we often fail to foresee crises, even when warning signs may be perfectly clear to outside observers.

The combination of optimism bias with the negativity effect implies the following: We are at the same time too pessimistic about the world in general, and too optimistic about our own abilities and the success of our social groups. While such a dual bias may seem bad, both do serve important functions. The negativity effect makes us risk-averse in unfamiliar or uncontrolled environments, beyond the protection of our social circle. This is a sensible survival strategy. Meanwhile, optimism bias motivates us to take calculated risks when we feel secure. We invest in our future, even when the actual, objective chances of success are not that great. This is a potent driver of creativity, progress and social change.

Bright futures

The negativity effect drives our tendency to experience society as being in decline, especially as we get older. However there is a second, countervailing story template for thinking about the future: the narrative of Progress.

In our personal lives, we find the greatest fulfillment when we feel we are progressing toward some kind of meaningful goal. But as a major social narrative—an explanatory story broadly shared within society—Progress is relatively new. Medieval Europeans saw the future as largely beyond their influence, shaped instead by fate and divine providence. The Enlightenment however weakened the existing social order and the role of religious narratives. It promoted individual freedom and the development of scientific knowledge. This mainstreamed the idea that we can influence and improve our future, through individual and collective action. One of the consequences was a string of popular revolutions in Europe and the Americas, from 1765 to the mid-19^th century. Another consequence was economic theory.

The Enlightenment gave rise to at least two strands of progress thinking. The first centered on collective action toward social improvement, while the second framed progress more as a natural law. The first, more progressive school of thinking eventually inspired civil rights movements and helped shape the modern democratic welfare state. Historically it has been very important, but it is also inherently a destabilising force. After all, the whole point of social change is to move beyond the status quo, rather than accepting society in its existing form.
A second strand of progress thinking therefore originated with liberal thinkers who did not feel altogether comfortable with the idea of self-determination for the masses, or the social unrest that came with it.¹¹ Rather than seeing progress as the result of social action, they preferred to see it as a natural outcome of economic growth, human ingenuity, and technological advancement. This view of “automatic” progress gained dominance in the West, especially after World War II.¹² Progress became institutionalised as something that is linked to economic growth and that can be measured (and to some degree managed) by experts. The relative stability of the post-war decades also showed that, as long as the majority of the population expects a future increase in their wellbeing, progress can be a stabilising force in society.

Problems of Progress

Modern narratives of Progress frequently imply that there is little need to solve problems collectively through forward planning, because most problems will be solved by technology and economic growth. There are however issues with this vision of the future, of which I shall mention two.

First, while technology has undeniably played an important role, it has often been secondary. If we define progress as an improvement in human wellbeing, its primary drivers were mostly not technological. Rather, progress over the last three centuries was largely based on the vast expansion of human knowledge following the scientific revolution, coupled with education, popular emancipation, significant shifts in moral thinking and the development of effective rules and institutions.
The suppression of infectious diseases stands as a remarkable achievement, yet it was accomplished through relatively straightforward measures: handwashing, sterilising medical equipment and separating human waste from drinking water. Antibiotics and vaccination have arguably contributed most to our longevity and health, but both rely heavily on naturally evolved systems and substances.¹³ We didn’t so much invent these as figure out how to use them.
Many other aspects of improved human wellbeing have even less to do with technology. Rather, they result from moral and social progress, shifts in what we collectively consider acceptable and unacceptable. These moral shifts were promoted by the emergence of new concepts, such as “human rights”, and by collective action in the past.

The second issue can be summarised (paraphrasing the great thinker and soccer legend Johan Cruyff) as: “Every advantage has its disadvantage.”¹⁴ Progress is often portrayed as something that occurs along a single dimension, a single line on which we should always move forward.¹⁵ However, a development that is positive in one respect can produce negative consequences elsewhere, even if these are not immediately apparent.¹⁶ Antibiotics, for example, have saved countless lives over the past century, but their overuse has fostered widespread antibiotic resistance. This reduces our future options for suppressing pathogens, a problem that cannot easily be fixed by technology.¹⁷ Similarly, cheap fossil fuels have enabled modern life and current levels of food production. But many of the negative side effects take decades to show up, and changes in global climate will have unforeseen consequences for centuries to come.¹⁸

Like any story about the future, the narrative of Progress is based on a certain, selective way of viewing the past and the present. Much of what we regard as progress now may ultimately undermine our wellbeing in the future. In fact, this latter insight is at the core of many Decline narratives.
Proponents of progress argue that it will occur in the future because it has occurred in the past. But this is an arbitrary extrapolation. The future hasn’t happened yet and it offers few guarantees. Moreover, the past is itself a narrative, a mental simulation of what happened, based on incomplete and selected information.

Motivational expectations

The notion of “automatic” progress may rest on questionable assumptions, yet this doesn’t mean that Progress itself is a bad narrative. Granted, it’s a fiction, but it’s certainly a useful one. The very possibility of progress can provide a motivation to act under uncertainty, which can make progress a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, modern society cannot operate without some faith in future advancement. As the sociologist Jens Beckert argues, most economic decisions are future-oriented and cannot be conducted without holding assumptions about the future. Since the actual future remains unknowable, we base our decisions on “fictional expectations”, collectively imagined scenarios of what the future will be like.

In the context of economics, our shared expectations enable coordinated decision-making in a complex and uncertain economic landscape. We collectively act as if our fictional expectations more or less represent the future. Beckert suggests that economic and technological forecasts are rarely accurate, but also that they do not need to be. They mostly need to be persuasive, inspiring the confidence required for action. Even if future-oriented decisions on, say, investment prove to be misguided in retrospect, we still need them to keep our socio-economic system going.¹⁹ While this is not always a good thing, it is a reality that we must acknowledge before we can deal with it.

As mentioned, the belief that Progress is possible, is in itself empowering. It can motivate us to improve current conditions through individual or collective action. In fact, a similar argument can be made for the narratives of Decline. The prospect of social or natural deterioration may feel disempowering, if we perceive ourselves as having no agency. But the possibility of decline can also motivate us to take action, to solve problems in the present and address likely challenges in the future. Progress and Decline are both narrative fictions, but we do need such fictions to engage with possible futures.²⁰

Capturing the future

Future fictions are essential for decision-making. However, if we grow overly convinced that a fictional scenario is what will really happen—effectively treating it as a prophecy more than a possibility—we become blinded to alternative outcomes. Nassim Taleb calls this tunneling, and he warns that it leads us to ignore real-world risks and opportunities. And if that isn’t bad enough, it makes us susceptible to manipulation, and can ultimately undermine democracy.

Our mental visions of the future are prime targets for marketers, politicians, and propagandists, because our expectations strongly shape our plans and our behaviour. Propaganda frequently seeks to sell us a single narrative of what lies ahead, suppressing uncertainty and vilifying rival perspectives. Decline narratives are particularly potent in this regard, which is why ambitious politicians often focus on issues that are perceived as going downhill. Decline narratives exploit the negativity effect: by tapping into emotions such as fear or anger, they very effectively hold our attention.²¹ When combined with a sense of agency (and the support of a like-minded social group), Decline narratives can become a powerful catalyst for action. As environmental and civil rights movements have shown, non-violent collective efforts may end up enhancing societal wellbeing. But as more conservative commentators often note, collective action can also turn violent, leading to widespread destruction and loss of life, as evidenced by pogroms, wars and ethnic conflicts across history.²²

Problems mostly occur when we are presented with narratives that are too deterministic, and that lack the perspective of an open future in which we have time to act and talk things over.²³ If a decline is presented as imminent, with very little time to prevent it, the need for action becomes urgent. Whether the perceived peril is climate catastrophe, the spectre of a shadowy elite, or the fear of mass migration—the proposed solution rarely includes measured debate or compromise among competing interests.
This issue is not confined to stories of Decline, also the narratives of Progress tend to be overdetermined: If it is already certain that science, innovation and technology will save us in the end, why bother trying to fix social or environmental problems through the complicated, messy and slow process of social dialogue and reform? Better to move fast and break things, or more commonly, to sit back and let progress run its course.

A tale of TINA

While the narratives we encounter are often overly deterministic, another issue is what we might call “story poverty”. In The Narrative Brain, Fritz Breithaupt argues that the problem lies not with stories themselves, but rather with a lack of alternative storylines: we have too few narratives to choose from when imagining the future. This is especially evident when we are asked to envision meaningful alternatives (or even mere structural reforms) to the current socio-economic system. The mainstream response for the past half century or so has become so entrenched that it has its own acronym, TINA: There Is No Alternative.²⁴ Given how widely this belief is held, one might think that there has been some seriously effective propaganda at work?

In fact, little explicit propaganda was required. What happened was a cultural shift, which the British political scientist Jonathan White calls “the privatisation of the future”. During the second half of the 20^th century, the Western world increasingly shifted its focus from collective to individual futures. This was partly a push-back against the more collectivist ideologies of fascism and communism, and partly driven by the rise of mass production and consumer marketing. Rather than changing society, which is a long-term collective effort, the dominant goal became to advance ourselves within its structures as individuals, within our own life span. And rather than seeking power (which is always scarce), most people came to pursue happiness through the acquisition of objects, experiences and self-improvements. The promise was that we could buy our way into happiness, provided we were sufficiently enterprising (or lucky). This cultural shift fostered a competitive mindset. It also made us increasingly skeptical of ideology and collective organisation toward common goals, especially if these involve long-term projects that extend beyond our own lifespan. Institutions adapted accordingly: citizens were recast primarily as consumers and voters, in a world of short-term personal choices rather than substantive collective ones. This shift toward a privatised future eventually occurred globally. It has made it very difficult to imagine an alternative society, one that does not revolve around fulfilling our immediate personal goals through consumption.

Of course, even if we are focused on our personal lives, we still harbour hopes and fears for our collective future. This is evident from our shared narratives of progress and decline, as well as in the widespread consumption of future-oriented fiction in books, films and series. The trouble is that we remain mostly passive in the face of these possible futures. We are preoccupied with our personal goals and too focused on choices that revolve around work, family or consumption. The agency we feel for shaping our shared future feels limited to occasional voting and choosing which things to purchase or avoid. It feels as if we are free to choose our personal path but not our collective future. The latter appears governed by all kinds of impersonal forces and structures. We seem to have returned to a medieval mindset: we feel powerless to challenge the fate of society, which seems destined to either go forward or backward.

Agency over prophecy

It seems we are in a difficult spot when it comes to envisioning the future: on one hand our outlook is moulded by deterministic stories of progress and decline, and on the other it is constrained by a lack of collective imagination and a requirement for endless economic growth. Where, one might ask, is the scope for genuine agency, for shaping our shared wellbeing beyond our role as voter, consumer or employee?

One way forward is to cultivate story awareness. When we recognise the narratives that frame our expectations of the future, their grip on us weakens. Our emotions become less of a slave to future expectations, and we can start to see future fictions for what they are: useful collective tools for anticipating problems, aligning goals and generating motivation.

Our mental simulations of the future are not the future itself. Reality is complex, and what lies ahead remains undetermined. We should avoid fixating on any single account of what is to come. What we need isn’t prophecy, in the form of some naive, oversimplified or deterministic narrative of what things will be like. Aspects of the future will be better than the past, other aspects will be worse. In the real world outside of simplified stories, our societies and lives oscillate between periods of flourishing and periods of instability.²⁵ While death is inevitable for individuals, societies themselves are remarkably resilient. Empires, governments and institutions may fall apart, cities may be abandoned and economies may crash, yet total social collapse is exceedingly rare. This resilience is cause for optimism. The bad news is that, historically, endless growth also does not occur. Our societies will inevitably run into difficult times, although these are seldom the end of the world.²⁶

Rediscovering possibility

The narratives of Progress and Decline have a tendency to downplay human agency. They depict societies as being pushed around by big forces that we common people cannot really control. Yet one of the key reasons why we cannot predict social systems very well, is that at any point we do have agency. You can act to alter the future, and so can other people, for better or for worse. The social future is always still open and we cannot say what it will be like, only what we aspire to, and what we fear for. Collectively, humans can do incredible things, or terrible and stupid things. But crucially, we have choices, which brings us to the subject of hope.

Hope is based on the sense that things may perhaps be bad, but they could get better. Hope requires us to acknowledge that the future is uncertain, but also that, in principle, we can act to change it. As used here, the term differs from optimism, wishful thinking or faith. Optimism and pessimism say something about the expectations we have. The same is true for faith or wishful thinking, which entail the expectation that things will turn out well, regardless of our own actions. Hope on the other hand is an active stance, and it requires a sense of agency and possibility.

Crucially, there’s only so much a single person can do, especially in the face of collective systemic problems. This is why it often requires many people acting collectively to change our shared future in a meaningful way. According to the psychologist Jamil Zaki, the main enemy of hope is cynicism, a conviction that other people generally have bad intentions. To a cynic, there is no point in trying to change the world for the better, because most people are out for themselves and thus have no interest in working toward a better future for others. History, however, demonstrates otherwise. People can and do act against their own narrow interests. We can collectively act to improve the wellbeing of large groups of people—this is precisely the point of the narrative of Progress, at least in its active, non-automatic form. Successful outcomes of collective action include the abolition of slavery, the establishment of workers’ rights, the expansion of voting rights to workers and women and the introduction of basic environmental regulations.

Hope, then, means acting, ideally with others, toward shaping a future we desire, while recognising that there might be difficulties, setbacks and failures. This requires not only a sense of agency, but also a form of determination, a motivational driving force to keep us going in the face of difficulty. Often, this force is fuelled by “righteous anger” at a moral injustice.²⁷ Faith or optimism can certainly help as well, although positive expectations are by no means required. What effective hope does require is a degree of epistemic humility. This means that we should be skeptical of our own beliefs and expectations, especially regarding the future, or the supposed bad intentions of other people.

Hope and humility in practice

What lessons can we draw from all this? First, the future of our societies is inherently unpredictable. We must recognise this and bear it in mind. Narratives about the future are, by their nature, fictions, even when they feel like inevitable realities. We should acknowledge complexity and try to practise an awareness that our knowledge is provisional and may well be flawed. This is particularly true when it comes to our “knowledge” of what lies ahead.

We are often attracted to future fictions because they seem to offer certainty. Uncertainty feels uncomfortable²⁸, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Accepting it however, requires practice. By accepting a degree of uncertainty, we enhance our ability to adapt to unexpected developments. It also opens the way to hope, which, in essence, is a practical application of uncertainty: it recognises that the future may bring challenges, but also opportunities for positive change. Moreover, research in behavioural science suggests that hope is a far more effective motivator than fear.²⁹ Scaring us into action may work in the short term, but the effect of fear eventually wears off as we get used to it or find ways to avoid it, and worst-case scenarios fail to materialise. Hope, on the other hand, is much more durable.

To practise hope we must do more than just accept uncertainty and the possibility of obstacles. We must also feed our imagination with possibilities of what we can achieve, especially if we work together with others. The news tends to focus on what goes wrong in the world. This is understandable given the negativity effect: positive news just doesn’t capture our attention very well. So to counter cynicism, we should actively seek out examples of people and groups making a positive difference. One good place to start is the Solutions Story Tracker, a resource created by the Solutions Journalism Network.³⁰ Of course, we should also avoid naivety and wishful thinking, remembering that progress often demands hard work and will encounter setbacks. But this does not diminish the value of such efforts. Effective anticipatory thinking requires us to see both possibilities and possible obstacles, so we should pay attention to both.

If we wish to contribute positively to the future, there are many places to start. A logical first step is to exercise agency within our own “privatised future”: what can you do in your personal and professional life to improve the wellbeing of others, human or otherwise? We should however keep in mind that as individuals we cannot take full responsibility for solving complex, collective problems. What we can do is contribute to their resolution, alongside others. The notion that we can solve systemic issues simply by buying the right products is absurd, as is the belief that technology by itself can solve such problems for us.³¹

Cooperative change

Cooperative problem-solving is difficult and does not happen spontaneously. Yet humans excel at it, and we have developed numerous social mechanisms to make it work—a topic I will explore in my next article. Some readers may be fortunate enough to work in an organisation that directly addresses societal challenges, big or small. But for many people, this is not the case. As Jonathan White describes in his history of the future as a political concept, collective action for social change historically took place outside work, in labour unions and mass political parties. In general, while social decline can be rapid, constructive social progress is usually slow. It often unfolds in fits and starts over generations, because it has to contend with established interests and power relations. It is a collective endeavour requiring patience and determination, so some form of organisation is essential to drive social progress. In the past, mass political parties often filled this role, but today many parties focus more on catering to voters as consumers. Modern voters share some of the blame for this: we have grown so accustomed to acting as consumers rather than active citizens, that we treat party manifestos as shopping lists of short-term promises. Still, this is no reason to dismiss democracy entirely. It may be imperfect and can certainly be improved, but it remains the least flawed system we have for collective problem-solving in large, complex societies.³²

Engaging more actively in local or national politics, directly or indirectly, is one way to help shape our collective future. But politics is not the only arena for action, and when it comes to social change, it often follows rather than leads public opinion. So participate in local communities, join discussion groups, cooperatives, NGOs, activist groups or contribute to education, to name just a few options. Ideas on what is valuable and how to improve society need to spread before they can make an impact, and true social interaction and discussion is still the best way to do that.³³ Moreover, as I will discuss in my next article, rebuilding trust and building community are vital for effective cooperation.
The key is to take responsibility and avoid both cynicism and naivety. We cannot see into the future, but we can contribute to it. Stories of decline may be highly useful as warnings, but they are not prophecies. Technology and economic growth are valuable, but not sufficient, and come with unintended side-effects. Progress, understood as increased wellbeing, is possible—but it does not happen by itself.

“Red thread” images by Io Cooman, based on photos from the Library of Congress.
Sanford postcard by F.C. Philpot, 1908, currently in the collection of Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

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Further reading

Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Penguin Books, 2007 (revised edition 2008).
One of Taleb’s most influential books, The Black Swan investigates the profound impact of unpredictable events. The book highlights a fundamental human blindness to randomness, asserting that our minds are “explanation machines” that use narrative fallacies to create a coherent, but false, sense of understanding the past. History, according to Taleb, is disproportionately driven by “Black Swans”, rare and unpredictable but very consequential events or trends. Because such events can disproportionately dominate outcomes, standard statistical tools like the bell curve are dangerously inadequate for describing the future as well as the past. Rather than naively attempting to forecast the future using limited past data, we should focus on what we do not know—and build robustness against negative Black Swans, while maximising our benefit from positive ones. This forms the basis of a strategy that Taleb calls “antifragility” in his later work.
The Black Swan forms the second part of The Incerto, Taleb’s philosophical investigation into the nature of uncertainty, the (mostly inadequate) ways in which we currently deal with it, and how we can do better. Other books in this body of work include Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness, Skin in the Game and The Bed of Procrustes. The core ideas of Incerto are explained by Ryan Faulkner in this summary on YouTube, and are expanded upon in The Incerto Podcast (listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts). The core ideas of The Black Swan are explained in this 5-minute animated summary and by Taleb himself in, among others, a Forum Network lecture.

Taleb, N.N. et al. (2014) ‘The precautionary principle: fragility and black swans from policy actions’, NYU Extreme Risk Initiative working paper, pp. 1–24.
In this technical paper, Taleb and colleagues formalise the precautionary principle as a tool for preventing systemic ruin in cases where potential harm is irreversible and scientific knowledge is incomplete. The paper asserts that for activities carrying a risk of global catastrophe, the burden of proof regarding safety must fall on those proposing the activity. Standard cost-benefit approaches to risk management only make sense if risks are limited and localised, or when potential damage is reversible. If global, irreversible damage is a possible outcome, the cost is effectively infinite and cannot be balanced against finite potential benefits. Also the argument that the probability of global ruin is very low doesn’t make sense, because even tiny risks can lead to a mathematical certainty of damage, given sufficient exposure. Systemic global threats must therefore be treated as if they can happen eventually, and steps must be taken to avoid them.

Fritz Breithaupt. The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell. Yale University Press, 2025.
Breithaupt explores how humans have developed narrative thinking to transform individual perceptions into shared experiences. He posits that our minds possess a unique “mobility of consciousness”, which allows us to mentally transport ourselves into different situations to co-experience the worlds of others. In narrative thinking, the ending functions as a reward: engagement in a story is motivated and rewarded by specific emotions (e.g. triumph, wonder, or satisfaction) at an episode’s conclusion, providing a signal to the brain that the sequence is complete. This is why we are so captivated by the ending of a story, even when the concept of an “ending” is much less relevant in real life. Narrative thinking is further defined by “multiversionality”, the ability to simultaneously contemplate multiple contradictory versions of a story. The various narrative possibilities create suspense in fiction, but also help us overcome crises and prevent us from being trapped by singular, rigid identities in real life.
Fritz Breithaupt explains the essence of storytelling in this 60-second video, and also discusses his work in this MindCORE seminar. He talks about the role of future-oriented fictions here.

Jonathan White. In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. Profile Books, 2024.
This book discusses “the future” as a political idea. White describes the 18^th-century emergence of an “open future”, the belief that history is susceptible to human influence. This belief helped galvanise mass political participation, and the development of ideologies like socialism and liberalism. However, White argues that the feeling of an open future has receded and we now live in an “age of emergencies”, in which time always appears to be running out. This perceived urgency can marginalise democratic processes in favour of either an authoritarian approach or a managerial, calculative outlook, managed by experts. The decline of traditional mass political parties has traded long-term collective projects for short-termist, personalised projects, in a process that White calls the “privatisation of the future”. Ultimately, democracy depends on an expectation of continuation and social progress. We must move beyond an obsession with imminent endings to recapture a sense of temporal depth in which we can collectively work on our shared future. Moreover, resolving collective problems requires debate and compromises, and democratic institutions are required to mediate this process. Contemporary democratic institutions are far from perfect, but this does not mean that we should get rid of them in favour of non-democratic decision making. Rather, it means that democratic institutions need to be strengthened and improved, and White outlines several proposals for this.
White also discusses these ideas in a 24 minute coffee break talk, on the Ink & Insights podcast, in this seminar, and in interviews with Aaron Bastani (at Novara Media) and at the Bath Institute of Policy Research.

Jens Beckert. Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Harvard University Press, 2016.
Beckert presents a sociological analysis of decision making in modern economies. History matters, but many of our actions are future-oriented. They thus cannot be conducted without assumptions about the future, even if the future is unknowable. In practice, this problem is solved by acting on “fictional expectations”, imagined scenarios of what the future will or may be like. These fictional expectations are produced by expert opinions, theoretical models and various kinds of forecasts. Economic and technological forecasts are rarely accurate, but Beckert argues that accuracy is not their main function. Forecasts mostly need to be convincing: what matters is the momentary belief in accuracy. Forecasts help actors make sense of seemingly chaotic or incomprehensibly complex situations, and give them the confidence to make and justify decisions. Economies need fictional expectations in order to operate, they help economic actors work in concert in the face of uncertainty. Though the future cannot be known, it is possible to know what other people think about it. If many people share a conviction that the future will develop in a specific way, they end up behaving in foreseeable ways and their actions become coordinated to some degree. Positive imagined futures can drive economic growth, and bleak ones can trigger economic crises. By continuously telling stories about the future toward which they are headed, economic actors effectively help create the future.
Jens Beckert also discusses some of these ideas in this 2019 talk at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs.

Jamil Zaki. Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. Grand Central Publishing, 2024.
Jamil Zaki’s book characterises cynicism as a pervasive “disease of social health” rooted in the mistaken theory that humanity is inherently selfish, greedy, and dishonest. The book explains how cynicism can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy, where “preemptive strikes” of mistrust provoke the very selfishness that is assumed. On the other hand, “leaps of faith” and a “reciprocity mindset” can transform social interactions into virtuous cycles. To counter cynicism, Zaki advocates for “hopeful skepticism”, an approach that replaces knee-jerk mistrust with a curiosity-driven commitment to empirical data. Most people consistently underestimate the altruism and trustworthiness of others. Inequality and elite abuse tend to foster a negative view of other people. Zaki suggests that rather than assuming the worst, we should pay more attention to how most other people really are, which is only possible if we interact with them in person. Moreover, we should actively seek out positive examples of cooperation and human action, to balance negative news. When combined with local community-building, such efforts can restore the “psychological glue” of trust. Hope is not a naive evasion of reality, but can be a practical tool for effective activism and collective progress.
Zaki discusses these ideas and more in a TED-talk, on the Psychology podcast, the Huberman Lab podcast, EP502 of the Passion Struck podcast, in a conversation with Robert Sapolsky and at an Action for Happiness event.

Rebecca Solnit. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Haymarket Books 2016 (first edition 2003).
Jane Goodall, Douglas Abrams, Gail Hudson. The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. Celadon Books, 2021.
Sumit Paul-Choudhury. The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World. Canongate Books, 2025.
Similar in spirit to Jamil Zaki’s Hope for Cynics, these three books make the case for hope as an aspirational and practical approach for dealing with problems in the present and the future.
Rebecca Solnit offers a defence of hope as an active commitment to engage with an uncertain and unknowable future. She contrasts this approach with both passive optimism, which assumes positive outcomes without effort, and pessimism, which treats failure as inevitable. Both, she argues, serve as excuses for political inaction. Solnit documents a long record of transformative grassroots victories (including some like the Arab Spring that, unfortunately, have since been reversed). By remembering and reclaiming the stories of past successes, civil society can find the “axe” needed to break through the walls of the present and shape a better world.
Similar to Solnit, the late Jane Goodall also characterises hope not as passive wishful thinking, but as a crucial survival trait that demands active engagement and hard work. Goodall argues that the same intellect that created environmental crises is capable of devising the creative solutions needed to help repair the damage. She also emphasises the importance of empowering the next generation, for instance through initiatives like her Roots & Shoots programme. Showing young people that they can make a difference, fosters the agency and purpose they require to help tackle future challenges.
Sumit Paul-Choudhury takes a somewhat different approach, using a different terminology but coming to broadly the same conclusions. Spurred by the personal tragedy of his wife’s death, he investigates how optimism functions as a biological motivator that drives humans and animals to act when outcomes are uncertain, thereby avoiding self-fulfilling “pessimism traps”. Paul-Choudhury explores the neurobiology of the optimism bias and positive illusions, the rational basis for progress and our ability to anticipate and improve the future. In the end he concludes that while passive optimism or pessimism is counterproductive, we should treat a “better future” as an objective to be realised through the active exploration of scenarios. Ultimately, Paul-Choudhury asserts that what he calls aspirational optimism (and what the other authors call hope) is a “shared duty” and a form of true moral courage, essential for solving collective global challenges like climate change.
Solnit talks about hope in this 2023 discussion and on The Left Hook podcast. The Jane Goodall Institute hosts the Hopecast podcast dedicated to the hopeful vision of Goodall, and National Geographic made a freely available documentary about her life and work. Paul-Choudhury discusses his view on optimism on the BBC Science Focus podcast.

C. Richard Snyder (editor). Handbook of Hope: Theory, Measures, and Applications. Elsevier Science, 2000.
Richard Snyder. The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here. Simon and Schuster, 1994.
The late psychologist and hope researcher Richard Snyder postulated that three main elements make up “hopeful” thinking: approaching life in a goal-oriented way, finding different pathways to achieve your goals, and believing in your agency, your ability to instigate change and achieve goals. Snyder argued that individuals who are able to realize these three components and develop a belief in their ability are what he calls hopeful people. Such people can establish clear goals, imagine multiple workable pathways toward those goals, and persevere, even when obstacles get in their way. Snyder also stressed the link between hope and mental willpower, as well as the need for a realistic perception of goals.

Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Tali Sharot. The Science of Optimism: Why We’re Hard-Wired for Hope. Ted Conferences, 2012.
Kahneman’s work forms an important basis for examining the limitations of human reason and the fallibility of experts. Where Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduces the concept of epistemic arrogance to signify that we overestimate our knowledge in the face of a volatile future, Kahneman identifies and describes the cognitive biases and mental shortcuts that lead individuals to overconfidence. He shows how our brains frequently prefer coherent narratives over complex truths.
Kahneman characterises the “optimistic bias” as a pervasive tendency to perceive the world as more benign, one’s own attributes as more favourable, and one’s goals as more achievable than is realistically the case. He labels this the “engine of capitalism”, because it increases the willingness to seek challenges and take risks. While such optimism provides critical resilience and is often essential for scientific success, it also fosters a dangerous collective blindness to risk and uncertainty. To mitigate these effects, Kahneman advocates for the “premortem”, a technique where teams imagine a project has failed and reconstruct the history of that disaster to identify neglected threats. Tali Sharot further examines the optimism bias, first identified by Kahneman and Tversky. In this short book that accompanies her TED-talk, Sharot states that this bias is hard-wired into the brain by evolution as a critical survival mechanism, facilitating the ability to envision and plan for a better future. This rosy outlook persists because the brain selectively incorporates desirable information, while often discounting bad news. Like Kahneman, Sharot notes that this mindset fosters resilience, improved health, and professional achievement, but can also trigger disastrous miscalculations.

Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert (2023). “The illusion of moral decline,” Nature, 618(7966), pp. 782–789.
John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister. The Power of Bad: How Our Negativity Bias Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. Penguin Books, 2019.
Mastroianni and Gilbert examine the feeling that morality is declining in society, and find it to be nearly universal across time and space, even citing a written example from Roman times. They propose that this illusion of moral decline is caused by a combination of two mental biases. One is the “negativity effect”, the psychological principle that negative events and emotions affect us more profoundly than positive ones. The second is the “biased memory effect”, which implies that in the longer term, negative memories tend to be less sticky than our recollection of positive experiences. As Jamil Zaki also points out, the illusion of moral decline mostly applies to our view of “people in general”. It does not apply strongly to our view of the people around us, with whom we regularly interact.
Tierney and Baumeister explore the negativity effect in more depth, in their very readable “Power of Bad”. They note that in the short term, it typically requires four positive experiences to offset the lingering impact of a single negative one. Ultimately, while negative information and feeling is immediately more potent, we can counterbalance this bias through persistence and conscious effort. Moreover, bad feelings can be leveraged in a positive way, as incentives for improvement. Unfortunately, near the end of the book Tierney and Baumeister seem to discount the possibility that alarmism and precaution can in themselves be useful. Instead, they put their faith in science and technology to solve all future problems. For a more balanced approach to risk management and the precautionary principle, see Taleb et al. (2014) above.

Dorian Lynskey. Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World. Pan Macmillan, 2024.
This rather exhaustive book investigates the appeal of stories about the end of the world, exploring how existential dread interacts with fiction, politics, science, and the public mood. Lynskey distinguishes between religious eschatology, which focuses on divine judgment and transformation, and secular eschatology, which encompasses planetary demolition, human extinction, and the collapse of civilization. Lynskey maps an “inexhaustible stockpile” of doomsday scenarios, ranging from comet impacts and nuclear winter to rogue artificial intelligence and pandemic-induced social breakdown. Lynskey critiques the numbing effect of “apocalyptic overload” and warns against the defeatism of “doomerism,” arguing that narratives of the end should inspire prophylactic action rather than psychological surrender.

Arthur Herman. The Idea of Decline in Western History. Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Robert Nisbet. History of the Idea of Progress. Routledge, 2017.
The historian Herman examines the idea of decline and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization’s inevitable end has become a fixed part of the modern Western imagination. His book traces the roots of declinism and cultural pessimism. Herman notes that cultural pessimists often view catastrophic events with “barely concealed glee”, as they believe the destruction of “sick” Western culture will clear the way for a better future.
Nisbet traces the history of the belief in humanity’s continuous advancement. He describes the influence of the Enlightenment, but notes that the idea of progress in Western thought is much older. St. Augustine already used Greek and Jewish concepts to establish a linear narrative of the “education of the human race,” viewing history as a series of necessary, cumulative stages leading toward a final, redemptive state.
Both Herman and Nisbet argue that the idea of decline is the “reverse image” of the idea of progress; both frameworks rely on the flawed assumption that societies are singular organisms governed by inexorable historical laws.

Peter Turchin. End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Penguin Publishing Group, 2023.
Based on empirical data, Turchin shows how there are patterns to history, driven by common social mechanisms. Social systems are broadly predictable in some of their large-scale dynamics, although each historical case is unique. Periods of growth and decline are largely determined by social stability. Stability in turn is linked to successful coordination and trust. Periods of instability on the other hand result from an increase in inequality, because “wealth pump” mechanisms transfer wealth from the working class to the elite. As the class of aspirant “power holders” grows and popular emiseration deepens, increasingly violent struggles for power develop and social cooperation starts to break down. Turchin uses a wealth of case studies to show that such instability can escalate into large-scale violent conflicts. However, sometimes conflict is averted and stability restored, by switching off the “wealth pump” and re-establishing elite cooperation to rebalance the social system.

Addie Schulte. De strijd om de toekomst: Over doemscenario’s en vooruitgang. Cossee, 2019.
In “The Struggle for the Future” (written in Dutch), Schulte discusses several “theories of decline” (neergangstheorieën). The modern decline narratives he examines are about migration, neoliberalism, robotisation and climate change. These are examples of what Dorian Lynskey calls “secular eschatology”, doomsday scenarios in which society is predicted to spin out of control, but which include the possibility of redemption. The message of these narratives is that if we listen to their warnings and take immediate, drastic action, we can still avert catastrophe and create some form of utopian society. Schulte points out the political usefulness of such narratives, and the rise in their political use in recent decades (especially on the political right, which has managed to successfully translate fears of migration into political power). However, in The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman shows that this is hardly a recent phenomenon, so perhaps it’s better to speak of a “decline story renaissance” rather than a new development. Schulte suggests that we should counter this trend by making more room for uncertainty, doubt and unpredictable developments.

Bas Erlings. Het spel van de populist: hoe zij het spelen, hoe wij het winnen. Alfabet Uitgevers, 2025.
In another Dutch book, “The Populist Game”, the former campaign strategist and behavioural psychologist Bas Erlings analyses how populists operate and why their methods are so effective. His central argument is that all populists follow more or less the same script, which makes very effective use of various cognitive biases and mass psychology. Populists exploit emotional triggers and simple, powerful narratives to sway public opinion, often bypassing facts and logic. But Erlings shows that several mainstream politicians, including Barack Obama and Jacinda Ardern, have managed to successfully counter populism by adopting some of its strategies, while avoiding some of its downsides. The crucial difference is that populists tend to exploit loss aversion and negativity bias, basing their narratives on powerful negative emotions such as fear and anger. Moreover, they leverage social feelings by strongly emphasising group identity (e.g. national identity or class), suggesting positive ingroup traits (e.g. national superiority, work ethic) and contrasting these with outgroups (e.g. migrants, “wokes”). Successful politicians who refuse to follow the populist script, counter this by leveraging more positive emotions such as hope, by respecting facts and by emphasising the commonalities of groups rather than their differences. While their message is very different, focusing on connection and cooperation rather than division, they also use some of the techniques that make populist messaging so effective. They avoid complex arguments, repeat simple, hopeful messages and address real problems experienced by common people. Effective messaging is by no means a guarantee for electoral success in the short term (or political success in the long term). But the landslide victory of Péter Magyar over Viktor Orbán in the 2026 Hungarian elections shows that there is a limit to the viability of the populist script based on misinformation and fear, especially in the long term, and that hope is a powerful motivator. The 2025 re-election of Trump was a demonstration of how effective the populist script can be, but his precipitous drop in popularity since then suggests that populism may actually be quite fragile in the long term, especially if it disregards reality in favour of narrative fiction.

Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Zer0 Books, 2022.
Fisher introduces the concept of capitalist realism, the widespread sense that free market capitalism is the only viable political and economic system and that a coherent alternative is impossible to even imagine. Drawing on the phrase that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” Fisher describes a worldview in which it is considered obvious that everything in society, from healthcare to education, should be run as a business. The book explores how capitalist culture has even managed to pre-emptively format our desires and hopes, turning even rebellion into a marketable style. Fisher identifies a pervasive condition of “reflexive impotence” among the public, a knowledge that the system is dysfunctional coupled with the belief that nothing can be done about it. Rather than being seen as a systemic problem, the resulting distress is subsequently “privatised” and treated as an individual pathology.

Ha-Joon Chang. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Penguin, 2010.
William Skidelsky. ‘Ha-Joon Chang: The net isn’t as important as we think’, The Guardian, 28 August 2010.
While the economist Ha-Joon Chang is an advocate of capitalism (“To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I think it’s the worst economic system except for all the others.”), in this book he criticises extreme free market capitalism. Moreover, Chang points out that we suffer from recency bias when it comes to imagining the role that technology plays in social and economic progress. The technologies that were truly important in shaping modern society are not the ones we usually think of, like the computer or the internet. Rather, more mundane technologies like piped water, the washing machine, vacuum cleaners and the electric iron had a much greater impact. Time-saving household appliances allowed women to leave the home and join the workforce, nearly doubling potential economic productivity. Also the invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history, and the telegraph had a much more significant impact than the internet. Before the invention of the telegraph in the late 19^th century, it took two to three weeks to carry a message across the Atlantic. The telegraph reduced it to 20 or 30 minutes, a more than 2,000-fold speed-up. While the internet has sped things up further and has greatly increased the volume of information we can rapidly transport, its positive impact on society has so far been fairly limited. Moreover, we tend to ignore its downsides: there is now so much information out there that it has become hard to find reliable information, and even if we find it we don’t actually have time to digest it. As Herbert Simon already argued in the late 1950s, our problem now is that we have limited decision-making capability, rather than too little information.

Freddie deBoer. “The Rage of the AI Guy — I’m only asking you to observe the world around you”. Substack, 4 August 2025.
David William Silva. “I’m Sorry to Burst Your Bubble: You Are Being Fooled About AI, and You Will Soon Feel Really Stupid”. Substack, 9 February 2026.
Another good example of recency bias and epistemic arrogance is the future potential of artificial intelligence (AI), as it is currently portrayed by tech company leaders, as well as in many books, blogs and in the media. Most current incarnations of AI are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), an impressively effective and very useful technology that is explained in some detail by Stephen Wolfram in his book and blog article What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?. As with computers and the internet, here is little doubt that the application of LLMs and AI in general will have an impact on the way we work, especially in jobs that involve producing or rewriting text or computer code, or that involve analysing large amounts of data. However, as Freddie deBoer points out, the current public discourse on AI is saturated with extreme, unsupported claims about AI’s transformative power. Even “serious” publications like The New York Times uncritically promote determinist visions of AI utopianism or doom. DeBoer reminds us that humans naturally believe they live in a uniquely important time. He suggests that many people are frustrated with modern life and the slow pace of positive change, and that they therefore seek revolutionary solutions. Like Ha-Joon Chang, he points out that truly transformative technologies and developments such as automobiles, electrification and effective medicine visibly reshaped daily life, and that AI has not yet done so. The current hype around the potential of AI not so much reflects reality, as more a wish to escape the mundane realities of student loans, traffic, aging, and death, by imagining that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is around the corner and will profoundly reshape our lives. But for the time being, such scenarios are pure fiction, and we will have to deal with the mundane realities of our actual lives. While AI may indeed end up having an impact, we cannot currently predict what its impact will be, and whether it will be positive. And as David Silva points out, LLMs are unlikely to produce anything akin to true human intelligence, and suggesting that it will is mostly a clever marketing ploy by companies like OpenAI and Meta toward the rather more mundane goal of raising funds from investors.

Richard G. Olson. Scientism and Technocracy in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Scientific Management. Lexington Books, 2015.
Olson traces the history of one of the most influential progress-oriented intellectual (and practical) movements of the past century, that of scientific management and technocracy. The resulting drive for industrial efficiency shaped global policy and labour relations throughout the twentieth century. Scientism, the importation of “scientific” (i.e. empirical and experimental, at least initially) attitudes and methods into social and political domains, came to dominate global governance and industry. According to Olson, the starting point for these trends was Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific Management, which subsequently moved beyond the factory floor to shape public administration (technocracy), the arts (Modernism) and diverse political systems ranging from capitalist democracies to socialist and fascist regimes. Olson characterises the “technocratic mentality” by its confidence in “scientific” problem-solving, its dislike of traditions and distrust of traditional ideological politics, and its commitment to material productivity and efficiency over considerations of social justice or democratic equality.
For a short overview of how Taylorism influenced European policies, politics and ideas in the decades leading up to the Second World War, see the essay Between Taylorism and Technocracy by Charles S. Maier (1970). For a less historical and more critical view of scientism and technocracy and the widespread damage caused by their application, see James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State.

Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail Or Succeed. Viking, 2005.
Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee (editors). Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
In his influential study “Collapse”, Diamond argues that past civilisational declines were often driven by “ecocide”, unintended ecological suicide, in which societies inadvertently exhausted or destroyed the environmental resources upon which they depended. Diamond concludes that survival is a “choice” dependent on a culture’s capacity for long-term planning and its willingness to jettison maladaptive core values. In contrast, McAnany and Yoffee’s Questioning Collapse criticises this thesis, asserting that human resilience and regeneration, rather than absolute, apocalyptic failure, is the dominant pattern in history when a social system fails. The critics reframe the abandonment of settlements as flexible mobility strategies used by common people to survive environmental or political crises. Furthermore, they argue that Diamond’s “ecocide” narratives sometimes downplay other documented pressures, such as colonialism and disease. Moreover, his focus on societies having a “choice” overlooks uneven power relationships that may severely constrain the agency of many people in a given society. Still, Diamond’s work is valuable, especially because he compares his case-studies of societies that collapsed with those of comparable societies that that managed to deal reasonably well with similar pressures. Examples of the latter include Tikopia Island, the New Guinea Highlands, the Hopi and Zuni Pueblos, Tokugawa Japan and Iceland. The positive examples highlight the constructive role that forward-looking communities and social leadership can play in preventing decline and in stopping or even reversing resource degradation. Notably, long-term planning is important, as is the presence of effective institutions, the establishment of new norms and values and the alignment of the ruling elites with common interests.
For more perspectives on the subject of historical social collapse, see Understanding Collapse by Guy Middleton, and the academic volume Beyond Collapse edited by Ronald K. Faulseit. See also the work of Peter Turchin above, and Paul Cooper below.

Paul Cooper. Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline. Duckworth, 2024.
Based on his popular and extremely well-researched podcast Fall of Civilizations, Cooper characterises civilisations as large, organised societies and focuses on historical episodes where the social fabric disintegrated, leading to the significant abandonment of population centres. Success and persistence typically stem from ingenious resource management (such as the Khmer’s complex water networks), strategic trade interdependencies, and the religious or divine status of rulers. Cooper argues that eventual decline often occurs when these once-nurturing productive forces turn into liabilities and the society proves unable or unwilling to change course. This collapse is frequently driven by a “perfect storm of calamities”, including environmental degradation, unforeseen climate shifts (e.g. extended droughts) and staggering levels of inequality that destroy social cohesion and the ability to react to crises. Additionally, the disintegration of exchange systems and bad treatment of neighbours can accelerate the unravelling of empires, leaving behind mysterious ruins as an empire’s glory passed from common memory within a few generations.

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Footnotes

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