How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed By Jared Diamond Summary

“America’s ‘Oh Sh*t!’ Moment”, written by Niall Ferguson, a historian who teaches at Harvard University, in 2011, explores why civilizations collapse, and how America can avoid this. He does not focus only on America, but many civilizations in the past that have collapsed. Niall Ferguson is the author of Civilization: The West and The Rest. The article is creatively and cleverly written using the metaphor of modern technology to describe the way in which the societal collapse occurs. This shows that the article was written for adults who are highly educated and understand and relate to technology. The article discusses the possibilities of what complete collapse would look like in American society. I believe the author successfully

Capitalist Society in The Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller "Death of a salesman" is a "tragedy of a common man". Throughout the play the reader sees how Willy Loman struggles to achieve something, which is beyond his capability. He has a dream, the American dream of success and accomplishment. And yet, he is not able to ever thrive because his idea of how to succeed is wrong. The times have changed, the play is set in the period of an economic boom and increasing desire for material goods in America and the Loman family is now living in a capitalist society, however, Willy seems not to have realised that things have changed.

Jared Diamond is a world renowned scientist, author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and currently a geography professor at UCLA. Of his six books published, we will be looking at the last chapter of his fourth book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In this book Diamond utilizes the comparative method to find resemblance in past societal collapses with our current society. In the chapter entitled, "The World as Polder: What Does it Mean to Us Today," Diamond points out that there are indeed many parallels between past and present societies and that our modern day society is currently on a path of self destruction , through examples such as globalization and the interdependency of each country.

Imagine a world where there were no problems, and everyone is happy. Few societies have not even been close to being this perfect. Great societies fail due to weak security systems, poverty, and inequality. The failed societies of Ancient Rome, Africa, and the dystopian novel Divergent by Veronica Roth, are all examples of great societies failing because of these three reasons.

John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” is a story about the undoing of modern civilization, but it also explores the genuine definition of civilization. By telling the story of the degradation of society and including depictions of life both before and after it, Mandel is able to explore society and culture through different perspectives. Mandel, however, gives us a glimmer of hope in her dystopian universe. “WHAT WAS LOST IN THE COLLAPSE: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty” (Mandel 57). The novel deduces that while civilization has been created by humans, civilization itself is not what makes us human. In addition, during the collapse, many people can not accept that civilization has truly fallen. This can be shown in the novel’s quote:“‘Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?’... ‘it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?’” (Mandel 248). Finally, while we must not take technology and civilization itself for granted, we must also realize that real relationships and human interaction are more important than what is on our

In “The end s of the world as we know them” article Jared Diamond looks at the collapse of several historical societies and the factors that caused their collapse. The factors are:

The book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, examines the nature of success. He challenges the commonly held misconceptions about why people succeed and fail. Gladwell states that success results from a mix of factors such as opportunity, time, luck, heritage, and many others. Gladwell builds his argument by examining many “success stories” throughout the book. Gladwell’s overall message in the Outliers is that no one is self-made, no one can take one hundred percent credit for their own success because they had so form of help. After reading the book, I could not help but to agree with Gladwell. He helped me to better understand the steps it takes for a person to become successful.

The theory of degeneration sparked public discourse and fear of falling civilization. Julia Reid says the fin de siècle was

In his book, “A Short History of Progress”, Ronald Wright argues that the way things are progressing in society today very closely mimics the progress of our ancient ancestors. If we keep this up, we too will fail just as they did. Much like ancient civilizations, we have become victims to the ideology that we are making progress and have turned a blind eye to certain flaws; the irreparable damage with which this mentality threatens us will prevail in the end. Wright states that “if we see clearly what we are and what we have done, we can recognize human behavior that persists through many times and cultures…this can tell us what we are likely to do, where we are likely to go from here” (pg. 2). In other words, although we cannot foresee the

The word “collapse” has a number of connotations associated with it. Some view it exclusively the degradation of societies of the highest order. Others see it as the complete disintegration of economic prospects and commerce. Some even think of it political ruin with the demise of states and ruling factions that maintain order. The most general definition for collapse can includes elements from these three viewpoints. American anthropologist and historian Joseph A. Tainter is best known for his writings on societal collapses. In 1988 he published his most widely recognized work, The Collapse of Complex Societies.

In the essay, “The Art of Failure” by Malcolm Gladwell we are given the meanings of “choking” and panicking while being in a stressful situation. Gladwell began to illustrate his writing by giving us other people's story, with the stories of Jana Novotna, John F Kennedy Jr, to name a few. Gladwell starts off by telling the story of Jana Novotna a professional volleyball player who developed stress when she saw who her opponent was, as she was getting near her chance of winning the championship; she lost it when “choking” took over her.

“If people destroy something replaceable by mankind their called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable by God, they are called developers.” – Joseph Wood Krutch

The humans living in that period were unable to supplement their previous diet, which was rich in protein, and their culture was devastated as a result; this then, is an example of progress (better hunting methods) that led to the failure of an entire culture as its problems were left unsolved. In his third chapter, Wright examines two particular civilizations that thrived but eventually declined due to resource depletion. What is interesting is the similarities that can be drawn from the examples of Easter Island and Sumer, like the widespread ignorance of the masses to actively prevent the abrasion of their land, the perpetual idleness of people to not do anything even when there was enough time to stop the tragic collapse, to current-day situations of people who even flat-out deny climate change and claim it to be part of the left-wing agenda. On Easter Island, it was over-logging that led to their collapse, since as their ecosystem withered away, logging became scarce, and wars broke out for those sparse resources. In Sumer similar environmental destruction occurred (i.e. overgrazing, land clearing), which should alarm the world population of today of what may become of the high levels

The sociological perspective was defined by Peter Berger as seeing the general in particular. What this means is that by using the sociological perspective, sociologists can observe trends by looking at how individuals within groups act. Sociologists use the sociological perspective to observe how society impacts individuals, whereas psychologists observe individuals and how their own experiences influence their lives and choices. Someone using a political perspective would think about how the political world can influence individuals, and someone with a religious perspective would think about how the presence or lack of religion would affect an individual.

Deforestation for agricultural purposes and the expansion of human habitats is happening around the world. This