For such brilliant insight, Tainter shows a disappointing inability to grasp the implications of his own theory at the end. The difference he draws between the collapse of isolated civilizations (such as Rome) and peer polity systems (such as the Maya) is arbitrary. We are dealing with “global” systems, whether we are dealing with literal islands, “islands” isolated by distance, geography, or culture, or the entire globe itself. The global system of complexity must collapse as a system. No single part can collapse in isolation, this is true. This is a direct result of the fact that civilization must always pursue complexity (thesis #13), and must always grow (thesis #12). Thus, when New Orleans collapsed, the United States government eventually moved in to restore its former level of complexity. This is one, arbitrary level we could look at; or, we could look at the arbitrary level of nation-states, and cite the collapse of the USSR and its immediate reabsorption into a similar level of complexity.
However, it would be obviously untrue to conclude from this that collapse is impossible. The only caveat is that the entire system must collapse as a system, not as individual, constituent parts. Thus, the Roman Empire collapsed as a system; the Mayan city-states collapsed not as individual city-states, but as a single system. We do not face the collapse of the United States or any one nation-state; we face the collapse of industrialized society itself. The scale of the nation-state has become arbitrary as well. As globalization proceeds, multinational corporations have risen to an unprecedented level of power, bisecting nations and undercutting their influence (see Jeff Vail, “The New Map: Terrorism in a Post-Cartesian World”). If nation-states are vertical powers, then multinational corporations create horizontal powers across them. This trend raises the question of whether we still truly live in a peer polity system at all, or if we are seeing the rise of some new level of complexity in such organizations as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — the inevitable conclusion to intensifying complexity, with the emergence of a single, global civilization? Ultimately, the distinction is still a semantic one, however; peer polity systems often behave as though they were a single civilization, because the political alliances and economic relationships between them fuse them into a single system of social complexity.
As we have seen, the crisis of the diminishing returns on complexity is not only present, it is global. The same problems can be seen in every country; we have highlighted the United States here only for its greater wealth of available data, and, as the “capital” of the globalized civilization/peer polity system, it provides perhaps the most striking example. We have passed the point of diminishing returns for agriculture, information processing, bureaucracy, technology and the economy itself. All of these are intertwined, as we saw in the previous thesis. Having passed the point of diminishing returns, the collapse of such a system is inevitable.
