On collapsing bridges

Jared Diamond postulates in “Collapse”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670033375 why societies and civilizations fail.

One interesting point is that the overall trend of mankind is not inevitable progress, as many people tend to assume – broad historical trends show that societies grow, flourish, and often times come crashing to a halt. Diamond explores this in Collapse, and points out a number of reasons why societies fail, and it looks like Pakistan has a distressingly high number of the qualities attributed by Diamond to a collapsing society.

“Collapsing bridges”:http://pakistaniat.com/2007/09/01/pakistan-karachi-shersha-bridge-collapse-dead-infrastructure-killed-bridge/ is relatively minor in the scheme of Diamond’s book, but ironically this particular collapsed bridge was inaugurated just a month ago by President Dictator Musharraf who is himself collapsing.


Another article which I read recently pointed out that the default action of all things is to tend towards entropy, and it is only the concerted efforts of a whole lot of people over the past which has pushed the human race so far – minus that effort there is no law which says the race (or country in this case) will not retrogress and slip ever backwards. Devolution, anyone?

The fact that either Benazir or Nawaz will be back in power is a sure sign that the entropy in the Pakistani system is increasing at an alarming rate – the system is broken and the players are too busy gaming it to notice till it’s too late.

h4. links

* “Why Societies Collapse: Jared Diamond at Princeton University”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s707591.htm

Leave a Reply