I present a perspective on why societies collapse from the perspective of modern global society but specifically today in America, a simplistic view based solely on the concept of property ownership.

Innately, we are programmed by nature to understand that we can only own what we create. This instinct within us is supplanted with the notion that we can own what we buy by society.

It is important to understand this, as it is fundamental to the argument presented here.

In other words, we instinctively understand that we can't own something if we didn't make it. We can accept trading, but the notion of owning something we did not create or trade for simply doesn't register with us. It has to be programmed into us.

Society then, differentiates from nature in the respect that you can buy something and therefore own it, which of course applies to land where it does not otherwise. But the important thing to note here is that ownership is changed from creation to purchasing. The definition of wealth universally is the ability to create. In society, this becomes the amount of money you have as you no longer need to create something, you simply buy it.

As a whole, society, because it sees land as something which can be owned, uses the earth's resources. But, because it also sees humans as a resource, it buys their labor. Society from this perspective then, can be seen as exploiting both nature, and itself.

Within society, this looks like exploitation, labor, theft, and transfer of wealth. Labor, while seeming normal, is exploitation of humans as capital, even if it is now socially acceptable because it is compensated for with tokens which are valued by society as wealth even if not instinctively understood as such. So just as society will take from the earth, so will it take from those within itself.

Now think of the transfer of wealth through various means, including exploitation - which occurs when labor is insufficiently compensated as always must occur if there is profit involved. But look specifically at theft, or rather, think of any kind of exploitation as theft, because inately, that's what exploitation of any kind is.

Society then has three basic classes of people: those who gain by exploiting, those who lose from exploitation, and those whose net sum game is neutral, that is, who in the long run neither lose nor gain from exploiting others or nature.

So, here is where we realize why societies collapse. If society is exploiting it's own, and instinctively those who are in the class who lose out in the long run understand that this isn't right, those people are not going to continue to allow themselves to be further and further exploited. The more unequal societes become, the closer they come to collapse. And as the point of an exploitative society like capitalistic society is accumulation of wealth; this also means transfer of wealth. If this continues, it will reach a point where enough people will have lost enough to understand that society is not there to protect them, and society will collapse in one way or another.

Think about the perspective of those who are continually exploited and who must be further exploited for the need for those at the top to continue to accumulate more wealth. These people are constantly exploited, constantly losing what they create. If they have no money, the only wealth they have is what ability they have to create things that money otherwise buys. When those people no longer have the means to feed themselves, they must do something to survive.

These people must survive and to do so they have only two choices: self reliance, or exploitation as a means to acquire the wealth necessary to survive. In other words, crime - from the perspective of society.

Once too many people are forced to exploit in order to survive, society begins the process of collapse. The threshold of course varies by culture as culture influences the perception of survival. "Just getting by" has significantly different meaning in India as it does in the United States of America.

The irony is, society is designed by people who will always win because they have no contact with their instincts. They are completely programmed by society for one simple reason: they are not even human beings. Yes, they are genetically and physically identical to everyone else; but they lack empathy; which gives us a powerful connection to our instincts, instincts which society attempts to program out of us, and does successfully in people who lack empathy.

Understanding this, we can clearly see that the problem with society is that it was designed for - and by in fact - people who lack empathy, because people who lack empathy will always win out in a paradigm of exploitation. Empathy simply won't allow one to exploit another, unless ignored or overcome by programming. Even then, it is a weakness, a reason to pause and think which gives an opponent the upper hand.

Societies then, will always collapse if exploitation is allowed, as empathy is a defining human characteristic. And no matter how hard those without empathy try, they simply cannot keep the majority of people from acquiring empathy, and enough people will eventually figure out that society is a losing game and either walk away or rise up against and collapse the society.

And you wonder why I live on a sailboat that is completely self-sufficient...