Resilience is kind of a strange thing if you start to poke and prod it. Take ancient societies, in which most of the population were relatively self-sufficient and produced resources for their own consumption. You could have a major dislocation and people would have to move and migrate, but then they could build their own housing and start growing food again, and possibly hunt and forage in the meantime to get by.
There were limits to this sort of resilience. You start to have more serious problems when there are a lot of people around, and a dislocated group comes up against the boundaries of another group and warfare breaks out, as was apparent when Rome found the need to increasingly expand the state to clamp down on warring neighbors and incorporate further and further reaches of the Mediterranean region into its trade networks, which allowed it to move bulk goods like grain around in large quantities, helping stabilize the state when a given sub-region was experiencing warfare or crop failure or both.
The Roman state is considered by historians as being incredibly resilient for this reason and others, but then the complexity and continuity of this state would begin to pose problems as well, when the entire apparatus was increasingly controlled by a shrinking aristocracy and then military dictatorship and bureaucracy, and the direction of the entire system became increasingly volatile under the strain of civil war and plague and famine. You did start to have the early development of a proletariat, in which people living in the cities would become dependent on the political conditions in the city, and the greater economic conditions of the entire trade work that the cities depended on, and then you would have the described disintegration of polities into "mobs" or otherwise coalescing rogue military bands lead by usurping generals, with the entire system increasingly at war with itself, confused as to what shape it should take or what direction it should go to maintain its stability.
The Roman state went through a series of catastrophic crises and breathtaking reversals, but eventually world events would beat it down enough as a self-regenerating system. After the civil wars of the late Western decline for example, you had the successive waves of bubonic plague that would wipe out huge swathes of the population, and just as things were recovering another wave would come and further frustrate those efforts. And you had the volcanic cooling which caused crop failures all over, stressing people's immune systems and making them more vulnerable to sickness. That larger system change struck hammer blow after hammer blow on the self-generating Roman system, driving it apart and then contributing to its disintegration in the West and its isolation and winking out in the East.
In the modern world, you have what could be described as an incredibly fragile and complex global commercial web of interlocking societies, a vastly expanded and elaborated form of that Roman Mediterranean state and trade networks, all mutually dependent on each other in many ways, though which is also in the process of decoupling and reconfiguring of course.
Most of the world population live in cities now, and theoretically, if you have a major dislocation of a population like this (such as in a coastal inundation event or some such), you can't just have them move and settled somewhere else and have some sort of polity spontaneously take root again. A lot of people don't know how to grow their own food, or grow enough of it to be productive and they also have a variety of modern requirements of living that aren't easily self-generated, especially considering the density of populations in space and the concomitant land zoning and regulation connected to those populations.
In other words: to move modern people and resettle modern people, they have to be "plugged in" to an existing commercial arrangement in which housing and food and utilities can be collectively furnished and permitted. If you can't do this, you have incredible social discord and possible political and economic breakdown.
There is an existing resilience here though in the fact that modern societies, with their wide ranging transportation and communication networks, formidable manufacturing powers, and far flung supply chains (which grow more fragile simultaneously) can continuously move resources around to where they are needed when a given region fails, and produce incredible amounts of often redundant resources and surplus.
But here too this wider system is increasingly fraught and at war with itself as to the nature of its composition and direction, especially as power consolidates and usurps the very life-giving operations of the system itself.
And meanwhile you have a plague of a very different beast, that of the Covid pandemic, which continually and cyclically re-emerges at greater frequencies, not to wipe out huge swathes of population, but to steadily eat into the entirety of the populations' many faculties simultaneously weakening the system through time. And then there is the matter of the steadily warming climate, causing increasing chaos and volatility and squeezing environmental resources ever more every year. And there are plenty of other stressing dynamics that I won't get into now, but that have been well-covered here.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to tell just how much strain the system can really take, and what it will really do as things continue to deteriorate, and what things will eventually look like. John Michael Greer provides compelling descriptions of the population contraction and resource depletion that will place real constraints on what the greater system can do to reconfigure itself over time, and what that might look like. And Ian Welsh has begun a fascinating exploration of theoretical political and economic principles of societies further along their curve of contraction. Which I think are great places to start.
Still, from this vantage point, the tip of this precipice is a strange place to be. How strange a thing, this resilience that we are always chasing and then forgetting. What will it all do in the coming decades?
