Some of you may be familiar with Dmitry Orlov. He's one of the immanent collapse doomsday sayers, like Joseph Tainter and some of the Cliodynamics people. Engineer by education and WITH a sense of humor (as you'll notice in his excellent talk here):

So, anyway, this is from "The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit":

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out and access to capital is lost.

 

Stage 2: Economic (Commercial) collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

 

Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

 

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

 

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.” Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I can die tomorrow.”

 

I have taken the list of human virtues from Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People, which I discuss in detail in the case study on the Ik, which follows the chapter on cultural collapse. The motto is from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.

As we can easily imagine, the default is cascaded failure: each stage of collapse can easily lead to the next, perhaps even overlapping it. In Russia following the Soviet collapse, the process was arrested at Stage 3: there was considerable trouble with ethnic mafias and even some warlordism, but government authority won out in the end.

While attempting to arrest collapse at Stage 1 or Stage 2 would most likely be a waste of energy, it is probably worth everyone’s while to dig in their heels at Stage 3, definitely at Stage 4, and it is quite simply a matter of physical survival to avoid Stage 5. In certain localities— such as those with high population densities, as well as those that contain dangerous nuclear and industrial installations— [….] avoiding Stage 3 collapse is rather important, to the point of inviting international peacekeepers or even foreign troops and governments to maintain order and avoid disasters. Other localities may be able to prosper indefinitely at Stage 3, and even the most impoverished environments may be able to support a sparse population subsisting indefinitely at Stage 4.

Although it is possible to prepare directly for surviving Stage 5, this seems like an altogether demoralizing thing to attempt. Preparing to survive Stages 3 and 4 may seem somewhat more reasonable, while explicitly aiming for Stage 3 may be reasonable if you plan to make a career of it. Be that as it may, I must leave such preparations as an exercise for the reader. My hope is that these definitions of specific stages of collapse will enable a more specific and fruitful discussion than the one currently dominated by such vague and ultimately nonsensical terms as “the collapse of Western civilization.

I think that's a fairly accurate and usefully layered model of how things do actually work. And once the processes which trigger a collapse begin, the fall further and further down every next layer does not stop until caught and something done about it. In Russia, it was caught on the political level of collapse by we know who. Some places are in perpetual societal collapse, so-called assabbyia black holes - where somehow no lasting meaningful human cooperation and collaboration can form around trust between individuals as such. He last level sounds a lot like a Hobbesian "war of all against all".

On stage 5, we've clearly been already fucked back in 2008, if not even before that. Finance derives from economics, so this is where things get even worse - depending, of course, on where you are and where you live. But I am already hearing talks about the "food safety" of the country both back home and here in Cambodia. And back home because all home production, market and exports were destroyed systematically and almost everything gets imported. Economics also means adequate and thought through allocation of resources assuming constraints and scarcity, as well as re-distribution (of resources, wealth and goods). Castro, for example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, told his people to start growing food on every empty and unoccupied piece of land they see, otherwise famine is around the corner - and Cuba survived, and is nowadays well-known for its healthcare (despite some of the heaviest embargos and what not). 

The political, there we're all by now perfectly aware what it all means and can more or less diagnose the situation. In my country that layer has already collapsed long ago. Here, in Cambodia, it hasn't because of the very specific and peculiar kind of dictatorship, political culture and nominal monarchic system they have. Socially, too, Cambodia is rather resilient, while Bulgaria - the North in particular, is to a large extent destroyed in that department too. And culturally, well, again... I mean, I went away (again) because I see my own country already a failed state and collapsed society, as well as disappearing people. But it is far from being the only case out there....

So, what is important, for a society to be resilient to collapse? The contrast I can make with Asia for the time I have lived here - Cambodia, Vietnam and Taiwan, is that, first of all, written Chinese is an incredible and brilliant invention. It conveys and immediately reveals concepts and ideas, in all their both concrete and elusively nuanced context, showing etymology, intention and continuity all at the same time. The collective memory and philosophy is encoded in the language itself, which is why they don't repeat the same mistakes every few generations. Then, religion-wise, they - in Taiwan at least - have preserved Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, which are not separate, but work in parallel and serve and fulfill different social functions (rather than feeling they should get rid of one to make place for the other, e.g. poly-theistic cosmologies with monotheistic religion, etc.) And most Asian countries have a tradition of strong State, rule of law, and social consensus when it comes to states of exception/emergency (as in, catastrophes are not as politicized and they trust their governments are not lying to them).

And these are some of the many reasons I am here with the intention of staying here. Because I don't think that in the future on the horizon things will be pretty in what's ahead, and Asia seems to be one of the calmer, more stable regions of the world, despite whatever other problems they may have.