A Reading List for the End of Civilization

22 books for turbulent times

Not long ago, I got touted in The Atlantic as the ultimate source on the death of civilization. I responded with denials, and even offered to take a polygraph test.

I’m innocent. I’m just a patsy. They’re trying to pin this on me—don’t believe them.

Then I pulled out the ultimate alibi: The death scene was a set-up. Civilization isn’t dying—it’s coming back. Just give it time.

I spelled out the reasons in this article.

Ah, but I still had some things to explain. That’s because The Atlantic published evidence of my complicity—all because of 41 mysterious books.

Some of my books on societal collapse

Here’s what they pinned on me:

Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.

He welcomed me into his suburban-Texas home and showed me to a sunlit library. At the center of the room, arranged neatly on a countertop, stood 41 books. These, he said, were the books I needed to read.

The display included all seven volumes of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; both volumes of Oswald Spengler’s World War I–era tract, The Decline of the West ; and a 2,500-year-old account of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who “was the first historian to look at his own culture, Greece, and say, I’m going to tell you the story of how stupid we were,” Gioia explained.

Gioia’s contributions to this lineage of doomsaying have made him into something of an internet celebrity….

In the aftermath, everybody was asking about those 41 books. Did I really have a reading list for the end of civilization?

With some reluctance, I agreed to share it. I’m doing that today.

But don’t hold it against me. Books are just circumstantial evidence. I didn’t actually kill civilization—I just read about it. I never left my comfy chair.

It’s true that I earned a living, some years back, as a kind of futurist. This is a valuable skill in turbulent times. I probably handled this vocation with a more holistic approach than others. That meant that I took old books and primary sources very seriously, and used them to interpret current day statistical, anecdotal, and theoretical information.

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In my world, game theory and data analysis co-exist with history, philosophy, and literature—some of it two thousand years old. If you can bring those together, you may gain insights that others might miss.

That’s what I try to do here at The Honest Broker.

With that proviso, I’ll recommend the following books on societal collapse. It’s not the full 41 volumes mentioned above—but below I will discuss 22 of those titles.