What is decline? We are well-acquainted with the macroscale events associated with the decline of an empire; runaway inflation, high unemployment, deteriorating civic conditions, lack of law enforcement, the subjugation of the capital city to barbarian hordes. The problem with these signs is that as well-known as they are is how useless they are for telling one what steps they can take to protect one’s own family and material possessions. By the time one of these undeniable phenomena sets in, there is relatively little you can do. The decline of a civilization, up to the point that such a decline becomes obvious to all, is marked by small things, particularly little things that get broken without getting put back together again.

Consider a very small, civic-minded social phenomena such as queuing. Standing in line while one waits his turn to order or buy something solves the collective action problem of efficiently and briskly distributing goods to a crowd of people with a minimum of potential for harm or unfair distribution. No matter it may be a relatively small thing which marks the existence of civilization, you don’t know how important or integral such a small collective action solution is to society until you notice them fail. When do we observe queuing dissolves? Under conditions of extreme panic and duress. The dissolution of queuing is not costless, either, as crowds seeking to individually get their hands on some important resource like food are not usually willing to go without a fight, leading to harm, conflict, and the further dissolution of the social fabric from which might be derived important social solutions.  Once you’re in a situation where queuing is, for whatever reason, unable to take place, the likelihood of conflict being solved peaceably and fairly diminishes; civilization is constituted by these simple, elegant solutions to the everyday collective action problems we face as a society.

Disorder tends to disorder, accumulating destruction which entails further destruction; the harder a fundamentally disordered technology is worked, the faster it shall work itself to ruin. However, there is an equilibrium which includes the order of self-propagating forms for these have the power to counter entropy, tending to stick around over time simply due to the inherent tendency of disorder to select itself out of existence, leaving the ordered in existence by default. This is the premise of evolution, and applied to society it is the quickest and most efficient means of explaining at once why a norm has tended to be around (i.e. it is adaptive) and why it should be permitted to stick around. If you find a norm persisting throughout all civilized lands through time and space, this would tend to suggest that norm is a prerequisite to civilization as it solves some collective action problem. In most cases, we aren’t even aware that there is a collective action problem being solved by this traditionally proliferating norms. Did you know that queuing is a collective action solution until it was pointed out that, without it, we would be subject to negative solution games?

Can you imagine how difficult it is to get queuing to spontaneously occur? If you assume the same problem, that of distributing goods to a crowd, and the crowd refuses to be orderly, almost the only thing that will have an effect is the threat of violence, preferably a gun you can fire into the air; otherwise, you will be shouting to the crowd to stop, everyone in the crowd will see that your shouting is ineffectual, and anyway that guy got his Red Cross aid without waiting his turn, so why should I? Typically, before a game is ever even implemented, either the solution shall spontaneously occur because everyone playing the game has had positive and negative reinforcement to instill the behavior required to queuing and the value thereof. Children are not born queuing, and while the tendency to cooperation with other individuals may vary from individual to individual, the tendency to cooperation does not of itself secure the solution, for the solution must be imposed on every individual through means of reinforcement which the individual in question had no say in.

To put it bluntly, collective action solutions such as queuing require the willingness to impose a standard of civic behavior on children and even adults who otherwise show no proclivity towards cooperation. An unruly child will be punished by his parents, an unruly adult might be refused service; each of these involves what would be, without the good in mind, apparent cases of oppression. Who are you to tell that child he is wrong in his behavior, to punish him merely to incentivize him to conform to society? If you wish to see the oppression inherent of making people stand in line to wait their turn, consider the above example in which the only way to impose queuing is with a gun.

Civilization is constituted by just these hundreds of small collective action solutions. When norms deteriorate, that is they become less favorable to the conditions required for the perpetuation of that society’s order, then disorder shall tend to occur in that society, each failing norm eroding at the social fabric which allows a dozen others to proliferate. From the point of view in which gender norms are viewed from the perspective of a potential collective action problem, it may be admitted that intersexual relations, especially those conducive to the formation and maintenance of healthy, fertile families, are just one of those collective action problems which must necessarily take a certain form, for any other forms tend to disorder; the mechanisms which make these gender norms so essential may be poorly understood, but it is still the case that destruction of an order should be harder to justify than preserving that order (the framing of the ‘’marriage debate’’ should be more indicative of the problems of a liberal framework than marriage itself). Spontaneous order is a very precious thing, and a suspicion of norms is a suspicion of civilization, a form of thought which is clearly at odds with the good of civilization. It is probably the case that relatively more civilized societies (taken in a sense relative to what material conditions of that society make possible) will appear more oppressive, but this is because they solve a greater number of collective action problems which allows that society to be more resilient to internal and external forces of entropy. It is when people no longer wait in line that civilization has ceased.