Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from noted historian and Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
We’re into about the fourth or fifth day of the Los Angeles fires, and people are commenting on the complete systems breakdown.
It’s a word that sociologists, historians, and archaeologists use—“systems breakdown”—but also “systems collapse,” the collapse of complex societies; for example, the Mycenaeans and others. But it’s the idea that the system becomes so complex that very few people operate it.
And when those people are incompetent, and they tend to be bureaucratic and ossified, calcified, then the entire system is so dependent upon them, it collapses.
That’s what we’re seeing in Los Angeles. It is a multifaceted breakdown. The insurance…
