Cumulative cultural evolution continued through successive rises and falls of cultures-societies. Paradoxically, social collapse is an inherent element of cultural evolution. Increasing meaning complexity is like climbing the peaks of an adaptive landscape: the higher meaning climbs, the more complex it is. But neither people nor meanings know in advance which peaks are the highest and most promising. Sometimes a collapse is necessary to come back down and begin climbing a new, possibly higher peak.
The collapse of culture-societies meant a fall in socio-cultural complexity, but for the people who formed these societies, it meant the restoration of justice and freedom, which were necessary for any further development:
“What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to ‘normalize’ collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order” (Scott 2017, p. 210). “There may well be, then, a great deal to be said on behalf of classical dark ages in terms of human well-being. Much of the dispersion that characterizes them is likely to be a flight from war, taxes, epidemics, crop failures, and conscription. As such, it may stanch the worst losses that arise from concentrated sedentism under state rule. The decentralization that arises may not only lessen the state-imposed burdens but may even usher in a modest degree of egalitarianism. Finally, providing that we not necessarily equate the creation of culture exclusively with apical state centers, decentralization and dispersal may prompt both a reformulation and a diversity of cultural production” (ibid., p. 217).
Collapses and dark ages also create conditions for meaning drift. Meaning drift is a random change in the frequency of a meaning due to the small population among which this meaning is common. Meaning drift results in a small number of meanings being distributed among a disproportionately large number of people. After their dark ages, the Greeks did not return to Linear B script but adopted the Phoenician alphabet (cf. Scott 2017, pp. 147-8).