Yep, the lesson is clear - inability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances leads to death and destruction. Interesting that the author talks about empires in the Middle East and theocratic death cults like the Mayans as examples, since neither form of governance is easy to change even when confronted with obvious problems.
But that wasn’t his point. Too bad he missed the obvious.
"The epidemic of cocoliztli from 1545 to 1548 killed an estimated 5 million to 15 million people, or up to 80% of the native population of Mexico (Figure 1). In absolute and relative terms the 1545 epidemic was one of the worst demographic catastrophes in human history, approaching even the Black Death of bubonic plague, which killed approximately 25 million in western Europe from 1347 to 1351 or about 50% of the regional population.