This is how civilization collapses today

“You don’t seriously think…civilization…is going to…collapse? Do you? LOL! Dude!! Here, have a beer!” It’s a question I get asked these days, sometimes angrily, sometimes mockingly, sometimes like I’m crazy — rarely seriously. My answer — said as gently as I can — tends to go something like this.
What exactly do you imagine “civilizational collapse” is? This strange, sci-fi term you might be hearing more and more, by overly concerned and earnest people like…well…me? Maybe you think, having watched too many Hollywood movies, and enjoyed them, like me, that it’s 2012 meets the Purge by way of Noah. Hold on — but isn’t reality far outpacing fiction these days?
What does a “civilizational collapse” look like? It looks like this. 

Here and now. It’s staring you right in the face. What a civilizational collapse looks like is beginning to happen already. America, China, India, Australia, Britain — it’s happening everywhere, in every way, too, economic, political, social, cultural, and ecological. Life as you and I think of it will never go back to anything that we still wrongly consider “normal.” And yet most of us go on as if…it will.
The last couple of years. That’s civilizational collapse. At least the beginnings of it. A global pandemic made worse by our nationalism, selfishness, and incompetence. A fascist political movement in America that shows no signs of slowing down. A working class that seems to be rejecting democracy, almost worldwide. China with a million — or maybe three, who really knows? — in concentration camps. Billionaires getting richer during a pandemic — who could easily pay to vaccinate the world, but don’t lift a finger. Need I go on? Flood, fire, famine, assassination, chaos, fanaticism, injustice, crimes against humanity, superstition, extremism, might making right, catastrophe, calamity, powerlessness, despair, silence, complicity — just a few features of a collapsing civilization. And also of…right now.
Only, probably — understandably — you’re hell bent on not quite seeing the dots above, or how they connect. I don’t blame you. Who’d want to grapple with…everything collapsing? LOL. It would be funny if it weren’t true. And so, mostly, we’re not grappling with it. We’re like crabs in the proverbial pot. The temperature’s rising. I saw more tweets about the new royal baby than anything else. Wait — how about the billions who could have access to Covid vaccines if billionaires gave a minute fraction of their wealth to help them? How about, oh I don’t know, the fact that without vaccinating the entire world, we keep breeding new strains of Covid, like the Delta variant, that is vaccine resistant? Forgotten in 24 hours, it seems. I digress — but maybe you see my point. We’re wrapped up in so many layers of fatuous nonsense — celebrities, scandals, intrigue, outrage — it’s hard to even know where to begin unpeeling them.
Why are we burying our heads in the sand? Isn’t the reason obvious?Thinking about…catastrophe…isn’t exactly a pleasant thought. Especially when…mostly, we’re already busy trying to survive the collapse of our societies, ways of life, economies — and that’s terrifying enough, thank you very much. Collapse is like the air we breathe — and so we live lives of perpetual anxiety, despair, trauma. Who wants to add to that burden? Who has the strength to go to that crap job every day…feel a little terrified every night about how you’re going to pay the bills…what happens if you get sick…if your kids get ill…and then have the emotional and cognitive bandwidth to care about…the plight of the world? Nobody, really.
And so we don’t. Like I said — perfectly understandable. But I think that we have to grapple with it. Because this bizarre, surreal affair called civilizational collapse is the story behind every headline, the truth inside every half-spun narrative, the great theme of all the endless dystopian news. And so we must begin to grapple with it — gently, gently, slowly, slowly, giving ourselves room and time to take it in. Maybe even holding each other up, for strength.
What does civilizational collapse mean, in a deeper way? It means three kinds of intertwined collapses. 

Economic, ecological, and social. And those, my friends, are already upon us. The hard truth is that those forms of decline and degeneration are here to stay — and they are not magically going to “fix themselves” or “get better” anytime soon.
(Let me explain. And like I said, take it slow, and be gentle with yourself as you read this. It won’t be easy. But aren’t you better off knowing than not knowing? So let me begin with the obvious one — ecological collapse.)
Severe climate change is already baked in now. Humankind is not going to stop something like a rise of between 2 to maybe 4 degrees.That might sound minor-league — but it’s ruinous. What are the everyday consequences, maybe for someone like you? Well, more of what you see around the globe. Weather events so calamitous they need new names. “Megafires.” The “red sky.” Megafloods and megatyphoons. Then there’s the famines and plagues all this devastation will bring with it. Not to mention the waves of mass migration. Life is not going to be “normal” ever again, in simple terms of “how we live on our planet.”
Ecological collapse is already here. The only question is whether it will be merely catastrophic — or genuinely calamitous. Think about mass extinction. The rates are beyond anyone’s capacity to process. Numbers like 75% of insect biomass lost in the last few decades alone. Seventy five percent? How long does that mean until…everything’s gone? The truth is that tipping points are likely to be hit. The insects die off, which kills the topsoil, which destroys the food chain. The bees dies off, and nobody pollinates the flowers, which ripples through the ecosystem. We don’t “know” — in a narrow, punditly sense. But we do know, in a truer one: life as we know it on this planet can’t exist without ecosystems woven together in incredibly fragile ways. Kill off the insects, the bees, the oceans, the reefs — and probably, sooner or later, the system itself comes crashing down. We know that much — it is a dead certainty. The oceans turn to acid, the rivers turn to dust, the harvest can’t grow in the cracked earth.
Now. That sounds horrific. It is. But we’re only barely beginning.
Let’s consider the next form of collapse, which is economic.

Climate change traps the world in a kind of vicious economic cycle. Instead of investing in more hospitals, universities, science labs, libraries, town squares — we are forever trapped rebuilding the ones that have just been destroyed by the latest mega-fire, mega-flood, catastrophe. Therefore, our living standards never really improve. We begin treading water. We are simply trying desperately to maintain our quality of lives on a planet that has turned vengeful and wrathful, destroying our systems over and over again. Whatever surplus we have as societies must be put to use rebuilding what has been lost to fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane — instead of building more, better, newer, expanding social contracts, enlarging social systems. Our living standards stall out — we don’t live longer, happier, better, saner, more peaceful lives — even if we’re victorious. Progress comes to a halt for an age.
But that’s the good scenario. The bad one — the more realistic one — is this: fatal, savage, vicious, and violent regress.
The global economy is falling apart, in a way that nobody much has really noticed very much yet. The rich are getting mega-rich. But the world’s proles, the average person, sees less and less of a share of the global economy every single year. Hence, they are growing discontented, frustrated, angry, disappointed. And they turn to demagogues, who teach them to hate — instead of ever really improve their lives, selves, or societies.
To really understand this trend, think about America. It’s the world’s first poor rich country — something new and gruesome. It’s the richest country in the world — but that’s an illusion. The average American lives in effective poverty — unable to pay their bills, hence, dying in debt. Such a life is an anxious, desperate, frightening thing. And so Americans turned, en masse, to a demagogue, who told them they’d “be great again” — all they had to do was hate subhumans. Today, that lunatic is starting up his rallies again.
Do you see how economic collapse worked in America yet? Let me make it clearer. The average American can’t raise a few hundred dollars for an emergency. Their life expectancy, happiness, real incomes, savings are all falling. They have little chance to live lives of dignity, freedom, and purpose. They will have to choose between “healthcare” bills and their homes, or their savings and their lives, and so on.
Meanwhile, a tiny handful of Americans have grown obscenely, surreally, bizarrely rich. Bezos, Gates, and Buffett are worth more than the entire US education budget — each. Wait — a person that’s worth more than how much a society invests in all its kids? What the? But that is what economic collapse is, my friends. Because these men are “worth” so astonishingly much, the rest of America doesn’t have enough left to invest in education, healthcare, childcare, retirement, elderly care…and so America doesn’t have any of those things.
See the vicious spiral at work? The rich get richer. Everyone else gets effectively poorer. 

That leaves societies unable to provide basic things for people anymore, like healthcare or retirement. But without those things, living standards never rise — and people never get richer. Bang! Catch-22. Like it has for Americans…life simply falls apart. If you believe that America never really became a civilized country…or that it went in the wrong direction, away from ‘civilization,” as a verb, a process, a way of life…then you have an inkling of what civilizational collapse really is, too. The socioeconomic part of it is a vicious cycle that leaves nations, one at a time, and then the globe, too poor to ever invest in much of anything meaningful, worthy, or genuinely valuable. Progress turns to regress, without investments by people in each others’ healthcare, retirement, safety, sanity, wisdom, education, and so forth.
What about the sociopolitical collapse of “civilizational collapse”?Poverty, powerlessness, and hoplesness fuel fascism, authoritarianism, nationalism, theocracy, and every other form of political regress — at light speed. People who are growing poor and desperate turn to hating and dehumanizing and demonizing those even more powerless and disposable than they are — the others and strangers in their societies. In America, it’s Mexicans and Latinos, in India, Muslims, in China, Uighurs, in Britain, Europeans. But the theme and the dynamic is precisely, exactly the same.
It’s not a coincidence these countries have all collapsed politically, into various fo