Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the seventh of a series of articles on some of these signposts.
Click on the image to enlarge.
I‘ve learned better than to try to confidently predict the future. While there is pretty overwhelming evidence that the collapse of our industrial civilization, and its constituent systems, is nigh and inevitable, exactly how and when this collapse will play out remains anyone’s guess.
But we can get some clues by looking at what happened in previous civilizational collapses, and in near-collapses like the Great Depression, and in more localized collapses of industrialized countries over the past century. And we can get further clues by looking at what is happening right now in more struggling nations (Sri Lanka and Haiti being two of the more well-documented instances) which are already experiencing repeated waves of collapse from which they look unlikely to ever recover, and also at nations (like Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria) that have been deliberately and methodically ruined and ‘collapsed’ because more powerful nations wanted their permanent demise. And there are even more clues when we look at local areas in even the most affluent nations — impoverished rural areas, abandoned inner cities and (in Europe) desolated and isolated suburbs that governments no longer even pretend to serve or protect. What they have faced, or are facing now, is pretty likely to be indicative of what we are all going to face in the years and decades ahead. I’ve been writing about this subject for over 2o years, and the writing is pretty clearly on the wall.
My earlier articles in this series have homed in on a few of the more obvious and concerning symptoms, signs, and precursors of the broader economic, political, social and ecological collapse of our now-global and massively interdependent civilization. In this article, I will try to put those symptoms and signs in the context of the many other elements and indicators of multi-system collapse — the so-called ‘polycrisis’ or ‘metacrisis’ — to set the stage for exploring some of them individually in future articles.
I’ve tried to capture this overall set of indicators in the chart at the top of this post, which is an update to charts I produced with a similar objective in 2014 and 2018. All such diagrams are of course extreme oversimplifications of the many factors contributing to collapse, their consequences, and how they are interrelated.
I’ve also tried to distinguish what I call intermittent signs of collapse — the more spectacular but usually somewhat temporary crises that arise and grab all the headlines — from the more chronic and persistent signs, that tend to creep up on us gradually, and don’t get as much media attention for that reason, especially since they are mostly predicaments that have no ‘solutions’ in any case, so no one really wants to hear about them.
What’s missing from this chart (because 3D charts are beyond my pay grade) is that these signs of collapse (1) are occurring at different times in different places, and (2) are occurring (and are likely to continue to do so) in waves, with periods of slow disintegration, followed by periods of chaos, and then by hiatuses of relative stability, before the disintegration resumes. I’ve tried to depict this in this chart:
Click on the image to enlarge.
That looks like it might be a manageable roller coaster, until you consider that for the past couple of centuries, we’ve been living in a ‘hockey stick curve’ world where every aspect of our lives, from our population to our economic production and consumption, looks like this:
Click on the image to enlarge.
Trying to track and chronicle collapse is further complicated by the fact that those with the yardsticks are deliberately lying to us about the state of our economy, using trumped-up numbers for unemployment that are 1/5 the real rates (the real rate being ~27%), and for inflation that are 1/3 the real rates (the real rate being >10%), just as examples.
Nevertheless, looking at the leftmost two columns in the chart at the top of this post, it would be hard to argue that we’re not already seeing evidence of most or all of these signs, in many parts of the world, much of the time.
In future articles, I’ll be exploring some more of these symptoms in more detail. For now, though, just a few thoughts about how this seems to be unfolding somewhat differently from how I thought it would even just a few years ago:
- The rapid increase in political instability: Despite the tumult and chaos of some of the wackier and more ideologically extremist political ‘leaders’ of the past century — like Reagan, Mulroney, Thatcher, Harper, both Bushes, and Bojo Johnson, to name a few — government administrations generally were able to continue to function and do their jobs passably well. But with the advent of TrumpMuskKennedy and their counterparts in other western countries, intent on destroying governments and privatizing (or simply getting rid entirely of) almost all government services, already vulnerable political systems have been destabilized and brought into such disrepute (largely enabled by the broad swath of mainstream media) that I sense our political systems are much more fragile, and much more likely to collapse more quickly, and not recover, than I would previously have thought.
- The erosion of the rule of law: In many countries in the west, even those who despised the rules, regulations, and procedures that are part of a functioning political, economic, and social system, respected these rules and regulations and the outcomes they produced. The stability of all these systems depends on those of all stripes, throughout the world, honouring these laws, and resisting attempt to usurp power and ignore them. That’s why we have institutions like the UN and UCC. But now we have corporations and governments priding themselves on being ‘above the law’, ignoring and rejecting long-standing and hard-fought basic principles of acceptable behaviour, compromise, and justice. It’s hard not to believe that this erosion of respect for ‘opponents’ and laws will not accelerate the collapse of these systems.
- The return of ‘forever wars’ and nuclear brinkmanship: War-mongers, especially when they are also fear-mongers, hate-mongers, liars, and quadruply incompetent (lacking cognitive skills, knowledge, experience, and mental health) are always a serious threat to the functioning of the ‘ship of state’, and those suffering from these unhealthy and debilitating qualities seem to be ascendant in many countries, as distrust is deliberately sowed among citizens already filled with anxiety about our future, and as we collectively flail about looking for someone or something that might possibly be better than our current hopeless lot. This near-nihilistic trend does not bode well for us.
And all of this is happening when we’re only getting the first inklings of how catastrophic ecological collapse is going to weigh in, as we struggle with accelerating economic and political crises. And if political and economic collapse causes such enormous disintegration that it leads to social collapse, then, as Dmitry Orlov warned us twelve years ago, that collapse is likely to be much nastier than most of us might have hoped. The current genocides offer a possible glimpse of what we might all be facing if such social collapse occurs.
Taken together, it’s hard not to get the sense that we might be sliding into one of the periods of chaos pictured in the ‘roller coaster’ chart above. Some screaming might therefore soon ensue, as the pace of collapse accelerates for most of us, at least for the next while. Hold on to your seats.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Pollard publishes How to Save the World, a chronicle of civilization's collapse, creative works, and essays on our culture, searching for a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works. For more information about his personal journey and current wok, click here.
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