If you frequent online dissident circles, you’ll soon encounter the idea of the collapse. Though devised by history scholars a century ago, the idea that civilization now faces a great decline is popular with ex-Trump supporters alienated by the MAGA movement’s failure. Embracing the collapse, they say, is the final red pill.
Who can blame them? Clown World stubbornly resists all opposition. The Moral Majority failed. The Tea Party failed. Attempts to retake legacy media failed. Online movements failed. Building new platforms failed. Sending Trump to reform the system crashed and burned down the remnants of democracy.
The prophets of the collapse see these signs and conclude that the current system is broken beyond repair. Or perhaps, a system designed to do the will of the people has been usurped by a machine engineered to suck all value out of the middle class and siphon it to the elite.
Mistaking the problem for garden variety corruption was where Conservatives went wrong. Corruption means an institution has been perverted from its original purpose. There’s still time to set it back on the right track. Our present kleptocracy was built to immiserate us.
Such a system cannot be reformed from the inside. That’s why every self-styled reformer Republicans elect immediately becomes a uniparty stooge.
Another disastrous mistake Conservatives make is assuming the gangster state is the cause, not a symptom of, our woes. They should know better. Because the Founders warned us what would happen if the people’s moral character dipped below the minimum level needed to maintain the system. You can see the results outside your window.
The truth is, barring a miracle, the divine chastisement we’ve richly earned will come upon us. Judging by the situation on the ground, it’s already begun.
Most people think of the collapse like falling off a cliff. But history shows that’s not how societal decline happens. As the Z Man says, civilizational collapse is more like falling down the stairs. It’s a long flight, but you only tumble a little way before hitting a sudden stop. People mistake those respites as a return to normal, but it’s just one of many landings on the descent. A people can stay on one of these plateaus for a while, but sooner or later they tip over the edge again.
What does this process look like in real life?
Not like Mad Max–not at first.
The first thing to go is social trust. Shared understandings and the ability to trust one’s neighbors are the fuel societies run on. “They took our jobs!” was exactly the kind of lame economic argument Conservatives were conditioned to lose with. The real threat posed by diversity was the documented erosion of social trust and cohesion evident in neighborhoods as they diversified.
If you’re Generation Y or older, you remember how neighborhoods where men borrowed each other’s lawnmowers and kids played outside after dark gave way to blighted tracts of rentals with barred windows. Now magnify that to a civilizational scale.
We’re already seeing processes everyone took for granted slip out of the sphere of knowledge. It’s more than Apple stripping features from each new iPhone. Planes are falling out of the sky, and ships are plowing into each other at sea. We could not go back to the moon if we wanted to.
Even the loss of social trust is just an instrumental, not a primary, cause of the Collapse.
Before we lost faith in each other, we lost faith in God.
Just as Jesus Christ remedied the original and worst Fall, He alone can save us from the loathsome state we’ve dug ourselves into.
It’s all downhill from here unless we each stand up, take up our cross, and make the penitential climb back toward the state of grace.
How far can we fall before we repent?
For a vision of the post-future that’s drawing closer every day, read the latest book in my mecha thriller saga Combat Frame XSeed: SS
For what it’s worth I think there’s another movie with a slightly different — and I think somewhat more accurate — read on how things might play out. Battletruck, from 1982. Known in some countries as Warlords of the 21st Century.
Thanks for the recommendation.
I’ll use this as a chance to bore you with my crackpot theory of the Mad Max series. It was inspired by a similar theory that says the first movie is the mundane (that is, real world) story of Max, who goes crazy and so subsequent films set in the post-apocalypse world are really Max’s complex delusion born from his insanity.
In my theory the “Mad” in Mad Max is not insanity, but the mortal sin of Wrath. In the first movie (again, the mundane world) he extracts cruel revenge from his enemies, but he is not fully culpable because, you know, they do murder his wife and child. Subsequent movies are Purgatory and for his purification, Max must, like Moses, lead others to their promised lands (in Road Warrior to the northern paradise, and in Thunderdome, “Tommorow Land”). And just like Moses, Max never gets to enjoy those promised lands.