I have long imagined that, to the people who lived through them, the great collapses of history often did not appear as a sudden disaster, but as a period when things became a bit darker and more confusing until one day everything was better again, but somehow different from before. The point of this entry is to ask, if we are in a collapse now, would we already know it, or would everything seem fine right up until some irreversible moment?
Certainly, the deposed rulers, the routed armies, the peasants who happened to be in the warpath of invading armies, and the like would all have felt the collapse of their time as a sharp sting. And for some historical examples, the collapse would have been sudden and precipitous for everyone.
But, in many cases, I suspect the average citizen who went on selling his goods or raising his crops likely saw things differently than we imagine from history books. Perhaps they felt as if they were passing through increasingly tough economic times and periodically received troubling political news that raised real concerns about their futures, but never seemed to affect them immediately. But, they survived in some form and eventually emerged on the other side. Although these events, by definition, would have changed them permanently, they may not have recognized any great change taking place in society at the time, or even during the remainders their lifetimes. (For example, when a bloody world war breaks out, a small income tax is imposed and is greeted as a temporary but necessary part of shouldering one’s burden for “making the world safe for democracy,” but sets the groundwork for a future totalitarian federal government.)
My hypothesis is that, for the survivors and those people of no special importance to history, they didn’t experience these collapses as sudden and excruciatingly painful moments in time while living through them, but as a drawn out period of depression and general hard times that they only realized was part of a momentous change after the fact. Only in retrospect did they see the starkness of their moment in history. Thus, if we are in one of these stages of history now, we may not really know it until some point in the future, by which time the pending collapse has become irreversible.
If so, does this change how we view our goals now? Do we oppose forces tending to lead to collapse, or do we conclude that we cannot prevent collapse and focus our efforts instead on learning how to direct society in a positive direction in the rebuilding phase afterward?
Decline on display
There is a difference between our trajectory today and the collapses and other perilous times of the past. Even in the relatively recent (by historical standards) Great Depression, only a few outlets existed for news and commentary to reach the average individual. Largely newspapers, magazines, radio, and word of mouth filled out his media consumption at the time. Early on in the Depression, he would have had the impression that times were getting bad and people were struggling. He would be aware that the wealthy were losing their fortunes and many average people were losing their jobs, but the wealthy never starved and his friends always seemed to feed their families somehow. The houses on his street still stood, the crops in the field still grew, and he would get by some way or another. Survivor’s bias is involved here, but it is the survivors’ perspective we are interested in.
We see photographs of “Hoovervilles” with dirt-floored shacks where Great Depression era families were said to live in poverty, but surely this didn’t reflect the entire nation. In other places, people went to work and returned home as usual. World’s Fairs were held in Chicago in 1933 and New York in 1939. Olympics were held in Los Angeles in 1932. Films were made, baseball games were attended, Golden Gate Bridges and Empire State Buildings were constructed. When I was a child, I recall asking my great-grandmother, who was then in her 90s, what it was like living through the Great Depression. She answered that it wasn’t so bad, and they grew plenty of vegetables in their garden so they never went hungry. Misery wasn’t universal.
One of the worst times in American history, certainly, but, to a man living through it, would even this have looked like an event that would lead to another ratcheting down of civil order several notches? At no point during it could he have known that the legacy of his time would be the modern welfare state and the incentivization of idleness and all of the ills that go along with it.
Today is different. Media availability is ubiquitous and doom gets attention. Listen to one side of the news, and Christian fundamentalists are transforming the U.S. into a real life Handmaid’s Tale. Listen to others, and we are months away from boiling the oceans off the face of the planet. Others will tell you “our democracy” is hanging by a frayed thread. Others more like me will tell you that a civilized society cannot long survive the assault on meaning and the degeneracy of values pushed by the nihilism of the progressive Left. There is a plot to destroy the fabric of society around the corner of every meeting of world leaders, and a different ideology is at the head of each one.
The data with which to form such predictions is on full display as well. Rates of inflation, household income, fertility rates, demographic change, suicidality, high school literacy, and endless examples of antisocial behavior are all uploaded and commentated on ad nauseum. Where once the only data available were the rumors from a neighboring town about the school closing down, abysmal reading comprehension skills among 8th graders are now simple matters of national statistics.
The new challenge
Unlike past collapses, the next one will be more visible before it arrives. But that doesn’t mean we will see it coming accurately. We shouldn’t find ourselves waking up suddenly in the middle of it one day with no warning that something bad was on its way. But our real trouble leading up to it will be in determining which of the dozen or so doomsday scenarios that are circulating at any given moment is actually coming. In a sense, all sides are constantly claiming “the end is near,” so it is not a matter of seeing a collapse coming, but of recognizing which predictions of collapse are false.
So, what will surprise us will be the answer to the question, “what thing will end up tipping us over into collapse.” We should not be surprised about the collapse itself. We think of innumerable possible causes of collapse, but the fact that so many of them are plausible means we can never know if any one of them will actually occur. Will it be uncontrolled inflation, mass unemployment, hoards of gender-confused children, the boiling over of whipped up hatred against whites, rampant distrust of the medical industry, world war 3, oppressive environmental regulation, majority of the electorate dependent on the welfare state, collapsing birth rates, disruptive technological change, or something we currently regard as still in the realm of conspiracy theories?
We can also recognize the possibility that our predictions of collapse will be self-fulfilling—our predicting it could be the thing that causes it, or at least accelerates its coming. If we see danger on the horizon and bug out all at once, the abandonment of society by decent people may be what pushes it over the edge after all. And this may not even be a bad thing. If the exorbitances of our society are simply filling a bubble that will only be more painful the longer it inflates without popping, then we are talking about a kind of accelerationism. And, in such a case, those who bugged out might find themselves in a stronger position to lead the society that emerges on the other side in a positive direction.
The challenge, then, is to master a state of imminent uncertainty. The near future is unknown other than that it will be troublesome and unavoidable. It is an illogical condition in which to, the certainty of an uncertain future, so there is no logical answer for how exactly to meet it. In absence of a logical answer, I might suggest a poetic one. To defeat a thing, embody its opposite. To overcome imminent uncertainty, embrace eternal assurance. The goodness of your life is not measured by the times in which you lived, but by the nearness to goodness in which you lived during them. If what you leave behind is important, let it be your example of what was right regardless of the troubles of your time.
I recognize the limits of the “moral argument for God.” To my atheist friends, the argument that life is meaningless without God could be met with, “we never claimed life wasn’t meaningless.” Fair enough. But, I think we can all agree by this point that embracing meaninglessness has been a poor strategy for humanity. And if the near future is unknowable, our only hope of preparing to have meaning in it is to look beyond the uncertain future to the permanent things of the world. Whether those are earthbound or spiritual is a question for further deliberation. Perhaps seeking the meaning in the more permanent things of earth will lead to one day finding meaning in the truly permanent things beyond earth.