It’s a topic you can’t mention in polite company. People will look at you like you’re a little strange, and probably call you depressing (it’s a compliment, by the way.) One of the great elephants in the room of now is that we live in an age of collapse.

Planetary collapse, economic collapse, social collapse, political collapse — what marks out this age as special, different, distinct is that all these things are like tidal waves converging to form one great tsunami of ruin. Incidentally, that’s why it’s so exhausting and draining that you should pat yourself on the back just for getting through the day.

An interesting thing about it all, though, is that none of these collapses are what you might call. The planet isn’t melting down because a giant meteor struck it. The global economy isn’t flatlining because the harvest failed. Politics isn’t coming apart because a band of aliens shot particle beams at entire cities. Instead, what’s genuinely bizarre, weird, and gruesome, about this age of collapse is that all its collapses — every single one — are self-inflicted. They’re the products of human choice and thought and action.

If that doesn’t strike you as strange, think about the causes of previous collapses. Plague, flood, famine, pestilence. The old biblical punishments. Societies thought themselves accursed by the gods — such was the uncertain hand of fate. But our age is different. All these many forms of collapse are things that were made by us.

And yet by us, and I don’t mean you and me. I mean people I’ve come to call the catastrophists. The catastrophists are a rising force in the world. They are people who seem to welcome collapse. Who yearn and long for it. Who pine for it ardently like a long lost first love. I don’t mean that in a poetic way, but in a lethally real one. Catastrophists are people who vote for, sign up for, applaud, cheer — or worse yet, lead their societies towards collapse. The lunatics, my friends, are runnning the whole hospital.

Let’s do a few examples of catastrophists.

In America, there’s the GOP. This is a political party that’s so ignorant, so foolish, so backwards, that while the entire rest of the rich world invested in social scale public goods, like hospitals, schools, retirement, and childcare, sending everyone else’s quality of life rocketing upwards, the GOP championed something like Somalia on the Atlantic. Every man for himself — there shouldn’t be any such thing as government, because heaven forbid anyone should pay taxes. I guess those roads and schools built themselves, but I digress.

Everyone with a few brain cells and a moral soul left is disgusted by the GOP. But it’s not just because they backed a President who just might be the worst person on planet earth. It’s because, if you think about it, they backed a President who just might be the worst person on planet earth so they could get on with the noble crusade of…collapsing their very own society. That’s how dedicated they are to the cause.

Hence, what used to be a kind of cult of thinly veiled supremacism surrounding the GOP has by now morphed into a kind of doomsday cult. A cult of people who seem to genuinely revel in and cherish the end of everything resembling civilization. Go ahead and pick something as bizarre and gruesome as you can think of — they’ve got there first, and they love it. Refusing to vaccinate their kids? Stocking up on guns? Arming teachers? And so on.

Do you see what I mean? Where once an American conservative might have been happy denying his neighbor healthcare — today he’s probably hardly likely to think that’s enough: he’d like to put an AK-47 in his kids’ teachers hands, if he believes in sending little Johnny to school at all. That’s the slow but sure growth of catastrophism — from a political extremism based on destroying all forms of government, to a doomsday cult that believes in tearing down civilization itself.

But America’s hardly the only home of catastrophism these days. Take my second example, Brexit.

What’s awesomely fascinating, in a kind of spellbindingly morbid way, isn’t that Britain’s leaders decided to essentially leave the EU — it’s that they decided to leave the EU and then promptly just..walked away. So in a few weeks, Britain’s going to face severe shortages of medicine. Of food. Of basic things, from insulin to cheese to fruit.

And instead of planning for this disaster, instead of trying to avert it, instead of even warning people about it, what are Britain’s leaders doing? Nothing. Except sneering at Europe — and welcoming the catastrophe.

Do you see what I mean by catastrophism? Let me sharpen my point. American catastrophism is hyper-aggressive: it’s a thing of commission. American catastrophists want to tear down what’s left of a functioning society (which isn’t much) — and they’ve succeeded, at light-speed. Why should I pay for your kids’ school?! Uh, because public schools are kind of a foundation of civilization? So what?! Keep your dirty hands off my machine gun!! And so on.

British catastrophism, though, is the opposite — and in that way shows us just how subtle catastrophism can be. The Brexiters aren’t tearing down society so much as just letting a gigantic wrecking ball swing through it, while they alternate between pretending not to notice, denying it’s there, and cheering it on. What else would you call a country that’s about to run short of medicine and food — whose leaders are either busy picking fights with European diplomats, or calling the whole thing make-believe, while entire industries already have begun to melt down? British catastrophism is a thing of omission, not commission — a kind of unbelievable, incredible, mind-shattering negligence, of such an epic scale that it probably hasn’t been seen since Rome burned down and Nero giggled and fiddled.

There are plenty, plenty more forms of catastrophism where those two came from, though. There are the billionaires who are quite happy to see the world burn. There are the people who cheer on climate change. There are the folks who don’t vaccinate and school their kids. There’s the rise of the neo-neo-Nazis (oh, sorry, I hear the New York Times calls them the “alt right”). And so on. When you begin to look for it, you’ll see catastrophism everywhere at work around us.

(Why would anyone pine for the catastrophe, you ask? Because every martyr and every saint needs a test, to prove the strength of their faith, over the demons and the monsters. What catastrophists all share in common is a deep-rooted belief in social Darwinism — that some people are born inferior, and other superior. When you believe that — well, you must prove your superiority in some way, mustn’t you?

The problem occurs when a social Darwinist finds himself a loser in life, in society, in culture. What is he to do? He could revise his beliefs — but that would mean thinking, which is hard work. He could accept his loserdom — and some do, like the “incels.” But that way lies the beginning of catastrophism — if you’re a loser, and you believe that being a loser is innate, it’s only natural to want the catastrophe to befall everyone else: your purpose in life is finished. Or he can reach the compromise most people who end up becoming catastrophists do: he must not really be a loser — the world just needs a bigger, tougher, harder test, to sort the pure from the impure. A final test, in fact — which only the bravest and strongest and toughest can survive. Bang! Catastrophism is born.

Because catastrophism is born of Social Darwinism, it has deep roots in the English-speaking world, which is where that line of thought went the deepest. That is why America and Britain in particular are like societies whose minds don’t function anymore: their social ability to think, reason, and judge has literally been torn apart by catastrophism and catastrophists. But catastrophism is just what happens when nations that believe aggressively in Social Darwinism find themselves in decline. Such societies will always beckon the apocalypse as a test of their waning strength — just to prove that they are really not the losers and weaklings they so despise.

You should see in America’s and Britain’s sad, weird, stupid, funny examples just how dangerous catastrophism is. It’s a force with the growing power to destabilize and topple even the most powerful and richest societies. And it’s not just a problem for them — but for all of us. How are we going to attempt to heal a dying planet…to repair a broken global economy…to reimagine work and business…to redesign democracy…if enough people have given up to the point that they want the apocalypse of all those things?

One of the great challenges of this age, therefore, is taking back the world from the catastrophists. From those who can’t cope with the challenge of living in an age of collapse — and so they are welcoming and applauding and cheering every kind of collapse thrown at them, instead, so they can prove they are tough and strong and brave enough to survive the end of the world, never once understanding that no one should have to. Such people have become suicidal in the truest way — but not just for themselves, for all of us — and the truth is that they need help. What they don’t need, though, is power. They aren’t responsible enough to use it wisely, nor are they wise enough to use it responsibly.

So our challenge — those of us who still believe in these little things called civilization, progress, and humanity — is taking back the world from those who would rather the planet die, democracy burn, and prosperity turn to dust — than all those things growing and blossoming once again. It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be simple. And before you ask me — well, genius, how — let me gently say: the first step is understanding that the rise of catastrophism in an age of collapse is something that every single one of us should know, think about, and understand.

Umair

February 2019