Nov 5, 2024 7 min read

Civilization, You, Me, Collapse, and Your Life

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Hi. How’s everyone?

How do you feel today? As we left in the morning, Snowy and I, I noticed a strange feeling in the air. People looked stressed, morose, worried. They were oddly quiet. Speaking in hushed tones. I’m not even in America at the moment, but soon enough, I realized: the election. It’s stress is being felt around the globe.

So. How do you feel today? Or tonight? On the eve of…all this?

Most of us, of course, feel anxious, worried, even frightened, upset, and bewildered.

I want you to sit with that feeling for a moment. Just let it…wash over you. As difficult as that is.

Let’s talk about all this together.

The Election is What Civilizational Collapse Feels Like

Much of what I discuss with you can often feel abstract.

But on the eve of what might well be the collapse of American democracy, it shouldn’t be.

That feeling you have, we all have, that’s echoing around the globe tonight?

That’s civilizational risk.

It’s a term I sort of coined that can feel remote, because it can seem to operate thousands of levels above the mundanities of everyday life. But that’s not how I mean it at all.

I mean this feeling you and I and the world all have right now.

Let me define it for you a little more tightly now.

The feeling that everything’s on the edge. Everything.
That suddenly, through one wrong move, it could all be lost. All of it.
The future, tomorrow, today, us, you, me.
And, period, full stop, that could be it, no turning back.

Do you feel that way tonight? I’d bet that many of us do, whether or not we’re trying to hide it and smile grimly through it all, or whether we’re in the arms of those we love wondering, waiting, watching.

So. Civilizational risk isn’t some kind of abstract theory or Grand Concept.

It’s an experience.

That we are all sharing right now. Right now, in this very moment.

There’s a good reason for that. You and I everyone sensible knows that if the election goes the wrong way, suddenly, we are on a very, very different trajectory. As a civilization. Not just in America. That’s why even here in gentle Europe, people were quiet, worried, and tense today, in ways I’ve rarely seen before. They know that they’re on the cusp of being affected, too, in grave, and perhaps, permanent ways.

I emphasize that to highlight the stakes here. America is the world’s hyperpower, it’s only one, really, and if this election goes the wrong way…you can finish that sentence. The point is that none of us are sort of exempt or immune from this eve of destruction (or maybe some sort of last minute salvation.)

We are all experiencing this together.

In different ways, of course. Nobody’s experience of anything is precisely the same, not even a song or a movie. But what we’re all feeling, this sense of stress, worry, anxiety, despair—that’s what civilizational risk is.

I want you to know that so all this becomes real for you.

Because the point isn’t to sort of prove how smart I am with some of Grand Theory.

It’s very different, and much simpler.

None of Us Should Be Going Through This

None of us should be going through this.

This is the 21st century. Human civilization is older than even that date. Conservatively, by five millennia, generously, by ten or fifteen.

And yet here we are, all sharing this experience of this immense, catastrophic, life-changing risk.

It shouldn’t be like this.

Let’s go back to my criteria, to make that clearer.

We shouldn’t have the feeling that:

Everything can fall apart, everything, that we value and cherish.
That it can happen—snap—just like that, in the blink of an eye
And that it might well be permanent, irreversible, or at least leave deep enough scars that it’ll never be the same again.

We should not be here.

Now think of how much we’ve normalized the experience of civilizational risk, the stress and despair we’re all feeling at the moment. It’s coming to exist in manifold ways, that are becoming omnipresent, too. Think of the way that climate change’s leveled cities and regions lately. The way that inflation and stagnation ravaged economies over the last five years. The way that young people around the globe struggle to the point of going numb, while middle classes haven’t made it, and upward mobility seems no longer to exist.

Think of the way that human progress itself came to a great juddering halt over the last few years, the grandest measures that we have. Or the way that people are losing hope in the future, as a consequence.

None of this is right.

This should not be our daily lived experience.

But increasingly, it is.

More and more, our days and our nights are consumed by the stress, despair, and anxiety of civilizational risk.

So what do we do with it?

That’s the question.

And the reason that I discuss all this with you isn’t just to lament, or grieve, or complain.

It’s so that we do something about it.

The Choice We’re Going to Have to Make

I believe that we now have two choices before as individuals.

We can change our lives, so that we don’t experience this crushing level of civilizational risk.

Or we can sink with the ship.

And that doesn’t mean that everything goes haywire tomorrow.

But it does mean: do you really want to go on living like this? With this level of anxiety, stress, despair? Facing the specter of constant upheaval, ruin, this feeling that it can all go wrong to the point everything’s lost tomorrow, period, full stop, and that’s it?

I don’t.

So I think we all have a choice to make. Either we master this new challenge before us, civilizational risk, and harden our lives against it. Or we let it…ruin us. As it’s currently doing.

Now. Our leaders and institutions aren’t going to do much about civilizational risk. Even if the election goes the right way, it’s highly, highly unlikely that the Democrats are going to patch up the middle and working class to the degree that all this doesn’t recur in short order. Or take climate change, inequality, downward mobility—any number of existential challenges.

Our leaders and institutions aren’t up to the task. They’re not going to fix it. The best we can hope for is this. An election where nobody’s really inspired, but hey, at least one side isn’t going to destroy human civilization as we know it because it worships Adolf Hitler, chuckle in horrified ironic despair.

That leaves us with the choice above. Either we master civilizational risk, or it goes on doing what it’s doing right now, which is ruining our lives.

We can go on pretending that we don’t have to make this choice. But in the end, of course, that too is a choice, and not a wise one.

On a night like this, I want you to feel that, because I think now you can grasp it, in a way that’s much more real than before.

How much longer do you want to go on like this? How many more of your days on this earth do you want to spend this way?

I think we need to change. Radically.

Life Shouldn’t Feel This Bad. And When it Does, it’s Time to Change

So how do we do that? That’s why I said: sit with the feeling. This is tough stuff.

Overwhelming stuff.

And we are going to need to think about our lives in very, very different ways if we want them not to end up sort of imploding in an age of collapse.

Hence, I’ve been discussing some new concepts with you. Radical responsibility, radical freedom, radical action.

The point is to construct our lives in such a way that civilizational risk is minimized, averted, so that we’re exposed to as little as possible of it, and instead, we have room to…be something better than these balls of stress and despair. When we do that, then we can…prosper, maybe. Or at least kind of breathe a sigh of relief. To get there, we are going to have be a lot smarter than our failed leaders and institutions, and, perhaps, even than those who still have unbridled faith in them, if we want to go on living in a way that the word means something.

That’s going to take new principles for constructing these things called lives. And we’ll talk more about those in the coming days. But just think for a moment if you’d taken radical action to get out of this mess a few years ago. Would you feel so stressed about it all right now? That’s kind of my point. We are going to have to forge very different kinds of lives now, and that should begin for you today.

Like I said, how much longer do you want to go on like this?

None of us can sort of escape civilizational risk. None of us are above it. And no, the point isn’t to end up Going to Mars, or uploading your brain into the cloud, or whatever silly fantasy is consuming such types lately. That’s not really living either, is it?

The point is life. Living it in a civilized way, if you like, or a full one. Not this half-hearted, numb, wounded thing we’re becoming right now.

Life in that way is eluding us at the moment, as everything…

It doesn’t even have to fall apart, for life to feel this bad, does it? It just has to sort of be at this edge, where it could.

But this is how things are going to be for the next few decades, which is the rest of what we have.

And so we are going to have take ourselves off that edge. If we can’t do it as societies, which we’re not going to do, then we are going to have to do it as individuals, groups, and communities.

Life shouldn’t feel this bad, my friends. I want to hug each and every one of you and tell you that. We deserve better.

Can we still live lives that feel alive in an age like this? That’s the question before us. Tonight, I want you to feel it, in a way that changes you. Don’t let this be your future anymore. Take my hand, and let’s forge a better one together.

The Election is What Civilizational Collapse Feels Like

None of Us Should Be Going Through This

The Choice We’re Going to Have to Make

Life Shouldn’t Feel This Bad. And When it Does, it’s Time to Change

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