Collapse Blindness, The Vicious Cycle of Self-Destruction, and Why America’s Flickering on the Edge

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? Many thanks to all who’ve joined so far, welcome new readers, and thanks again old friends. Today we’re going to discuss…

Collapse. At macro and micro levels. Because the last few weeks have been a kind of object lesson in how fragile things really are at the moment.

Why America’s Flickering From Stability to Collapse 

America’s been on a roller coaster ride lately. Trump surged back. Meanwhile, the media did their best to character assassinate Biden, which they still are. Trump and his ilk planned a kind of social revolution by way of Project 2025. And the Supreme Court mounted a kind of rolling judicial coup. 

Today? Things are poised on a knife edge. One day’s up, the next is down. A few days ago, pundits and a failed media were clamoring for Biden to drop out. Today, after a disastrous speech by Trump, the pendulum’s perhaps swinging the other way. Polls offer little solace. People appear confused and bewildered. The polity’s stuck. Social groups are at each others’ throats.

What is social collapse? This is social collapse. 

Not so long ago, we discussed the notion of “flickering.” A state that systems go into, oscillating between poles, if you like, before they finally flicker…out. And you can see that literally in America’s gyrations, or perhaps convulsions. One day, Biden, the next Trump, up, down, this, that.

Another word for all this is “volatility.” And what we face here, in this situation, is a sort of extreme volatility. If Biden’s re-elected—or whomever replaces him is, if he drops out, not that he necessarily should—then democracy prevails. For a while. At least until the next election, by which time, it’s all but certain, the MAGA movement and its heirs will contest it all over again, perhaps in even more severe and arduous ways.

What happened at the RNC? Many likened it to a…Nazi rally. There people were, waving “mass deportation” signs, while speaker after speaker recited all kinds of half-truths and Big Lies. So is this…Nazism? That’s the wrong question, really. Every incarnation of fascism takes its own shape, and that shape confronts a society with its demons, shadows, and worst aspects. In all this, we see volatility at the extreme: one side willing to rip society apart, and to hell with any form of social stability.

So all this is what social collapse is. Of course, if you’re a long-time reader, you know by now that I predicted all this, and we’ve been discussing it for quite some time. But it’s not some kind of abstract prediction anymore. Now Americans are experiencing it, and the experience is…

The Vicious Cycle of Social Collapse

I’m going to write more about this in coming days, but perhaps one of the most important aspects of living through a social collapse is the feeling of it. Because those feelings are overwhelming.

Dread. Anxiety—not quite severe enough, so let’s say, distress. Panic. 

Social collapses in this way are self-fulfilling phenomena.

What do I mean by that? As things fall apart, people grow overwhelmed. By all this dread, panic, fear. And as they do, of course, it’s all that much easier for fanatics and lunatics to seize power. As people begin to panic, the center ceases to hold, and the center and the left fail to cohere. They’re consumed, instead, by panic-driven infighting. This candidate can’t win! That policy won’t work! We can’t prevail! 

And as that happens, any semblance of a functioning opposition to fascism, authoritarianism, and extremism falls apart, in this frenzy and hysteria. 

You can see precisely this setting in in some corners in America. And that’s why the best advice, which you’ll hear from scholars and survivors of social collapse, in unison, is to stay calm. Keep your head in the game, and your eyes on the prize. And focus.

The point of fascism is to terrorize a society into giving in, so that elections, even if they happen, cease to matter. This is the chief danger for America now. That in the panic of social collapse, the center and left simply cease being able to function in mature ways, and instead, consumed by squabbles and internal bickering, simply fall to pieces.

I want to emphasize that point. In periods of social collapse, the chief danger is panic. Not in the sense of bank runs or Hollywood movie Purge-style mayhem. But panic in the way of norms breaking, cohesion shattering, and solidarity splintering. Panic over who can win, and by what margin, panic with the feeling that the victory of the bad guys is all but inevitable.

This way, social collapse becomes a self-accelerating, self-fulfilling, and self-perpetuating phenomenon. Something like an avalanche, started by a few shifting sands. And so this feeling that you might have right now? It matters, profoundly, but only in the sense that it must be faced down, and enough of a society’s sane side must do it, too, for democracy to prevail.

Otherwise, panic, dread, and fear—they’ve always been fascism’s great levers.

Collapse Blindness, or Where We Are Now

It’s been a while since we discussed how we’re doing at the civilizational level. That’s because there’s been so much to focus on at the smaller level of nations, from America to Europe. But let’s take a moment to do a brief glimpse, and tie it back to what we see in America.

It’s gone almost unremarked upon, by climate change is now hitting us hard. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say, harder than was thought, even just a few short years ago. Temperatures have soared to nearly 1.7 degrees centigrade above average, crushing the once optimistic target of limiting warming to just 1.5 degrees. And that, of course…hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Meanwhile, extreme weather’s sweeping the globe. From floods to megafires to droughts and beyond. By now, sadly, we’re sort of inured to it—the media barely covers it very much, or at least in a sophisticated way, and so a sort of sense of weariness has set in. But the fact is that we’re now normalizing what are pretty breathtaking levels of climate catastrophe. Think of the extreme heat searing America at the moment, or the Middle East. Consider how many regions in the world are running out of water, some of those being scorched by extreme heat.

On the horizon loom a range of new pandemics, which are of course linked to and fueled by climate change. The hotter it gets, it seems, the more risk of more severe pandemics we produce and encounter, and of course, Covid’s hardly “ended,” as we suffer yet another wave of it. 

The point is that our greatest risk to civilizational integrity and prosperity—and perhaps even survival—is accelerating. And we’re so beset by other crises that we barely even talk about it anymore. Isn’t that sort of funny? And yet it’s also understandable—America’s so obsessed, rightly so, with its democracy surviving, or collapsing into fascism proper, that climate change barely registers, even as mega-scale impacts rake the nation.

And all this is another kind of civilizational risk in itself. What should we call it? Perhaps something like collapse blindness.

What I mean by that is this. We only have so much attention, so much sight. And if we’re focusing intently, exclusively, on the most urgent immediate threats, then of course, perhaps we have few resources, cognitive, emotional, relational, attentional, to give to the rest. And yet, they, too, are very real. So here we have something like a dilemma, or maybe just human fragility: we can only focus on so much, and it’s human to focus on the immediate threat, especially if it, too, is existential.

And yet all this breeds collapse blindness. Let’s go back recently in American history, to illustrate it a little more deeply. What happened over the last decade? America was blind to its own collapse. When figures like me or Sarah Kendzior or a long list of us pointed out that all America’s socioeconomic indicators pointed to the rise of fascism, we were swiftly dismissed. America went collapse blind.

The risk of fascism was marginalized and ignored. Why? Because America’s media and punditry and even much of its intellectual class and so forth were focused intently on a very different set of issues, which was sort of preserving the primacy of neoliberalism and the American model of hyper capitalism. No criticism was to be allowed, and certainly not the idea that capitalism gone haywire implodes into fascism.

All that led to collapse blindness. And in that sense, collapse blindness is a Big Problem of the systems we have. They tend to become fixated on their own survival—even at the expense of the collapse of the whole, the larger ecosystems which support and nourish them. Of course, our civilization is an example of that, depleting the natural ecosystems on which it depends. But so are our smaller systems, from political parties, to corporations, to economies—all of which are also depleting their particular ecosystems, whether those are society, prosperity, well-being, and so forth, to preserve the advantage, primacy, and survival of power.

All of that is leaving us collapse blind. As a civilization. As organizations. As societies. As communities.

But what about as people? Because more and more, people know that things aren’t going well. That they are going historically badly. And that things must change. And as our institutions go on failing, because they’ve gone collapse blind—like America’s media, for example—the last bulwark of perspective, sanity, and truth is simply people themselves. 

That’s a tall order, given human frailty. But, as the existentialists knew, there is more than just frailty to us. In that very frailty also lies human possibility.

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