The Growing Reality of Civilizational Collapse

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? 

Welcome back old friends, welcome new readers, please join me on Bluesky if you haven’t already.

Today we’re going to continue discussing what we have been lately: everything from Havens, to collapse, to making sense of a world going haywire.

It’s been a while since I began discussing the term “civilizational collapse.”

You could be forgiven if you’re an old friend of mine and even you raised an eyebrow. Was I…serious? What did I mean, anyways? Did I really mean something like “civilization collapsing”?

Or was it just some kind of way to needle or provoke you?

Recently though, I think you’ve had a sudden thunderbolt of understanding that I was, well, serious. And…prescient. 

I don’t like writing in the way I have to these days, but.

Now, you can see civilizational collapse beginning to happen, suddenly, snap, just like that.

Take the example that sent shudders through the world this weekend. Polio and smallpox, among other disease, returning, to a certain very large country, for political reasons.

That’s a vivid illustration. Are we still civilized if we’re deliberately encouraging the return of some of humanity’s oldest and deadliest maladies? 

Forms of Civilizational Collapse

So by now you can see that no, I wasn’t kidding. 

The example of polio and smallpox returning is a very real example of civilizational collapse, one that I think we can all understand, at least those of us who are thoughtful people, that sort of immediately jolts the mind awake with a certain horror. Is this really happening? How did we get here?

I’ll come back to this example, but first let’s go through a number of forms of civilizational collapse.

Even a few months ago, like I said, you could be forgiven for thinking I was exaggerating or joking—but I’d bet you’re not laughing now. Like many people, you’re probably filled with a deep foreboding. How far is this going to go?

A better way to think about that question is to understand the various forms of civilizational collapse.

What is civilization, anyways?

We can define it in many ways, of course, but my purpose here isn’t to have some kind of academic debate. It’s just to make sense of the world with you intelligent and thoughtful friends of mine.

I think most of us would agree that civilization, at least in the sense of our modern one, and probably in the sense of many older ones, too, can be defined by the following institutions.

• Public goods, like public health, in our modern context, or in the ancient one, aqueducts and fountains
• The rule of law
• Inalienable rights
• Democracy 
• Market economies
• Property rights 
• Norms of peace
• Independence and personhood
• Progress, not in the political sense, but just in the one of human emancipation from bondage

I could go on, but I suppose that’s a good enough short list of basic features.

And that list also illustrates what “civilizational collapse” is.

Now think of the example of polio and smallpox resurgent, needlessly, not due to poverty or  natural calamity, but deliberately. Why is that prospect so strange and frightening?

Because it makes a mockery of many, many of the elements on even that small list of civilization. Public goods, in this case, public health burning. Millennia of progress eviscerated, vaccines being one of humankind’s greatest accomplishment, perhaps the greatest one, period. 

Now let’s expand that view a little bit.

What other forms of civilizational collapse are there?

Let’s go through a few, not for the sake of theory, but because the risk of all this is what’s growing, and falling squarely on people’s shoulders. After all, if I’d said to you even last year, watch out for polio and smallpox, you would’ve laughed at me, yet here we are.

• Breakdowns in the rule of law
• Economic crashes and financial crises that lead to long-run periods of stagnation 
• Depressions
• The erasure of property rights and basic freedoms
• Political fanaticism 
• The normalization of violence and brutality
• Widespread regress

We can also think about that little list another way. Civilizational collapse is a larger form made up of various smaller forms of collapse. Social collapse, economic collapse, political collapse, cultural collapse.

And of course these are all interlinked. In the polio and smallpox example, a generation of kids getting fatal or lifelong diseases will have pretty dire economic consequences, too. Zoom out, and consider the way that downward mobility fuels rage and resentment.

Micro and Macro Collapse

Of course, that feels really, really incomplete, doesn’t it?

That’s because I’ve left out—deliberately—the two biggies, that are already in the back, or maybe the front, of your mind.

Collapse is a spectrum. At one one is the stuff I’ve discussed with you so far—the micro end of the spectrum. But what’s at the other end? Perhaps the defining example is World War. 

Capitalized because we’ve had two of them so far, and in those periods, civilization was a thing that indeed did collapse.

Now, we are on a trajectory that all our macro trends say should culminate in another World War. From trade wars becoming depressions to simmering conflicts to angry youth to declining  middle classes. History says in no uncertain terms that these trends lead to capital W World War.

And of course there’s another form of macro-scale civilizational collapse we’re contending with, albeit, so far, at micro scales, which is climate change. It’s causing an accelerating intensity and frequency of calamities, which are still localized, but growing, and soon enough, they will cross a threshold into a macro scale. One city flooded is a disaster, but what’s ten, fifty, a hundred? Our language becomes inadequate, which is why I had to coin terms like civilizational collapse.

So at the serious end of the spectrum, the macro end, civilizational collapse is made of ruptures like World War or climate catastrophe. We’ve had World Wars before, and it’s so easy to imagine what civilizational collapse means in that context—life stops being civilized. Climate change is a bit more abstract, and in that regard, we probably have to think of ancient civilizations snuffed out by it.

Exposure, Collapse, and You

So what’s my point? Just to scare you? 

No, I’m trying to teach you.

The point is that civilizational collapse is very real. We’re under the impression, still, many of us, that things are going to somehow revert to normal or what have you, and of course, they’re not. 

More and more of the weight of all this, which is civilizational risk, is going to fall on people’s shoulders. And they’re going to pay the price, in increasingly dire and severe ways. From losing their assets and savings, to their careers going up in flames, to watching their societies crash and burn—and worse, they’ll feel shocked, blindsided, and say, I didn’t see it coming.

You shouldn’t be one of them.

Now you should take the time to think all this through, and understand your exposure to all these forms of civilizational risk. That’s true for families, for individuals, for institutions as big as insurance companies and banks, for corporations—for all of us.

This age is going to be separated into four categories of two kinds of people. People who don’t make it, and those who do. Those who don’t, plenty of them, will just be unfortunate—they won’t have the resources to have stood much of a chance. Those who do, some of them, will be lucky. In the middle are a large number of people who do have some level of resources, and can still marshal them in ways that minimize their risk, and maximize their agency.

And that is the key here.

Minimize Risk, Maximize Agency 

I led you through all this because I want you to understand the stakes, and the contours of what the future holds—but also because I want you to grasp the conclusion.

Minimize risk, maximize agency.

This should be your mantra, your motto, your beacon. 

Those who can attain this will make it through the troubles and struggles ahead—which have only, the truth is, barely just begun. Remember the 1930s, and contrast them with the 1920s, and ask where we are in that cycle now, and how long it takes to culminate.

I don’t want to sound like I do when I write essays like this. It makes me uncomfortable to take on this role and to speak these words. So consider that I write them as a friend, whom history has put in this place—not as someone who wanted to say any of these things at all. 

Minimize risk, maximize agency. That is the strategy that will separate winners from losers in this age, whether they’re people, countries, societies, blocs, nations, institutions.

Your challenge, and I’ll help guide you through it, is bringing it to life in your context. That brings us back to Havens. Thank you for all your emails, if you asked, mine is just umairhaque at gmail—give me a few days to begin replying to you, after I put some meat on the bones of the little idea of Havens, which is a good one, I like it, and it resonated with you too, I need to sort of distill and reflect on it a little bit and see if we can all use it as a kind of path or map.

Here’s a big hug from me and Snowy!

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