Understanding Our Collapse, and Where it Goes From Here

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Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new readers, and a big thanks to all.

Today we’re going to discuss…collapse blindness.

It’s been a decade since I predicted what I then called American collapse.

My warning was simple—but, as we’ll discuss, indigestible, incomprehensible, unbelievable.

America would—was at grave risk of—collapsing into authoritarianism and fascism.

And I gave a timeline, too.

About a decade.

My warnings, as old friends know by now—and even to my own surprise, sometimes—have an eerie way of not just coming true, but coming true right on schedule.

So a decade ago, I warned of American collapse. Fast forward a decade later, and you can watch people (not me) comparing a Presidential Rally to 1939’s Nazi rally.

Bang. It’s all happening, right on cue, just as I said.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves me in an uncomfortable place.

I want to take a moment to help you understand me, a little bit, and why it is that America got here.

Collapse Blindness, or Why America Failed to Understand its Own Collapse

I understand myself, now, back then, as one of America’s best thinkers in my generation. And even then, I imagine, I sort of knew it. That was why I gave these sort of swashbuckling, maddening, crazy-sounding warnings. I was utterly confident in them, and I am now. I don’t mean that in the egomaniacal way it sounds, but in the opposite one: so what? it didn’t do any of us any good, did it? LOL. Not me, not America, not democracy, not anybody.

So today I write to you from a different place. Not a hesitant one, but a reluctant one.

Even back then, as I gave this warning, I understood what was about to happen.

Almost nobody would be able to understand it.

Certainly not the institutions and leaders that needed to. America’s liberals, the Democrats, it’s columnists and what passes for its intellectual class.

I understood then that something was going to happen that I wouldn’t like. Collapse blindness. They would attack me for issuing these warnings. They’d see it as a kind of class defection. I was almost one of them, almost, a young man, lauded by Harvard and the Ivy League, celebrated in All the Right Places, appearing on CNN and the news and what have you.

But in this world, there’s a code, an omertà. You can’t warn. Or you couldn’t, anyways. Because that was tantamount to saying something was going wrong. And nothing can ever be allowed to go wrong, because that’s a failure of leaders and institutions.

And yet the more that things do go wrong, the harder this omertà, this code of silence gets—setting a kind of failure cascade, an idea we’ve discussed many times.

This is how collapse blindness hardens the process. Institutions and leaders and norms reinforce the blind spot: our society can’t collapse. And if you warn of it, why, you must be crazy, dangerous, or stupid, because then you’re saying that we’re blind, and either way, you have to be stopped.

So what I knew was going to happen, just as I knew America was going to collapse, did happen. Nobody listened, and in fact, my peers and colleagues turned on me. They began to regard me as something else. Not one of them. These buttoned down, sober types, always celebrating The End of History or what have you. Never daring to be critical. At a system, synthetic, integral level.

Now, that’s not so you cry for me, it’s so you understand how this happened. Today many of you will openly call me (and yourselves!) a Cassandra, and I suppose, with a chuckle, that’s true. But for me? In those days, I’d built a very, very successful corporate career, in Europe, as a kind of insurance against what I knew was going to happen. And so I didn’t care that my peers and colleagues in the intellectual world turned on me. I understood that and I’d sort of hedged against it.

I don’t want you to go collapse blind.

The world is going to go on collapsing, and so is America. So where does that leave you?

Let me continue my story. You see, this reaction did, and does, leave me in uncomfortable place.

If I warn, it serves no purpose—it just fuels a vicious reaction, from the very side that the warnings are for.

But if I don’t warn, what good is it being one of my generation’s better thinkers, at all?

Here, I’ve come up against the limit of what it is to be a fine thinker. What do you do when nobody cares? My answer is that you still do your duty. Whatever gift you have in this life, you must use it, and that’s just as true for thinkers as it for, I don’t know, musicians, artists, or physicians.

So I’m torn, between the counter-reaction I know will arise, and my moral duty. Hence, the reluctance that I’m sure you can sense. Hesitance isn’t the right word.

All that I am trying to do in a way these days is open your eyes a little bit, because we have all gone collapse blind.

You often wonder if I know what’ll happen next, and the answer is, sure I do. And so do you. But I don’t share it as openly with you because in a sense, I’ve understood that an age has to be prepared to hear its thinkers, otherwise the thinker, too, is drained, spiritually. The seer is the one who must be blind, the myths say.

There are times, though, when it’s worth being counter-productive, understanding that an age isn’t ready to hear you, quite yet, and this is one of those times, because of course, like I said, it’s all coming true just as I said, exactly as I said, and right on schedule: American collapse.

This is one of those times, and I’m going to tell you what happens next, by way of three general principles.

We’ve already discussed the first, in fact. And it goes like this.

Collapsing societies can’t envision their own collapse.

I used the word “envision” there for a reason. What really happened in this strange, bewildering story I’ve told you, of being The Guy Who Predicted American Collapse, from the spires of Harvard, no less, and…LOL…a deafening silence ensued?

America couldn’t envision its own collapse. And so it couldn’t understand it.

Now, I’m speaking in the past tense, but this is still where we are.

What happens if the election goes the wrong way? Most can’t envision it. They can’t really see that future very well, if at all. Certainly, the New York Times and CNN and whatnot don’t really write about that America. They paint sort of very hazy pictures of what it could look like. In this regard, sci-fi writers do a better job, frankly, from the Handmaid’s Tale to cyberpunk dystopias, but I digress.

If you can’t envision a thing, you can’t understand it. So the crucial thing is vision.

When I gave my now infamous warning, what happened was a series of failures in the minds of my peers. They refused to envision it. What is “it”? Precisely what’s happening now. Imagine how surreal it would’ve been back then if I’d said imagine the Chairman of the Joint Chief calling the President a fascist. But this is where we are.

Failing to envision this future we’re in now, my peers couldn’t understand it, either.

So I tried to help them, as desperately as I could. I shared my findings and my research. I discussed at length how the insights of the last great generation of thinkers, like Keynes, was what I was applying and building on, and as we’ve discussed, Keynes was the towering figure who discovered what causes fascism, and made social science’s greatest breakthrough.

I explained how decades of stagnation and middle class despair pointed squarely to the 1930s repeating themselves, how well-being was plummeting, and that predicted the rise of demagoguery, in certain terms.

I understood that they wouldn’t “listen” to me. But I did imagine that if maaaaybe I could help them envision that future, then maybe they could understand the present, and see how the two were connected. I knew even this much would be a major, major struggle, all but impossible.

And of course I failed. Go ahead and chuckle with me.

My point isn’t about the past. It’s about the present.

Collapse is a Series of Implosions.

Even now, America can’t really envision what a collapsing society is. And even now, there is no real understanding—none—that the 1930s have repeated themselves, and it’s general, widespread stagnation that’s causing these old demons to rise.

Now, that’s not sort of idle and pointless, which it sort of sounds like. I say it because it helps us understand what happens next. That gives us the basis for another prediction, which is…

What you want me to tell you is who wins the election.

Nobody can predict that.

And yet somehow I predicted, too, what happened over the last few months. Trump resurged, and is on the brink of winning.

How did I do that? Because this is what history tells us, as I’ve discussed with you. When societies stagnate, that predicts fascism. What predicts it even more is when they don’t understand what causes fascism.

And so they fumble. Whatever advantages and leads and gains they might have had or made, which is just what the Democrats did over the last few months. All that can be summed up in a sentence: stagnation causes fascism, and not talking about the economy is the biggest mistake you can make.

I’ve shared with you as openly as I can what can be said. America is up against history. Worse, it’s making all the mistakes a society can make. Kamala’s spending her last few days warning that Trump’s a fascist, instead of convincing people she can fix their lives, and handle the economy. If warnings made Presidents, I’d be one.

What happens next isn’t what you think. In a sense, I don’t want to put it this way, but, it matters less than you think. I don’t mean that if one side wins, they won’t take people’s rights away, and collapse democracy. Of course I don’t.

What I mean is something else entirely.

America still can’t understand and envision social collapse.

So even if it gets a reprieve for the next four years, this cycle is going to repeat itself.

Ad infinitum.

And at some point, the fascists are going to win.

When they do, they’re going to do exactly what they’ve already promised to—all the crackpot stuff about blowing up the global economy, abolishing various of government, “terminating” the Constitution, and so on.

The question for you is really grasping that. I know that’s an ugly, obscene, terrible thing to say. But right now, America is not really thinking clearly, or well. And if you want your life to go on as a happy and prosperous thing, then you had better correct that mistake. What’s your plan? What’s your strategy?

For collapse?

Is it OK with you to sort of play this game every few years, and hope that it doesn’t all implode? I don’t say that judgmentally: if you can bear that tension, that awful anxiety, that level of risk, that’s sort of amazing, and I applaud you. I don’t think many people can, is all. It is truly soul-destroying to go through this once, but to do it for the rest of your life? You should start asking yourself if you want to live that way.

And if you don’t, as we’ve been discussing, take some radical responsibility and create some radical freedom to sort of sidestep the final stages of collapse. How many of us want to, can, should, live in a collapsed society? Of course, not everyone has the means to outrun the implosion, but the question is how to create those means.

So: collapse is a series of implosions.

We’re on the cusp of the next one. But even if it’s stalled, miraculously, for four years, will it…just happen then? You see, our mental models of collapse aren’t very accurate. It’s not linear, and it’s not like “an” explosion, either. It’s more like a series of volcanos erupting, each one setting fire to the next. And in between, you and I, with our human minds—we grow altogether too comfortable, hoping, even really believing, trying to disown what we really know, telling ourselves that the next eruption won’t happen.

If this election is won by the more democratic side, then that attitude will certainly prevail. And yet all it will do is ensure the next eruption is that much more violent. Do you see how these things are related?

Collapse in this sense is a series of implosions.

The next implosion is produced by the very act of trying to bottle it up, which works about as well as trying to cap a volcano with tissue paper. It might make you feel better, but that isn’t a snotty nose, it’s a volcano.

So imagine people way, way back in history, perhaps, doing just that. Here’s a series of volcanos, erupting, one by one, and you tell yourself everything’s going to be fine because you wrapped one in tissue paper, or you made it a sacrifice, or what have you…can you envision what happens to your society? Much less understand it? This is where we are now, and today, our volcanos are fascism, inequality, climate change, stagnation, and more.

They keep going off, harder and faster, because we’re doing nothing while telling ourselves we’re doing something, and that of course only makes it all even worse.

Our ignorance of history and our lack of interest in understanding why all this happening—it ensures that it will keep happening.

The gaps between the eruptions will lessen, and the system will accelerate. Neither tissue paper nor worship stop volcanoes from doing what they do, which is erupting.

There is No Point at Which a Society Takes its Own Collapse Seriously

Here, I’ve tried to give you a general theory of collapse. The last part of it, which I’ll keep brief, goes like this.

There’s no point at which a s society takes collapse seriously.

None.

Look at America today. There’s Kamala warning that Trump’s a fascist. That’s after his own Chief of Staff did, and that’s after his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs did. There are countless pundits and columnists and whatnot who’ve finally—a decade late—finally become aware how grave the situation is, and have begun to repeat the mantra.

And guess what? Nobody cares.

Nobody. It isn’t moving the needle one millimeter. Because of course if you don’t know what fascism is by now, well, my friend, good job, history’s holding its head in it hands.

Repeating mantras doesn’t work. Not in our human world. Maybe it’ll save your soul, who knows, but it doesn’t save collapsing societies. But for a reason.

Because there is no point at which a collapsing society will entertain the notion that it can, is, will, or could. Interestingly, perversely, funnily, its societies at little to no risk of collapse which can entertain that notion, and that of course is a sign of their health, cognitively, emotionally, socially.

But collapsing societies can’t. That’s why Kamala’s warnings are falling on deaf ears, just as mine did.

What do collapsing societies dream of? What can they envision? What can they sort of handle, take, grasp? Let’s think about history. Nazi Germany believed it would last for a thousand years, that people would be superhumans, that the war could never fail. Fairy tales. As Caesar destroyed the institutions of democracy, as the Triumvirate rose, Romans believed more than ever that their glory had never been mightier, and their empires was destined to last forever. Myths.

Collapsing societies can’t understand themselves. They cannot envision the very collapse which is right around the corner. Perhaps because it’s the very act of doing that that’d provoke the very fears which lead people to embrace demagogues and pronounce them superhumans and superheros. Collapsing societies can’t, and I want to emphasize that, can’t, imagine that the very road they’re on is one step away from the plunge into the abyss.

It isn’t within their cognitive or emotional powers. It’d be like asking a table to become a chair, or water to become fire. Can’t be done. It isn’t within their nature.

America is in this place, too, of course. It can’t take collapse seriously, even now. Not on the liberal side, nor on the conservative one. Perhaps at this very late hour you’d imagine that all these warnings and cries of fascist, fascist prove me wrong, but if you’ve understood me, then of course, they’re the precise opposite.

What do you think all that means? I don’t spell my warnings out anymore. I don’t think that our age is ready for them. And I’m not the kind who’s going to shout to make myself heard. An age is ready when it’s ready, not before then.

And sometimes? Not just sometimes, my friends, but more often than not. The plain truth: not before it’s too late.

But you are here, and I am, too. So I am trying to prepare you, as best I can, for what we both know is going to happen. This work is done with grace, through love, with delicacy and infinite care.

You know and I know by now the bitter, stupid, startling, unforgivable, obscene truth.

The world is now going to do what it is going to do.

The question is: what about you?

Don’t join it. You have this life. Take it, grow it, live it.

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