(What to Do With Your) Civilizational Anxiety

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I can barely walk down the street or look at my phone. Without someone, friends, acquaintance, colleagues, asking me: what’s going to happen with the election?

Not so long ago, that question would’ve been asked with a chuckle, maybe. But now? It’s asked with a genuine sense of dread. I can hear it in people’s voices, see it etched on their faces, as much as they try to hide it, behind polite smiles and ironic laughs.

It’s not really just “election anxiety” people are feeling. Let me coin a term.

Civilizational anxiety.

It means more or less what it sounds like, but I think it goes deep, and it’s a sort of unifying concept we might want to begin to use.

That Isn’t Really Election Anxiety You’re Feeling, It’s Civilizational Anxiety

When we say that we feel “election anxiety,” it’s kind of eliding the point. This isn’t (as we all know) a “normal election.” But that’s because there’s the feeling that civilization itself might just be on the line.

Normal elections do, sure, indeed produce a level of anxiety. But calling this feeling that is like comparing a tsunami to a ripple.

But civilizational anxiety isn’t really just about this election.

Think about the many new feelings we’re beginning to experience. We often discuss how even our vocabulary for naming them, let alone our paradigms for understanding them, are barely emergent. Eco-grief, the rage and despair produced by stagnation, the sense of abandonment and betrayal so many feel around leaders and institutions, the strange sense of hollowness that this is how the future turned out.

Civilizational anxiety is an umbrella for all of those new emotions.

And if you’re the kind of person that thinks emotions are just the soft stuff, let me remind you that they’re at the center of the greatest ideas of the last century. Keynes’ paradigm which said that depressions cause fascism—it was about what he called “animal spirits.” Then there was Freud and Jung’s notion of the unconscious, and how it’s the true driver of our actions and beliefs. I could go on.

It’s everywhere these days, if you look. Think of our vernacular, to describe an average day. We wake up and “doomscroll.” Off we go, to our “bullshit jobs.” We’re glued to our screens, where macro and micro demagogues scream and rage. We check the news, and sort of expect a deluge of pretty horrifying stuff to hit us.

And that’s all hard.

We’re enveloped in civilizational anxiety these days. We may feel it in different ways, but, as we’re about to explore, the strange thing is that it’s universal.

Why Civilizational Anxiety is the Universal Experience of Now

You might think that when I talk about “election anxiety” or “eco grief” that civilizational anxiety is sort of a left wing concept. It’s emphatically not—like I said, it’s unversal.

Think of what’s at the core of the appeal of the far right. Trump said it out loud the other day, in fact: “American civilization” is under threat, being invaded, pillaged, etcetera. In Europe, of course, the far right has made great hay of the idea of “civilization” disappearing, at the hands of immigrants and refugees. To this side, it’s others who threaten the ideas of patriarchy, hierarchy, and dominance. It’s social order has been disrupted, and so it feels…

Civilizational anxiety. And it felt it, I think, before the center and left. It exploded in a kind of rage. And that rage was a way to make the center and left feel its own kind of civilizational anxiety. In other words, in psychological terms, the far right gave, projected, its civilizational anxiety to the center and left, because it couldn’t hold it, contain it.

See how funny and strange that is when I point it out?

So the far right, feeling that civilization’s under threat in these days, explodes in rage, and attempts to wreck democracy and its institutions, which makes the center and left shudder, and say: civilization’s under threat.

This sort of circular game is precisely what I mean when I say that civilizational anxiety’s universal. It’s post-political. We all feel it.

But of course we ascribe different causes to it, and endorse different solutions. The right says that it’s the fault of women, the LGBTQ, immigrants, and the left says it’s the fault of the authoritarian, intolerant, fascist right. The point isn’t “who’s right” (at least not yet.)

The point is that the feeling is so widespread now of civilizational anxiety that it’s the closest thing to a universal experience that there is in this age. It unifies us, though we often let it divide us instead.

We’d be wiser to investigate the reasons.

Why are we feeling this way?

The Symptoms of Civilizational Anxiety

Let me put that another way.

So what does civilizational anxiety really mean?

I don’t like to use the word “symptoms,” for a reason that’ll shortly become clear. But if we were to propose a kind of symptomology of this experience, I think it’d look like the following.

• Our problems feel insoluble.
• Our leaders appear incompetence, clueless, or bewildered
• Institutions don’t serve their functions anymore, from Supreme Courts to democratic mechanisms
• Elites have captured all the gains, and the middle and working class have been left for dead
• Systems are failing and there appears to be no real solution or remedy in sight
• No paradigm is present to address any of the above
• Nobody hears or sees you sort of trying to just survive in this void of chaos

Feel like that? A lot of people do.

Again, on both left and right. That’s not to equivocate sides. But it is to say that these are the symptoms of civilizational anxiety, and they’re widespread these days.

So how does that leave people feeling, in more formal terms?

One of the my favorite stats, which I quote often, is that half of young people feel numb and overwhelmed and like they can’t function anymore.

Civilizational anxiety is that widespread, I’d suggest, and that severe. You see, some forms of anxiety are low-level, and some are severe. Civilizational anxiety doesn’t really exist so much at a low level, because the stakes are so grave.

And so…real.

Often, in pop thinking, phobias and anxieties are confused. They’re not the same. Phobias aren’t “real,” in a sense. I’m afraid of flying. Actually. It terrifies me. That’s funny, because of course I’ve travelled the globe many times by now. I know that the risk is infinitesimal. But I’m still afraid. Can’t help. Bumpy flight? I turn into quivering Jell-O. That’s a phobia.

Anxieties are more real than that. Civilizational anxiety is like that. It’s not a phobia. The ugly truth is that it feels so difficult to contain, handle, deal with, manage, because it’s all too real.

What happens if the election goes the wrong way? By now, we should all know. For example, even Elon Musk’s out there saying that he’s going to, as Trump’s pick to manage the economy, wreck it. But for a reason, which is to ultimately fix it. We’ll leave aside whether or not that’s realistic, true, or absurd for now. The point is that even Trump’s side is pretty open about the pain to come.

That’s sort of how real this experience is.

The Feeling of an Age of Collapse, and How Not to Let it Ruin Your Life

Let me now put this all in a much simpler way, since we’ve discussed it a bit.

Civilizational anxiety is the feeling, sense, experience, that things are falling apart around you. In a civilizational way, not just a personal one. The two get confused though, and I’ll come back to that.

Let’s continue a bit with that symptomology. It’s the feeling that:

• The basics don’t work very well anymore—whether democracy or just the price of groceries
• You never know what’s going to go wrong, at any given moment, at a system level
• Because you can’t rely on systems to work very well, you try to shield yourself, and end up angry, confused, and bewildered, often projecting their failure onto hated others
• Leaders and institutions don’t get how badly broken things really are, and their constant refrain of things are good, things are good, things are good leaves you feeling angrier and more alone and less heard by the day.

Now. If this were just a phobia, none of that would be real. But of course all of that is real. All of that, funnily, sadly, and pretty crazily.

Because this anxiety is so severe, what happens next tends to be one of two things, or maybe a sequence of both. We internalize it. We begin to blame ourselves for this chaos, and tell ourselves that we’ve failed, our lives haven’t worked out, if only we’d worked harder, or had the right connections or pedigree. Depression sets in, and soon becomes despair that way. Guilt, shame, and self-blame are endemic among us for this very reason.

And as despair festers, it becomes hate. We begin to say to ourselves, because this feeling must be given away, can’t be contained, can’t be held, except by the very strongest among us—that it must be their fault. Those people who are taking my land, women, country, money, jobs, opportunities, future, life, blood, energy, purpose.

They become a corrosion in the moral universe, which can only be set right through the ritual act of purification. This is why the far right is ascendant. This sequence of self-blame for collapse, curdling into projection at others, who become hated scapegoats.

I analyze all that for you for a simple reason.

None of this is your fault.

None of it.

The way to stop this cycle is at the root.

Yes, things really are collapsing around us. But that isn’t your fault. There is no sense in which personal culpability can be had for civilizational, system, or institution level failures, except the most diffuse one, “you voted for the wrong guy, ha-ha!” But that doesn’t make you a bad person, necessarily. It just makes you human. We all make mistakes.

Self-blame in this age is the way to destroy yourselves, my friends. You mustn’t make that mistake.

And yet, as we’ve discussed, you must take a kind of radical responsibility, at the same time.

Let me explain what I mean by that seeming paradox.

Radical Action as the Answer to Civilizational Anxiety

We’ve established three things so far.

• Civilizational anxiety is universal
• Civilizational anxiety is severe
• Civilizational anxiety is real, as in, not just an irrational phobia.

The question then becomes: how do address it? “Solve” is maybe the wrong word, but that’s the idea. What do we do with it?

Psychology doesn’t yet have really good paradigms for helping us with this level of anxiety, because, in truth, it’s so new, and sure, you can argue it’s also very old, but let’s sidestep that by now. The point is that talking it through is going to be of limited help, and I think that today’s therapists and psychologists (I know that many of you are in this profession) should take up this challenge, just as Freud and Jung took up the challenge of their age.

I think that the best way to deal with civilization anxiety is through action.

Radical action.

Remember the sequence of not dealing with it well. Self-blame, guilt, shame, which become depression and despair, which curdle into hate and rage.

That’s not a very good way out, because if you think about it, what does all that produce? Only more civilizational anxiety, at a macro level. Rage and hate give power to demagogues who turn right around and…destabilize civilization even further. It’s a vicious cycle, which leads nowhere.

Instead, we are now approaching the time of radical action. We talked a little bit about radical freedom and radical responsibility, which are two forms of this way of thinking and being in the world.

Radical action means something like: yes, your anxiety around civilization is real. Now you must construct a life in which, through which, by which, the project of civilization goes on. For it, and for you.

Both of those are important—it and you. You need to have a decent and good and fine life. That means thinking through carefully how to preserve this thing called civilization at a personal level, in it. But it also means that life can and should preserve that very idea, because of course, otherwise, what purpose does it serve?

So it means asking and answering questions like: where will you live, that’s sort of less at risk? What kind of professions will you choose, and they don’t last a lifetime these days, but a decade or so? What kinds of relationships will you forge? What kinds of books and films will you read and watch?

Simple stuff, complicated stuff, basic stuff, fundamental stuff.

The radical action part is being willing to take some giant leaps when they’re called for. I’d bet right about now there are plenty of Americans who wished they’d made exit plans over the last decade or so—a simple example. Radical action in this sense just means being willing to rip it up if its not working, in order to go on living a civilized life, versus just sinking with the ship, which is where the sequence of self-blame inevitably leads.

I’ve tried to give you a sense of radical action. But perhaps a better way to think about it is through its absence. Living in times like these carries a certain momentum. The ship is sinking. And yet jumping overboard seems foolhardy, too, or perhaps just too scary. Should I really move, switch careers, make some new friends, change who I am?

The answer to that question is: yes. I know that, because civilizational anxiety is so widespread and severe. That tells us that people aren’t up to the task of managing it or handling it—they’re trying to escape it, run away from it, bury it. But every headline, every tweet, every post, reminds us: this is where we are.

But where we are shouldn’t always be who we are.

In times like these, it’s wiser to change who we are, instead of going on being the kinds of people that collapse wants us to, permits us, allows to, be. To do that, means understanding the radical principle: the first step is the hardest, because, yes, it’s a giant leap, and a leap of faith in yourself, in a world on fire.

Yet when I put that way, you can see: what other choice is there?

My advice is this. The next few years will be ugly, hard, and difficult. Radical action now is what will ensure you still live a civilized life. Don’t be afraid, because you already are. But of the wrong thing. You’re afraid, in the end, not just that things are sinking, burning, collapsing, but that you have to trapped in and among them. You don’t. Free yourself, to live a life you deserve again, and stop blaming yourself for the mess that we’re all in now. That is the way out of this mess, not just for you, but for us.

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