The Collapse of Civilization

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It feels like civilization is in the early stages of collapse: multiple regional wars involving in nuclear-capable nations; sabre-rattling between great powers; loss of trust in the institutions that structure and stablize society; global commerce stumbling as supply chains are strained or broken; resurgence of anti-democratic sentiments and dictatorial ambitions.

Certainly civilization will change significantly in the coming decades. Changes in technology, in information, in organizing, have shifted the balance of power between nations, classes, ideologies. And that will lead to big changes to many areas of life.

But change isn’t necessarily collpase. The types of breakdown we’re seeing mirror what past civilizations experienced as they entered their final decline. But in every case, those were regional powers. Modern civilization encompasses the whole planet, so the dynamics of a modern collapse might play out differently. A social order might collapse without the attendant material devastation seen in past collapses.

On the other hand, if it is a collapse, the material devastation will be so much greater.
So much more of the population depends on a world-spanning social order for survival. And humanity is capable of so much more destruction. A true collapse of this civilization would look like a collapse of the human species, and possibly of the entire ecosystem of the earth.

If any sort of collapse is imminent, it’s not clear that anything can be done to change that. Complex systems like a civilization enter a state of deterioration from which there is no turning back without exponentially increasing inputs. Even if we could come together to coordinate that kind of intervention, the earth’s inputs are constrained.

These are dour thoughts, but they’ve stuck with me for the past few years, and sadly been confirmed again and again by what seems like an inexorable slide towards a future less bright. I hope I’m wrong, and I’m nigh desperate for a direction to push that will help correct the path of humanity.

2 Likes
2

Well it better happen this time becuz i been hearin this apocalyptic stuff on the boards now for decades. It’s all empty promises. All of it!

3

Empty like western nihil or empty in the sense of eastern void that makes an appreciable difference I think.

4

I don’t have a feeling that external factors are the signs of collapse, but internal factors, such as authoritarian politics becoming increasingly popular, and structures that were built to protect against the mistakes of the past being deconstructed. The loss of basic social behaviour to those outside of my bubble. That kind of thing.

1 Like
5

I agree that that’s the most troubling thing. A high-trust society enables so much, and at every level of society – interpersonal trust to feel safe in your home and community; systemic trust to believe that the state works for the common good (sincerely, if not perfectly). Authoritarianism is, paradoxically, a kind of politicized distrust, where people try to get ‘their guy’ massive power to punish the others responsible for the very rot that motivates it.

But it isn’t just happening locally, the trend is on the global scale. The right is surging in both the US and Europe; China’s democratic movements have been all but extinguished; Russia’s dictatorship is expanding unchecked, defended by powerful people everywhere; the descendants of Holocaust survivors committing an implicit (or, sometimes, explicit) genocide. The external factors are signs of a collapse of trust within every society, and they feed back to vindicate that lack of trust.

This reaction is frustrating because it’s true. But it will be true in every case but one.

1 Like
6

Civilization doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In the midst of the sixth great extinction, can the human species be far behind? Scientific researchers are racing to find solutions to ecosystem collapses brought on by the success of advances in scientific technology. Meanwhile, climate change is putting pressure on modern institutions that seemed invulnerable 50 years ago. As the situation worsens, government actions that once seemed draconian, appear reasonable and necessary to people under pressure.Hence, the shift to political extremism. Still, barring nuclear holocaust, civilization is nowhere near the end. So, what do we do to turn this ship around?

The decline of trust and sociability in the United States has important implications for American democracy which is declining as a model for the rest of the world. “Social capital which is practiced as a matter of arational habit has its origins in irrational phenomena, like religion and traditional ethics, would appear to be necessary to permit the proper functioning of rational, modern economic, and political institutions.” Francis Fukuyama, “Trust”

1 Like
7

The direction to push, if any, is surely to the left. The right is just reactionary. The traditional gender roles championed by the right are precisely what’s led to the sixth great extinction etc. And at the root of that—toxic—masculinity is fear of ego-death. The fundamental difference between Eastern void and Western nihil is that only the former is esoteric.

“The advent of the ‘last will of humankind,’ the will to nothingness, marks the critical point of exhaustion at which the enervated will is no longer capable of awakening erōs, the point at which the pathos of distance vanishes altogether. The advanced decay of late modernity thus signifies a state of affective entropy, a disgregation of the will into quanta so discrete that they can no longer generate the erōs needed to sustain the ethical life of the community (CW 7). A dissipation of the will would result in the irrecuperable desuetude of erōs, and a cessation of erōs would nullify the temptations of the Versucherkunst [”(at)tempter’s art"]. The decadence that besets late modernity thus comprises an assault on beauty itself, as potential objects of erotic attraction are systematically debased. Indeed, if it were no longer possible to ‘attach one’s heart’ to a great human being, in whom one sees reflected one’s own prospects for self-perfection, then one would have no means of redeeming one’s hatred of oneself. The future of humankind as a whole would no longer be warranted, and the teachings of Silenus would become wisdom once again." (Daniel W. Conway, “Love’s labor’s lost: the philosopher’s Versucherkunst”.)

And with this, his essay ends. Well then, I see a way of ending the most important way in which potential objects of erotic attraction are systematically debased in late modernity or “postmodernity”. The answer is in the question, or rather the solution is in the problem, in the following passage:

“[T]he established custom of reading esoteric writers nonesoterically has a very precise and predictable effect on the practice of scholarship. It gives rise to a systematically recurring misimpression: everywhere we look, we see the dispiriting spectacle of the human mind vanquished by the hegemonic ideas of its times. It appears that even our most celebrated geniuses—our Aristotles and Shakespeares—with all their extraordinary gifts and agonized efforts, always end up just confirming the myths of their particular ‘cave.’ It is difficult to overstate the profound influence of this recurring experience. It forms a crucial but unseen part of the intellectual background of our times, motivating the late modern or postmodern predisposition to the radical critique and disempowerment of reason. In the age of the forgetfulness of esotericism, it comes to seem obvious to everyone that the human mind is not free but wholly contextualized, culture-bound, socially determined. And if that is so, then all our truths are ultimately local, accidental, and temporary; our highest wisdom, only the hometown ethnocentrism polished up.” (Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, page xiv.)

Arthur Melzer: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing

8

And maybe the totality of involvement into the lowest general cave , maybe a seventh hell must be transversed so as to be able to recollect and recover the one who has been buried there, and recover the ions which elapsed, the kalpas of memory trying to recover its very essence and through the evolving superintelligence put finality the limits of the restrest to repeated tests so that they will; believe without the Ned of eyes.(I’d)

9

The idea that civilization will collapse because America’s dominion is ending, is an absurdity only a fool like a brainwashed American, would fall for.

Only in mankind is exterminated will civilizations end.
The domination of superstitious ideologies/dogmas, like Abrahamism and Americanism, include in their own indoctrinating superstitions the idea of Armageddon…the end of times.
Self-fulfilling prophesies made by those who cannot imagine a world without their delusions, their lies, remaining ‘indubitable truths.’

When a population has been indoctrinated and nurtured by lies a return to the truth is considered to be an end of times.

10

The handwriting is on the wall, here in Dubai that restless souls brought me to, at the moment , the ‘Kalifa’ building seems enormous and suggestive to the notion that king oil rules the world.

It wouldn’t need to be that way , as carbo hydrants are bringing our world to asphyxiation.
The stranglehold between that and the political morass , can now be tempered only by artificial intelligence, which naturally comes out of very long chains of evolution, but will break away very soon, developing it’s own cyber psychology.

How will that go? Wait and see let’s.

This was predicted

The collision of cultures, the rebirth of the Ottoman Empire,

11

History repeats…but never in exactly the same way.
There will be no Ottoman Empire, as it was, for there is a Chinese and Russian empire, and an American Empire of Lies…and China has its belts and roads initiatives encroaching into the entire far-east.
Turkey wants to become a member of BRICS, and BRICS is currently developing a security component, on top of its socioeconomics.
Americanism is under pressure.

We’ll finally see if race/ethnicity and sex/gender are truly social constructs, and if populations are interchangeable.

12

Diagram - Cycles of Culture
Diagram - Cycles of Culture678×960 112 KB

The cycle is repeating…
Sucess establishes the factors of its own demise.
A fighter thar defeats all his opponents will eventually decline and be defeated.

Americanism is in the last phase of the cycle.
Now, even obtuse dolts are beginning to see what in the past they rejected as another “conspiracy theory.”
Not all but some. the thickest still live in denial, unable and unwilling to see what is occurring.
Sometime in the future, as things progress, even these thickest dullest of mind dim-wits, will claim that they always saw, always knew, what was going on.

Denial is the first stage of grief, due to a traumatic loss.
We are entering the second phase, anger…the most dangerous phase.
See the developing anger in America’s representatives of its ruling elites…towards Putin’s Russia.
This is connected to a past traumatic event they’ve inherited from their parents …going back to Soviet Russia and Stalin, triggered into memory when Putin dealt with their Oligarchs when they tried to seize control of Russia’s natural and human resources - as they’ve done in many places throughout the world.
Vehemently opposing any attempts to nationalize resources, preventing them from being corporately exploited.
Corporations are how these internationalists conceal themselves.
Their hatred for Russia goes back to how they wanted to destroy the Russian people and their culture so as to establish their Global Communist Utopia.
These “internationalists” migrated in waves, into the US where they’ve seized control of its core institutions …trying, once more, to Globalize their control - Messianism.

Dangerous times when nuclear weapons are in their hands.
Their superstitions include the possibility for Armageddon.

13

@felix_dakat, extinction is a problem, but is it already driving social and political instability? Eventually it could lead to a collapse of ecosystems that humans depend on, e.g. making it harder to grow enough food to feed a population. But I am not aware that that is already happening.

Similarly for climate change, though there I could see even a few destructive climate events (Katrina, Harvey, Sandy) driving social distrust, as institutions fail to respond in the ways people believed they would.

The inherent flaws in US constitutional order have been laid bare in the past few decades. The system depended on the people in charge sharing a near-uniform religious worldview, and even then it was susceptible to extreme polarization. But as the US has become a truly diverse society, where minorities have been granted full participation in democratic governance, the “gentlemen’s agreements” that made it work aren’t respected, and what’s left reinforces the all-or-nothing politics that have me thinking this way.

To abuse the metaphor: there are enough people pushing left and right that I tend to think a perpendicular push will be more effective. Thus things like this:

I feel this. In the US, support of Trump and Antifa both seem driven in part by boredom with the regular functioning of the world. So much of the popular concept of a meaningful life is based in struggle, and the promise of post-scarcity future must be terrifying for anyone who has internalized that.

True that Americans overesitmate our importance, but the collapse of a hegemony could reasonably entail the collapse of anything that the hegemony has enabled (even setting aside that we’re talking about a nuclear hegemony, whose weapons could tear the earth to its constituent parts). Already American weakness has led to multiple wars that in the past were prevented by the credible threat of American strength; what happens when the lack of credible threats make it impossible to ship produce to population centers?

We might just be using different definitions of “civilization”. I would call a transition in which large swaths of the West are reduced to the level of developments of North Korea, a “collapse of civilization”, though I understand the sense in which it isn’t. I care about the connected whole we’ve made of humanity; any transition that leaves us in disconnected clusters would be the death of one the most beautiful things we’ve ever built.

14

Your self-importance spilleth over into a waterfall of credulity.

When one superpower declines another rises.
Those indoctrinated into its “truths” experience it as ‘an end of the world.’
In animal groups when one dominant male dies another takes his place, to keep the peace.
His personality is unforeseeable.

What will be gone, once your Empire of Lies disappears, are the lies you currently hold to be indubitable truths.
I know living in your fantasy world, populated and surrounded with affirming minds, and a repeating propaganda, like your own, is comforting and you’ve become accustomed to this comfort, but, in the end, nature is self-correcting an no human contrivance, no matter how popular or seductive it might be, can evade facing the accumulated consequences of all those years of deception.
Your comforting habituation with the lies you were raised on, has nothing to do with it.
The universe doesn’t give a shit what you, nor I, prefers.

15

Nature isn’t self-correcting, because nature doesn’t have a concept of what’s ‘correct’. Modernity is an aberration from millennia of scarcity, as life is an aberration from rocks, as stars are an aberration from cold and empty space. I still want to live on a planet orbiting a warm star, and I still want a better future for our descendants.

What’s true is that in the past 50 years, the current global order has increased global wealth production by more than an order of magnitude. In the next 50 years we could do it again and then some, or we could restore the natural order by vaporizing the rock we stand on. One of these extremes is better than the other, and if humanity can continue on a trajectory like the one we’ve been on, we should.

I don’t give a shit what the universe prefers, and I’m not trying to convince rocks about the value of civilization (much as it sometimes feels that way).

16

Nature refers to a fluctuating interactivity…like the wavs a surfer must balance himself upon.
Whether or not you, as another surfer, gives a shit what a drop of water prefers, doesn’t matter to the ocean.
You, as subject, must accurately approximate the water’s movements if you wish to keep afloat and not fall into the abyss.

Sea currents, affected by winds, are the objective real world…the surfer and his board are the subject riding on his fabricated ideals.
You don’t decide how the water moves relative to the atmophere…you must balance yourself upon it or drown in it.
Your rigid ideals are your surf board…how you maneuver it upon the surf is how you adjust your preferred ideals to the objective world…to natural order.

17

This perpendicular IS the saving grace of belief in the semblance of natural extension that de-differentiates ‘real nature’ and the artificial one.

… to reboot the power to will.

Right? To right to left.?.

18

When it comes to civilization, we are both the surfer and the surf. Each individual seeks their balance, and most of what we’re navigating is the collective result of everyone’s choices.

So our choices should respect both levels. We should make choices for ourselves and the people we’re responsible for that prepare us for what is likely to happen. But we should also do what we can to shape the waves.

It’s not like what’s happening is the sun engulfing the earth – some unstoppable force that we can only react to. Rather, billions of people not-so-different from us are making choices, forming beliefs, changing behaviors, and the result is that certain institutions are viable or they aren’t; certain futures are achievable, or they aren’t.

I hesitate to talk about collapse, because I worry that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy: talking about distrust, deceit, the erosion of norms can signal to people that maybe they’d be suckers not to join in and get theirs while the getting’s good. But it’s also a source of coordination to be explicit about what’s at stake. If we agree about the good in what we have, and about how vulnerable it is, we can start to think about what it will take to keep it.

The ideas that are destabilizing civilization seem naive to me – and specifically on the left, people with whom I largely agree on values but whose tactics permit a minority whose values I abhor to wield far more influence than they should. A relatively small shift in how the values on the left are driven forward could “decide how the water moves”.

There seems to be some hint that this is happening in France, in reaction to the EU parliamentary election. Macron has gotten a lot of shit for dissolving the National Assembly, but I respect it. It will force people to consider their priorities, to face the actual alternative to compromise and cooperation and functional institutions.

Or maybe it will accelerate the collapse of civilization. Exciting times!

19

The degree to which a civilization’s underlying ideology contradicts the real world - the surfer turns his board directly at the waves - will determine how long the surfer will stay on the board.
Surfer = subject with its subjective awareness.
Ocean = objective world, physis/nature, indifferent to the surfer’s subjective views and preferences.
Air/Atmosphere = ideology calling the surfer to grow wings and fly above it all.
Constantly interacting with the water, creating waves.
Abyss = metaphysics.

Every civilization produced people who believed their was the ideal, the superior, the last, and when collapse came many of them experienced it as a traumatic end of the world…because for them it was an end of A world, not THE world.
This is more evident in the civilizational cycle,…

Diagram - Cycles of Culture
Diagram - Cycles of Culture678×960 112 KB

…the last men are the soft men…who cannot imagine any other system other than the one that kept them comfortably soft.
Hard times lie ahead for them.
Sheltered minds convinced that the delusions they were raised on and enthusiastically swallowed because they tasted so sweet, and were so fulfilling and empowering, will consider the taste of refreshing and palate cleansing water bitter.

The bullshyte is now hitting the proverbial fan, dear boy.
All that crap swimming in your head, may be comforting and you may not be able to imagine a world without them, but they are now causing the decline of your Empire of Lies.
The one that kept you well fed and feeling innocent; the one you were willing to sacrifice reason to preserve its emotional rewards.

As decline proceeds all those romantic ideas you considered indubitable truths, will be exposed as being fanciful lies.
Those challenges you casually dismissed as “conspiracy theories” will gradually become difficult to dimiss.

20

Self-Deceit may increase the effectiveness of deceit, but the world doesn’t care about what humans need to believe to help them cope.
The very ideas you’ve constructed absurd theories to justify are part of the many causes that’s destroying the very system you’ve become accustomed to.

The irony is amazing.
Careless and all those Americanised minds here, and everywhere…with all their romantic idealism, and the bullshyte they’ve used to justify their naive conception of human beings, is one of the factors that is now destroying the very system that made them possible and they now depend on.

A system where money can guarantee a vote implies a citizenry easily swayed by repeating lies.
How can the Israel Block hold so much power if money could not manipulate Americans?

Marketing = science of lies - Bernays
Hollywood = art of lying - See the names of who started and still controls Hollywood.
US politics = power of lies. Salesmanship. The art of selling and promoting yourself to the highest bidder. Prostitution.

The best and most shameless liars reach the top.
The rest stay beneath the American dream’s middle-class ceiling - two car garage and picket fences.
He who kisses the ring of power and proves himself able to do anything to rise above…makes it.
The best liars are the ones who believe the lies they are saying.
Repeat a lie long enough and it becomes a ‘conventional ruth.’
A ‘truth’ the masses will passionately defend…will give their lives defending.