@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.