systemic collapse

context

what lies ahead is a text introducing the context of systemic collapse from a deeply personal viewpoint. it will cite many academic and non-traditional works, but ultimately it reflects how my ways of seeing and relating personally to this theme have been evolving over the past many years. it should be helpful/useful for anyone starting to (or already deeply) questioning the dominant civilizational systems of our society and wondering about hopeful/viable futures as we move forward.

an impeding systemic collapse?

many people realize that the way our (self-terminating) economic system works isn't sustainable. to put simply, "infinite growth isn't possible on a finite planet". we're effectively consuming all of the ecological substrate that we depend on and we're accelerating in that direction much faster than we're being able to turn it around - regenerate it. and the modern, academic world has known it at least since the 60s. indigenous knowledge, for much longer than that.

call it the metacrisis, anthropocene, polycrisis, wisdom gap, all useful lenses for analyzing and relating to the state of the world, the possibility of creating a world uninhabitable not only for the humans, but most other terrestrial creatures is a possibility within our lifetimes, discussed everyday in these circles.

even if we talk about virtualization - i.e. how most of our lives/economies are becoming digital - a ready player one dystopic yet still romantic kind of reality, our [GDP is still 99% correlated with energy use], and [97% with material production]. SDGs, social change initiatives, diplomacy or technology (very probably) won't magically solve the issues of accumulation, extraction, abstraction (see also: moloch, what technology is actually worth building).

and while there are many challenges and oppositions to alternative visions, such as degrowth or any type of systemic transition really, many of us still feel called to grapple with this question and try to envision a better future that's adjacent possible.

it's a hard pill to swallow. one that once we really internalize, there's no unseeing it. and it becomes a responsibility not just to transform it for ourselves or the planet, but also towards the previous and next generations. it can be poetically, existentially and very practically seen as a civilizational rite of passage.

for the first time in human history, we have the first truly globally interconnected human society, with its own unique set of catastrophic and existential risks present today.

despite, or in addition to that, if we're not so short-sighted and narrow-minded, people have been learning from different sources, thinking, researching and prototyping around this for millenia.

daniel schmachtenberger and the folks researching the metacrisis often refer to this possible event of a systemic collapse as a probable though not desirable outcome, and therefore striving to conjure up a third attractor - neither totalitarianism nor complete breakdown of the existing systems, as that [would badly hurt/kill a ton of people] - is a must.

the gist of the argument is:

every major society in the history of our civilization has collapsed. and now we have a globalized one acceleratingly crossing planetary boundaries. with win-lose dynamics/molochian forces at work, it seems like we're in a very challenging trajectory that needs drastic change.

nate hagens on the great simplification puts it brilliantly on an energy consumption and ecological overshoot framing.

the book first principles and first values - forty-two propositions on cosmoerotic humanism, the meta-crisis and the world to come is also a core reading, discussing it to a great degree.

a few great explorations on the subject from an infrastructure/hardware perspective as well: XXIIVV — collapse, Collapse OS — Why?, Collapse OS — what makes collapse inevitable and imminent.

the more i read into it, the more likely this collapse seems. and while still having many caveats/attempting to hold back from doomerism, it seems to me that:

ultimately, whether we're going to collapse or not really doesn't matter much.

(what? millions will die! billions will suffer!)

yes, that's definitely a huge problem that we want to avoid at (almost) all costs.

but the point isn't to speculate on whether or not we will collapse. if we will, probably there'll be no way to tell "hey, that specific person in the interior of taiwan was pointing all along to the critical piece of infrastructure that failed and was the tipping point of the system", or "that person in the xyz's person administration in the COP61 could've drastically changed the path we're collectively on right now".

have you tried taking a look at the landscape of potential catastrophic and existential risks? we can - and should - discuss theories of change, challenges, strategies, opportunities and the (thankfully) plethora of emergent initiatives and projects attempting to create viable alternatives that allow us to sense, coordinate and unfold as an actual superorganism.

even if our analysis is wrong once again and we don't collapse (which doesn't seem likely), the transformation that needs to happen now and ongoingly, is indeed about the dominant civilizational systems we're immersed in, but i'd argue - even more so within us and among us on the path to get there. in how our current lifestyles and ways of being have become insanely wasteful, alienating, profoundly disconnected from nature and from ourselves. it's both a massive infrastructural/ecological crisis of global proportions, but also an equally, or even more pervasive, crisis of intimacy, morals, inspiration and imagination.

we need to act on personal, local, regional and global levels. find/craft our place(s) in the whole. collaboratively make sense of what's emerging in our realities and endeavor to cohere towards more beautiful processes/outcomes. increase our capacity to wake up, grow up, own up, open up, and show up in the world as the adults we'd like to have seen - or the ancestors that we'd like to be.

and this is a life-long journey.

wondering about whether systemic collapse can/will happen isn't something to be "right about", or to have some speculative mental masturbation exercise over a chat in the pub. that can also happen, but it misses the point.

to put it simply, the right relationship to be in with life/nature isn't one of extraction and mindless consumption, but of respect and constant learning about the delicate web of impacts from our actions.

this conscious relationship with reality is what i want to work towards.

and we need to act/coordinate towards a systemic transition.

further reading

joseph tainter on the collapse of complex societies.
all links already mentioned in this page.