Are we headed for a system wide collapse (in the US, but perhaps elsewhere?).
The current environment is one of crisis mounting on top of crisis, each with increasing urgency and each never getting solved.
Just to count them
- issues of executive power concentration (pre trump even..), now alongside corruption and ignoring rule of law
- US overextended and largely illegitimately engaged militarily across the world
- mass surveillance without consent
- covid & associated economic devastation
- racial justice
- unending sense of riots, damage etc..
A friend of mine lived in East Germany when the Wall came down. I recall there was one event after another that eventually culminated in the collapse of East Germany and communism.
Is the US experiencing something similar? Not just in terms of government effectiveness but even legitimacy?
I don't think a routine election counts as a collapse. A govt collapse in the US would mean some combination of elections failing, leaders keeping or gaining control through force, and a breakdown of rule of law with a lot of chaos, violence, and disruption.
I very much do not want to see the US collapse; it would not be a pleasant experience. I don't think it's too likely in the near future, but it's certainly possible and these sorts of developments often only seem obvious in hindsight.
It's sort of a spectrum, though, isn't it? I mean, we had a sorta/kinda "collapse" in April for a few weeks. There were genuine shortages of some stuff.
And more topically: let's be honest, right now the US is on a crazy train heading straight for riots and a general strike come December 14th. Are nationwide giant protests against a stolen government a "collapse of society" too? A little, yeah.
This is not a particularly good article on collapse, as other comments suggest. However, is no one else here worried that it feels we are much closer to it than in the past decades at least? The global economy is wobbly in unprecedented ways, we have a proxy war in Europe between two major nuclear powers, and there is a rise of political extremists in every country.
Along with environmental and economic collapse, I'm worried about political collapse. Basically, I worry that democracies will either cease being democracies, or become so mired in their own bureaucratic processes that it's impossible to decisively act when an emergency arises.
We can say that the latter has already happened in the U.S., but it could always be worse and the emergencies we have to deal with can get worse too. We need to be able to deal the problems facing the next few generations by making rational decisions based on long-range planning. It doesn't seem to be happening, and when people get frustrated with the political process they don't just give up on their leaders, they give up on the whole democratic system and turn to strong-man leaders who can "get things done". The decline in public regard for democracy has been going on world-wide for awhile now.
I think some kind of dramatic failure less likely than a gradual descent. More like Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela or something than some of the more, uh, 'exciting' examples from history.
Of course, things going badly in the US is going to have spillover effects everywhere else too, so that's something to keep in mind. I'm not sure how isolated various places would be.
The USA is overreaching and the further it overreaches, the greater the risk of various parts of the socio-economic system breaking. The more things break, and the more serious the problems, the faster the USA will collapse.
This is the real future of the USA if it is not able to curb and even to reverse its per capita energy consumption.
When any system grows beyond its capacity to manage itself, then that system tends to collapse. We see this most clearly in economic bubbles, but the same mechanisms are at work in foreign policy, in NATO, in the EU, in China, and so on.
There will never be a simple way to understand the problems of growth and overreach so this means that countries which have greater capacity for self reflection and thinking through the consequences of their actions, are the ones most likely to dominate and to thrive in the long term.
Right now it looks like the USA will be a historical oddity by the year 2500 if not sooner
We're headed towards a collapse either way, with many, many millions dying. Very possibly billions over the course of this century. Either it's a major society upheaval leading towards positive change, or it's just general societal breakdown as civilization as we know it becomes impossible. Our current political-economic system is simply not up to the challenge, so not having upheaval is not an option.
A comparatively mild collapse sooner is better than later. This really is an existential threat like we have never experienced.
Any particular angle on how such a collapse might come about?
The biggest threats I see are the debt problems in the Chinese property sector explode causing their "commercial paper" market to set off a chain reaction causing global contagion due to China being nearly everyone's number one trading partner. Or the US has an internal conflict and that majorly affects things (which is what I'm considering in this question). The other is simply demographics spell the writing on the wall that populations will continue to shrink and shrink and I would imagine it potentially gets to a point where the amount of infrastructure we've built the modern world on top of wouldn't have sufficient human capital to keep it running below a certain critical threshold of population size, but that one is a bit longer off.
The Tax-idermy, were a society pushes ridiculous amounts of stabilization money into collapsing external peripheral "shell" societies who in return send refugee waves in convulsions, while slowly sinking into the civil/war/crime collapse accepting end-state is in full, brutally visible progress.
The politicians, leering for the authoritarian toolkit, because they doubt they can stabilize the mess that is to come.
How bad does it have to get, before you take a step back and acknowledge, that yes, this is un-subjective worser and even local recovery is unlikely, due to interconnected nature of global society and nature.
Sorry if things are bleak, but software seems to be one of the few levers i myself can pull towards a positive outcome, a better place, by allowing others to escape the dystopia of government eating the cooperated monopolies for societal control because government needs to be in control of something- anything and its definitely not in control of anything that would change outcomes.
Covid isn't necessarily the primary concern but one crisis among many. Arguably most civilization collapses happened in times when there were too many crises at once, that individually could be handled but all at once or in close succession become overwhelming. A current example of this would be that with climate change we face increase in temperatures causing wildfires on the west coast, deadly heatwaves in the southwest and hurricanes along the Atlantic. Due to Covid hospitals are already overwhelmed so injuries from hurricanes are harder to deal with, making not massive events worse than the sum of their parts. Combine this with governments unwilling to take action and who actively dismantle the preparations already in place and it is worth being concerned.
Calling this a prosperous time is also flawed, for who? The middle class is nearly gone, freedoms are being eroded, racial tensions are still high, the world order is destabilizing as many governments lean into more dictator-like structures. I genuinely want to understand what you see to give you hope because right now I'm failing to find much to grab onto.
Most of what you're claiming are indeed signs of social problems, and not small ones. But not a single one of them is an indicator that a collapse is imminent. Some of them are counter indicators, for example the strength of the US military.
All of them were the norm throughout human history up until very recently, and political structures were relatively stable for most of it. The problems might suck but they aren't signs of imminent political instability.
I do think political instability is imminent, but not for any of these reasons. I think there's a weak point, social cohesion, and a pry bar is being used efficiently and cheaply to destroy it. We are being propagandized to hate each other by groups of people who don't have our best interest in mind. All the social programs and military spending in the world can't help when a society no longer views itself as one entity. And calls for unity aren't the answer, they're more of the same propaganda. Those calling for unity do so with an implied qualifier that "unity" happen entirely under their ideological control. There's no desire to compromise, because we don't view those that we would be compromising with as belonging to the same nation.
(I think you're missing the "Ask HN:" prefix, right now this is getting buried in new)
The chickens are coming home to roost...
My impression is that a lot of developments that were already going wrong for quite a long time, but could be ignored relatively easily, are now reaching a breaking point.
I think there is also a sort of "cascade failure" going on, on which some events are changing the conditions for more rvents to occur: E.g.: The general political turmoil inside the US led to the Trump election, which led to a weakened image of the US in the world, which may have emboldened other powers like Russia, which may have contributed to the outbreak of the Ukraine war, which has led to record inflation, etc etc.
Likewise, climate change has reached a level in which the consequences are beginning to be felt even by rich nations, and the predicted tensions and upheavals are starting to materialize.
Those are not the single "causes" of any of those events, but it might be one of many causal chains that connect all those world events and led to mutual escalation.
Where all of this is leading? I have no idea, but definitely to a different era. The question is what kind of era.
If America does collapse, it will likely be for political reasons. Maybe the people in power will let it crash and burn for some misguided principle, or they will do something immensely stupid with unforeseen consequences. American economy is strong, and the society is robust enough, but there are serious risks due to the combination of dysfunctional politics and a high degree of centralization.
The current environment is one of crisis mounting on top of crisis, each with increasing urgency and each never getting solved.
Just to count them
- issues of executive power concentration (pre trump even..), now alongside corruption and ignoring rule of law
- US overextended and largely illegitimately engaged militarily across the world
- mass surveillance without consent
- covid & associated economic devastation
- racial justice
- unending sense of riots, damage etc..
A friend of mine lived in East Germany when the Wall came down. I recall there was one event after another that eventually culminated in the collapse of East Germany and communism.
Is the US experiencing something similar? Not just in terms of government effectiveness but even legitimacy?
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