Society Is Collapsing. The Signs Are All Around Us.

A modern societal collapse isn’t the same as the various civilizational collapses of historical empires. The world is different now, interconnected and interdependent, and the days when one nation can continue to survive without other nations are long gone.

No, a modern collapse refers to the idea that global human civilization and its cultural identity will either become primitive or disappear completely. While no one knows for sure when, or exactly how, global society will collapse, there are shocking signs that raise the question of whether we have passed the point of no return.

Overexploitation of Resources and Overpopulation Beyond The Carrying Capacity of Earth.

The human population has skyrocketed over the past 200 years—we’ve gone from roughly one billion people on Earth in the early 1800s to over eight billion today. That seemed like a good thing in the past, but experts now warn that humanity has grown too quickly, and that we are additionally consuming way more limited resources per person than ever before. That means that a single adult today is way more taxing to our societal and planetary system than was a single adult 150 years ago. So, while population has grown dramatically In number already, the actual growth in terms of stress on our systems and resources is actually many times greater than the 8 billion number suggests.

There have been recent studies warning that humanity’s growth and resource consumption are unsustainable and that a “population correction” is imminent. The ecological term for this is overshoot: Humans are consuming resources more quickly than the Earth can produce them, making it all but inevitable that we’ll eventually run out of food, fuel, or other crucial supplies. As a worst-case scenario, you have to look at how modern people react to sudden and unexpected limitations.Mostly, those actions are violent and seemingly irrational. At a national scale, the answer to dwindling resources is more likely than not going to be war of conquest than anything else. War itself is a form of population correction, and a modern resource war of global proportions could easily cause a global societal collapse.

Look around you. We’re already seeing the impacts of humanity’s overshoot. The most notable of these effects is climate change, which is happening because human activity (such as industry and agriculture) produces greenhouse gasses more quickly than nature can absorb them. In other words, overshoot includes the waste we produce as a species as well as the resources we consume—both are currently at higher levels than the Earth can sustain.

As long as we continue to sustain our population growth by overexploiting the world’s resources and generating large amounts of pollution,  we’ll inevitably reach a point where the planet can no longer sustain all of us—we’ll run out of resources such as fossil fuels, and/or large areas of the world will become uninhabitable. According to some scientific research already, billions of people around the world are malnourished and suffering from harsh climate change because of over-consumption in “better” parts of the world. When the problem gets worse, billions of people will die because the planet simply can’t support them. And those deaths won’t be solely due to starvation. Because people will fight to live before they give in to death, and that means war.

Individual societal collapses will begin to to smaller, poorer, and more vulnerable nations and cultures first. The advanced world will seek to draw more and more resources to themselves, and away from those who cannot hold onto them. Eventually, the survival of various nations will depend strictly on their military ability to defend their resources and sustain their own people at the expense of others.

War comes for us all, and in the case of the modern world, war inevitably leads to nuclear confrontation between great powers. Desperation leads to the unthinkable.

We all like to think that desperation would never take hold, but the truth is that is always does. Physical need will eventually always override reason.

Take the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island who saw their society collapse because of the overexploitation of resources. Eventually, that resulted in starvation, a population crash, and towards the end, the extreme desperation of cannibalism.

Now, imagine the same circumstances, but on a planetary scale, not just an island…

Polarizing Politics and the End of Unity

Another big sign that we are facing global society’s collapse is how much politics is now dividing nations, as well as individuals. Humanity as a whole will never agree on the same values, nor has it ever. But, politics has become a violent debate that reaches new levels.

People are radically divided across the board, making it difficult to come together to fix problems that could lead to society’s collapse. Such extreme polarization as we see today creates a set of dynamics in politics that make it a winner-take-all contest between the parties. We have taken the usual politics of give-and-take compromise between parties and made every decision into “My Way Or The Highway.” If one person doesn’t wholeheartedly embrace every single value of the side they are on, they will be cast out and ostracized. This results in a societal fracturing along finer and finer lines, until societal cohesion simply breaks down. You can’t vote for Trump unless you are a racist. You can’t vote for Harris unless you are a communist.

The dynamics of this polarization create a positive feedback loop: Partisan voters feel increasingly hostile toward one another and reward politicians who deliberately antagonize the other side, driving further rounds of polarization. This political divide eventually leads to protests, many of which will inevitably turn to violent and illegal methodologies in order to accomplish their goal.

Meanwhile, even in European nations, strong political divides are growing between urban and rural populations, as evident by the UK Brexit vote and the Yellow vests protests in France. Recent studies point to how a large number of voters living in the suburbs, towns, and rural areas of European countries are less likely to trust the political system. Similarly—although more extremely—the Roman empire experienced a massive wave of political violence and unrest that led its citizens to distrust their own leaders, contributing to its own societal collapse.

Identities Over Issues

It would seem that many of our partisan differences stem less from disagreements about what we believe than about who we are and who we believe our opponents to be. In other words, identities, not issues, are what have been driving our political behavior.

Our social and cultural disagreements run far deeper than straightforward economic questions like, “Will this bill help improve the economic conditions in my town?” or, “Which candidate or party will help lower the cost of living?” Instead, partisanship operates at a more fundamental, tribal level: We support the party that we believe represents people like “us” and that will help us defeat and punish the hated “others.”

These identity-based politics transform political competition into an all-or-nothing, us vs. them struggle marked by a phenomenon political scientists call “negative polarization”—we hate and fear the other political coalition more than we love and admire our own. In other words, loyal Democratic Party voters aren’t Democrats because they have deep love and admiration for the Democratic Party and all it stands for. Instead, they have an abiding fear of and hatred toward the Republican Party, and they view the Democrats as their only bulwark against them. We can see this demonstrated in just how many people say they voted for Harris simply because she wasn’t Trump, and vice versa.

This level of extreme partisanship makes democratic governance all but impossible. After all, you can’t compromise or accept the normal give-and-take of democratic governance (like losing elections), because to do so would risk letting the hated other side “win.” And when your partisan rivals are feared and despised rivals who you believe want to destroy everything you cherish (instead of merely being a group that you disagree with on routine political matters), you’ll inevitably come to see every election as an ultra-high-stakes contest. “The future of democracy is at stake!”

Eventually, both sides develop a mentality of winning at all costs—because the other side is simply too radical, dangerous, and different to be trusted with power. And that is where we are now. America finds itself bitterly divided between the “winners” and the “losers,” with one side feeling vindicated and empowered, while the other feels desperation and fear that their very freedom and lives are at stake.

Decisions are not being made calmly or coolly by either side, in this case. Where they really weren’t radical before, now both sides are literally engaging in a contest of who can do more damage than the other. That is the fertile soil in which the seeds of collapse can thrive and bloom large.

The Apocalypse of A Collapsing Climate

Some researchers argue that flourishing civilizations such as the Mayans, Greenland Vikings, and Pueblo peoples of Chaco Canyon were ultimately wiped out because they failed to address rapidly changing climates. There are four primary indicators of societal collapse due to environmental change:

• A consistent pattern of environmental change that goes unaddressed for an extended period.
• Agricultural and industrial production being expanded without limitations.
• A systematic or governmental failure to adopt new means of production and energy generation that is sustainable
• A continued societal focus on economic growth in the face of diminishing returns and dwindling resources.

Although the media and the world’s governments began to give some attention to global warming in the late 1980s, we’ve actually known about the greenhouse effect and the dire consequences of increasing greenhouse gas emissions for at least 100 years. But, governments haven’t done substantial work to prevent global warming from worsening. And climate change isn’t something you can address later or all at once sometime. It is very similar to cancer in a person. If you catch it early, and act to stop it, you have a good chance to beat it. But of you want or delay treatment… eventuallyyou reach an inevitable point where there is simply nothing to be done but let the cancer run its course and hope for the best.

That is where we are now. We had plenty of early warning, but we chose to ignore it.

Around the turn of the 19th century, scientists calculated that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from preindustrial levels would result in significant warming—by one calculation, 4 degrees C, or 7.2 degrees F (which turned out to be fairly accurate). By 1958, scientists began measuring background concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and they showed constant and predictable increases over time.

While scientists have warned of global warming for some time, one reason the general public did not share that concern is because for decades people saw it as more theoretical than real. Also, people have a hard time being motivated to care about anything that isn’t going to affect them “right away.” Couching climate change in terms of “later this century,” or “by the year 2050,” well, people checked out as soon as they heard that.

This disinterest began to change as global temperatures increased, but it was already getting to be too late at that point. We have had many repeats of a given years summer being “the hottest on record” at the time, and despite the droughts and wildfires that were widespread in the US, people still always figured it would get better “next year.”

Recently, the media and the public began to pay more attention to climate change scientists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN has been working for decades now, and their warnings have gotten more and more public attention. They strive to provide a scientific perspective on climate change and its economic and political impacts, but are often hampered by the need to remain moderate, so as to appease all the nations of the UN. Even still, their recent warnings of a “Red Alert for Humanity,” leave little to the imagination. If that is the “moderated” notice, what does the realistic one look like?

The information now slowly beginning to circulate among climate scientists is that it really is too late. Given the current actions of corporations and national governments, even in the face of certain destruction, with “Business As Usual” allowed to continue, and the path of infinite economic growth embraced more than ever, the picture is a bleak one.

Plagues, and pathogens, and pandemics, Oh my!

More than four years ago, the SARS-CoV-2 virus began blazing its trail across a world that was starkly unprepared for what lay ahead. As of August 2024, the virus had infected more than 700 million people and caused more than 7 million deaths. The pandemic also shined a light on vast health inequities, led to economic disruption, and spawned vitriolic politics on everything from masks to vaccines to school closures.

This pandemic was a shock to an already destabilizing societal system, and we can easily draw a line between how the world was before, and how it is now after. Collapse was already underway, but not yet quite visible to the untrained eye. The pandemic laid bare the instability in our systems for all to see. And it threw a wrench in the machinery of civilization, the full effects of which haven’t been seen yet.

In recent months, with COVID-19 receding for many into less of an existential threat and more of an accepted undercurrent to daily life, a new infectious disease outbreak—H5N1 avian flu virus, or bird flu—started making headlines as it spread among dairy cows and poultry in the U.S. and infected a small number of farmworkers. Then it began to mutate, and now the medical world waits with dread for the day when human-to-human spread becomes a reality.

Scientifically, it is a matter of when, not if.

Politically, it is a disaster waiting to happen.

With the increasing effects of all the above conditions, from overpopulation to climate change and even to polarization, the drive towards the next pandemic is being accelerated. People press every farther into animal habitats, resulting in increased zoonotic spillover. Thawing permafrost contains who knows what biological horrors to be released with a warming climate, and at a time when antibiotic resistance in bacteria is a growing threat, we are only expanding animal agriculture across the globe.

We are a ticking time bomb for a truly devastating pandemic. Antibiotic resistant tuberculosis is nightmare fuel to those who understand the science. An H5N1 mutation could spark a pandemic with a mortality rate north of 18% and possibly as high as 50%

Either of those numbers is civilization ending.

What’s To be done?

Societally? Nothing. Nothing can be done.

Overshoot, war, and climate change, and disease. Those are the Four Horsemen of our modern Apocalypse, and if you listen closely, you can already hear the stamping of their hooves…

Here is the reality. Without the techno-hopium, without the bright political rhetoric, and without the ignorant well-wishing, here it is:

It is too late. We fucked up. There is nothing to be done except prepare to suffer the consequences of our actions.

And our inaction.

The time for prevention is long passed. Now is the time for preparation. And not for society, oh no, that is a goner. It’s really dead already, and the rest of us are just fleas trying to suck just a little more sustenance from its rapidly cooling corpse.

No, civilization can’t be saved, that isn’t what we need to prepare for. We need to save ourselves. That is what we can try and do.

And I say “try” because it isn’t a guarantee. Far from it. The only real guarantee for the coming decades is that we will all face increasingly deadly and more frequent disasters. Things like the fires raging through the cities in California right now. Or the wars blazing through lives in the Middle East and Europe.

Maybe it isn’t at your doorstep yet, and that is good for you. You still have a chance. But whether to prepare or not, it will be there soon. Your nation will be at war. Your neighborhood will be the fireline. Your life will be at risk.

No one is guaranteed survival. But the prepared will at least increase their odds dramatically. So look to that. Look to yourself, and to your family, and to your small community of friends and relatives. That is a sbig as you can get. That is as much as you can have some control over.

Prepare for collapse. And try to survive. And above all else, remember. Remember why you had to prepare. Remember what we did to cause this. Learn the lesson.

And take that lesson with you. So that maybe, just maybe, some future will still exists for the human species on the other side of collapse. And maybe that future can be a brighter, greener one.