Collapse of Meaning: Are we at the Threshold of the Fall of Human Civilization?

2023 could be the beginning of the age of catastrophe! Is the future warning us about what's on the cards for humanity as a whole? Because the grim truth that we're now facing is that our collective human civilization is beginning to collapse in very real and in very serious ways. Most Americans are comforted in the belief that our government and our country's best and brightest will step up to protect us.

The entire idea of American exceptionalism and the illusion of national security is that we are strong and that we can take a blow and that we will protect Americans from any sort of major attack or cataclysm. But the truth is that we are very brittle and inelastic at this stage of development – both individualistically as well as societally. President Biden recently stated, “We’re always looking ahead and America never leaves anyone behind.”

But what if it turns out that the greatest threat in this age of catastrophe and loss of meaning is the very idea that Americans will pull together in times of crisis? What if this is an elusive notion? Killed by decades of treating “American Freedom” is the freedom to get ahead at any cost. During ordinary times, it's easy to think that the elite, the one percent, are actually concerned about everybody's welfare. But then in that moment of crisis, say a hyper-inflationary financial calamity, when the elites treat these economic interruptions as an opportunity for profiteering and price gouging from the public purse, then that's the recipe for a failed state as the US economy grounds to a halt and millions of Americans are put out of work. Then we will witness how vulnerable our way of life really is.

People are fundamentally scared of two scenarios which are inter-related. The first is the idea that we have built a technological society whose comforts we are reliant upon, whose coordination we need to sustain our current eight billion planetary population and the idea that if we just turned off all the machines tomorrow, the kind of handmade version of our societies where all the crops are brought in by hand, for example, would provoke mass die-offs.

The story that we've been sold is part of the second fear which is gradually presuming that our institutions are no longer trustworthy, that they have become not truth-seeking exercises, but rather auction houses in which people who are powerful and wealthy can buy a version of the truth that suits their parochial ends.

In a world in which the sacklers successfully convince the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) that opioids weren't dangerous and kick-started an opioid epidemic that has killed 200,000 Americans so far which is 142,000 more than the number of our soldiers who died in Vietnam and where the sacklers themselves became richer than the Rockefellers. How do you trust such institutions? You don’t. Never has the public trust been so rapidly corroding. The Trump phenomenon is a symptom of this disease.

Here’s a realistic nightmarish scenario: If our national electrical grid goes down, 90% of Americans will die within six months! Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is an electromagnetic wave similar to radio waves, which results from secondary reactions occurring when the nuclear gamma radiation is absorbed in the air or ground. An EMP attack would wipe out not just the infrastructure that we have, but we would very quickly see the distance between the importance by which the government seeks their own survival verses the survival of the American people. This idea of national security would collapse almost instantaneously. But in the age of catastrophe, it doesn't really take an EMP to see what happens when hope and trust exit the equation as our basic institutions start to fail us. We all just lived through three and a half years of a global pandemic. We all got a small glimpse of loss of certainty and helplessness in an age of mechanization and structure.

At the micro level, what happens when somebody doesn't have a job, doesn't have the basic kind of access to resources that we take for granted in the rich world? You turn on the tap and water doesn't come out. You go to the store and there's not enough food. You press the button and there's no electricity. What happens then? History tells us that when people grow suddenly poor, what happens is massive waves of authoritarianism and fascism coming their way. History tells us that in absolutely unsparing and unambiguous terms! That's the story of why Weimar Republic Germany become the Nazi Germany. It's the story of the Arab Spring world. Soon, it could be the story of America and in fact the fate of the world.