Our Emotional Reactions to Collapse

For more than 20 years, I have been writing about civilizational collapse. I’m not an expert in the subject, just someone who’s read a lot about anthropology, the history of civilizations, human nature, and how complex systems work. My fundamental thesis has remained basically unchanged over this time: Our now-global industrial civilization culture is utterly unsustainable and has now entered a period of increasing chaos leading inevitably to the complete collapse of all its underlying and interconnected systems — political, economic, social, ecological, financial, technological, educational, transportation, health care etc. This collapse is proceeding in punctuated stages, and is unevenly distributed geographically, and will continue, like past large civilizational collapses, for centuries if not millennia to come. All large complex systems, by their very nature, eventually collapse, and there is no preventing, escaping, or even significantly mitigating it. Much has been written…