The Frightening Case Of a Coming American Collapse

The United States is in the midst of a social collapse. That’s the claim Umair Haque makes in an electric essay. Here are his three main takeaways.

If the United States were to collapse, how would we know it? We think we’d know, right? Structures would fall, the banks would run out of money, and the general disposition of the people would be at a level best described as “freaked out”.

But what if the usual markers, always tied to economic forces, aren’t able to account for social decline?

This is the question at the heart of Umair Haque’s essay, “Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse”. An essay I’ve been reflecting on for the last couple of weeks.

And while you may not find yourself with the same level of alarm, there is no doubt that Haque exposes the peculiarity of America’s most bedevilling problems.

“Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society.”

These social pathologies, like social diseases, are expressions of some deep sickness in the body politic. These pathologies include school shootings, the opioid epidemic, nomadic retirees, extreme capitalism, and a predatory society.

I reflected on each of these specifically, naming a pathological concern for each:

Three Concerns

After laying out these pathologies, Haque describes the three points raised by them.

1) We are pioneering a social disease.

“These social pathologies are something like strange and gruesome new strains of disease infecting the body social. America has always been a pioneer — only today, it is host not just to problems not just rarely seen in healthy societies — it is pioneering novel social pathologies have never been seen in the modern world outside present-day America, period. What does that tell us?”

The constant refrain in the five pathologies was the strange uniqueness of the problem. While politicians have often praised American uniqueness as Exceptionalism, it isn’t always good.

It’s often alarmingly bad.

We could just as easily name the exclusive case of American willingness to imprison its populace for long sentences and at extremely high levels. For its seeming rejection of rehabilitation and its willingness to kill the incarcerated, even minors.

Our friends in the world see capital punishment as barbaric. That we kill those who committed crimes as minors compounds that view. Even the most corrupt places in the world won’t stoop to our level…

That takes some next level hatred.

Exceptional at killing, at letting our people die with epic levels of poverty in the modern world, and a healthcare system which amounts to some spit and a Band-aid to a quarter of the population is unheard of in the rest of the world.

We are willingly blind to how obscene this is, and how individual this very problem is.

If we had any compassion at all, we wouldn’t export this pathology to our friends.

2) We aren’t concerned enough.

“American collapse is much more severe than we suppose it is. We are underestimating its magnitude, not overestimating it. American intellectuals, media, and thought doesn’t put any of its problems in global or historical perspective — but when they are seen that way, America’s problems are revealed to be not just the everyday nuisances of a declining nation, but something more like a body suddenly attacked by unimagined diseases.”

Our historical perspective is restricted by a present political course so erroneously divided and criminally indoctrinated toward the Left/Right sort that it refuses to look further back than 1981 or further even than these present divides.

And even more frustrating is how the rose-colored exceptionalist glasses blind us to the infinite ideas implemented in other parts of the world to deal with problems far less acute than ours.

We aren’t studying our own history or reflecting on world history to see what it can teach us.

But it is also worse than that.

We have calcified certain other beliefs and practices which are ultimately contrived and not founded in present analysis.

Take for example, the central economic theory of the last half century which encourages us to correlate the Dow with worker wages. The fear of inflation has created a doctrine of intervention to protect the market and the workers. Only it doesn’t.

But the continued use of the doctrine isn’t based in evidence because the evidence points in a different direction.

We could say the same about mass incarceration, climate change, healthcare, education, and countless other areas of society. We’re not making decisions based on evidence.

3) The U.S. is an outlier…and a warning for the world.

“Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel. And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it — much less explain it. We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it.”

This is why the Left/Right sorting of the public is so dangerous: it doesn’t account for how de-centered our public square is.

Whenever we say “both sides are doing it,” we are trying to center the conversation—but it doesn’t draw us to the ideological center. It plants a flag where we are and claims that space as the center. Even as we wrestle out of camp and hurdle toward a cliff. We try to break it up and find the center while we’re standing in the middle of nowhere.

To even begin to address all of our concerns, we need to speak more honestly about (to hazard a different analogy) how incapable our autopilot is for navigating this asteroid field.

We Must Act

Our own history will give us clues to how we got here, but we won’t find any silver bullets, and we especially won’t find detailed how-to guides and Dummies books which will receive unanimous consent so we can finally start to fix our problems tomorrow.

But our continued pretending that everything is normal, that our problems are inevitable, or that the world’s other countries have nothing to teach us is a new, terrifying pathology we’ve developed in our country’s recent history. Not because our people weren’t naive before. We haven’t been a global super power all that long.

It’s just different.

We’re entering entirely new territory. No precedent here or elsewhere. Not in the modern world.

And perhaps most importantly, the United States has poorly handled getting things wrong. We suck at humility. And we definitely suck at admitting it when we’ve royally screwed up. Probably most obvious is our response to slavery wasn’t 40 acres and a mule, but Jim Crowe. And we’ve never made amends for either.

Fixing these pathologies and getting out from under their weight is going to take a lot of work. Diverse, intentional, humble, and bold work. Work which starts by admitting how royally WE have screwed up and how uniquely positioned WE are to involve others in fixing it.