THE COLLAPSE IS HERE

THE COLLAPSE IS HERE - The Dive with Jackson Hinkle

June 1, 2022

The Dive with Jackson Hinkle

When I look at the world today, I see something chilling. Collapse is already here — and it's spreading. And next to it is the curious juxtaposition of pretending that life will go on "normally." I've warned for some time now that we're entering an age of collapse, where our great systems will fail — and if you look around now, you can see it beginning to happen.

We're going to talk about this in three forms — political, economic, and social systems — and on two levels, national and global systems. What's alarming — oh no, am I an alarmist? — is that now our systems are visibly beginning to fail, and fail incredibly swiftly, in all of those ways.

Let's begin with some obvious examples. In America, at the moment, you can't get…baby formula. Think about that for a second. The richest country in the world can't provide baby formula for its people. What on earth? It's a vivid example of system failure. What kind of system? In this case, economic systems.

Right now, a wave of mega-inflation is surging around the globe. It's driven largely by climate change — and our nonexistent "response" to it. Harvests are failing, goods are getting harder and harder to distribute and ship, raw materials harder to source and attain. Inflation is going to keep rising — for the rest of our lives, with maybe a pause here and there. And as inflation goes on rising, the average person will get poorer.

But poorer doesn't just mean "less money," thought that's bad enough. Poorer, on a civilizational level, means what happened in America. You can't get things anymore. Basic things. Baby formula. But there's a long, long list of things you can't get in America, too. Decent healthcare, affordable medicine, safety from gun massacres, bodily autonomy if you're a woman. This is what happens when societies get poorer. Shortages become the norm. You can see them beginning to happen in vivid, shocking detail now. Empty shelves are becoming the new normal. The age of abundance is over.

Our economies have failed. And they're going to continue to fail. That brings me to failing social systems.

Think of how many generations our economies have failed at this point.

Boomers were the last ones to really live the dream — since then, our economies have been in decline, and that decline has accelerated rapidly. Gen X had it worse than Boomers, but not so bad as to cause total despair — enough to be comical. Millennials had it worse than Gen X — and they can't afford to move out of their parents' homes, or start families, so birth rates are declining. Zoomers have it far, far worse than Millennials — they'll never be able to retire, they can't get decent jobs, their lives are over before they began.

There's a word to sum all that up — intergenerational inequality. What does intergenerational inequality do? It destroys the possibility of functioning social systems. Someone has to pay for them, after all — from retirement systems to post offices to hospitals and universities and so forth. Social systems must be funded from the public purse. But when people are struggling harder, generation after generation, getting poorer, there's less left over to invest.

This is the real reason why young people are apathetic about politics. They know they can't change anything even if they try. They don't have the money, so what's the point? Sure, they can vote in politicians who want to build social systems — and sometimes they do, like AOC or who have you. But those politicians are left powerless in the end, because societies in which generation after generation is getting poorer cannot afford to be functioning societies at all.

This isn't just an American problem, of course — America never had many social systems thanks to the bitter legacy of apartheid, since social systems are for all. It's a European problem, a worldwide problem. Even European social democracy is barely hanging by a thread at this point. In gentle Canada, extreme conservatives rise time and again. People who get poorer give up on politics. Downward mobility is the end of democracy. It creates a vicious spiral of poverty, apathy, resignation, because even if you want a functioning society, nobody can afford one, so what's the point?

What happens without good social systems, though? People's lives fall apart, even faster. They grow uneducated. Ill. Distrustful and hostile. Their minds narrow and their spirits wither. There is nowhere common to rub shoulders. Life becomes individualistic, a bitter struggle, in which everyone else is regarded with suspicion, an enemy. In the absence of community provided by real social systems, from libraries to parks to great and grand ones like retirement or educational systems, people turn to pre-modern forms of community in their search for belonging and meaning. They turn to fundamentalist religion. Conspiracy theory. They grow radicalized and look to crackpot theories like "The Great Replacement" in despair and confusion. Hate takes over when community dies.

Original: https://youtu.be/rb4bEBRb9ys

Collapse Is Already Here — And It's Spreading
READ MORE: https://eand.co/collapse-is-already-here-and-its-spreading-4cc38f47ea0c

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The Dive with Jackson Hinkle is an American perspective on news & politics which airs daily.

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