Is Society Collapsing? Signs of the West’s Potential Downfall

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Is society collapsing? What’s pointing to a potential downfall of Western civilization?

A societal collapse refers to the theoretical idea that a human civilization and its cultural identity will either become primitive or disappear. While no one knows for sure whether Western society will collapse, there are shocking signs that raise the question.

Keep reading to learn about four signs that could point to a future societal collapse. 

Sign #1: Overexploitation of Resources and Possible Population Crash

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. However, some experts now warn that humanity has grown too quickly, and sometime this century the population is going to plummet. 

William E. Rees—a prolific population ecologist—recently published a study warning that humanity’s growth and resource consumption are unsustainable and 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, Rees believes a population correction could cause a societal collapse. 

Furthermore, Rees contends we’re already seeing the impacts of humanity’s overshoot. The most notable of these effects is climate change, which Rees claims 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. 

Rees says that we sustain our population growth by overexploiting the world’s resources and generating large amounts of pollution. Therefore, we’ll soon 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 biologist Paul Ehrlich, billions of people are malnourished and suffering from harsh climate change because of over-consumption. If the problem gets worse, Ehrlich says billions of people could die because the planet simply can’t support them (alternatively, Rees believes starvation won’t necessarily be the sole cause of a population crash). At that point, a societal collapse could occur because these people belong to certain cultures, possibly making them extinct altogether. In a similar instance, the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island saw their society collapse because of the overexploitation of resources that resulted in starvation, a population crash, and more extremely, cannibalism.

Sign #2: Polarizing Politics

The second sign that we might face Western society’s collapse is how much politics is dividing nations. 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.

Humans are radically divided, making it difficult to come together to fix problems that could lead to society’s collapse. According to Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, polarization creates a set of dynamics in American politics that make it a winner-take-all contest between the two parties. The dynamics of polarization, he writes, 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 sometimes leads to protests, many of which have infamously turned to violent and illegal methodologies in order to accomplish their goal.

Meanwhile in European countries, strong political divides are growing between urban and rural populations, evident by the UK 206 Brexit vote and the Yellow vests protests in France. In a 2021 study, Michael Kenny and Davide Luca 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

Klein observes that 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 drive our political behavior. 

He writes that our disagreements run far deeper than straightforward economic questions like, “Will this bill help improve the roads in my town?” or, “Which candidate or party will help lower the cost of prescription drugs?” 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.” 

In Klein’s analysis, 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.

Klein writes that 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. Ultimately, writes Klein, 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.

Sign #3: The Apocalyptic Weather

Geographer Jared Diamond argues 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. Diamond identifies three indicators of societal collapse due to environmental change:

  • Consistent pattern of environmental change
  • Agricultural or industrial production making the crisis worse
  • A systematic or governmental failure to adopt new means of production

Although the media and the world’s governments began to focus their attention on global warming in the late 1980s, Vaclav Smil (How the World Really Works) contends that we’ve 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. 

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. This disinterest began to change as global temperatures increased. The summer of 1988 was the hottest on record at the time, and drought and wildfires were widespread in the US. The media and the public began to pay more attention to climate change scientists. In 1989, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established under the UN to provide a scientific perspective on climate change and its economic and political impacts.

Is Society Collapsing? Signs of the West’s Potential Downfall

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Katie Doll

Somehow, Katie was able to pull off her childhood dream of creating a career around books after graduating with a degree in English and a concentration in Creative Writing. Her preferred genre of books has changed drastically over the years, from fantasy/dystopian young-adult to moving novels and non-fiction books on the human experience. Katie especially enjoys reading and writing about all things television, good and bad.

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