/ world today news/ Let’s assume that our esteemed reader is convinced that the collapse of the United States is inevitable and will happen, if not right now, then certainly in his lifetime. Our task is to help him come to terms with this and overcome the shock, horror, grief, despondency and other harmful emotions. After all, the USA (was) so great and powerful – how come?!
Swiss-American psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identifies the following stages in the process of coming to terms with tragedy and grief: shock, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. She has applied these categories quite successfully to help patients cope with traumatic events in their personal lives, such as the death of a loved one and the unexpected end of their career. Some thinkers, such as the American authors James Howard Kunstler, have found that the Kubler-Ross model is also directly applicable to the process that their fellow citizens (at least the thinking part of them) are now going through to come to terms that their future will inevitably there is a rupture with their present, whether as a result of natural resource depletion, national bankruptcy, climate catastrophes, a viral pandemic with a very low mortality rate, the apparent deterioration of education and health systems, life-threatening infrastructure depreciation, or the inexorably progressive insanity of the ruling elites. But they say almost nothing about the internal logic of this rift. Instead of analysis, these analysts offer a variety of subjective assessments and metaphorical descriptions, from the notorious “chance of a severe and protracted recession” increasingly mentioned in the financial press, to “prolonged emergency” (as Kunstler called his book) and to the ever-fashionable “collapse of Western civilization”, which at any moment and anywhere can serve as a pretext for an enchanting feast of fantasy.
For some, this approach is enough. For those who have already successfully passed through all the stages of reconciliation and are accustomed to the idea that America’s collapse is inevitable, I offer a more precise terminology that allows us to distinguish between the stages of collapse. This kind of taxonomy of collapse has practical applications: depending on the situation, it may be possible to locally slow or freeze the collapse at a certain stage and thus save many lives. Even when the continued existence of society as a whole at a given level of socio-economic development becomes impossible and collapse is inevitable, this does not mean that the whole must almost completely die out, and the few survivors degenerate into half-wild, solitary wanderers, miserable vegetating among the ruins in the dark and cold and waiting in vain for the delivery of humanitarian aid.
As American anthropologist Joseph Tainter describes in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, under certain conditions, collapse is a proper and necessary adaptation from the point of view of survival. Guided by his logic, one can imagine the collapse not as an escape from the battlefield, but as a tactical and strategically reasoned retreat, carried out according to all the rules of military science and without loss. One can think of the collapse as a kind of reorganization (planned without our participation, so it is pointless to discuss its expediency) during which transnational financial structures, global consumer society and liberal political regimes will collapse along with those social groups and cultures , which are particularly strongly dependent on them, while everything else, important, valuable and much loved, will remain with us.
In an effort to make my taxonomy of collapse as applicable and useful as possible, I’ve organized it into a series of mental stages that allow each of us to determine where we are, how prepared we are, and how to prepare ourselves even better. Each stage is associated not with a certain emotion, as in Kübler-Ross, but with a certain level of trust or faith in the inviolability of the status quo – or rather, with the loss of this level of trust. Although each stage of collapse brings with it certain physical, visible and measurable changes, these can be long-lasting, while the loss of confidence often sweeps through society at lightning speed, sometimes in the form of panic. It may be recognized as a universal rule of social behavior that no one wants to be the last fool who still believes a lie. Thus, what yesterday seemed incredible, tomorrow may become obvious to everyone, and to a sarcastic remark “yesterday you didn’t think so!” the quite reasonable answer “yesterday no one thought so!”
First stage: financial collapse. Lost faith that things will go on as usual. It becomes impossible to count on the future to be similar enough to the past to calculate financial risks and guarantee trades. More and more financial institutions are on the verge of bankruptcy. Savings and investments collapse in value or are completely written off. Access to credit, financial markets and remittances is lost.
Second stage: trade collapse. Lost faith that the free market can supply you with everything you need. Money depreciates or becomes scarce. Essential goods accumulate in private hands, imports and retail trade slow or stop, and widespread shortages of food items necessary for survival become the norm.
Third stage: political collapse. Lost faith that your government will take care of you. As attempts by officials to compensate for the loss of access to essential goods among the population prove futile, the political elite loses legitimacy and viability. Local, often illegal or semi-legal forms of exchange and trade arise spontaneously.
Fourth stage: social collapse. Lost faith that your people will not leave you in trouble. Community organizations, whether charitable or otherwise, trying to fill the resulting shortfall in products and services face a lack of resources or are stalled by internal conflicts. Faced with general distrust and hostility, people isolate themselves within their families and circles of acquaintances.
Stage Five: Cultural Collapse. Lost faith in human virtue. People are losing the ability to show “kindness, generosity, care, sympathy, honesty, hospitality, compassion, mercy.” (This list of human virtues is taken from the anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s Mountain People.) Solzhenitsyn’s “Die today, I tomorrow” became a common maxim.
Armed with this list, one can think of collapse as a cascade of collapse stages proceeding strictly in the top order. A financial collapse is the first thing that happens as soon as the financiers realize that something is wrong and start paying back commercial loans. Then there is a trade collapse when, due to lack of trade credit, businessmen are forced to cut off trade. Political collapse is inevitable when commercial collapse leads to a drop in tax revenues and the government loses its ability to make mandatory social payments and provide for its activities. Well, and so on down the chain. But in reality, it turns out that all the stages of the collapse do not happen one after the other, but overlap each other in a strange way. This is to be expected: people are not insects, and once they start to suspect something, their behavior ceases to be predictable. But it is nevertheless useful to distinguish the phases of collapse, as each phase requires its own special approaches and adaptations.
Of course, the collapse of something is impossible without such a thing. Thus, if there is no financial sector at all, and every moneylender has taken away the ax, then a financial collapse is impossible. If the trade is based on barter transactions using a certain amount of gold and silver as collateral, then the lack of trade credits will not harm it in any way. And if there is no political system but a strictly anarchic patriarchal-tribal system, then political collapse is not a threat to us, in which case we have nothing to fear and our connections, foundations and original culture will remain intact and unharmed. On the other hand, if we have no connections, no foundations, no identity, but only vulgar pop culture, relentless consumerism, and pathetic attempts at ostentation, then the world’s most liberal and democratic finance, commerce, and politics are dead.
If the collapse is predetermined, then trying to stop the collapse at the first or second stage is a waste of time and effort. Sometimes it makes sense to dig in and hold the defense in the third stage. But preventing the fourth and fifth stages is a matter of pure biological survival. In areas with high population density and the presence of hazardous chemical production, WMD stockpiles and nuclear facilities, the prevention of the third stage may require the intervention of international peacekeeping forces and other external forces to prevent acts of nuclear and other terrorism and man-made disasters. At the same time, the population of remote steppe agricultural and pastoral areas, isolated mountain enclaves and hard-to-reach islands can bypass the third stage of collapse almost without noticing it.
Hopefully, these definitions will serve as a basis for a more meaningful discussion of the future and, in a sense, already accomplished collapse of the US, the EU, and other collapsing regions, rather than the invariably fashionable but empty-mouthed “collapse of Western civilization.”
Translation: V. Sergeev
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