Is This What Collapse Looks Like?

What is happening to the world? It’s a question being asked with growing urgency around the globe. Wars rage on, systems and institutions are faltering; divisions of all kinds, including widening inequalities, are deepening—heightening the risk of conflict. The environmental emergency is accelerating, and uncertainty reigns, fuelling a global mental health epidemic.

Is poor leadership and geopolitical mismanagement at the root of our problems—or are we witnessing the slow, perhaps inevitable, collapse of civilisation itself?

Civilizations do not collapse overnight, but unravel over centuries as established systems, values, and ways of living decay. The underlying structures—economic, political, social, ecological—gradually fracture, until the mechanisms that once held everything together can no longer absorb the strain.

As pressures such as extreme inequality and ecological breakdown reach critical thresholds, tipping points are triggered—points beyond which reversal becomes impossible, at least in the short to medium term. Despite this, warning signs are routinely ignored, deferring action to an imagined future, when things will miraculously improve.

The refusal to respond proportionately to the risk ensures that systemic failure—and in some cases, outright collapse within particular domains—is virtually inevitable. Such breakdown often results from a system’s carrying capacity being exceeded—the point beyond which it can no longer sustain existing levels of demand, tension, or pressure. Once that threshold is crossed, the only remaining question is when collapse will occur, not if.

While breaching carrying capacity may be the structural trigger for collapse, the deeper causes are more complex and multi-layered: a toxic mix of hubris, ideological rigidity, denial of stark realities, systemic inertia—and, arguably, deeper energetic shifts. Today, these dynamics are reinforced by political complacency and corporate influence/power, ensuring the survival of unjust systems—no matter the cost.

Crisis Cascade

The consequences of entrenched resistance to change—and the arrogance that fuels it—are now starkly visible: multiple systems are under extreme stress, many of them either approaching or already breaching their carrying capacity.

Critical areas, themselves symptomatic of deeper systemic pressures, include social injustice/exploitation, economic inequality, armed conflict, and mass displacement, while the environmental emergency stands out as the defining existential threat of our time. Key planetary boundaries—from biodiversity to climate stability—are being crossed, bringing irreversible tipping points dangerously close.

Economic inequality is intensifying, spiralling debt traps entire populations in cycles of generational hardship, and poverty is becoming endemic—from low-income households in the West to indebted nations across the Global South.

These and other conditions are feeding a series of interconnected fires: social unrest, widespread psychological distress, deepening political polarisation, and the rise of far-right extremism. Exploitative, dangerous politicians are being empowered, while civic trust, institutional credibility, and the foundations of democracy continue to erode.

In parallel, armed conflicts persist, and the legal and moral frameworks meant to govern warfare are being flagrantly disregarded—nowhere more so than in Israel, where the state is committing grave violations of international humanitarian law, including genocide against the Palestinian people.

These crises are not separate or isolated. They are interwoven, each reinforcing the next, accelerating the risk of cascading breakdown. Climate change and ecological stress destabilise economies; economic exclusion and systemic injustice fuel extremism, division, and violence—driving displacement and mass migration. Institutional fragility compounds political inaction, paving the way for authoritarianism and the collapse of democratic norms.

Transitional times

While the scale and interconnectedness of today’s challenges are unprecedented, civilisational breakdown itself is not new.

From Rome to the Maya and Mesopotamia, history reveals societies that underwent seismic transformation—events often painful, yet ultimately generative. Such collapses acted as a kind of clearing agent, creating space for new forms to emerge: evolving social orders, cosmologies, and ways of living that more closely reflected the needs of a changing epoch.

There are myriad signs suggesting we may be experiencing the birth pangs of such a global transition—a profound shift with the potential to reimagine civilisation and transform human consciousness.

Yet resistance to change remains fierce—entrenched powers cling to fading worldviews and obsolete systems, rather than adapt to emerging realities or create the space for transformative thought. And with resistance comes conflict: the old must give way to the new—or as one wise voice put it, “The old bottles must be broken; the new wine deserves better.”

The clash between progressive forces seeking transformation and those clinging to power is no abstraction—it is expressed daily in competing values, visions, and worldviews, with divisions growing more polarised year by year. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the global landscape has been shaped by two opposing currents.

One is a rising tide of people demanding change—calling for justice, equality, ecological repair, and a reimagining of how we live. From the Arab Spring to Occupy, from climate marches to Black Lives Matter, this is the powerful voice of a world community desperate for new ways of living.

The other is a shrinking but determined reactionary minority, which in many cases holds political and corporate power. Wedded to outdated structures and backward-looking worldviews, they are increasingly resorting to extreme tactics to maintain the cruel, unjust status quo and the dysfunctional systems that underpin it.

These reactionary elites—age-old deniers to progress, justice and equality—are not merely indifferent to change; they are actively hostile to it. Their resistance is not only ideological but existential, driven by the recognition that the collapse of the old order threatens their power and control.

In their attempts to preserve decaying systems and suppress the inevitability of transformation, they deepen the crises destabilising our world. As a result, instead of a peaceful, evolutionary transition from one age or civilisation to another, we face conflict and division—an existential battle, the outcome of which will shape the future for generations to come.

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