Fear of Collapse: Things Falling Apart, Left and Right

“Riding Into the Unknown”: as depicted by Midjourney AI; not my prompt 

Much has been written of late about the “collapse of the left” and the global rise of right-wing populism. In many cases this is (somewhat understandably) blamed on infighting among ‘factions’ of the left. This recent article laments the “abandonment” by leading leftist thinkers of their commitment to the values that have traditionally defined the left, and the embrace by “high-profile defectors” of xenophobic and neocon causes, suggesting some of them are doing it “for the money”.

Rhyd Wildermuth, one of those who has been accused of going over to the other side by joining the sometimes-disturbing right-wing-funded platform UnHerd, rebuked the charges, blaming the intransigence of diehard “woke” liberals for the disillusionment of many leftists with the idealistic neoliberal party line. The term “loss of faith”, tellingly, is much used to describe the behaviour of such “defectors”. An excerpt from Rhyd’s rebuttal, explaining why he believes it is the self-proclaimed spokespeople for the left who have, in recent years, “lost the thread”:

Suddenly, using a material analysis to understand economic disparity meant you were anti-Black, anti-trans, and anti-disabled. Suddenly, thinking that the concerns of the working class mattered more than ever-changing academic theories meant you were a fascist. Just as suddenly, criticizing the globalization of capitalism and the erosion of local democratic control meant you were antisemitic. Believing humans should be allowed to decide what they do with their bodies suddenly meant you’d fallen for far right conspiracy theories about micro-chipped vaccines. And practically (or perhaps truly) overnight, standing for the principles of free speech and due process meant being a white supremacist and a rape-apologist.

On the other hand, what being “leftist” meant no longer looked anything like what it used to. What passes for it now is indistinguishable from capitalist optimism: an embrace of technological disruption as the key to social progress, a focus on individualistic identity-markers rather than collective class struggle, an increasing vilification of manual labor and non-urban cultural and religious forms, and a fanatic belief that every natural limit to human consumption and behavior can be transcended.

I wonder, though, whether there isn’t a deeper explanation for the apparent dysfunction of the political left, that also explains the growing success of demagogues in appealing to conservatives in many countries.

My reading of anthropology suggests that we humans are susceptible to three core, instinctive emotions that we share, for evident evolutionary reasons, with all creatures — anger, fear, and sadness. These emotions motivate us, when it’s appropriate, to fight, flee, freeze, or move on to new places. But in our modern civilization culture, these emotions (plus some additional uniquely human ones like hatred, shame, jealousy and guilt) can be provoked in ways that can render us dysfunctional.

We’ve learned to ignore, distrust and deny what our instincts tell us, but that won’t stop them from telling us about the dangers we face.

It’s pretty easy to understand the fear and anger of conservatives and of what used to be called the “working classes”. The cities have become alien, frightening places to them (fears which the right-wing media are all too willing to amplify). Everything they believed in, especially the American Dream (“you can do anything if you work hard enough”), seems broken, lost. Their lives are defined by precarity. There are no jobs, and no job security (and heaven forbid that our educational systems should teach young people how to create their own). Their debts have been rising and their income and net worth falling (especially if you use real inflation numbers) for 50 years. The values they were taught (hard work, obedience, religious faith) seem to have fallen out of favour. They are utterly baffled by complex issues like the economy and climate change.

No surprise then that when demagogues come along that rail against “modernity” (everyone’s favourite new whipping boy, since it can mean anything you hate about the current state of the world), and promise a return to nostalgic past times that never actually existed (eg “MAGA”), and also promise to punish the sinners whom they blame for everything falling apart (liberals, feminists, foreigners and of course “the government”), these demagogues are often welcomed by conservatives and the “working classes”. They’re terrified, and angry, and they’re looking for someone who will tell them they’re right, and that soon everything will be put right again. The most telling word in MAGA is the last one.

It’s been half a century, I would say, since self-proclaimed leftists actually gave a damn about the “working classes”, so caught up are they in their humanistic, idealistic, ideology of endless progress, “fairness” and “justice” (vague terms that, like “freedom”, “democracy” and “modernity” mean vastly different things to different people). The working classes have surely noticed that there is no more progress, fairness or justice today, at least how they would define those terms, than there was 50 years ago, despite self-proclaimed progressives being in power for quite a bit more than half of that time. It is hard to deny that that power has been squandered by successive “progressive” administrations in favour of what Aurélien calls “performative governance” (saying the right things and showing the right, diverse, public faces, while doing substantively nothing).

And it is equally hard to deny that these “progressive” administrations have been every bit as incompetent at accomplishing anything of lasting value, as the “conservative” and populist administrations they have traded power with. It isn’t hard, with that record, to see how politicians who vow to lessen the role and cost of government forever, successfully play on the simple thinking and naiveté of most voters (across the political spectrum).

I see the fragmentation of what used to be called “the left” as being largely the result of a very similar intuitive sense of anger and fear among leftists. Like the rest of the population, I think, leftists sense there is something very wrong with the way things are, and the way they seem to be headed. Their anger, I think, reflects a sense of betrayal by so-called “progressive” political “leaders” whose only drive seems to be how to stir up opposition to conservatives and populists (ie foment more anger and fear) as their means to obtain or retain power.

The vast majority of what Aurélien calls the Professional-Managerial Caste (PMC) — the part of the “left” that remains when the “working classes” have deserted it — have not benefited at all from the supposed “growth” in the economy for the last 50 years, and find their situation almost as precarious as that of the “working classes”. They have seen carefully crafted performances by “progressive” administrations while the economy continues to crash and become ever-more inequitable, and while the world burns (in many senses of the word). They have seen the small top-caste segment of the PMC (with loud media support) refashion the alleged values of the left to be around an abstract, ideological platform of identity, theory and principles, largely, as Rhyd says, divorced from any connection with action (other than performative “actions”), and divorced from most people’s actual material lives.

Why should they support any party or leader or movement that utterly betrays in their actions (and inactions) what their words espouse?

[As an aside: What the political ‘pundits’ miss in their furious election polling is that, notwithstanding which party the befuddled citizens claim to support (ie hate least), the citizens in almost all ‘western’ countries have consistently, and by a large margin, supported what were traditionally “progressive” programs and policies — free access to abortion, universal free health care, and sharply graduated taxation of the rich, most notably. The fact that these citizens are now concluding that the self-proclaimed “progressive” and “centrist” parties are not actually willing to face the political storm required to implement these programs and policies, bodes poorly for these parties and well for the conservative and populist parties that oppose them.]

I believe that most of the population, in most of the world, across the political spectrum, probably intuitively knows (but refuses to let themselves believe) that the polycrisis can only end in one way — collapse. Most, I think, have no clear sense of what “collapse” means, but the daily doom-scroll keeps telling them that things are getting worse, and are out of control, and the future looks even worse. And so they are, understandably, angry, fearful, and sad.

As I keep saying ad nauseum, this is what collapse looks like. When everything has become dysfunctional, so the entirety of our civilization is operating largely on auto-pilot, continuing its corporate-capitalism-programmed attempts to grow and consume as many resources as possible, most people are starting to look for an exit ramp (preferably a reassuring, simple, populist one, though a religious/spiritual/ideological one will do in a pinch), and, I think, have largely, and not irrationally, given up on the political process. Most won’t of course acknowledge this — the vacuum it leaves behind is too awful to countenance — but we are, I believe, starting to act as if this civilization is (almost assuredly but not quite certainly) done for.

This is indeed a “loss of faith”, and I’m not surprised at all at the number of former leftists and collapsniks who have retreated to religious beliefs, or to (mostly ancient) spiritual and mythic beliefs and practices. A lot of people, it seems, need to have faith in something.

Collapse is what happens when this is finally admitted, and people head for the hills. Most people don’t really believe Trump will be any better than the execrable war-monger and PMC-top-caste patsy Biden. They’re both known quantities, and both they and their political machines are almost universally loathed by the citizens, and pretty much equally incompetent and ideologically sclerotic. The same, I think, applies in most ‘western’ nations, and the same may also be true in non-Empire nations, who have their own share of incompetent demagogues. Aurélien argues that in times of crisis we turn politically to whoever is best able to offer us some basic security to weather the storm, and the answer to that, increasingly, is none of the above.

If you read Jared Diamond, or Ronald Wright, they will tell you what happens next when a civilization collapses. There will be attempts to keep it going, and attempts to reform it to make it work, neither of which can succeed because neither changes the broken underlying fundamentals (too big, unsustainable, resource scarcities, complicating ecological collapse, etc etc). If there were any functioning alternatives to the collapsing power structure (“uncivilized hordes”), they would then try to fill the power vacuum. But with this collapse being global, there are no functional powers waiting in the wings to take over.

Finally, when attempts to bandage up the failed civilization have clearly not worked, there will be a reluctant “walking away”, as the shreds of the dysfunctional civilization fail to meet even the basic needs of citizens (and as this dysfunction is amplified by the movement of potentially billions of climate refugees). And with no other civilization to walk away to join, whatever emerges in our attempt to reorganize citizens into viable communities will, I think, of necessity be utterly chaotic — millions of small experiments, most of which will fail, because we no longer have the basic skills, hard or soft, or the preconditions needed to create and sustain communities. We have forgotten how to live the way we lived for a million ‘pre-civ’ years.

It’s going to be hard, and very likely last centuries, perhaps even millennia, during which we’ll watch the long tail of a suddenly much smaller human population stretch out, in endless decline. Perhaps ending in extinction, or perhaps in a much smaller population of radically local tribal communities, struggling their way to rediscover how to learn to live sustainably, together, in community.

It’s going to be hard, and, I truly believe, based on everything I’ve read about civilizations and cultures and human nature, it’s more than likely going to be exciting, even awesome. I wish I could be there to see and participate! (Yeah, crazy thinking, I know. I’m weird that way.)

This is what we are, intuitively, I think, all afraid of. Across the political spectrum, we don’t like things falling apart. We don’t like precarity, uncertainty, struggle, having to change, and making mistakes. We don’t like complexity, and how it plays with our foolish ideologies and humbles us — and when it comes to complexity, Gaia has no peers. And most of all, we don’t like chaos. We are absolutely right to be instinctively afraid, angry, and sad in these, the declining, frail years of our once-promising civilization. And we are right to feel betrayed by political, economic and social ideologies that have done us no favours, and which led us, inadvertently, to this collapse.