[skillpass]

Personally I feel like the Collapse movement is full of histrionics and hysteria, and for a while I was ignoring it. But the movement seems to have a psychological pull. Most of the people I talk to in the US who are tuned into the news cycle or culture war on both the right and the left have started to accept parts of the Collapse narrative (rampant crime leading to breakdown of social order, climate change induced disasters leading to mass displacement of populations, etc.).

It worries me to see so many people accept Collapse as inevitable. I think such pessimistic attitudes will lead more people towards radicalization as they see revolutionary change as the only means to preventing collapse.

There must be some part of the human psyche which is attracted to the idea of world ending disasters. Ideas of apocalypse are found in many religions throughout the world.

Perhaps the Collapse movement is the new eschatology for a post-religion world.

[Manuel_D]

I think the allure is escapism: life is boring and unfulfilling for many people, so they are attracted to the notion that some spectacular event is going to suddenly upend their lives and make life more interesting.

One of the other patterns I see is justification of apathy. People rationalize lack of desire to work or apply themselves with the justification that the world is going to end relatively soon, so why bother.

[derbOac]

I agree it's probably escapism, maybe due to life being unfulfilling, but I'm not sure boredom is driving it. I suspect a lot of people of different political inclinations are deeply dissatisfied, and feel helpless. So they turn to collapse theories of different sorts.

I really wish there was a good way of tracking actual sentiment about collapse, and indicators of societal upheaval, to better understand how things really are, or what people really feel in general. There's many such things but they're all imperfect and point in different directions for different groups. Maybe this says something about the complexity of society -- if we could predict collapse, we'd probably be able to avoid it -- but it seems like it deserves more attention. I feel like it's a topic of increasing salience, but I'm not sure I have much to base that on other than people say it is. It is a pandemic, so there's that, but there's been similar things in my lifetime that didn't lead to quite so much collapse narrative.

Maybe things were so good or stable-seeming before that returning to some kind of historical norm with regard to instability factors is bringing things back to a baseline with collapse narrative? End-of-world beliefs are a classic thing; maybe they just disappeared (relatively speaking) for awhile.

[Karrot_Kream]

> It is a pandemic, so there's that, but there's been similar things in my lifetime that didn't lead to quite so much collapse narrative.

Yet despite all of the rhetoric around the pandemic throughout the entire world, very little has functionally changed politically. While the pandemic most certainly exposed many problems throughout world governments, the fact that no major change (e.g. revolution, energy collapse, etc) has actually happened is a testament to the world's current status quo.

> Maybe things were so good or stable-seeming before that returning to some kind of historical norm with regard to instability factors is bringing things back to a baseline with collapse narrative?

The world was a lot less connected before. Now we see the pain around us instantly through shared photos, Twitter, and the 24 hour news cycle. In the past you could go months without realizing that a major conflict was occurring, especially in less connected parts of the world.

[nemo44x]

> life is boring and unfulfilling for many people, so they are attracted to the notion that some spectacular event is going to suddenly upend their lives and make life more interesting

Mainly agree. As I was watching the Taliban take over region by region I wondered how many people were watching it in their comfortable home with nice things and climate control and couldn't help but feel envy in that these people (Taliban fighters) are doing something impactful and meaningful in their lives; creating the change they wanted. That while living in poverty relative to the person watching at home, they have real purpose.

Would the unfulfilled and bored person ever be able to put it all on the line for something they are certain is theirs and do their part in a collective of idealists with the same courage of their convictions? That the work to get there doesn't happen in a day or a month or a year but over decades, much like building a meaningful career and family that gives you fulfillment.

[Karrot_Kream]

If you feel this way, I encourage you to go volunteer in one of the many poverty and conflict-stricken regions of this world. The US Peace Corps does a lot of this kind of work. It's needed and fulfilling work.

[nemo44x]

Would love to in another life, but have too many responsibilities and obligations (e.g. things I love and cherish) here to do anything like that in good faith at this point. I have a friend who did when he was young (probably best time to do these types of things) and it's a thing that has a lot of meaning to him to this day and rightfully so I imagine.

[lazyasciiart]

If you're at the point where you envy Taliban soldiers for having a purpose in life, it might be good for the people you cherish to have you go figure some stuff out.

[nemo44x]

When did I say I envy them? Or that those that may envy their purposeful lives would agree with their politics and beliefs they fight for. Only that I could imagine a person with feelings of no purpose could look at them and envy that particular attribute.

[thyrsus]

There's also the "benefit" that if the future doesn't resemble the present, you don't have to make mundane preparations for it, like contributing to a 401k (since dollars will be useless), to say nothing of promoting beneficial government efforts (like social security or health care).

[Karrot_Kream]

The era of Mutually Assured Destruction inspired tons of post-nuclear-fallout fiction. I'm pretty sure Collapse is just the modern version of the same thing.

[thyrsus]

That era didn't end, we just became inured.

[i_haz_rabies]

I think the problem is that collapse _is actually inevitable_ if we don't solve climate change, and if you don't think humanity is capable of the coordination and sacrifice necessary to solve it, you are left with one conclusion.

[goatlover]

Where in the IPCC report does it say that collapse is inevitable? Why would that be the only conclusion? One can imagine global civilization adapting and doing what it can to mitigate the effects of climate change. Soldiering on might be one way to put it. If modern civilization and the biosphere overall are more resilient than some assume, then adaptation is a possibility.

One can also imagine cleaner technologies and carbon capture rapidly replacing fossil fuels in the next two decades, reducing the riskier scenarios. At any rate, there's no certainty since none of us has a time machine, and climate models are models of the climate, not human civilization or future technologies.

[eggsmediumrare]

Clean tech and carbon capture is solving climate change. I think the post above meant collapse is inevitable if we continue to do nothing. The IPCC doesn't exist to model human responses to climate change, so would have nothing to say on the subject of collapse. Perhaps inevitable is not entirely accurate... But "very likely" seems prudent.

[FooHentai]

Energy descent is another interesting angle - We know for a fact that the rate of replacement of fossil fuels is orders of magnitude below the rate at which we've been consuming it, and that there is no equal which will allow our energy-rich lifestyles to continue.

This implies at a certain point we descend to a less energy-rich lifestyle because we have no alternatives. What that descent looks like, graceful or painful, is an open question. As is exactly when it would happen - Folks were convinced peak oil was just around the corner but reality is a bit less simple.

[chobeat]

For sure there are eschatological traits, it's discussed quite commonly in the literature on the topic. We are exiting the linear, flat time of our parents and entering again in a cyclical time and we need ruptures: Collapse is one, Singularity is another but there are more on the horizon (like escape to space and so on).

[ben_w]

While I listen when, e.g. Stross compared the Singularity to an Atheist take on Christian theology, I don’t think our parents lived in anything like a linear time:

My dad was born in ‘39; the first fission bomb was ‘45; first transistor was demonstrated in ‘47; first fusion bomb ‘51; NTSC TV color standard was ‘53; first artificial satellite was ‘58; the laser and the pill in ‘60; measles vaccine in ‘63; the 60s was civil rights, anti-war, free love, gay rights and second-wave feminism in the west, decolonisation in Africa, the green revolution, and the majority of the space race; 8-track, compact cassette, PDP-8, BASIC were all ‘64; first ATM and first human-to-human heart transplant was ‘67; the Mother of All Demos was ‘68.

Then the 70s happened and made the 60s seem languid — the mainframes became home computers, the women became national leaders, space became more relevant, DNA sequencing first invented and then used to fully sequence a virus, first test tube baby and first genetically modified human insulin from E. coli, X-ray tomography and MRIs invented, smallpox eliminated first from the Americas and then worldwide, public key encryption, cochlear implants successfully implanted, first demo of an audio CD, polio eliminated in the USA, …

And the 80s surpassed the 70s like the 70s surpassed the 60s.

So much has changed so fast; these days you can only even keep track of how much has changed because of the crowdsourced efforts of other people.

[Karrot_Kream]

My grandfather near the end of his life had a rant about WhatsApp. "I grew up sending telegrams to my friends and family, learned to listen to the radio, started watching television, called neighbors on my home telephone, got my first mobile phone, and now you want me to do this WhatsApp thing? What's the point?" The sheer amount of change his generation saw was staggering.