The Beginning of the End of the World
Image: Kip Evans
Why We Have to Take the Idea of Civilizational Collapse Seriously, and What it Really Looks Like
by umair haque
Here’s a tiny question. In your darker moments — do you wonder if, well, in some elemental sense, the world around us is ending? That things have changed? Doesn’t something deep down in your gut whisper that to you? Mine does.
Hold on. Am I serious? How am I not? A relatively mild pandemic brought our civilization to its knees. We couldn’t even vaccinate the world to end it. The world is already resorting to resource wars in anticipation of climate change. And we’re our climate inaction is causing levels of warming faster and worse than scientists predicted.
So let’s talk about what I mean by “the world ending.” What does that strange phrase really mean? We have to step far — far — outside ourselves to really understand it. Because I don’t mean a meteor. I don’t even mean runaway climate change causing catastrophe after catastrophe. It just means more…of this. Now. What we’re already living in. A kind of bizarre, gruesome, hellish dystopia. The end of the world feels like now for a very good reason. A species (that’s us) fighting each other desperately for life — on a dying planet.
Imagine that aliens visited this planet. What would they see? Something like this. This planet was dying. Meanwhile, “the world” as the species that dominated it had become accustomed to thinking of it, looked something very much like this. About 10% of the world was rich, and that was mostly in an enclave in the North and West — Europe and America. Just 10%. Rich in the simple and minimal sense of: being able to provide for one’s basic needs. And even among that 10%, much of it had fallen into poverty — like Americans and Brits, who increasingly couldn’t provide for basic needs. Nevertheless, thanks to a long, long history of centuries of violence, slavery, hatred, and subjugation, 10% of this world was vastly richer than the rest.
The other 90% of the world was still shatteringly poor. That was most of it: Africa, Asia, South America, the Middle East, and so on. The majority of human beings in this world didn’t eat enough protein to meet the standards of a healthy Western diet. The majority of human beings lived on about $5 a day.
That was the world — in the simplest way. A rich 10%, a poor 90%, and an ultra rich 1% or 0.1%. And that ultra rich was increasingly the only people for whom life was really improving. They were becoming richer than kings of yore. But what about everyone else? In fact, those billionaires profited off a worldwide illness, making as much money as workers lost.
Human beings were effectively three tribes on a dying planet. And soon enough, those three tribes, those three strata, would find themselves at each others’ throats, in a bitter, desperate fight for survival.
(So this world was really three worlds — that old first, second, third world distinction is still, to my mind, a good one. There are two ways to think about that. There’s the true first world, social democratic Europe. The weird second world of failed-state poor-rich countries, like America and Russia and now Britain. And then there’s everyone else, more or less. Or — the broader, perhaps darker way. The first world: the 0.1% of the globe that’s ultra-rich. Then second, the still rich but increasingly desperate 10% of average Americans and Europeans, the middle classes in rich countries who are growing poor. And then the 90% who never became rich at all.)
Now, the way that this world works is this. The rich world and the poor world almost never meet. The people in the rich world live in relative comfort and peace and prosperity. They watch silly reality TV shows and internet porn and aspire to perfect pecs while…90% of the world is still poor, half of it barely able to subsist at all, and most of it still abjectly so. The people of the rich world don’t devote their lives to, say, building a world that’s richer, fairer, and freer for all — mostly, they devote their lives to…not much…just triviality, narcissism, infantile pleasure.
The people in the rich world don’t care about the poor world — but why would they? Their lives suck, too. In very real ways. The people of the rich world are not really very happy people. Some, like Americans, watch each other’s kids die and shrug…they watch one another perish for lack of healthcare…so why would they care about…the world? They live alienated lives, which is why they pile up possessions, to forever try and fill that hole in the soul with status and dominance and superiority. The secret they don’t know is that hole can only ever be filled by caring for the rest of the world, but they can’t do that, because to them vulnerability is weakness, and weakness is death.
(We’re aliens — remember. I’m not trying to judge you. Just to observe.)
So the two worlds barely ever meet. The people in the poor world are mostly trapped there. And the people in the rich world are quite happy that way. They don’t want the dirty filthy subhumans of Amazon or the Sindh or the Pampas anywhere near them — if they even know what those things are. They allow a few in, sure — the ones that fill gaps in their “labour markets,” doctors, engineers, and so on. But as a rule, the people of the rich world are happier exploiting the people of the poor one that knowing them, seeing them, talking to them…much less living beside them. They say they value democracy, which is living as equals — but that’s laughable: the people of the rich world have no desire whatsoever to treat the ones of the poor world as equals, only as things to be used and abused.
Hence, mostly, in this world, if you have the terrible misfortune to be born poor — you live and die that way. If you have the luck to be born rich — you live and die that way, too. Genetics, birth, circumstance — humanity’s long history of violence, hate, war, and oppression, is still everything. An African isn’t born a slave anymore — just dirt poor, and meant to stay that way. An Indian isn’t born a bonded laborer anymore — just desperately poor, and meant to stay that way.
If you were an alien, wouldn’t you see all that? And what would it say to you?