The Age of Megafailure
How Societies Fall From the Heights — and What Stops Them
by umair haque
Hawaii up in flames, 100 people dead and counting. Thousands evacuated from wildfire-stricken regions of Spain. Thousands of hectares of Portugal, on fire. The blazes in Canada? They’re still going, and so far, they’ve destroyed an area the size of… Greece. Oh, and Greece? It’s on fire, too.
“How did we end up in this mess?” It’s the question that haunts broken, failing societies. The answer takes a certain deal of strength to even hear, let alone consider: more or less every kind of institution has to fail. This is an age of megafailure, spreading outwards from America, to Britain, to China, India, Spain, Portugal, Italy… you get my drift. So let us answer this difficult question, even in a tiny way — not to point fingers, but to answer, a little later, the next question: “what in blazes can we do about it all? Is it too late?”
(Hint: it might not be yet, but it definitely will be soon.)
What is the most obvious kind of failure we see daily, the most egregious one? Well, societies fail when extremism rises, and in this age, that is right wing extremism. So the first, most obvious set of failures is that of conservative parties. There are three: first, a failure to rein in the worst among them, to capitulate to them, greedily seeking the very power not to create — but only to destroy. Second, a failure to offer, consider, and even now debate less extreme views. Third, a failure to advance and promote the saner and wiser among them, instead of the extremists. That is three failures alone.
Second, less obvious, is a great and tragic failure of liberal parties. Most visible is an ongoing failure: to compromise with extremists, to legitimize their views by “both sides”-ing away truth and morality. Then there is a failure to develop a new generation of leaders, to replace the ones who never seem to understand this, and lose continually and predictably. And third, most important by a long way, a failure to propose a new social contract. Societies don’t just break from the inside when their social contracts fail — they break when there is no alternative proposed by leaders for a better, newer one, at a grand scale, like a New New Deal, or a Marshall Plan. At this, stunningly, liberals have failed for decades now, even while society crumbles around them — just like they did in Nazi Germany.
(Yes, Bidenomics is a good thing. Yes, it promises long term benefits for America. But is it a sweeping social contract? A New New Deal? No.)
Then comes a failure of media. In the States, this has reached comedic proportions.
Collage of Fox News, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post.
But the true failure is the second: to inform people how precisely history is repeating itself — how fascism only ever arises in declining, suddenly poor, failing societies, that this is an old story, that no one is above history, that it is not only about greed, racism, and hate, but all those finding fuel in the match of poverty and despair — that this story is as old as virgins being sacrificed atop pyramids so the rains come again. These two failures — and they are colossal ones, first to legitimize anti-truth, while never explaining, discussing, elucidating, the context for and causes of, extremism — doom a people to never really understanding their plight all, their minds spinning in befuddled circles, and that is where Americans unfortunately are now. We will return to that.
Then there is the failure of technology companies which link us. They have given not just free rein to, but often preferential support to, extremists. Why? Perhaps they are scared, perhaps they are sympathetic. Who can say? A failure is still a failure, though, and here lie three more vital ones: discriminating for extremists, against those decrying extremism, and pretending that none of this matters, that they have no real power or effect on social mores, norms, values, or trust. But that is hardly a credible claim when people spend hours a day glued to these technologies. One doesn’t have to look further than Facebook allowing Russian propaganda or Xitter’s widely reviled…everything…to see all this.