The Age of Megafailure

How Societies Fall From the Heights — and What Stops Them

Noah Berger

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.