The Decade That Everything That Could Go Wrong Did Go Wrong

The Five Crises Afflicting Our Civilization, or Why This Feels Like an Age Where Everything’s Going Wrong

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Imagine a decade ago. Just a decade ago. And I stopped you on the street. Or we stopped some random person on the street. And we, or I said, listen: over the next decade, everything that can possibly go wrong…is going to go wrong. The economy, in country after country, is going to begin to stagnate. Climate change’s mega-scale impacts are going to arrive — there are going to be orange skies over Manhattan and San Francisco. And before we can even process that, the planet’s going to appear to hit a new phase, global boiling. Parts of South America are going to be 20 to 25 degrees Celsius warmer than they usually are in the winter. Wet bulb events are going to be about to be hit.

And meanwhile, as a response to this, after a great global pandemic? Our societies will be bitterly divided. Half of them, or so, are going to increasingly believe in outlandish conspiracy theories, about blood-drinking Satanic figures who secretly run the world. Hate and violence will spread. Adding to all the problems above, fascism’s going to recur, with a vengeance.

Long before we finished any of that, the person we were talking to would probably have run away, laughing. These folks are crazy! They think that…not just a few bad things are going to happen. They’re paranoid, delusional, I feel bad for them, but hey, I’ve got to get on with my day. Goodbye.

And yet here we are. What’s the theme of the last decade of human history? Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. Economies sputtering. Fascism rising. Societies, radicalized, people at each others’ throats. War, of course, breaking out again. Climate change — going from bad to WTF faster than we can scarcely begin to process it.

Our civilization’s in a series of crises. Not just one. But a multitude. Economic, social, political, ecological — and of course, a climate crisis. Scholars have begun to call it a “polycrisis.” And looking around this first Extinction Summer, at what the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, called the age of global boiling — the world is beginning to suddenly, slowly, understand just what a mess our civilization’s in. 

So let me say it again. Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. That’s the theme of the last decade. And the question that faces us, as a civilization, as societies, as people, is this: are we going to keep heading down this obviously ruinous, lethal, bizarre, trajectory?

Think about it for a second. What does it mean when everything that can go wrong…does? It means something, after all. You can believe in coincidences, but nobody sane or thoughtful can buy that many, at once, at such a large scale. A pattern like that must have a cause.