This Is What the Beginning of the End of a Civilization Feels Like

A New Dark Age is Falling — And We Might Be Powerless to Stop It

Image Credit: Jongsun Lee on Unsplash

One of the defining features of this age is a paradox. It goes like this. 1) The world is going to hell, and 2) we’re powerless to stop it. Do you feel it? That aching, infuriating, paralytic sense of powerlessness that defines now? Take a hard look at the world. “Climate change,” aka temperatures rising, mass extinction, ecological collapse, social upheaval, economic dislocation, flood, plague, water running out. There sit you and I, shuddering at the mess things are in, hearts pounding in our throats, knowing, desperately, bitterly, we’re totally powerless to really stop any of it.

I’m here to tell you a bitter truth. That feeling isn’t just a feeling. It’s not just fatalism. It’s reality. Your gut is right about your powerlessness. And that powerlessness is probably the greatest flaw in the design of the world that we’ve built — or rather, that was built to keep us, more or less, blind, dumb, foolish, hateful, and violent.

The world is experiencing what you might call a Great Centralization. Power has been consolidated and centralised. To extreme, absurd degrees. The result is that you and really are powerless to change much — except in illusory terms. Sure, kings and emperors have always existed. But power has been centralised in our world — by technology, institutions, and systems — to a degree which has never before existed in history, so far as I can tell.

Who really decides the fate of humanity? The planet? Life on it? You and me? The animals, oceans, rivers, forests? A handful of people do. Billionaires, politicians, maybe a few executives. That’s it. The rest of us? We hold no power whatsoever. Over anything, except maybe, to some tiny degree, how much and long we can survive the age of chaos unfolding, beginning now.

That is not the way it should be. The world should not be powerless. The relationship doesn’t go like this: the world is going to hell, and we’re powerless to stop it. It goes like this: the world is going to hell because we’re powerless to stop it.