Weekly Mind Dump: What "Collapsology" Bodes for America

Those in power are diligently dismantling the foundations of our civilization at a frenzied pace. This is more than madness, it is civilizational suicide.

“Harrowing Hell” ~ Hieronymus Bosch

Week of 8/3-8/9, 2025:

I’m a bit late with this installment of “Weekly Mind Dump” because I’ve been mulling in the dark spaces of my mind the future of my country. I can’t shake from my head the prospect of “decivilization” and “societal collapse.” Those of you who know me as “The Grim Reaper of Joy” and the “Impresario of Gloom & Doom” can tune out now. The rest of you, well, you might want to serve yourselves a stiff drink before proceeding.

Oxford University Press lexicographers announced last year that the term of the year was “brain rot.” The Economist word of the year was “kakistocracy” — the rule of the worst. Between them, these two words accurately describe the disturbing, deranged and disordered time we are living through.

In the past week, a gunman (a word that leaves our lips weekly if not daily) sprayed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta with 500 rounds of gunfire, killing a 33-year old policeman, a Marine vet who had served in Afghanistan and who leaves behind two small children and a pregnant wife. The shooter, who fatally shot himself, had blamed his depression and the death of his dog on the COVID vaccine and decided to take revenge, putting the CDC in his crosshairs with his five guns. A resident told a reporter, that gun violence feels like “a fact of life” now. “This is an everyday thing that happens here in Georgia.”

HHS Secretary RFK, Jr. was late in issuing, via email, his remorse, instead posting right after the shooting photos of him posing proudly with his fishing haul on a nature outing. “Kennedy is directly responsible for the villainization of CDC’s workforce through his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust,” said Fired But Fighting, a group representing some of the 2000 recently laid off CDC employees.

The shooting is emblematic of the insane war on science and knowledge that grips a swath of the American people who now embrace medieval superstition and conspiracies fed to them by QAnon, amplified by poseurs in the media and politics and embodied in the MAGA mania.

Trump proposes cutting the agency’s budget in half next year and Kennedy has ordered $500 million cut from mRNA vaccine development funding. This comes on top of letting go 10,000 HHS employees, including researchers, scientists and public health experts — the cream of the American health science establishment, many of whom are now finding work abroad. Meanwhile, the WHO- and World Bank-supported Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) has issued a warning about a potential H5N1 bird flu pandemic and the danger to the global population of “17 outbreaks of dangerous diseases [that] have already occurred.” COVID virus has not gone away and is constantly mutating.

What could go wrong?

We are governed by a menagerie of nattering maniacs and rank opportunists who spew myths about a “deep state” and anti-science nostrums ripped straight out of the coldest depths of the Dark Ages. Their delusional anti-gravity, flat-earth notions extend to economics, health, diplomacy, defense and, well, just about anything that’s fact-based and empirical. And 90 percent of Republicans continue to solidly back this black magic buffoonery headed by the felon-in-chief. We are in a decivilizational phase of our history.

A field of research I’ve always found fascinating is that of “collapsology” which focuses on societal, or civilizational, collapse. Scholars in this field broadly examine the factors that lead to the destruction of civilizations. They break them down accordingly: environmental degradation, economic instability, political instability, social inequality, disease outbreaks and external threats. I add another, which I’ve written about: moral collapse.

Having analyzed dozens of civilizations, social scientist Luke Kemp calculates that the average lifespan of a civilization is around 340 years. Anthropologist Joseph Tainter posits that societal collapse is a relatively rapid process, usually “a few decades,” stemming from “substantial loss of sociopolitical structure,” and specifically cites the fall of the Western Roman Empire as a key example in the West. Scientist Jared Diamond attributes a large role of societal collapse to deforestation, loss of soil fertility, restrictions on trade and endemic violence. Others cite environmental degradation, foreign invasions, climate change, famine and pandemics as leading catalysts behind civilizational decline. Very often it is a combination of a number of these factors.

I particularly favor British historian Arnold Toynbee’s findings. Having examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, he concluded that they rise by successfully meeting daunting challenges under the stewardship of dynamic, creative leaders, e.g., George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, etc. And they fall under the misrule of self-serving tyrants and mediocrities, e.g., Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the president’s collection of unqualified cabinet misfits. “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” Toynbee concluded.

I’ve previously compared Donald Trump to the emperor Nero, both deranged leaders. Roman scholar Edward Champlin describes Nero as having “effectively stifled true competition,” a leader who was “oblivious of reality.” Both aptly apply to Trump.

A citizen of another country commented in social media, “You don’t live in a democracy. You live in a militarized oligarchy where the 40 richest people, who could fit on a bus, have more wealth than the bottom 60 percent.” With the breakdown of our governing institutions, those in power have a free reign to dismantle the economy, public health safeguards, defense, rule of law, security alliances, disaster relief infrastructure, higher education and even the arts — which they are diligently pursuing at a frenzied pace. This is more than madness, it is civilizational suicide.

What we are witnessing today is the slow-motion fraying of American civilization. If it collapses, the end will not be apocalyptic, but will be self-inflicted over time, uneven and under the weight of its internal contradictions. The degradation permeates not only our politics and economics, but our collective psychology; call it cultural rot. Americans feel more and more unanchored, adrift in a structure whose foundations are crumbling and a time in which hope in the future for themselves and their children is evaporating. They have lost faith in the institutions that constituted the bedrock of American democracy for two-and-a-half centuries.

I, for one, see no signs yet of meaningful counteraction or a slowing of the onslaught of barbarism. That doesn’t mean there won’t be glimmers of the return of reason. I earnestly scour the horizon for them. But this observer sees only darkness, a Hieronymus Bosch vision of the future.

I think I’ll end on that upbeat note.

Yours truly,

The Grim Reaper of Joy