The Long Flatline: In a Selfish Society, do “Systems” Actually Exist?

The world keeps going about its daily business like a zombie pretending it hasn’t burned out yet. But as it whispers to itself through the flames “this is fine”, the corrosive fumes of an industrial civilisation undergoing autophagy become potent hallucinogens. “This is fine” soon becomes “this is normal”. Whoever thought, one could get so tripped out on their own collapse.

While for many of us this impassioned foray of 8 billion humans into rapid self-destruction seems to make no sense, it turns out that we are simply spectators of a natural phenomenon, one that jumps straight out of the biology textbooks: overshoot. I wrote a whole book about this phenomenon called The Biology of Collapse, but it might as well have been titled Physiology Principles of Civilisations Consuming Themselves.

So calm down. The zombified state of humanity is nothing to worry about. This happens to every species that has reached the end of the road. No organism on the planet cares about “the planet”, about what will happen once everything runs out, or what will happen to its children – and humans are no different: the competitive drive to survive is very seldomly a collective, existential affair. It is a quick, irresponsible, individualistic smash-and-grab operation, and sometimes entire planets die as collateral damage in this process.

So, If you do want to blame someone else for this shitshow besides biology, blame the individual. Because although collapse may affect us collectively, we own it individually, and there’s your big problem: the solutions to existential crises always need to be systemic-level events, but in practice they can only be delivered by individuals i.e. people who will always place their personal priorities above the priorities of the “system”. This mortal cul de sac was always there, but it was amplified by an invisible hyperobject of system-level processes that can only be described as Necrocapitalism. The collective mess we call “civilisation” may be collapsing, but we all have our individual lives within this mess. Whether it is denial, a new job that will help us stay afloat for a few more years, or downsizing to live in a van, we all simply carry on at the individual level as the tsunami of terminal illnesses humanity accumulates send this civilisation’s heart rate monitor into flatlining status. Those few individuals who were supposed to act at the systemic level, ended up being just as corrupt as the rest of us.

We are a species that tried to make it as a collective but remained a collection of individuals instead. As long as the so-called “collective” grows, everyone chips in. They seem to be aligned towards the same purpose, but this is an illusion: they are all individuals simply benefiting from the collective’s growth. Because when the collective suffers, everyone suddenly disappears into a different direction. There is no one to save the “collective”. So I would call this not a collective, but an opportunistic infection that comes, peaks, and goes. And while it probably would have been ok to find out this bitter truth at the 5,000 human settlement level, at the 8 billion figure it is way too late. Things are about to go down from here in a fashion so spectacular, cli-fi disaster authors will hand in their resignation.

So, while me, and others, keep talking about “systems”, it would appear that systems only exist at the theoretical level after all. The individual is king, except maybe in an ant colony. A “system” – social, economic, political - that is composed of individuals is not a system. It is an incoherent collection of mutually competitive forces that will never collaborate unless the common goal is overshoot. It is only when the entire civilisation begins to flatline that occasional voices, like mine, start screaming out of the petri dish. Too little, too late.

But even a flatline can be normalised. Society normalises its downfall in much the same way a terminal patient normalises their disease. Collapse can even be soothing for some, those who saw the crash before it happened and now realise that they were the mentally stable ones after all. The anti-depressants were given to make them as crazy as the rest of the population, not to cure them.

The entire global economy is busy normalising its cardiac arrest: food is becoming an investment decision. Jobs are here to train AIs, not to pay your bills. Home ownership – are you kidding me? That’s cancelled. You’re not simply living through “changing times”. You are part of Generation Collapse, paying for the Boomers’ sins.

Are there ways to collectivise collapse, to “own” it as a species, not as individuals? I don’t want to sound like I’m running a workshop so I’ll just park this question here. If I gave you any answers they would probably sound like they had been cooked up by an AI from the Afterlife, so I won’t do that as there’s plenty of that out there already. But I’ll tell you this: socialism came close, very close to collectivising our individual self-destructiveness into something more benign, if it wasn’t for our own selfish biology corrupting us into capitalism: the economic system where individual profit is prioritized, consumption becomes a mauling mob, and responsibility makes a disappearing act as it is cut into 8 billion tiny little pieces and distributed to each of us. For lack of any better human political system, Death will continue to be the biggest democracy we ever experienced: it auto-resets personal income, crosses all classes and species, and everyone participates, whether they like it or not.

But I won’t write a book about socialism. I don’t want to provide you with your next utopian summer read as you sit in a chaise longue watching the forest fire across the bay turn individual greed into a flammable commodity, the ashes of which are collectivised into a cloud that chokes us, individually.

I’ll also spare you the AI summary of this article: capitalism killed society by disabling collective nucleation and ethical solutions, and by allowing the heartless, and now almost virtual, individual, to assert their self-determination to not give a shit about anyone, or anything on this planet.

This “collective” looks increasingly less like a society and more like an assisted dying euthanasia club. All ages are welcome. The “systemologists” can debate with each other whether systems actually exist or not. As for collapse itself, it is not something that happens, but the final stage in a cycle. If you are focusing on the collapse by itself, you are missing the entire cycle. The main event may be this house of cards been carried off into the wind, but if you want the reasons, you’ll need to look into how the house was built. I’ve been studying the house of cards for 7 years now. Welcome to The Long Flatline.

My new book, The Biology of Collapse is OUT NOW