End Times or Transitional Period?

People comfort themselves: “This is merely a transitional period, things will settle down soon”. But, of course, it is not and they won’t.

The Middle Ages had lasted 1000 years and they constituted a total breakdown of civilization. We are on the precipice of a new such phase.

How can we tell the difference between transition and disintegration?

Transitions engender a ferment of new ideas and paradigm shifts. Breakdowns involve the impoverishment of both culture and the individual’s inner experience. Human relationships fall apart on every level. Narcissism, psychopathy, and other forms of mental illness go off the charts.

I noticed, for example, the profound lack of curiosity about others and about the world.

Navel gazing combines with “cool” superficiality to yield shallow surface communication which amounts to staccatoed meaninglessness.

Ask any personal or deep question of the young and they cast you as either derisive or offensive (“digging”).

Conversations - even between ostensibly intimate partners - are extinct, having been totally replaced by video games, brainless social media posts, and other dumbing pursuits.

This profound breakdown in interactions results in an incapacity to maintain intimacy or relationships.

Everything - from sex to learning - is casual and random. The young invest the bare minimum in their rote learning in order to eke out a living in our dystopian world. Having acquired a degree or a skill, they suspend all thinking and involvement and turn into glazed-eye zombies.

It is a binary state, devoid of nuances and subtleties: I feel bad (“awkward”) – I feel good.

The backlash is comprised of regressive, totalitarian, and rigid doctrines enforced by total institutions. The former social polarization and conflicts are suppressed and supplanted with homogenizing authoritarianism.

Populism is another hallmark of dissolution: a contumacious and defiant wave against authority and learning coupled with a rise in willful, proud ignorance and obscurantism.

Periods of transition are the offspring of science and knowledge. Eras of discomposure are characterized by an abundance of unstructured information and empowering technologies. Creativity is on the wane - replication, imitation, and narcissistic navel-gazing on the ascendance.

Gender roles shift and are often inverted when social institutions and civilization itself crumble. Relations between men and women degenerate into open warfare and abusive exploitation.

Finally, as Tonybee had noted, civilizations decline when multiple natural and manmade calamities strike and grandiose, self-depleting projects are embarked upon by societies who teeter on the brink of utter dysfunction.

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