It all Falls Apart

 

It all falls apart

Everything is starting to unravel.  You can see it all around you.  Inflation, mass migration from the third world, $33 Trillion in debt and climbing quickly, breakdown of social norms that have evolved over tens of thousands of years, out of control crime, a political system that is unraveling in its ability to govern, war.  The fact that all of these things are happening simultaneously is not surprising.  The interconnectedness of our increasingly complex systems act as feedback loops.  One system begins to fail, which influences another system that is dependent on it to also fail.  And so on.  Before long, a total systems failure occurs. 

Think about something as simple as a McDonalds Big Mac.  The interconnected systems that must come together to make that happen must all work in harmony.  The lettuce growers need to plant and harvest, they need fertilizer and equipment, they need transport companies to move their lettuce to market. McDonald’s buyers purchase the lettuce using global credit and banking systems.  The lettuce is distributed to packaging companies who process and package the lettuce for use by McDonalds.  The packaged lettuce is moved by transport companies to franchisees where employees use it to prepare the Big Macs for sale.  Again, credit card processing companies facilitate the transaction so you can use money, deposited into your account to seamlessly move currency from you to McDonalds.  And all this is just for lettuce.  The same feat of coordination is required for the tomatoes, beef, onion, special sauce, pickles, and bun.  When even one piece of this intricate ballet fails, no Big Mac.

With this mental model in mind, consider all the factors that must be harmoniously working to create a functional society.  An agreed upon set of norms needs to be established that defines right from wrong, a concurrent sense of justice to punish poor behavior, a sense making apparatus to help us understand what is true and what is not true, a set of institutions that create the most viable circumstances for the protection and development of children and  communities. 

The interrelationship of all of these societal functions, many of which have evolved for good reason over thousands of years, is required for a society to effectively work.  And we are seeing all them fraying in real time.  The fact that each of them are required to work, and that they are all dependent on one another, is seemingly lost on most people.

Take just one institution and remove it and you get a cascade of failure rippling through the system.  For example, what happens when you destroy the family as the basic bedrock of societal function?  And by family, I mean and mom and a dad and their children.  Well, we can see exactly what happens in communities where fatherless households are the norm rather than the rare exception.  Unguided youth, rampant criminal behavior, drug abuse, unemployment, and no ability to contribute to the functioning of society.  They produce people who are not only in great despair, but who also are a net drag on societal functioning and human flourishing.  They cannot be a part of the interdependent systems that create a Big Mac, or a car, or a building, or a transport system, or a banking system, or an educational system – or any of the systems that allow society to operate. The more we allow for the destruction of family as the bedrock of society, the less society will function.

The basic norm that has evolved over thousands of years in all places, that the family is sacred and that society must adhere to tenants that allow for the creation and sustainability of families, has eroded.  And has led to the destruction of the family.  No fault divorce, the breakdown of sexual mores, the embrace of promiscuous behaviors, the tolerance of faithlessness and abandonment.  These are all contributors.  And so, we can see how interconnected the agreed upon norms that underpin our societal function, once abandoned, lead to a cascade of failure that threatens the functioning of everything.

That so many symptoms of societal and civilizational collapse are happening simultaneously is not surprising.  Like many calamities, everything seems ok until suddenly it is not.  In retrospect, the errors and mistakes that led to the collapse may be obvious, but in the moment, many do not perceive the danger. 

In most ways, the lessons of human existence, earned by a thousand generations, provide us the way forward.  One might ask, why is it that in all times and places the family has been the foundational structure of any society?  That temperance and loyalty and chastity are moral imperatives?  It is because they are the behaviors most correlated with human flourishing.  They did not come to be so by accident.  They are the result of lessons learned across thousands of years of human existence.  The more we stray from them, the more likely we will fail and fall.  This is obvious.

This begs the question.  Have we created a society that aligns with what is most beneficial for human flourishing?  Do we promote the values, norms, and behaviors that correlate with human flourishing?