I have spent years writing about the collapse of society. Zombie apocalypses, space station failures, civilisations unravelling from the inside. And I always assumed I was writing fiction. Increasingly, I am not sure I am.
What I am watching in the world right now looks uncomfortably like the early chapters of every collapse narrative I have ever written. And that concerns me deeply.
The Fractures Are Already There
Look at Europe. Competing protests on the same streets — Palestine, Ukraine, immigration, nationalism — each side convinced the other is not just wrong, but evil. Look at America, where the political divide has stopped being about policy and started being about identity and survival. Look at South America, Asia, Africa — the same patterns, different contexts.
We have lost the middle ground. The space where people who disagree can still share a meal, still recognise each other's humanity, still find common cause on the basics — that space is shrinking. And I am not sure we fully understand what we lose when it disappears entirely.
Why This Is Happening
I am not a sociologist, but a few mechanisms seem obvious:
- Algorithmic amplification. Social media platforms are optimised for engagement, and nothing drives engagement like outrage. The most extreme voices get the most reach. The most divisive content gets the most shares. We have built a system that rewards conflict and punishes nuance.
- Information silos. Two people can look at the same event and come away with completely different factual accounts of what happened — not because one is lying, but because they have been fed genuinely different information ecosystems. Shared reality is dissolving.
- Cognitive dissonance at scale. When the gap between what people believe and what is happening becomes too large, something breaks. Either the belief, or the person's ability to engage honestly with the world.
Historical Parallels
History is not reassuring here. Rome did not fall in a day. The Balkans did not explode overnight. The Arab Spring did not spring — it built, and simmered, and then cascaded in ways nobody predicted and almost nobody controlled.
The pattern is always the same: rising division, eroding trust in institutions, economic pressure, a triggering event, and then a cascade. The triggering event is almost never the real cause. It is just the spark in a room that was already full of gas.
"I pray for cool heads. I genuinely do. But I am watching the room fill with gas, and I am not sure anyone is looking for the exits."
What Comes Next
I do not have a tidy conclusion. I do not know exactly how this resolves. I know that historically, societies that reach this level of internal fracture either find a way to de-escalate — usually through exhaustion, loss, or the emergence of a genuine unifying threat — or they do not. And the ones that do not tend to produce outcomes that last generations.
What I do know is that the answer is not more shouting. It is not winning the argument. It is not proving the other side wrong so conclusively that they have no choice but to admit defeat. That has never worked, ever, in the entire history of human conflict.
The answer — if there is one — is in the boring, difficult, unglamorous work of finding the humans on the other side. Not the loudest voices. Not the representatives. The actual humans. The ones who also love their kids and worry about the future and want to live in a world that works.
I hope we find them in time.
