Why moments that feel like collapse often precede transformation.
By Jennifer Buergermeister
There is a quiet sentence you hear more often now, spoken not dramatically but with a kind of exhausted sincerity: It feels like the end of humanity.
The sentiment surfaces in conversations about climate change, political extremism, technological disruption and the daily flood of alarming headlines. Many people who pay close attention to the world feel as if the systems that once provided stability —democratic institutions, shared facts, ecological balance — are beginning to fracture simultaneously.
It is a frightening feeling.
But history suggests something important: moments that feel like the end of civilization are often moments when civilization is reorganizing itself.
Human societies have lived through periods that appeared far more catastrophic than the present one. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death killed an estimated one-third of Europe’s population, dismantling economies and social structures across the continent (Cantor, 2001). In the twentieth century, two world wars devastated entire regions and claimed tens of millions of lives.
Yet from those ruins emerged new social and political systems. The aftermath of World War II produced international institutions such as the United Nations and new frameworks for human rights that reshaped global governance (Mazower, 2012).
Crises, in other words, have often been the precondition for reinvention. We are at a fork in the road: opportunity or danger?
One explanation lies in the way complex systems behave. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter argues that civilizations grow increasingly complicated over time as they attempt to solve problems through additional layers of administration, infrastructure and regulation (Tainter, 1988). Eventually, those layers become expensive and inefficient. The system reaches a point where maintaining complexity consumes more resources than it provides.
At that stage, societies must simplify or transform. The turbulence of the early twenty-first century may represent such a moment.
Human civilization has become more interconnected than at any previous time in history. Economic systems are global. Information moves across continents instantly. Environmental changes in one region influence ecosystems worldwide.
The complexity scientist Peter Turchin describes this stage as the emergence of a global “ultrasociety,” in which formerly separate populations function as a single interconnected system (Turchin, 2016).
That integration brings enormous advantages. Scientific collaboration now occurs on a global scale. Medical breakthroughs spread rapidly. Knowledge once confined to universities is accessible to billions of people.
But it also means crises propagate more quickly. Financial shocks, misinformation and political instability travel across networks that bind societies together.
The result can feel like universal instability. Yet alongside these tensions, another long-term trend is quietly unfolding: the expansion of human moral concern.
Over centuries, societies have gradually widened the circle of beings whose suffering they consider morally significant. Movements against slavery, for women’s rights and for civil rights represent successive enlargements of empathy beyond tribe or nation.
The philosopher Peter Singer refers to this phenomenon as the “expanding circle,” a slow but persistent widening of ethical awareness (Singer, 2011).
Today that circle is widening again, encompassing concerns about future generations, biodiversity and planetary climate stability. These expansions rarely occur peacefully. When moral boundaries widen, established hierarchies often react defensively. Backlash becomes part of the process.
Another unusual feature of the present moment is that humanity is beginning to examine its own psychological tendencies in public view. Concepts such as cognitive bias, misinformation, narcissistic leadership and moral disengagement, once largely academic topics, now appear regularly in classrooms and media discussions.
The psychologist Albert Bandura described moral disengagement as the mechanism that allows individuals and societies to justify harmful actions while preserving a sense of righteousness (Bandura, 1999). Recognizing such patterns may be an early step toward counteracting them.
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung warned decades ago that humanity’s greatest danger was not technological power but the unexamined human psyche (Jung, 1957). A civilization that becomes more aware of its own psychological vulnerabilities may also become more capable of resisting manipulation and fear.
None of this minimizes the seriousness of the challenges humanity faces. Climate instability, technological risks and political polarization present genuine dangers. But complex systems often require pressure in order to evolve.
Biologists call this adaptive stress. Under environmental pressure, organisms develop new capabilities. Ecosystems reorganize. Life becomes more resilient through the process of adaptation.
Civilizations appear to follow similar patterns. Periods that feel chaotic are sometimes the moments when societies begin questioning assumptions that previously seemed immovable.
The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci once described such times as moments when “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born.”
These are uncomfortable eras. They rarely feel hopeful while they are unfolding. But they are also the periods when new institutions, ethical frameworks and cultural ideas begin to take shape.
The early twenty-first century may ultimately be remembered not as the end of humanity, but as a difficult turning point, a time when humanity was forced to decide what kind of civilization it wanted to become.
History suggests that such decisions rarely happen easily. They happen when people begin to recognize that the old systems are no longer sufficient and begin imagining better ones.
References
Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.
Cantor, N. F. (2001). In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. New York: Free Press.
Jung, C. G. (1957). The Undiscovered Self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mazower, M. (2012). Governing the World: The History of an Idea. New York: Penguin Press.
Singer, P. (2011). The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tainter, J. A. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turchin, P. (2016). Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books.