What kills societies

We have nowhere left to go together.

Sometimes I think about that cheap plastic model of the solar system I got one Christmas. One of the few childhood memories I retained. I built it crooked. Jupiter wobbled on its arm like a drunk god. The sun was too small and pale. The proportions were all fucked. It didn’t matter. At night I’d spin those little orbits until the planets blurred into rings and my little room became a control room. The kind you see in old documentaries. People in thin ties and thick glasses pointing at screens, talking important science stuff. I wanted that room. I wanted that future. Then I grew up, made all the wrong choices, and the room turned into an office. The boring kind.

This is how societies die, I think. I’m becoming increasingly convinced. Not with fire, with boredom. Not because an enemy arrives, but because we have nowhere left to go together. And so we turn on each other.

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Survive the day. Budget anxieties and optimize calendars and hydrate. Watch six episodes to forget. Buy a lamp that simulates sunrise so that the morning in the office hurts a little less. Adventure outsourced to the screen, wonder sealed in plastic.

The word for this is stagnation, but that sounds too clean. What we have is spiritual mildew. It creeps under the paint of everything, softening it, until a finger pushes through what looked like a wall. You know this feeling. It visits you during team stand-ups, it visits you in line at the supermarket, it visits you in the quiet after midnight when the phone finally sleeps and the apartment sounds like an aquarium pump. That low, slippery dread: this can’t be it.

Mark Fisher described something like this when he said the future had been cancelled, only the paperwork remained. You can smell that paperwork everywhere now. It smells like antidepressants and old carpet and burnt coffee. It smells like meetings about meetings. Talk about “vision statements,” then make sure nothing is at stake. Strategy departments proliferate like mushrooms after rain, as if quantity of planning could replace the violent joy of doing. All this maintenance for a status quo that isn’t even worth it. Centrist parties are a curse. The “reasonable” liberal bureaucrat is a farce. The far-right lunatic is a symptom.

Don’t you realize? Bureaucracy is a murder of the soul.

Slavoj Žižek would tell you an ideology is what you do when you no longer believe and still you do it. That’s the civic religion now: participate without conviction. Vote for a flavor of the same thing. You don’t care? No matter. Pretend progress is thinner bezels on a phone. Pretend your job is a calling. Pretend you are not, in fact, suffocating behind polite smiles.

Nick Bostrom (that’s the end of name dropping, I promise) would warn that civilizational risk isn’t only asteroids or engineered plagues or nuclear self-annihilation, but the possibility that we simply fall asleep at the wheel and coast into a local maximum of useless, trivial, unsatisfying pleasures. The Great Filter could look like a guy on his phone.

Empires don’t fall when they are hated. Empires fall when they become boring. It’s almost obscene to say, given the blood, but it’s my opinion. Hate at least arranges energy, boredom dissolves it. The Roman frontier did not need better walls as much as Rome needed a reason to continue being Rome. The American century will not end because of a single battle lost; it will end because enthusiasm for the whole thing dies, because the collective can not say what it is striving for, because the grandest project on offer is a slightly better phone.

There is a point in the life of any person, any city, any country, where you can live off momentum for a while. You can coast on yesterday’s victories, on myths you still half-believe. The engine is off, the car still moves. The danger is how quiet it seems. You can hear yourself think. You mistake drift for direction.

I did too, for a while. I became a high school physics and math teacher because that was as close as I could get to the control room from childhood. I thought if I could at least be the adult who lights the spark in someone else, that would count. And it did, for a little while. But the bureaucracy (and the ADHD) (and the social anxiety) (and the introversion) wrapped its fingers around everything—wonder, curiosity, the unteachable electricity of a kid who finally gets a physics concept and looks at you like you handed them a laser sword. I realized that I didn’t belong in that system. Leaving felt like breaking a promise. Staying felt like suffocation. So I left. I still miss the chalk. The chalk was nice. I haven’t found a purpose since. I’m bored.

And we think boredom is small. We treat it like weather. But boredom is a political fact. Boredom erodes solidarity. Stagnation fractures the common “we” into a million private universes. In a stagnant society, you don’t argue about what to build, you argue about how to divide the rubble. And because human beings are primates with poetry attached, all that energy is going to find a drum beat. If you don’t give people a mission, they will invent one. Often a cruel one. Often a stupid one. Very often both. That’s what wars are. Infinite violence replacing exploration. A shared enemy replacing a shared dream.

The far right understands this perfectly—they sell progress wrapped in regress. The market understands this perfectly—it sells just one more. Meanwhile the supposedly adult institutions mumble their press-releases and polish their guardrails and point at graphs and ask for patience. Patience for what? Patience for the eternal present? Boring fucking dystopia. Just one more regulation, bro. Just one more wait until we discussed this for another decade or two. Fucking EU, making me angry despite all the good it represents. Reward risk, reward the unorthodox. We need institutions that promote courage, not bureaucracy.

Give us a dream, give us a goal.

A society without adventure, without exploration, without frontiers to be broken and torn apart, is a hospice. It can be a very comfortable hospice with great dental coverage, but it will still smell of slowly dying and it does. Like the entire country of Germany does.

This is the plea, then: Ad astra—but in the plural, in the commons, in daylight, with reward and purpose and common good and lab benches children can actually touch. Not techno-fetishism. Not billionaire cosplay. I’m talking about technology as a public language again. I’m talking about projects whose point isn’t shareholder value but shared value, the kind of projects that knit a people because they are too large to fit in any one head. If there is purpose on the species-level it lies in discovery. In the existential. In the dread. In finding answers.

We did this before. Not just the Soviets with their utopian posters and their brutal contradictions; not just the Americans with Apollo; not just the forgotten collectives who drained swamps and built aqueducts and carved rails across impossible mountains. Humans are at our best when we pick something unreasonably big and just fucking do it. We call this Utopian bullshit when we are cynical; we call it history when it works.

What kills societies is the decision to confuse maintenance with meaning. We will need maintenance forever. Maintenance is noble. But maintenance without myth becomes a spreadsheet, and you can’t raise children on that. You can’t raise yourself on that. You will start petty wars to feel something. You will invent gods to find purpose. You will choose a strongman because at least he sounds like he’s doing something.

All this “stability” we are so in love with is suffocation. It’s killing our inner drive. Our inner child. We are still the same people we were when we drew stars on cave walls with ash and longing. We still have that sense of wonder. And then the years drag on and we lose something and do not even notice it.

And already I can hear the countless reasons for “no” because that is what we have become apparently. No, because there are so many problems. No, because this is naïve. No, because people are selfish. No, because money and billionaires. No, because carbon. No, because history says so. No, because politics. No, because because.

A dictatorship of the plain.

The problems will never be solved. Will we wait forever?

There is a reason doomerism colonizes timelines and I have been very guilty of that. Institutions are guilty. Bureaucrats are guilty. Artists are guilty. We are all guilty. And I for my turn apologize. Together we have turned optimism into something embarrassing. Hope into cringe. We have fed the lowest common denominator. We have been lethargic, angry, useless. We have done nothing but symbolic gestures. We have brainwashed ourselves into believing we did something when we did absolutely nothing.

We can try being better.

Antonio Melonio

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