America is Choosing Collapse

This is How Civilizations Die.

America is Choosing Collapse: This is How Civilizations Die--The Slow Death of the American Dream- The American Dream, once the symbol of possibility & prosperity, is now a fading illusion, & the collapse of the U.S. is no longer a hypothetical scenario--it is the reality folks are living in. The nation’s focus on consumerism, militarization, & exploitation of resources has left it ill-prepared for the crises of the 21st century. Climate change, economic inequality, & political polarization are symptoms of a deeper systemic decay, & rather than addressing these issues, America continues doubling down on the very structures that are leading it to ruin. From the collapse of essential industries & the decline of infrastructure to the fragmentation of social cohesion, America is following the same path that has doomed past civilizations. This is how civilizations die--not with a single cataclysmic event, but with a series of failures that culminate in the gradual erosion of the nation’s capacity to thrive. The choice is clear: America is choosing collapse, & its death, while painful, is the inevitable consequence of its unwillingness to change course.

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America’s populist right is no longer mismanaging the economy— it’s dismantling it.

Tariff wars, supply chain sabotage, debt ceiling brinkmanship, & attacks on core institutions have become ritual acts of cultural purification.

Drawing on Cultural Materialism, one often finds that when a society can no longer sustain its material complexity, it constructs myths that make collapse feel sacred.

Historical patterns repeat:

The Maya built monuments as agriculture failed.

The Khmer Rouge emptied their cities to purify the revolution.

Melanesian cargo cults summoned lost abundance with ritual mimicry.

America’s version is financial & infrastructural.

Its ruins are not temples or statues — but bridges, bills, & balance sheets.

Destruction is no longer the cost of politics — it’s the point.

Collapse is not happening to America. It is being chosen.

The signs are everywhere if you know how to read them.

The debt ceiling is no longer a technical negotiation.

It’s theatre.

A spectacle of brinkmanship designed not to prevent catastrophe but to sanctify it.

Every standoff & near-default is a public ritual: burning the fiscal offering on the altar of ideological purity.

Inflation? It’s not a crisis. It’s a purification rite.

The dream of cheap abundance is being sacrificed so that a new mythology can be born — one where pain is patriotic & austerity is a moral good.

Trade policy? No longer strategic. Merely sacrificial.

Tariffs are not tools of leverage.

They are relics from an imaginary past, deployed to signal authenticity while sabotaging the supply chains that once underwrote American strength.

The spectacle is the point.

The right isn’t trying to fix the system.

It is trying to make its destruction feel meaningful.

& why wouldn’t they?

No society willingly admits that it has become ungovernable.

It creates myths instead.

It turns failure into faith. & it does so with the whole pageantry of divine necessity.

When a society cannot solve its contradictions, it ritualizes them.

America has turned political dysfunction into sacred drama.

Each shutdown, each default threat, & each regulatory purge is not a mistake.

It is a sacrament.

This is the theology of collapse.

Cultural Materialism teaches that when the infrastructure of a society breaks down, the superstructure compensates with myth.

The ideology shifts to make ruin feel righteous.

In ancient societies, collapse was accompanied by renewal myths.

But they were myths.

Sacred narratives are crafted to make the unbearable seem ordained.

Today’s American mythmakers are just as devout.

But their myths are not told in temples.

They are tweeted from congressional offices, broadcast on cable news, & enshrined in policy.

The myth goes like this:

That trade is treason.

That debt is a sin.

That sabotage is salvation.

That destruction is deliverance.

This is not politics. It is liturgy.

The populist right is not managing its decline. It is sanctifying it.

& the high priests of this new religion wear suits, not robes.

They do not chant — they legislate.

They do not fast — they filibuster.

But the logic is the same: to collapse with dignity under the illusion of control.

Collapse, properly understood, is rarely a single event.

It is a long arc of refusal: to govern, adapt, & compromise.

It is not a hurricane.

It is a choice made over & over until the capacity for reversal vanishes.

In the Maya, rulers built ever-larger monuments as the agricultural base shrank beneath them.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge tore down irrigation systems in the name of purity.

In Melanesia, cargo cults built airstrips to summon ghost planes with sacred goods.

In America, highways crumble while budget committees pray to the market.

Infrastructure fails while Congress holds seances with Reagan’s ghost.

Policy becomes prophecy. & failure becomes fate.

The collapse is systemic, but it is not without narrative. That is its genius.

What looks like madness from the outside is coherence from within.

The ritualistic logic of decay is internally consistent.

It explains suffering as sanctity, decay as discipline, & austerity as a virtue.

Decline is not denied. It is explained, exalted, even embraced.

To question it is to blaspheme.

To advocate for repair is to break the spell.

So, even modest efforts to fix the machine are treated with suspicion.

Infrastructure spending becomes communism.

Regulatory reform becomes tyranny.

Technocratic competence becomes treason against the holy project of destruction.

This is not opposition.

It is orthodoxy.

In this theology, suffering is sacred.

Pain is proof of commitment.

Dysfunction is proof of authenticity.

Collapse is proof of righteousness.

The American right has reinvented itself as a priesthood of ruin. Not because they have no solutions, but because solutions are beside the point.

A functioning state does not serve the myth.

Only collapse does.

This is how sacred sabotage works.

There are echoes in late Rome, where elites retreated into ceremony while barbarians crossed the Rhine.

There are shades of Byzantium, where theological disputes outlasted grain shipments.

There are warnings from Weimar, where democratic institutions eroded under a deluge of performative obstruction.

History does not repeat. But ritual does.

& today’s rituals are made for cameras, not candles.

Each one is designed not to govern but to enchant.

To signal purity through paralysis.

To declare loyalty through legislative vandalism.

To transmute dysfunction into drama.

This is why repair feels heretical.

Why technocratic governance is treated with suspicion.

Why compromise is condemned not as weakness but as apostasy.

In the theology of collapse, cooperation is betrayal.

What is rewarded is not effectiveness but fervour. Not pragmatism, but purity.

The more one refuses to govern, the more one proves one’s faith.

It is a system in which salvation comes not through fixing the machine but by proving it was evil.

& so collapse becomes not a fear but a fulfillment. Not an accident but a prophecy. Not a warning, but a wish.

Collapse becomes catechism. Sabotage becomes sanctified.

Every broken law, every blocked bill, every abandoned bridge is a psalm in the liturgy of decline — chanted with conviction, not regret.

This is a Moribund society.