After the Collapse

A few months ago I wrote a post about the collapse of all of our political, social, and economic systems, which I predicted would occur within the next 100-150 years, as a generous estimate. Recently, I've been trying to figure out what the world would look like on the other side of that collapse, and I've come to some interesting conclusions.

First, we need to establish what exactly the collapse would look like. Would it be an all out nuclear war leaving a post-apocalyptic planet in its wake? Or would it simply be the dissolution of all our values and the anarchy which follows? Either could be true, as could a number of other situations. However, I believe there to be commonality in where these different futures leave us. As I discussed in my post "The Collapse", there would be a complete destruction of the institutions which govern our behavior, both politically and socially, and the resulting disbandment of values would lead to a fatal market crash across the world. In the aftermath of such a collapse, there would be a need to reestablish morality, culture, and values.

So how would the people left after the collapse go about doing that? Of course, the answer is unclear, as trying to predict the future, especially such a damning future, leaves almost everything to error and almost nothing to precision. However, I would hope the remnants of humanity grow exponentially and become Nietzsche's ultimate class of people: Übermenschen and Überfrauen.

This concept, which Nietzsche discussed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, highlights the next step in the evolution of mankind, in which people abandon all forms of moral institution, such as religion, and create their own values and morality. He also outlined that such a person would have a deep passion for art and music, another manifestation of his belief in culture over religion, and that they would be energetic and constantly improving themselves. Now, if this sounds unattainable, Nietzsche in fact did not believe people were capable of becoming the "Über" versions of themselves, at least in the 19th century. A couple hundred years later, and nothing has changed; we still cannot create our own values, and religious morality is reasserting itself in places one would not expect to find it.

But perhaps these people of the post-collapse future can evolve into Übermenschen and Überfrauen, given the hardship they will have to endure, and the memories of the collapse they will have to live with. In such a world, filled with these Über-people, one could expect to see a resurgence of human culture akin to the renaissance, where art and music fill the streets and each person would live in accordance with their own morality, unhindered by other people. In a world like this, the possibilities for human achievement are endless, as we would have finally shed our biological need for simplicity and defeated the fundamental problem. We would not be chained by religious truths - we would create the truths ourselves and never seek to impress them upon others.

This sounds rather utopian, and if Dostoevsky, who heavily influenced Nietzsche, has taught me one thing, it is that utopian ideals are often doomed to fail. However, the idea of Übermenschen and Überfrauen are unique in that they do not posit any utopic vision for society; rather, they attempt to outline the next evolution in the human individual. This means that while there are bound to be outliers to this post-collapse civilization - people who did not evolve beyond their base biological tendencies, the majority of people should create this Über-society through their individual strength.

Now, I am making a significant presupposition in these arguments which should be addressed. I assume that the collapse will traumatize people into growth rather than regression, and that the growth would be genuine adaption which would last for many generations, as compared to experience, which would die along with the generation that survived the collapse.

The collapse could indeed lead to regression, and then all of the movies which depict savage post-apocalyptic worlds where the rich control the poor and force them to engage in brutal combat could be true. Our morality would have regressed to such a point that we would fall deeper into the institutions we now question, and the fundamental problem would remain unsolved as the individuals in this society would be unable to cope with their totalitarian regimes, much less the inherent complexity of the human condition.

And it could also be the case that any potential growth of the human spirit would be stymied after a few generations, as the Über-people died out and left behind progeny who could bask in the fruits of their ancestor's labor. In that way, one might see a secondary collapse. Tolkien wrote of a few such collapses in his works, including the Fall of Númenor (the primary collapse), and the decay of Gondor in the Third Age (the secondary collapse). Without going into the fascinating details of either of these collapses, they do raise a valid concern; if the culture instantiated by the superior people who are born of the collapse is not continuously fought for, it will perish, and the human race will find yet another fall after its renaissance. This fight need not be violent, and if the Über-people had any sense they'd first rise above their savagery and stop killing one another for trivial reasons like differing values, but such a culture would need to be continuously recreated every generation, and there's no guarantee that it could be done.

However, if it can be achieved - if the people who survive the collapse can truly grow on a biological level to paradoxically rise above their biology, then there are no limits for how far this new human civilization could reach. And now the natural question arises, which will conclude this essay: is the collapse a precondition for this new race of people? I would answer negatively - it could be true that Über-people could arise naturally, given time. However, a collapse would necessitate growth of some kind on the other end, and therefore I believe it to be the most likely catalyst for the next step in human evolution.