Our Catastrophe

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that instability has become ordinary. As if the constant state of crisis described in Naomi Klein’s influential book, Shock Doctrine, has nestled in and become the norm.

It’s visceral. My entire adult life has felt like a never ending sequence of disruptions. Terrorist attacks that reshaped geopolitics. The Global Financial Crisis. Pandemics. Regional wars with international consequences. Housing pressures. Rising inequality. Political division. Climate anxiety. Economic uncertainty.

And don’t forget disasters. A constant stream of calamity characterised by a new one arriving before the last one is finished.

Individually, none of these things seem unusual. History is punctuated by wars, disasters and upheaval. To be honest, I didn't think much of them as connected phenomena.

But after years working in emergencies and disasters, I began wondering what exactly was going on, and why it felt like so many things were beginning to unravel at once.

Gradually, I started seeing these less as isolated events and more as expressions of something broader and profoundly fundamental. A whole-of-society problem emerging through what we consider normal, everyday life.

Perhaps what we're experiencing is not a series of disconnected disasters at all. Perhaps this is our catastrophe.

And by that I mean that catastrophe is not just something that happens to a society.

It can emerge from society itself. Born from the cumulative structure of modern life. From the way we have collectively organised economies, politics, infrastructure, culture and everyday behaviour. In other words, how society relates to itself.

This is the unseen but deeper danger confronting us.

It’s not simply that crises are becoming more frequent or severe, but that the civilisation we have built is producing catastrophic conditions and, in turn, reproducing them.

This possibility sits mostly at the fringes of public discussion. Catastrophe is something that happens to others or belongs to the genre of apocalyptic fiction. But increasingly, the idea that the systems we have built carry systemic existential risk has entered mainstream thought.

One expression of this shift is the Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Since 1947, it has served as a symbolic measure of humanity’s proximity to self-inflicted destruction. Today it sits closer to midnight than at any point in human history, reflecting a growing recognition that many of our greatest threats are of our own making.

And it’s existential. Nuclear war. Catastrophic climate change. Engineered pandemics. Ecological collapse. Uncontrolled artificial intelligence. What distinguishes these risks is that they are largely products of how we have organised ourselves.

In Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, Luke Kemp explores the history of societal collapse. He argues that collapse is rarely the product of one sudden event. Rather, societies undermine themselves gradually through complexity, overexpansion, inequality, environmental pressure, concentrated power, and an inability to adapt to changing conditions.

It’s worth recognising that our contemporary systems amplify many of the same forces that undermined our ancestors. Our societies are dependent on interconnected systems of energy, finance, communication, transport, agriculture, trade and governance. These systems have generated extraordinary technological capability and material abundance, but they have also increased exposure to collapse.

As we’ve seen over the last couple of decades, our supply chains, energy and economic systems are not as robust as we may have thought. Political systems increasingly struggle to manage long-term risk within short-term electoral cycles. Ecological systems are treated as inputs for economic expansion rather than the foundations that make society possible in the first place.

The result is a society that appears stable on the surface while becoming increasingly brittle underneath.

And yet much of this remains socially normalised. Which may be the most unsettling part.

We continue to treat our self-created crises as isolated problems rather than connected expressions of how we have organised ourselves. Catastrophe, therefore, is of all of our concern.

The danger is not simply the crises themselves. It is the relationships, assumptions and structures that continually reproduce them.

And if that is true, then responding to catastrophe requires confronting modern life itself.

Because catastrophe is no longer threatening society. It is society.