How long can a society survive when it lives on lies?

and what happens after?

I don’t know, but we’re bound to find out. I’m not just talking about the United States here, but the growing global movement towards self-delusion. Whether it’s economic or ecological reality, the truth is unappetizing and the world has flocked to more appealing options. Trump’s return to power is just one sign of this trend. I’m not here to make an argument, complain over differences of opinions, or try to analyze what has caused the trend toward belief in lies. Instead my question is, where does this lead?

If there were no consequences to living a counter-factual life, on a societal scale, then I would be all for it and join the party. However, I suspect that facts and truth matter in the long-run. One of my favorite environmental quotes is “The great thing about unsustainable things is that they don’t sustain.” Not sure who to attribute that one to.

As a society, if we’re not living in delusion, we have at least opted out of preventing potential catastrophes and decided to deal with them when they arrive. Is that what people mean when they say living life one day at a time? it sounds so serene and wise. Who cares if the facts, supported by loads of theoretical and empirical evidence, say spewing CO2 into the atmosphere will cause ecological collapse, let’s just wait and see. Who cares if pursuing boundless amounts of national debt could lead to a collapse of the currency as a global trading standard? Or never mind the economic consensus that tariffs lead to price inflation, let’s believe the lie that they will actually make everything more affordable and solve numerous other social problems.

The delusional are running towards a cliff ignoring the experts chasing after them yelling '‘Stop, you’ll die!”

Plenty of people are asking “why,” I’m asking “what’s next?” Collapse? Unfathomable to most Americans despite all the world powers that collapsed prior to the United States recent rise. Reading Navalny’s Patriot has provided me with some potent insight into Russian history that is especially relevant for people who doubt the possibility of collapse or its consequences. Nations are frail and tend not to last that long.

Perhaps a more unspoken popular belief is “Don’t worry, history won’t repeat itself.” Well, I’m not worried - but I do think circumstances that repeatedly produced the same results historically are likely to continue doing so. If that’s not true, we might as well scrap math and science altogether. The consequences of the climate crisis are already taking lives and disrupting the ‘developing’ world; but the only changes I’ve noticed in Seattle are that air-con, once seen as unnecessary, is now deemed a necessity and most summers are plagued with weeks of unbreathable air from rampant wildfires.

Or is it that the post-truth crazies are wiser than I give them credit for and adopting a “collapse is inevitable” attitude rather than denying the cliff they are running towards. This certainly fits well with popular Christian and other cult teachings. If we are deterministically doomed, then the foolish ones are the experts screaming “stop!”

But maybe both sides are wrong. Or maybe the experts will stop the crazies. I don’t know. The sad question some of us are starting to ask is: Where do you want to be when the world ends? For me, the answer is clear: not with the crazies or the experts, but with the artists watching it all go down and producing some creative art-e-facts.