Collapse Will Not Reset Society to a Better State
The fantasy that civilizational collapse will wipe the slate clean and allow a fresh start is contradicted by every historical example collapse preserves existing power structures, or empowers those already best positioned to exploit chaos.
"Without some human force ready to make use of disaster, neither plague nor destruction are sufficient in themselves to rewrite how society functions. Where these things occur without a strong existing revolutionary ideology, the status quo recovers with amazing speed." Jean Wimmerlin
Jean Wimmerlin's survey of historical collapses demolishes the popular reset fantasy. During the Black Death which killed 30-50% of Europe's population English law courts sat with only minimal interruptions. Litigants sued each other over the estates of the newly dead while corpse wagons rolled past the courthouse. The government did not dissolve; it tightened its grip, issuing the Ordinance of Laborers to force survivors back to work at pre-plague wages. After the total destruction of Berlin in World War II, a streetcar conductor who started in 1935 was likely back at his job by 1946, paying rent to the same landlord and filing taxes with the same bureaucracy. The German government was still paying Third Reich-era pensions to foreign Waffen SS volunteers as late as 2019.
The pattern holds across every scale of disaster. Trade predates the Iron Age and has survived every catastrophe since. Even during the Russia-Ukraine war, Russian gas continued flowing through Ukrainian pipelines with transit fees paid in full. The institutions that structure daily life courts, banks, tax authorities, property registries display a resilience that seems almost perverse. Even nuclear war, by U.S. government estimates, would likely not reach the threshold needed for a fundamental restructuring of governance.
The real force that reorders society is never disaster alone but organized human action driven by political or ideological coordination. Revolutions succeed without major physical disruption (Cuba, Iran). Disasters without revolutionary movements produce tighter enforcement of existing rules. The fantasy of collapse-as-liberation is most appealing to those who feel powerless within the current system, but history shows it is precisely the already-powerful who benefit most from upheaval.
Takeaway: Collapse does not liberate it intensifies. Those who dream of civilizational reset should instead invest in building the institutions and movements that can actually reshape society from within.
See also: Liberalism Contains the Seeds of Its Own Failure | Culture Wars Are Won Over Generations | The Most Intolerant Minority Wins | Shifting Baselines Make Decline Invisible