If we use the stages of grief as a model for human reckoning with tragedy, we are currently desperately bargaining that we might simply flip a switch — be it policy or market-based — and continue to expect to live as we have in the relatively peaceful End of History period of the past few decades.

Climate change activists, for example, look to the state and potential mechanisms for world governance via climate conferences to solve the problem. If only we put in the right number of bike lanes or subsidise the transition to a world of electric vehicles, industrial society would lumber on. Free-marketeers, relatedly, look to the unfettered global market to innovate our way to unleashing energy abundance never before captured in human history — a fantasy of the world economy run on nuclear power with Silicon Valley-backed AI-run vertical farms underwriting fully automated luxury capitalism.

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These assumptions — that industrial society must continue indefinitely, or that we must develop solutions at grand scales — has us stuck in a political and technological gridlock, and limits our ability to imagine alternatives. Some of the most salient cultural traditions for this historical moment live outside the current oversized scale of market and state.

Writers such as John Michael Greer, who have compared ours to collapsed civilisations of the past, have been proclaiming that we are at the end of the industrial society. In response, forward-thinking individuals are cobbling together a worldview to get us through this period of crisis: something like the conservatism of Christopher Lasch combined with the environmentalism of Wendell Berry, a synthesis we might call Left Conservatism.

In practice, this nascent ideology looks to revive civil society, cares about ecology and culture of place, desires robust local and regional economies, is broadly anti-war, and rejects the ongoing bureaucratisation and commodification of all the most sacred aspects of life. This milieu of thinking doesn’t belong to a set political tradition — hence the contradiction in terms — but, above all, Left Conservatism centres the local, the particular and the human-scaled.

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Whether or not we are ready for it, we are entering a world in which the market and state are failing to meet basic needs. We will therefore need to embrace much more radical self-determination, at various scales for various problems. Those who take on the responsibility of de-scaling our economy and politics will be the most successful in the New Tragic Age, which may not be so tragic after all, depending on how we prepare.

There is an interesting history of something like Left Conservatism in the United States, especially owing to federalism and the ability to devolve power to states. Writers such as Berry, Lasch and Norman Mailer represent versions of this alternative to the typical Left-Right binary. In an interview with Martin Amis, Mailer describes the appeal of the term:

“The best thing that can be said for conservatism, and there are a great many terrible things to say about it, but the best thing to say about it is that they (conservatives) do tend to have a certain appreciation of the world as a whole. I become uneasy when I find people drawing up solutions, which is, of course, the great vice of the Left, to solve difficult problems, because I think they cut out too many of the nuances. So, Left Conservatism is my way of reminding myself that you have to deal with everything in context.”

In a globalised market and bureaucratic state, nearly every aspect of life is decontextualised — a line on a spreadsheet to be analysed by financiers or policy-makers. The principle of subsidiarity, or the idea that decisions should be made at the lowest possible scale, closest to where they will have an impact, is a helpful rule. Political questions answered on appropriate scales would allow for a patchwork of diverse cultures — working in concert when necessary and focusing on self-determination where appropriate.

Here, the environmentalism of Berry is scaled down. Instead of focusing primarily on the global and intangible, Berry’s environmentalism is about local ecologies, fundamentally inextricable from place and culture. What follows from this distinction is a radically different ontology: a concern for global concepts such as climate seems to drive activists toward acts of destruction, whereas a focus on the stewardship of a specific, knowable ecology encourages acts of creation.

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Lasch is best known for documenting the advancing narcissism of the modern era, but he also mourned the loss of the culture of pre-industrial times. He bemoaned “the decline of craftsmanship, the fragmentation of the community, the loneliness of the modern metropolis, the subordination of spiritual life to the demands of the market” and called for a reinvigoration of active participation in civic life. Primarily known as a Leftist, Lasch retained a respect for the positive potential of the state, as long as it remained in balance with strong families, neighbourhoods, and working “guilds”.

For both, whether dealing with the market or the state, it is the scaling down of focus that radically reorganises the field of action. The inhuman scales through which we currently engage in politics rightfully make us feel out of control. Our sense is that the only way to protect ourselves from such totalising forces is to either recoil from them or to destroy them in some way or another. You can see this most clearly in climate activism, where the sense of helplessness leads to a rage channeled toward acts of destruction. However, when the scale is more human — a neighbourhood, a family, a garden — suddenly the possibility for acts of creation or stewardship become much more real, and the responsibility for action more tangible.

Those hovering around these ideas — localism, civic orientation, care for local ecologies — are seeking to move beyond the gridlock of over-scaled politics as currently constituted. They see the future clear-eyed, and know that more partisan appeals to solutions of the global market or governance will just provide us more of the same. The “Left” part of Left Conservatism is recognition of the need to protect ourselves from the exploitative forces of the market — the desire to commodify and sell off every last sacred thing. The “conservative” part is the desire to protect the sacred from the flattening authority of bureaucracy. Despite superficial political differences of individuals, working at the local scale as neighbours can start to draw out the shared sense of the sacred: a clean environment, a safe community, a thriving home.

This was not the view of “Guy Alaska”, who earlier this month posted a photo on Twitter of his wife doing just this. “She has been doing our laundry like this for TWO YEARS,” he wrote. “She can’t even feel her feet and she’s shivering in front of the woodstove. A true heroine. Comment ‘’ to show your appreciation for this monument of a woman.”

Quite unsurprisingly, Guy’s post provoked a backlash. Why had his family chosen the harsh pioneer path — living off-grid and without running water — happily and intentionally. What could possibly make this couple choose to live, to put it bluntly, like poor people? The answer, as I found out, is both straightforward and illuminating.

Guy Alaska is originally from Michigan, but his wife, Shay, is an Alaska Native. With several young children, they were living on an acreage in Michigan when their house burned down two years ago. The insurance money didn’t cover a rebuild, so they decided to start afresh in Shay’s homeland, something they had long been dreaming of.

Guy tells me that, for them, Alaska represented “one of the last free places” in America. “There’s still plenty of places in Alaska where you can buy land,” he says. “You own it — you don’t have to pay anybody so-called ‘property taxes’, which means you’re free to not have to earn money, which means you’re free to not participate in a system that you don’t want to participate in.” For him and Shay, the goal was to opt out of what sociologist Michael Bell calls “the treadmill of consumption”, which describes the way in which people in highly developed countries try to “keep up with the Joneses” through more and more material consumption, without any real gains in overall happiness or satisfaction.

After their house in Michigan burned down, the Alaskas started out by camping in a Mongolian yurt in different locations in her home village, but soon grew tired of getting evicted and decided to broaden their search. They soon found the perfect spot: three acres on an island that cost just under the $30,000 they had in savings. The couple bought the land sight unseen and set off. “We just showed up here with all that stuff, and basically blazed a trail into the woods with a pair of loppers until we found a spot that we could build on,” Guy says.

In the past two years, Guy has built a 75-square-metre cabin and a woodworking shop that doubles as a barn. He has also cleared a half-acre of forest for hay, installed paddock fencing around a quarter acre and a small solar panel system for electricity, as well as building a two-hole outhouse and a smoker for smoking fish and game. All the while, the Alaska family has subsisted off the land: on one occasion, Guy hunted down a bear which Shay then prepared by hand with her youngest in a baby carrier on her back.

While the family has accomplished a lot, they don’t yet have a rainwater harvesting system to collect enough water for indoor plumbing. This means they have to haul water to use in their home, which makes washing in the river an attractive option. Guy takes odd jobs in carpentry and milling to pay for things the family can’t produce themselves, and he is saving up to eventually buy a washing machine. (Even hardcore off-gridders see a benefit in that.)

The Alaskas aren’t the first American family to vanish into the wilderness. The early pioneer stage of the United States is central to its ethos and self-image. Americans think of themselves as valuing self-reliance, and central to that belief is having the courage to resist the push of conformity. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s key text on the topic implores: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” But with industrialisation, mass wealth and the expansion of the welfare state, there has been an upending of this value in lieu of a new worship of consumerism, ever-increasing material standards of living, and vague notions of “progress”.

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Even as writers such as Steven Pinker insist that this ever-increasing mass affluence is always a net good, we are reaching material, environmental and even spiritual limits that are causing breaks in the normal functioning of society. The way they see it, the Alaska family isn’t recreating the pioneer lifestyle for merely philosophical or spiritual reasons. First and foremost, they see their path as logical: “You have these huge systems that everybody’s really relying on, and to be free for us out here, we can’t rely on those systems.”

For Guy and Shay, the path of freedom necessarily aligns with a rational desire to be both self-reliant and prepared for the potential breaks in those systems. They are not alone in their thinking. Before the Covid pandemic, about 10 million people in the United States would fit the definition of a “prepper” or “resilient citizen”, with the ability and resources to survive any kind of disaster for at least one month. Following Covid, that number has jumped to about about 20 million. There is an increasing sense of unease at the prospect of a world of escalating disasters — chlorine gas spills, zoonotic diseases, typhoons, solar flares, civil unrest, terrorism, and full-scale war — but also a loss of faith in the state’s ability to help its citizens in times of emergency.

The recent wildfires in Hawaii are a clear example. Citizen accounts assert that people were waiting over a week for any help from the government, after a catastrophic failure of state warning systems: the only assistance came from fellow citizens sharing resources and generator power. While officials report only 114 confirmed deaths, journalists attempting to cover the story suggest the death toll could be far greater. The lack of reliable reporting on disasters such as this further undermines people’s trust in institutions, strengthening their desire to pursue resilience on a household or community level.

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But fear is not the only motive behind self-reliance. Though Guy and Shay want to be prepared for a potential disaster, they are also interested in connecting with a deep cultural lineage. “We kind of settled on staying in southeast Alaska, just because Shay’s heritage is here. Her people have been here for 4,000 years, and that’s our children’s heritage too. They have rights to hunt marine mammals like seals and sea otters, and we wanted to be close to their culture, so they can stay involved with it. As far as our philosophy goes, we’re interested in authenticity.”

To that end, the Alaska family has an ongoing fundraising campaign to buy their family a yak for use on their homestead. They’d like to move away from reliance on cars to something more sustainable, and plan to use the yak to get them to town, to move fish and game, and to log their land. Functionally, a yak can do most of what a tractor can do, but, as Guy says, “the only difference is you can’t go quite as fast”. In many ways, despite being rural conservatives, the Alaska family is living a progressive “degrowth” lifestyle, with lower consumption, low energy use, and sustainable livelihoods.

But the online backlash to their lifestyle suggests a growing bifurcation between those Americans who want to exercise individual liberty and those who are shackled by the ideology of mass affluence or the drive for status. Not that it bothers Guy and Shay to be called “really poor”. They think they’re the lucky ones. As Guy says, “We’re free to be poor.”

Lasch had an affinity for the common man. He made appeals to religion and tradition for moral guidance; he saw the family as a “haven in a heartless world”; he regarded a sense of pride in one’s hometown as essential for the community functioning of Middle America; and he called for a political economy wherein people would be able to access meaningful work that called them to a higher vocation. These visions never came to fruition during his lifetime. But that hasn’t stopped others from attempting to pick up the mantle. Today, his heirs can be found across the world — in the increasing trend towards homesteading and localism.

In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Lasch argued that American culture had become increasingly addicted to instant gratification, which placed individual desires, unmoored by virtue-based cultural norms, above the flourishing of the common good. Fundamentally, he attributed this cultural rot to the idea of progress, which, he explained in Mass Culture Reconsidered two years later, is couched in the “refusal to acknowledge limits to human powers”, and ultimately “tears people out of familiar contexts and weakens kinship ties, local and regional traditions, and attachments to the soil”.

Over the past few decades, a growing movement of individuals and communities has embraced this idea — choosing to reject the dominant culture of consumerism and “progress” in place of homesteading and localism as functioning alternatives. Most of these people, I have suggested, are driven by a larger, more amorphous sense of risk, which I attribute to the trend of societal decline.

I recently interviewed a number of small-scale home producers in and around Chicago, and most appeared to be driven by a larger, more amorphous sense of risk and societal decline. There, I was as likely to find a rural second amendment libertarian as an urban progressive socialist. In certain cases, their distrust concerned government regulations and labelling schemes; in others, there was a general sense of uncertainty around industrial food production and corporate incentives toward profit-maximisation; still others had become fed up with the entire food system after attempting to resolve persistent health issues. Despite their divergent politics and backstories, they all shared an impetus to turn to home food production to gain some sense of control and self-sufficiency.

Cultural historian Morris Berman calls this Dual Process, or the ways in which people are forced to discover alternatives in the twilight of a waning civilisation. Berman suggests that as societal functioning breaks down — as it did in Ancient Rome — people find other ways to meet their basic needs. It is in this process of meeting those needs that individuals, usually unconsciously, develop parallel institutions that could end up developing into the society that succeeds the collapsing empire.

Homesteading is, in many ways, borne out of this sense of alienation. It involves, at its most basic, taking part in the home production of goods, such as rearing livestock, hunting, fishing, beekeeping and preserving foods. This was the common mode of living for most of human civilisation until the industrial revolution, but it didn’t disappear. Interest in home production returns in waves: as victory gardens during the Second World War; as the back-to-the-land-movement of Sixties and Seventies; and now as a new self-sufficiency movement spurred in part by the pandemic and the sense of disorder that followed the decline of urban life and global supply chain shocks.

Often, the individuals I spoke to felt drained by the meaningless work of “email jobs” and an ever-increasing treadmill of consumerism. Here, they channelled Lasch’s remark in The True and Only Heaven (1991) that “capitalism itself, thanks to its growing dependence on consumerism, promotes an ethic of hedonism and health and thus undermines the ‘traditional values’ of thrift and self-denial”. Through the act of homesteading, however, these individuals have started to flex their atrophied muscles by taking responsibility for their needs. Lasch argued that a distributed universal ownership over the means of production, both through household production as well as “small producers — farmers, artisans, master craftsmen, journeymen” were essential for a functioning republic.

In general, homesteaders seek to reduce their reliance on technology and other external systems that may one day prove unreliable. As a result, many are forced into a daily confrontation with the unfiltered messiness of nature through work with their hands, unmediated by screens or advanced tools. Lasch drew on thinkers such as William Morris in The True and Only Heaven, suggesting there is a fundamental dignity of labour in creative handicrafts, and a certain “pride of workmanship formerly associated with small-scale private ownership”. Juxtaposed with the wage labour of early factory life, or even rote spreadsheet work in a modern office job, the act of production in the home can be immensely satisfying.

Homesteading is by definition driven by an interest in self-consumption, which differentiates it from a commercial small farm. However, some home-scale producers do have budding cottage food businesses selling at farmer’s markets. The Smith Homestead in Mississippi, for example, started out with a small garden over health concerns and access to healthy foods, and now has a small operation selling hand-made soaps, candles, handicrafts and fresh foods locally. It is also quite common for these households to share or barter in informal economic exchanges. In that way, it becomes both an act of self-reliance and a way to make an accessible, meaningful vocation in the crafts of small-scale production in the home.

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It’s hardly surprising, then, that many homesteaders also advocate localism, whose goal is to build resilient and sustainable communities by prioritising local resources and production, and instilling a kind of civic pride of place and belonging. According to Lasch, what he calls “particularism” was an antidote to the progressive idea that we could or should love every citizen of the world in the same way we love the members of our families or communities. He pointed to people such as Willa Cather, who spoke to the particularities of place, attributing “Nebraska’s vigour and prosperity to the presence of Bohemian, Scandinavian, and German immigrants”.

Today, people engaged in homesteading seek a similar sense of belonging, something they feel has been robbed from them by the atomised society of the advanced economies they were born into. Take, for example, the recently published children’s poem “All the Ways You Can Stay“, by Wally Chamberlain, who grew up on a third-generation dairy farm in rural New England. Intended as a remedy to Dr Seuss’s “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!”, which encourages young adults to leave their hometowns for office work in the nearest metropole, Chamberlain offers:

“The barns they all lean, and the field’s overgrown.
Paint peels quicker on a house that’s not home.
It’s hard to see, but indeed is the truth,
That places will fade without memories and youth.
Yes places need people, and this one does too,
And maybe this place, and these people, need you.
Your family, your friends, these hills, and this town,
They’d not be the same, without you around.
So leave if you must, but perhaps not today.
Stop and consider all the ways you can stay.”

What this reveals is that, despite recent pearl clutching that homesteading is adjacent to “white supremacy” or localism is “blood and soil”, many engaged in these activities care not just about prioritising individual action, but also about building communities that champion ecological sustainability and decentralised power structures, including caring about hyper-local politics and informal economies. These people often come together to share knowledge, resources and support, creating networks that prioritise resilience and self-sufficiency. Roxanne Ahern of Happy Holistic Homestead, for instance, hosts a “swap and shop” a couple of times a year with neighbours where everyone exchanges clothes and other gently used items. Again, for Lasch in The True and Only Heaven, there is a power in informal networks developed by the Common Man, which can be the foundation for the “revival of active citizenship”.

Looking towards those experimenting in homesteading and localism, we might therefore gain some insight about the modern world engaging with the not-so-distant past — a time where relying on nature to scratch out a larger force was commonplace. Those who are seeking a fundamentally more meaningful existence, through the rejection of the false promises of technological progress and the embrace of the limits of nature, are showing us the glimmers of a path towards a life that could simultaneously begin to address our spiritual and economic woes.

Lasch spent his career documenting the tragedies and loss in industrial modernity. He wrote of “the decline of craftsmanship, the fragmentation of the community, the loneliness of the modern metropolis, the subordination of spiritual life to the demands of the market” — but never lived to see a fully embodied example of people celebrating “the goodness of life in the face of its limits”. If Berman’s Dual Process theory is correct, and we are firmly in a moment of civilisational decline, we are also in a moment of great promise and opportunity. Almost 30 years after he died, Lasch’s vision could soon become a much-needed reality.

Both these competing visions of beauty have one thing in common: they are the result of many decades of the self’s extreme commodification. In other words, both are evidence of the fact that we have fundamentally lost our ability to see real beauty.

An intuitive sense of beauty should transcend trends. But our understanding of it fluctuates wildly. Just look at how the ideal woman’s body has varied in the last few decades: the fetishisation of heroin chic was en vogue in the Nineties, only to be replaced by the curvy Kardashianism of the early-2000s. Only in the last week, Kim herself has made headlines for having lost 10 kilos and “her signature curves” — heralding an era in which skinny is back.

This oscillation is the sign of a culture that has lost touch with the eternal. In its place, culture is now ruled by the narcissism of the individual — who, as Fromm put it, now “experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions”. The impact on interpersonal relationships has been drastic, and terrible. Fromm argued that one has to transcend one’s narcissism in order to see beauty in another, and so experience love — but society now precludes such transcendence, by seeing meaning-making as purely a question of economics. Community has broken down, and so we are forced to find meaning through marketing ourselves to the highest bidder.

The result is not beauty, but ugliness. Consider the marketed self that dominates social media: an exaggeration of sexual attractiveness which has, with the help of the beauty-industrial complex, become grotesque. Female bodies are made to appear hyper-fertile through Botox and butt lifts, and male bodies virile through calf implants or tummy tucks. A recent GQ article highlighted a man who spent $75,000 to have both of his femurs broken and his legs extended to increase his height by a few inches. “I noticed that taller people just seem to have it easier,” he said.

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Such comments hint at how ideas of beauty influence intimate relationships. In dating algorithm swipe culture, taller men get more engagement. So, instead of removing himself from a market in which his body lowers his chances of finding a date, this man chooses to alter his body to game the system.

As for women, almost every form of cosmetic surgery has been on the rise since the pandemic, including Botox, lip fillers, and nose reshaping. When we were forced into becoming avatars of our real lives, in both professional and personal settings, we increasingly saw ourselves as the image we projected. It inspired many to alter their bodies in ways that look good on screen but horrifying in person. Instead of resisting the urge to flatten our existence to how we appear on Zoom, we altered that appearance so that our avatars look younger and similar.

This is one form of ugliness: radically manipulating the appearance of the self in order to satisfy our sense of what beauty is. But there is another prevalent form, which is based on radically altering any shared sense of what beauty is — by declaring it to be a form of patriarchal oppression. This form is epitomised by the fat acceptance movement.

At their most extreme, fat-acceptance activists claim that health standards, let alone beauty standards, are a social construct that must be overthrown. The “health at every size” mantra of The Association for Size Diversity and Health is, in some ways, an understandable response to sometimes extreme pressures to be thin. But it goes even further,  completely detaching health from weight, despite strong evidence the two are fundamentally linked. Elsewhere, this group forgets that a plus-size model posing in a tiny bikini (inevitably sent by a sponsor) is simply an individual commodifying her appearance to gain status. Unlike other models, this status comes from playing the victim: fat activists often suggest that equating weight with health is discrimination or an affront to their disability.

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True and transcendent beauty, though, is not to be found in either status game: it lies neither in exaggerated sexualisation nor exaggerated victimhood. Quite the contrary: beauty depends on the eschewal of narcissism, and the practice of outward virtue within an interdependent community. Today, however, this is no longer possible.

The upshot is that we have begun to see ourselves as standardised products, to be compared across an image-saturated marketplace. This view is apparent in the statement ubiquitous on TikTok: “He/she is a 10, but…” By reducing appearance to a crude number, our sensual experience of someone’s being is reduced to the visual — it is completely flattened. We are losing, to use Ivan Illich’s phrase, “sensual praxis”: a way of living that appreciates the full extent we are able to experience the world.

Illich asked, “What can I do to survive in the midst of the show?”, before answering his own question with a proposed two-fold approach. First, he calls for “an ethics of vision”, which calls for us to “protect” our “imagination from overwhelming distraction, possibly leading to addiction”. Second, he suggests “ocular askesis”, a discipline by which we train ourselves to perceive the world as we wish to see it. Illich scholar L.M. Sacasas goes further: “Our task, then, would be to cultivate an ethos of seeing or new habits of vision ordered toward the good. And, while the focus here has fallen on sight, Illich knew and we should remember, that all the senses can be likewise trained.”

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Fromm says something similar about love, which, he argues, “isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.” Love, like beauty, has been decoupled both from the context of interdependence and the wholeness of embodied experience. The decoupling has left us with a crisis of intimacy: even as we reveal more intimate details about ourselves on social media, we are losing our ability to be close to others in real life.

The commodification of beauty is at the heart of this crisis. Fromm argues that “the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle underlying love are incompatible”. But we can overcome the idea that we are only beautiful if we can be marketed in specific, narrow realms. We can choose not to rate each other with numbers, or indulge the swipe culture of dating apps. Training ourselves to see the transcendent beauty of virtue is a way to open ourselves up to the expanse of human experience, to hone our “sensual praxis”, to restore our ability to be interdependent again, and to love.

When Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism in 1979, well into the post-war wealth boom that turbocharged the industrial era, he argued that narcissistic tendencies develop partially as a result of industrial society. He identified phenomena as disparate as the modern school system, sport, psychotherapy, advertising and consumer culture as playing a role in the development of widespread, unchecked narcissism. But he didn’t go far enough: it was a glut of energy resources that instilled in us the belief that we could control nature as if we were gods.

For decades, our standard of living in the developed world seemingly increased without end. The improbable access to energy coupled with crony capitalism turned wealthy societies into pure consumers, swallowing anything and everything the economy could imagine and manufacture. Our system was unrivalled in history. Our inner Narcissus was unleashed.

Two major trends influenced our narcissistic tendencies in this energy-rich universe: we developed personal meaning in consumption, turning what we wear, where we eat, and where we shop into our religion. Consumption became a signal of belonging in a world breaking apart any semblance of community.

We also developed a collective philosophy of progress that told us we have won history: we had conquered all the resource and material challenges of the past. We believed that our collective wealth as a species was only going to keep growing. No wonder, then, that progressivism, in its traditional sense, became the widespread political psychology exactly as the upward slope of oil consumption looked almost exponential.

These two widespread psychological outcomes unveiled the worst of our egocentric propensities. On the one hand: we identified with what we chose to consume, an inward-looking narcissism, displaying self-worth through ostensibly corporate fandom, a religion of the self. On the other, we displayed an optimistic faith in human limitlessness.

Fusing the two together, the abundance of cheap energy lumbered the developed world with a narcissistic psychosis. You can see this in everything from the overvaluation of an individual’s salary and power as measures of success to the denigration of caring roles and familial obligation. In each case, the focus is on the individual thriving while ignoring the interdependence that makes life possible.

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But look at the world today: the seemingly constant upward trajectory of humanity is faltering. On the far side of industrial development, we have begun to reach a peak — in affluence, in meaning, and now in access to resources and position. Increasingly, there is widespread social disorganisation and political dysfunction as our high-energy society reaches its material limits. Economic theorists call this the crisis of capitalism; energy analysts call it peak oil; social commentators call it the meaning crisis; Weber called it disenchantment; Marx called it alienation. Whatever we want to call it, we have fewer resources now and it is changing how we think.

According to relative deprivation theory, as individuals in a society achieve a certain level of affluence and sense of security, any lowering of that standard leads to a feeling of entitlement and a sensation of being robbed. Sociologists suggest this sense of loss can often foment social movements and result in society wide outbreaks of deviant behaviour.

But this general sense of malaise and unease has also created a widespread culture of victimhood. Similar to Lasch, who relied on the clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder to explain societal narcissism, I believe that these tendencies are manifested in borderline personality disorder, or BPD. The characteristics of BPD include a sense of paranoia, the feeling that you are on the receiving end of unfair treatment, and a sort of mental witch-hunt against the individual or group believed to be behind it.

The political factions we now see arising out of various forms of social disorder — environmental, economic, financial — demonstrate just this trend: a widespread cultural outbreak of borderline personality disorder, centring around victimhood. Just as the seemingly endless exploitation of cheap energy caused us to once see ourselves as gods, our now-dwindling resources have us seeing monsters lurking everywhere in the shadows.

Consider the class of overproduced elites, the neurotic radicals of our current era. Working on the assumption that cheap energy and growth would maintain its trajectory forever, our institutions oversaw the creation of more white-collar positions. But today, at the end of the hyper-industrial era, these positions are becoming scarce. And what follows is not just a sense of deprivation-fuelled entitlement, but also a kind of bitter in-fighting with victimhood as its currency.

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Take the madness of our universities as an example. Individuals prepare their whole lives to go into academia, only to graduate into a cratering job market with nearly-impossible-to-land positions. In certain fields, PhDs work for years as low paid adjuncts or postdocs, often moving around the country with young families in the hopes of one day finally landing a tenured position. But instead of recognising the end of limitless white-collar growth as the proximate cause, frustrated would-be academics turn to those gaining the limited positions as both the enemy and the cause. In a dark psychological twist, victimhood politics have now become a means to secure a scarce position.

Similarly, those suffering from clinical BPD have been known to use their sense of victimhood as a way to control situations or achieve desired ends — such as when privileged white women pretend to be women of colour, or when activists attempt to dethrone existing “privileged” elites under the pretences of racism, sexism or some other victimisation of underprivileged groups.

But while this trend might be most immediately apparent within leftist, or “woke”, identity politics, there is also a parallel strain of victimhood politics in something like the red-pill movement made up primarily of young men. Frustrated by the lack of healthy male role models, opportunities to experience coming of age rituals and meaningful work, these men have now turned to women as the proximate cause of their ills, like early-modern peasants blaming witches for their misfortunes.

They bemoan the gynocracy, haunted by memories of mothers and teachers who have controlled and scolded them throughout their lives. And as a result, they seek out strong and often toxic role models who feed into their victimised self-perception and encourage misogyny. Fundamentally, this is just the same kind of aggrieved politics as the derangement of late-stage liberalism: this is not the life I was promised, I must find a nearby scapegoat to pin the blame on.

These are just two examples from the Left and Right, but this broader culture of BPD is widespread and growing. Radical feminists blame men, ecomodernists blame Luddites, vegans blame ranchers, environmentalists blame climate change deniers — the list goes on. But while this culture is clearly unhealthy, it’s also a natural and understandable psychological response to the sense of powerlessness fostered by an increasingly constrained material world.

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The importance of repression

By Park Macdougald

The ultimate destination of this narcissistic fantasy is ridding the world of all its evildoers — a kind of gnostic apocalypse in which only the truly righteous will enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet this is the exact opposite of the cultural approach we’ll need to survive. In the previous era of increasing resources, we had the riches to increase our independence; we no longer needed one another to survive. Today, however, as resources and stability begin to wane, we must rely on one another again.

The antidote to the individualistic culture of narcissism created by the upswing of energy resources, as well as the culture of victimhood birthed by its painful downswing, is a culture of interdependence, an acceptance of limits, and a reliance on mutual care. Historically, humans living within material constraints were forced to rely on one another to get by, with some of the worst impulses of human nature constrained by mutual interdependence. Our greatest moderating force is the experience of being relied upon, and relying upon others.

Fossil fuels drove us all crazy: perhaps the collapse of man’s brief age of energy abundance can make us sane again.