The Top of the Bottom
How 12-step recovery and thermodynamic principles are urging modern civilization to admit defeat and embrace inevitable collapse.
In 12-step programs, the first step to recovery is admitting powerlessness over one’s addiction specifically and with living more generally. These admissions usually are made when addicted life becomes so intolerable that the addict becomes open to and willing to adopt new, healthy ways of living. This admission and its associated state is usually called hitting bottom. I hit bottom in 1999; that’s when I admitted to myself and others that I could never safely consume alcohol, evidenced in countless bar-rooms, jail cells, unsavory late-night situations, and rapidly failing health. I also had to admit I didn’t know how to live, or in 12-step speak, I had to admit my life was “unmanageable” — i.e. I couldn’t handle the myriad tasks and processes needed to live a happy, healthy existence with my outgoing existential operating system. Paradoxically, this admission of powerlessness and existential incompetence was a huge relief, as it seems to be the case with many I’ve met who were in a similar position. The energy I previously spent propping up the lies and egoistic attachment to my miserable life was freed up for healthier, wiser pursuits. This first step provided the gateway for the other eleven that address the misery in more detail.
Hitting bottom — the point at which the addict realizes he or she can’t go on using — is similar to the thermodynamic principle of maximum entropy, aka MaxEnt. At a certain point, every energetic system — be it a substance-addicted human, a civilization, or a galaxy — reaches a point where it becomes too complex (entropic) to go on. When a system reaches that point, it begins its unstoppable path towards collapse, decay, and death. MaxEnt is the top of the wave, just before that wave folds over and crashes.
Treated as an energetic system, our modern, industrialized civilization is in the middle of a MaxEnt event. Reliable modeling for this peak and its subsequent collapse have been known since at least 1972, when the Club of Rome modeled out a precipitous collapse of population, food production, and more. So far, the model is proving to be lethally accurate. Despite this situation, mainstream and even not-so-mainstream media narratives purport that with the right technology, the right president, the right policies, the right interest rate, the right widget — that with these things, we will can achieve a harmonious relationship between humans and the planet. This is like telling an alcoholic who usually drinks whiskey that his alcoholism will work itself out if he only drinks beer (hint: it won’t).
Life for most modern Americans is akin to an addict in their last days of addiction, characterized by complexity, decay, and destruction. It’s a wave in mid-collapse. Modern Americans — and their foreign imitators — are told to keep surfing this collapsing wave, spending their stressed-out, tired lives working so they can afford to buy their bliss. What they’re really doing is maximizing investor profits, shopping for stuff they don’t need and investing in hollow, materialistic lifestyles, all while burying themselves in education, transportation, housing, and medical care debt. In this harried, delusional universe, connecting with and investing in family, community, health, and nature become afterthoughts.
This modern world’s values are unlike historical ones, which were mainly concerned with strengthening connections to one’s family, tribe, community, and god(s). This modern world’s structure is also unlike historical ones, the latter being geographically constrained and inclusive of housing, schools, churches, sweat lodges, and other amenities that strengthen social connection. Historical societies were also located in places with fresh water, arable land, and bearable climates — all handy things for, you know, staying alive.
Modern America flips historical norms. Family and community bonds have been replaced by algorithmic, digitally-delivered solipsism that promote fealty to corporations and political parties. Centralized community structures have been replaced by individuated homes that act as centers of their own universe, degrading community connections and amplifying societal solipsism. Amenity structures like shops and places of worship— ones that could promote social cohesion — are in dispersed locations within an hour’s drive of one’s home. Small, community-owned and run businesses near housing are replaced by multinational-corporation-owned office parks and malls far from housing. Settlements are placed indiscriminately since air conditioning and imported water can make environmentally hostile locations viable for human habitation.
It’s unbelievable anyone believes this anti-human, anti-planet, anti-Life system can continue much longer, much less want it to. For its part, the planet has been tossing floods, wildfires, heat-waves, droughts, and disease at this lifestyle and its structures, hoping to excise all of it like an infected wart, but America gonna America.
The thing about waves is that they can be forestalled and buffered, but never eliminated. Collapse is a matter of when, not if. There’s no going back to the mythological “again” Trump trumpets, nor to the Halcyon days of Clinton-era neoliberal economics Harris indirectly promises. The epochal wave of modern, industrial society is crashing. And if my experience of getting sober is any guide, that’s the best possible scenario, for it’s only on the other side of collapse that new, healthy, resilient systems can emerge.
This is an revised version of a post originally published at https://deepfriedlander.substack.com.
