When Power Loses Its Roots

Recognizing Collapse, Reimagining What Comes Next

If it feels like the world is coming to an end, it’s because it is. Not in the sci-fi “end of the world” sense, but in the civilizational sense. All civilizations rise and fall, and we are living in the late stage of the end of the civilization known as “the Western World.”

I read An Arab Philosophy of History (originally published as Muqaddimah) back in 1992. It was written by the 14^th century social historian Ibn Khaldun. He had served multiple courts over his lifetime—as a jurist, diplomat, and administrator, including the Marinids, Abd al-Wadids, and later the Mamluks in Cairo. By the time he wrote the Muqaddimah, he had withdrawn from active political life, having witnessed repeated cycles of dynastic rise, corruption, and collapse firsthand. I remember thinking at the time how the society he was writing about mirrored my own.

He was writing about a late-stage Islamic imperial world characterized by long-established bureaucratic states, elite decadence and court intrigue, heavy taxation to support urban luxury and standing armies, declining ʿasabiyyah’ (social cohesion), increasing distance between rulers and the people, a loss of moral legitimacy. In other words: A civilization that had already passed its generative phase and was living off inherited structures. Sound familiar?

Even back in 1992, the United States showed several of the same structural signals Ibn Khaldun identified as late-stage: enormous institutional complexity, expanding administrative and military overhead, elites increasingly insulated from consequences, social cohesion beginning to fray beneath apparent prosperity, culture sustained by momentum rather than shared meaning. Since 1992 those things I notice back then have continued to degrade at an alarmingly accelerated pace.

Ibn Khaldun’s insight wasn’t about which civilization collapses—but how power behaves once it loses its relational roots.

What he understood, and what still feels unsettlingly current, is that the unraveling of a civilization does not begin with collapse, but with disconnection. Power loses its relational roots. Institutions continue to function, but they no longer serve life. What remains looks solid on the surface, even as the social fabric beneath it thins and frays. By the time a system begins to visibly fail, as we are witnessing now, the deeper rupture has already occurred. Understanding this pattern—that collapse begins with disconnection—changes everything about how we might respond.

This moment is not just and ending—it’s a transformation, a profound reorientation.

If you’re paying attention, you notice. You feel concerned. You may even feel helpless to steer us in a different direction. What we’re witnessing is an inevitable shedding of a system that hasn’t worked in a very long time. The truth is it has never truly worked for many of us. It’s a system based on extraction, inequity, domination, and the myth of infinite growth—something fundamentally incompatible with life on a finite planet.

If you sit with this for too long, or pay too close attention, it can be not just unsettling but terrifying. The terror is specific: it’s the feeling of watching systems you were told were permanent begin to crumble in real time, of recognizing patterns you can’t unsee, of understanding that the ground you’ve built your life on was never as solid as you believed. It’s the particular helplessness that comes from seeing clearly what’s happening while having no levers large enough to stop it. So many people look away—not out of ignorance or apathy, but out of a survival instinct that whispers: You still have to live. You still have to get up tomorrow. You still have to care for the people you love. The cognitive dissonance of inhabiting a dying system while still needing to function within it is almost unbearable. I get it. Reading the paper or watching the news can feel like watching the world race toward the edge of a cliff with no means to stop it. Dissociation, in this context, is not weakness—it’s a natural human response to a reality that threatens to overwhelm our capacity to metabolize it.

And yet, I think there can be a strange kind of comfort in recognizing when something is reaching its natural end. Death is an opportunity to compost the old so that it can provide nutrients for the seeds germinating beneath the surface, waiting for the opportunity for rebirth. Our imaginations are those seeds—already present, already alive, but needing the right conditions to break through. They have been waiting for the hard-packed soil of inevitability to soften, for the weight of “this is just how things are” to finally lift. The breakdown of what no longer serves creates the very conditions our imaginations need: space to breathe, nutrients released from old forms, light reaching places that were too densely overgrown. When we realign ourselves with our inner knowing and the rhythms of the natural world, we regain the capacity to imagine something else—something truer, more humane, and more alive. The old world doesn’t have to be fully gone for the new to begin growing. Seeds germinate in the dark, drawing life from what has broken down around them.

Something truer does not look like a better or more ethical version of the same system; it requires a different orientation to life itself. It is a world organized around relationship rather than extraction, belonging rather than domination, rhythm rather than speed.

At the most intimate level, this means dignity is no longer earned through productivity but recognized as inherent. Knowledge is no longer abstracted from the body or the land but rooted in lived experience, memory, and place. We remember what it means to be embodied creatures, to trust our inner knowing, to learn from what we touch and tend rather than only from what we can measure and quantify.

At the collective level, care becomes essential infrastructure rather than a private responsibility, and community is understood as a necessity rather than a lifestyle choice. Life moves in seasons instead of quarters, in cycles instead of growth curves, honoring regeneration over endless expansion. The logic shifts from endless accumulation to reciprocity, from isolation to interdependence.

This is not a utopia or a return to the past, but a remembering—a re-entry into ways of being human that are more aligned with the living intelligence of the Earth and the wisdom of our own inner knowing.

The work of bringing this world into being does not begin with grand plans or sweeping reforms, but with how we choose to live, notice, and relate right where we are. It begins by slowing enough to listen to our own inner knowing, by tending our bodies and nervous systems, by remembering what it feels like to live in rhythm rather than constant urgency. From there, it widens—into how we care for one another, how we participate in community, how we steward the land and resources we touch, how we tell the truth about what is no longer working without turning away. Change moves outward the way roots do: quietly, steadily, beneath the surface at first, reshaping what can grow above. We do not need to know exactly what comes next to begin. We only need to live differently now, in ways that are more attentive, more relational, and more aligned with the life we are already part of. This kind of living requires more than intention; it requires practice, rhythm, and a framework that helps us return again and again to alignment.