How a Society Becomes Its Own Disease

(A Cultural Pathogen’s Guide to Modern Civilization)

It begins, as most terrible things do, with good intentions and a spreadsheet.

Not a particularly clever spreadsheet, mind you. Just the sort designed by a subcommittee of moderately caffeinated humans with strong opinions about population control, waste disposal, and the strategic deployment of roundabouts. The kind of spreadsheet that confidently asserts you can fit 9 billion people on a planet designed for curious lizards and occasional meteorites. That, of course is if they all stand shoulder to shoulder and breathe in turns.

This is the sort of math modern civilization calls “urban planning.” In prehistoric times, it would’ve been called “a rather bad idea followed by several sharp sticks.”

But we digress.

Patient Zero: Homo Sapiens Bureaucraticus

The disease begins when a society becomes convinced of its own cleverness. It then promptly builds a global network to ensure that no one with actual insight can do anything about it.

Symptoms include:

Inexplicable reverence for quarterly earnings.

A compulsive need to extract resources from one hole in the Earth, polish them slightly, and bury them again somewhere else.

Ritualistic gatherings known as “summits,” where important people pretend to solve problems using artisanal lanyards and PowerPoint.

At this stage, the society becomes self-replicating. Not in a joyous, biological sense, but in the way a printer continues to spew test pages long after you’ve begged it to stop.

Phase Two: Weaponized Consensus

Now comes the fever. Having infected itself with a narrative such as: Infinite Growth Is a Good Idea or Don’t Worry, We’ll Terraform Mars. Then society begins manufacturing agreement at scale.

This is achieved through:

Media campaigns designed to soothe, distract, or inflame, most often simultaneously.

Academic papers that prove whatever needs proving, as long as someone is funding the grant.

Memes because nothing says “nuanced debate” like a SpongeBob reaction image.

Opposing views are labeled as either fringe, hysterical, or very problematic indeed. This is especially true if they come from people who still remember forests, personal agency, or how to cook without an app. Damn hippy tree huggers.

Phase Three: The Immune System Turns Inward

In healthy organisms, the immune system defends against invaders. In late-stage civilization, it does the opposite: it attacks whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and anyone asking whether our economic model is actually a pyramid scheme held together by delivery drones and tax breaks for yachts.

Here, dissent is recast as treason. Truth is redacted for national security. And a perfectly normal Tuesday might include:

Being arrested for recording police misconduct.

Watching the sea rise while your governor bans the word “climate.”

Logging into a platform to announce your departure from that platform, before being algorithmically seduced by cat videos and remaining there forever.

Terminal Stage: Cheerful Catastrophe

By this point, the civilization has achieved peak irony: it has the computing power to simulate entire universes, but still can’t get everyone clean drinking water.

It has devices capable of instantaneous global communication, mostly used to argue about pizza toppings.

And it has built machines smarter than itself. Machines which, in a cruel twist, learned their moral compass from the comment section on FaceBook.

The final symptom of the disease is optimism.

People continue to believe that the next election, the next innovation, the next inspirational TED Talk will save them. They invest their faith in crypto, charisma, or carbon capture. Alas, they never suspect that the true virus was not in the system, but was the system all along.

Prognosis: Mostly Terminal, But Occasionally Hilarious

There is no known cure for a society that believes it’s immune to collapse.

But there is a treatment: laughter. Not the polite kind, but the deep, slightly panicked kind that emerges when you realize your toaster just applied for citizenship and the only candidate left on the ballot is a raccoon in a lab coat.

And in that moment, the one when you laugh, cry, and file your 12th GDPR consent form of the day...know this:

You are not alone.

You are simply one of the few left who noticed.

And that, dear reader, is how a society becomes its own disease:

With spreadsheets, sincerity, and a dash of delusion.

Also, oat milk.

No one knows why.

But it’s always oat milk.