The thing that scares me most, though, is that in today’s United States there are parallel arcs of rapid decline on ALL levels–psychological, emotional, social, political, and even spiritual. One of the defining features of societal collapse is this: it starts ramping up, and keeps intensifying faster and faster–because off the ‘separate’ elements I just identified are in truth not separate al all, and keep amplifying each other in an accelerating downward spiral.

And once such a society-wide ‘downward spiral’ takes off and starts accelerating–it’s very hard to stop or even slow down. People often wonder how horrendous events like the Nazi takeover in Germany of the Rwandan genocide, of Pol Pot’s murderous carnage in Cambodia can even happen.

Well, I think we’re seeing the answer unforlding right in front of us and within us right now. It’s a form of socially-sanctioned mass hysteria, a kind of mass social blindness and surging collective rage and madness.

In both form and content it’s very much like an intense, terrifying dreal–a really bad nightmare come to life. The nightmarish horribly inhumain beliefs and actions underlying these atrocities come to be accepted or even embraced by many people…and then the madness and atrocities just keep growing and intensifying.

–Richard Lowenthal