Only Total Collapse Will Rouse Humanity from Its Suicidal Sleepwalk

As Gaza's children burn while the world watches, it becomes clear: only climate catastrophe, nuclear armageddon, or World War III may force humanity to abandon Western capitalism's suicidal path.

The brutal death march of global capitalism does not pause for our lamentations. It grinds forward with mechanistic certainty, reducing human bodies to raw material and human aspirations to market commodities. We stand now at the precipice of a darkness so profound that our collective imagination fails to grasp its dimensions.

Gaza Exposed the Multipolar Fantasy

Let us dispense with comforting illusions. The mythologies we have constructed about saviors – whether BRICS nations, ‘multipolar world orders’, institutions of international law, or benevolent statesmen – have disintegrated before our eyes. As Gaza burns and its children scream under collapsing concrete, we witness Russia making backroom deals with the architects of genocide. As Palestinian bodies pile in makeshift morgues, China issues empty declarations at the United Nations while its trade with the genocidal regime continues uninterrupted.

These are not the actions of counterweights to empire. They are the maneuvers of players within the same global system, differing perhaps in position but not in fundamental nature. They have shown themselves to be integral components of the very machinery we hoped they would dismantle.

We have watched, with desperate hope, the Palestinians stand against overwhelming military force, the Lebanese resisting occupation, Ibrahim Traore challenging neocolonial structures, Syrians and Yemenis enduring apocalyptic bombardment. We projected onto them our desperate yearning for liberation from the imperialist hellscape spreading like wildfire across our planet. But they cannot do it alone, and our delegation of hope to others is itself a form of moral abdication.

The Frightening Truth is: It Really Comes Down to Us

The terrible truth we must confront is this: the responsibility is ours. The revolution required is not national but global, because the capitalist system has metastasized globally. It has burrowed deep into the institutional structures of every society, captured the regulatory mechanisms that might constrain it, corrupted the informational systems that might expose it, and weaponized the technological systems that might liberate us.

Consider the grotesque spectacle of our current moment: we watch genocide in real-time on social media platforms owned by billionaires who fund that same genocide, we march in permitted protests that change nothing, we sign petitions that disappear into administrative voids. Meanwhile, the machinery of death continues unabated, and the architects of suffering retire to coastal mansions and mountain retreats after receiving fifty standing ovations for speeches that are nothing more than celebrations of mass murder.

The ruling classes have constructed a system of control so comprehensive, so technologically sophisticated, and so psychologically insidious that most cannot even perceive the depth of their enslavement. The surveillance apparatus tracks our movements and predicts our thoughts. The military-industrial complex develops weapons of terrifying precision to eliminate those who resist too effectively. The propaganda system manufactures consent with algorithmic efficiency.

All Wish to Sit at the Blood-Soaked Table of Imperialism

As

vanessa beeley

and

Fiorella Isabel

so meticulously lay out for us, Putin, for all his anti-Western rhetoric, demonstrates through his actions that he seeks merely better terms within the imperial arrangement, not its dissolution. His government works in tacit coordination with Israel while claiming to stand against Western hegemony. This is not resistance; it is negotiation for a better position at the blood-soaked table of imperialism.

And what of China? Does it dream of global equality? Let’s rephrase, do ruling elites anywhere envision a future where they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the peasants in the villages they dominate? History speaks to us with terrible clarity. The powerful do not relinquish power voluntarily. Systems of exploitation do not reform themselves out of existence. The capitalist machine — whether neoliberal or state capitalism — will not decommission itself out of ethical awakening.

We have already weathered global catastrophes that should have taught us these lessons. World War I reduced a generation of young men to shredded flesh in muddy trenches, yet we learned nothing. World War II revealed the industrial-scale horror humans could inflict upon one another, yet we learned nothing. The grinding machinery reassembled itself, adapted, and continued its relentless accumulation.

“Humanity appears incapable of changing direction without first experiencing the catastrophic consequences of its current trajectory. We seem determined to learn only through suffering, to change only when continuation becomes impossible”

World War III

The terrifying conclusion becomes unavoidable: only the total breakdown of global society will create the conditions for fundamental transformation. This is not a wish but a recognition of historical pattern. The entrenchment is too deep, the control too complete, the psychological captivity too thorough for anything less than systemic collapse to break the spell.

What form will this breakdown take? Perhaps nuclear winter that eliminates most of humanity. Perhaps the collapse of ecological systems that sustain human life. Perhaps the return of fascistic brutality in World War III as soldiers march through our streets, rounding up our women and children to violate their dignity and take away their innocence while the men disappear into torture camps. The specific manifestation matters less than the certainty of its arrival if our course remains unchanged.

This is the darkness we must stare into without flinching. Humanity appears incapable of changing direction without first experiencing the catastrophic consequences of its current trajectory. Even high-definition genocide—burning children and prisoner rapes streamed directly to our iPhones—fails to move us to effective action. We seem determined to learn only through even more extreme suffering, to change only when our current path becomes literally impossible to continue.

Resistance

Yet within this terrible recognition lies a seed of possibility. If we understand the machinery of our destruction with unflinching clarity, if we abandon the comfortable myths that absolve us of responsibility, if we recognize that no external force will save us from ourselves – perhaps then we might begin the work of genuine resistance.

Not the performative — flag-waving, song-singing, tweet-sharing — resistance that leaves power structures intact, but the fundamental reimagining of human society. Not the delegation of hope to distant leaders, but the reclamation of our collective agency. Not the comfortable protest that returns home for dinner, but the sustained commitment to dismantling systems of death.

The machinery of global capitalism does not pause for our lamentations, but neither is it invulnerable to our determined opposition. The question remains whether we will summon the courage to oppose it before the breakdown comes, or whether we will continue sleepwalking until we awaken amid the ruins.

- Karim

* To increase the visibility of BettBeat Media, your restack of this article would be greatly appreciated.