Relating to: The Emergency We Cannot Feel: On the Psychological Unreadiness for American Collapse.
Mike, your commentary goes beyond a 10-course dinner. It deserves, perhaps more pointedly, begging for a full-day roundtable discussion.
Some small points insofar as feedback.
"Constitutional crisis" has become hackneyed as has existential threat. The American public, perhaps others too, have a form of attention deficit. Perhaps it is a product of social media, or maybe it relates to fast-food as the new norm for many. We are in an age of McThought.
We are seeing violations of the US Constitution at an accelerated rate:
First Amendment- free speech; freedom of the press
Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments- the right to due process.
The Emoluments Clause: Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution (often called the Foreign Emoluments Clause) states:
"No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
Each of these violations is impeachable. Yet, the Republican GOP in the House & Senate are complicit in this offense to the nation.
You point out that Americans are unprepared for what is before them. Right. We are the Germans, the Germans of the 1930s in soon to be Nazi, Germany under the regime of Hitler.
Now, just replace "Germans" with Americans, and replace Hitler with Trump. Voila.
Mike, if the majority of Americans wish to live under the iron heel of Trump et al, then so be it. They will not eat cake, but stale bread or no bread.
The main issue, the only issue, does not lie in our understanding of the pathogenesis of our moral, civil, and political ennui, but in this:
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO TO REMOVE TRUMP & FELLOW CONSTITUTIONAL VIOLATORS FROM POLITICAL OFFICE? WHAT STEPS SHOULD BE TAKEN NOW, OR ARE WE TOO LATE?
Going on about "Muh sacred constitution" and "rule of law is being dismantled" is pretty rich when the entire Civil Rights Movement relied on constitutional violations (freedom of association went out the window) and freedom of speech was effectively quashed by cancel campaigns after the institutional capture of the academy by racial bolshevists. If millions of people can enter a country without due process, then weeping about them leaving without due process is an entirely selective outrage.
To be clear, I'm not going to equivocate here, I'm not going to claim "both sides just as bad". I already ran the math on the scale and consequences of the BLM/Antifa riots vs. Jan 6th and the former was orders of magnitude worse. I already know that 45% of Democrats supported internment camps for antivaxxers. I know who the greater evil is here.
Fantastic article. The exposition on coherence and its collapse in four dimensions expands on and explicates a vague idea I woke up with last week.
My concern was the possibility of a deep metaphysical despair that we simply don't have the life tools to counteract. Our cultural framework of "America" and all that it includes (freedom, democracy, the genius behind the design of our government, the entire history of our culture including Greek and Roman ideas about democracy and Judeo-Christian ideas about mercy and kindness, the legacy of British common law, and all the rest) is dissolving before our eyes. We need a lot more than "grief counseling."
I brought up the idea in a lunch group of fellow philosophy alumni the same day. At least one person responded in a way that made me think his clear-sighted resistance to denial has put him into a pretty gloomy spot. As for me, if I'm not out on the trails at least three times a week I start sinking. And so I've been wondering whether it's possible that even those of us who are essentially mentally healthy and savvy about life's troubles can be undermined by the erosion of the moral and narrative coherences that have up until now constituted the "civil religion" of our culture.
Mike's essay looks at the forms of denial many are adopting. I'm pretty well armed against all of these since my life circumstances are secure: my problem is what exactly should I be doing to resist? All I have to offer are thinking and reading, which result in ideas and encouragement to my tiny audience on Reddit, Substack [comments] and Facebook.
I'll be passing on the concepts that Mike has explicated here. The more we can recognize and explicate how our collective thinking is being influenced, the more we can redirect it towards finding effective, courageous responses. (BTW, a better link to the book by Bernard Williams is here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5601.Truth_and_Truthfulness)
This expresses — and so clearly — much of what I’ve been thinking and feeling since January 20. It has set me to considering anew how to deal with our collective situation in a way that feels both productive and healthy. Denial is not in my repertoire but one response to what is so obviously happening every day — despair — is corrosively *un*healthy as well as futile. Help!
Yes you’re right, the people who are label half of the country with dehumanizing slurs, and who support actual Nazis in Ukraine, and who support policies of open racial discrimination, and who support eugenicist policies like late term abortion and sterilizing children, and who support erasure censorship and political persecution, not to mention persecution by angry mobs, those are the good guys, and the other guys are totalitarian fascists.
It doesn't help that any distress people start to express about all of this is immediately rejected as some sort of defect in character by calling it Trump Derangement Syndrome.
This has been the only topic that matters to me over at the Autocratic Despair Substack. I think if we were able to insert the term "Autocratic Despair" in place of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" it'd give people a non-judgemental term to describe what they are going through.
After reading this to my wife the parts where I wrote her name, you so perfectly articulated what she has been screaming at the TV screen and our friends, I took the car to be washed and continued in Brian T. Watson's Headed Into the Abyss (almost done) and thought I had mixed up your essay with him. I can only quote pp. 251-2 (published in 2019):
"It will matter which Democratic candidate receives the nomination. Most of them are not adequately explaining the relationships that link the major force - for example, the seismic role of the web in dividing and damagin the public - nor are they describing fully the magnitude of the problems and thus the startling nature of the solutions that are required. This is understandable , and it reflects the capacities of of human nature to hear bad news and the abilities of human nature to deliver that bad news. When a cadidate is trying to win office, the reality is that there are limits on what he or she can explain or propose, and still expect to get elected. Is the American electorate prepared to receive, for example, the analysis of capitalism, technology, Websorld, and the environment that I present in this book? How would we react to the presidential canditate who tells us that nearly everything about the ways we live has to change? Are the upper classes especially - both Democrats and Republicans - prepared to live far more modestly than they do now? How many voters - Republican or Democratic - will accept that a civilization-ending set of developments is bearing down on us?....If Trump is reelected there really is nothing I can add to what I have already written in this book about society's sure demise in the face of the forces that are unraveling it and the ecosphere. Trump simply won't address these forces with any meaningful policies. The Democrats are extremely unlikely to win the Senate in any case, so Congress too would be a bystander to our dissolution...... Donald Trump did not create our crises; they are products of 40 years of developments." (I have to wonder if in the first line he meant "It will NOT matter..."}
From a distance, I’m Australian and live in Australia, neither political party has served the broader US populace well since Reagan became president and the whole political establishment drunk the cool aid of Economic Rationalism (AKA Neo-Liberalism or Chicago School of Economics). Although the US has become increasingly wealthy that wealth has not been shared. Instead it has increasingly been funnelled to the 1% whilst the lives of the poor and middle class have increasingly become more miserable.
Absolutely. And I’ve lived in it nearly my entire life (born a couple years before Reagan). I think part of the problem is that for so long we wobbled back forth between less crappy (Democrat to me) and more crappy (Republican) administrations that we became numb to it. That and, to me at least, it’s hard to see how an average person could have had much effect on it.
Meanwhile, the population grows, the internet brought us great communication which then became even greater information overload and noise. And the divide grew deeper.
Great article. I always find it strange when the NY Times and other major publications begin a story about Trump by saying, "All presidents have bent the rules from time to time" or "every administration has its scandals," which is absurd context for the shocking Trump scandal that inevitably comes after the "everybody does it" table setting. Perhaps this is the difference between journalism and litigation. As a litigator (I am one), I would never begin by creating such a favorable context for a bad actor. Journalists, on the other hand, seem compelled to do it, zapping away the energy from their own story with false equivalence. Even though they are fully aware of the criticism!
I’ll make it simple, Made Simple for MAGA (condescend much?):
I was critiquing the banality of the writing, in the lede, which is trying for “oomph” by using a crayon—a cheap, woolly, rhetorical trick in place of actual argument. And so embarrassingly clunkish, to boot! That’s all I was suggesting. I just prefer adult ledes to kiddy ones, I guess. 🤷♂️
See, instead of showing why we’re / you’re (I’m thankfully not an American) in a constitutional crisis from the jump — citing precedent, outlining erosion, naming culprits, yadda yadda — it settles on false equivalency so rudimentary as to be intellectually disqualifying.
This sort of cheap, lazy, “X is true, Y is true, and therefore Z is ominous” construction would never see the light of day in the pages of a serious publication. But this is just a blog post, right? And you’re not so fussy, obviously. Or discerning, as long as your thoughts are validated by the oh-so revelatory (kinda-not-really) import of the TL; DR-for-most-l’d-bet content.
But I like my writing to take me on a proper, earned journey from start to finish AND have something to say along the way.
So, yeah, the lede’s banal. It’s childish. So sue me! 😉
I sat with this essay for a while. So much of it resonates—the sense of unraveling, the emotional dissonance, the difficulty in naming what is happening while it’s still happening. I recognize the urgency, and I feel the sorrow that runs underneath it. And yet, reading it from outside the U.S., I found myself holding a second awareness alongside one articulated.
There are places where the lens feels intensely focused inward, as if what happens in America inevitably shapes the fate of the rest of the world. That might have felt more accurate once. Now, I’m not so sure. In recent years, I’ve witnessed other democracies making strong, independent choices—refusing imported extremism, safeguarding pluralism, or actively recalibrating their relationships with power. These aren’t perfect systems, and none of them are immune to authoritarian drift. And still, they haven’t been passively waiting to follow America’s lead.
The essay is point on in many places—it’s deeply thoughtful. It’s just that from where I stand, it feels like part of a larger mosaic. One piece, held in place with care. And I wonder what might open if we let in more of the view. The quiet strength in other countries. The resilience that exists outside the frame. The possibility that coherence isn’t only found by returning to something lost—but by noticing what is already rising elsewhere.
Not all parts of the world descend into darkness at the same time, and the empires and dynasties that eventually decline are replaced sometimes by better forms. Hitler was in power for a long horrible 12 years. And then he wasn’t. Not to minimize the human suffering he caused, but no system lasts forever. Even if the worst happens and the trump regime does its worst, it will not last. They are fantasists who have an unstable and unrealistic view of their temporal power. It’s easy to be paralyzed by fear but it helps me to know authoritarian empires die of self-inflicted wounds - arrogance and corruption and overreach.
Maya, yes—exactly this sense of impermanence is something I hold close too. No system, however brutal, is invulnerable or eternal. And yet, I also feel it matters where we place our gaze while we walk through these times.
I often think of it this way: decline and collapse bring openings, and also immense human cost. Both are true. So while I trust that no authoritarian project can fully sustain itself, I also stay attuned to the harm unfolding in the meantime—and to where seeds of something more life-affirming are quietly being planted.
For me, it helps to widen the lens—not to bypass what is happening, nor to offer false comfort, yet to remind myself that many places are already embodying forms of resistance and renewal. These can be threads we learn from, even as one dominant empire flails.
I deeply appreciate how you bring the longer view here. It is a thread of steadiness that matters. And it invites us all to keep discerning where we place our energy and what we choose to tend.
Paul, both. No revolution, no change, no transformation ever begins without hope—and likely also a vision of what can emerge. And if the American people are ready, much of the world will exhale and step alongside again. We are all holding our breath, you know.
Bulls eye! Mr. Brock eloquently articulates exactly what I’ve been feeling. Fortunately there is a community of people that are fully aware of the nature of this threat. Unfortunately that’s lacking in the legacy media more than anywhere, which is where it’s most urgently needed.
What Brock calls “working the system from the inside” is what I call “beltway brain” - the belief that all the problems can be solved in Hill meetings, not taking all that outside noise too seriously.
I agree 100% with everything said here. My hope is that there will be enough of us who do get this and will somehow break through to the wider population.
Have we even dealt with the pandemic we lived through five years ago. I do not believe we have even done that. And the clear threat we face from climate crisis and the constant news about toxins like microplastics in everything. Or mass shootings.
Why would people want to face the loss of a governing system when they can’t even face those threats?
I was wondering if anyone else was thinking along these lines, e.g. about climate change. To me there's an element of magical thinking (if I close my eyes, the monster won't notice me; if I believe hard enough, the bad thing won't happen), of "if we act like all is ok, it will be", inertia, the "snowball effect" (getting enough people on board to drag along the others that haven't "gotten on board" yet), feelings of helplessness or powerlessness optimism, etc. Human (individual and group/mass and social) psychology.
Yeah, little challenging to get too worked up about the collapse of constitutional democracy when many of us have been worked up about the collapse of our habitat for 30 years to absolutely no progress… pick your catastrophes at this point.
Excellent article Mike. Every day our country is closer to a total collapse of our democratic rule. It is so in our face not to see it for ourselves. For too long I have felt encouragement from brilliant intellectuals who have claimed that Americans are strong and can resist and prevent the fall of our democracy. I will keep hoping but I now have severe doubts. We are in a RED ALERT WARNING!!!
Mike: Outstanding analysis of the situation. That said, there is an additional causal element. George Carlin said it best when he said, “They just want you smart enough to run the machines.” We have devalued the teaching of critical thinking and problem solving skills over the last 4 or 5 decades in our school systems. This was done by design, not accidentally. As a result, a large portion of the population accepts insufficient answers to questions that demand well thought out, detailed responses. Everyone should be taught to ask, “And then what?” when offered a shallow or dismissive response. The inability to do this has led us here, and regaining the ability to do this may be the only thing that can save us.
Such a fantastic article, I ended up discussing with the ChatGPT. It was pretty impressed also lol. Excerpt
That’s such a fitting name — Notes from the Circus — for the surreal, chaotic, and almost carnivalesque disintegration he’s describing. And Mike Brock… wow. I hadn’t read anything of his before, but this is exceptional. Philosophically rich, morally clear, and emotionally precise.
He’s doing something rare: speaking with urgency without sounding alarmist, weaving political analysis with psychological insight, and ultimately appealing to something much deeper than ideology — a shared moral and cognitive responsibility.
⸻
🧠 Mike Brock’s Superpower in This Piece:
He’s not just trying to wake people up politically — he’s trying to reignite their capacity to feel reality.
That line you shared early on —
“The emergency we cannot feel is no less real for our failure to feel it.”
—could easily be the epigraph for our time.
It reminds me of something James Baldwin once said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Mike Brock is trying to make people face it. Not just intellectually, but emotionally, spiritually.
Thanks for this article. I hope many read it though in reality hardly anyone will
Personally, I’m in the “learned helplessness” phase. I see all these things and I feel that there is nothing I can do about it due to lack of resources and the way that institutions have been quietly eroded.
Relating to: The Emergency We Cannot Feel: On the Psychological Unreadiness for American Collapse.
Mike, your commentary goes beyond a 10-course dinner. It deserves, perhaps more pointedly, begging for a full-day roundtable discussion.
Some small points insofar as feedback.
"Constitutional crisis" has become hackneyed as has existential threat. The American public, perhaps others too, have a form of attention deficit. Perhaps it is a product of social media, or maybe it relates to fast-food as the new norm for many. We are in an age of McThought.
We are seeing violations of the US Constitution at an accelerated rate:
First Amendment- free speech; freedom of the press
Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments- the right to due process.
The Emoluments Clause: Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution (often called the Foreign Emoluments Clause) states:
"No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
Each of these violations is impeachable. Yet, the Republican GOP in the House & Senate are complicit in this offense to the nation.
You point out that Americans are unprepared for what is before them. Right. We are the Germans, the Germans of the 1930s in soon to be Nazi, Germany under the regime of Hitler.
Now, just replace "Germans" with Americans, and replace Hitler with Trump. Voila.
Mike, if the majority of Americans wish to live under the iron heel of Trump et al, then so be it. They will not eat cake, but stale bread or no bread.
The main issue, the only issue, does not lie in our understanding of the pathogenesis of our moral, civil, and political ennui, but in this:
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO TO REMOVE TRUMP & FELLOW CONSTITUTIONAL VIOLATORS FROM POLITICAL OFFICE? WHAT STEPS SHOULD BE TAKEN NOW, OR ARE WE TOO LATE?
Going on about "Muh sacred constitution" and "rule of law is being dismantled" is pretty rich when the entire Civil Rights Movement relied on constitutional violations (freedom of association went out the window) and freedom of speech was effectively quashed by cancel campaigns after the institutional capture of the academy by racial bolshevists. If millions of people can enter a country without due process, then weeping about them leaving without due process is an entirely selective outrage.
To be clear, I'm not going to equivocate here, I'm not going to claim "both sides just as bad". I already ran the math on the scale and consequences of the BLM/Antifa riots vs. Jan 6th and the former was orders of magnitude worse. I already know that 45% of Democrats supported internment camps for antivaxxers. I know who the greater evil is here.
Take note.
Fantastic article. The exposition on coherence and its collapse in four dimensions expands on and explicates a vague idea I woke up with last week.
My concern was the possibility of a deep metaphysical despair that we simply don't have the life tools to counteract. Our cultural framework of "America" and all that it includes (freedom, democracy, the genius behind the design of our government, the entire history of our culture including Greek and Roman ideas about democracy and Judeo-Christian ideas about mercy and kindness, the legacy of British common law, and all the rest) is dissolving before our eyes. We need a lot more than "grief counseling."
I brought up the idea in a lunch group of fellow philosophy alumni the same day. At least one person responded in a way that made me think his clear-sighted resistance to denial has put him into a pretty gloomy spot. As for me, if I'm not out on the trails at least three times a week I start sinking. And so I've been wondering whether it's possible that even those of us who are essentially mentally healthy and savvy about life's troubles can be undermined by the erosion of the moral and narrative coherences that have up until now constituted the "civil religion" of our culture.
Mike's essay looks at the forms of denial many are adopting. I'm pretty well armed against all of these since my life circumstances are secure: my problem is what exactly should I be doing to resist? All I have to offer are thinking and reading, which result in ideas and encouragement to my tiny audience on Reddit, Substack [comments] and Facebook.
I'll be passing on the concepts that Mike has explicated here. The more we can recognize and explicate how our collective thinking is being influenced, the more we can redirect it towards finding effective, courageous responses. (BTW, a better link to the book by Bernard Williams is here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5601.Truth_and_Truthfulness)
This expresses — and so clearly — much of what I’ve been thinking and feeling since January 20. It has set me to considering anew how to deal with our collective situation in a way that feels both productive and healthy. Denial is not in my repertoire but one response to what is so obviously happening every day — despair — is corrosively *un*healthy as well as futile. Help!
Yep. MAGA is a fascist movement and Trump is a cultish fascist leader. Been saying it for years. Fully coherent here, Mike.
Everything in the state
Nothing outside the state
Nothing against the state
This describes MAGA?
Are you sure you’re not the one in the cult?
Are you kidding?
Yes you’re right, the people who are label half of the country with dehumanizing slurs, and who support actual Nazis in Ukraine, and who support policies of open racial discrimination, and who support eugenicist policies like late term abortion and sterilizing children, and who support erasure censorship and political persecution, not to mention persecution by angry mobs, those are the good guys, and the other guys are totalitarian fascists.
🙄 Up is down indeed.
It doesn't help that any distress people start to express about all of this is immediately rejected as some sort of defect in character by calling it Trump Derangement Syndrome.
This has been the only topic that matters to me over at the Autocratic Despair Substack. I think if we were able to insert the term "Autocratic Despair" in place of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" it'd give people a non-judgemental term to describe what they are going through.
After reading this to my wife the parts where I wrote her name, you so perfectly articulated what she has been screaming at the TV screen and our friends, I took the car to be washed and continued in Brian T. Watson's Headed Into the Abyss (almost done) and thought I had mixed up your essay with him. I can only quote pp. 251-2 (published in 2019):
"It will matter which Democratic candidate receives the nomination. Most of them are not adequately explaining the relationships that link the major force - for example, the seismic role of the web in dividing and damagin the public - nor are they describing fully the magnitude of the problems and thus the startling nature of the solutions that are required. This is understandable , and it reflects the capacities of of human nature to hear bad news and the abilities of human nature to deliver that bad news. When a cadidate is trying to win office, the reality is that there are limits on what he or she can explain or propose, and still expect to get elected. Is the American electorate prepared to receive, for example, the analysis of capitalism, technology, Websorld, and the environment that I present in this book? How would we react to the presidential canditate who tells us that nearly everything about the ways we live has to change? Are the upper classes especially - both Democrats and Republicans - prepared to live far more modestly than they do now? How many voters - Republican or Democratic - will accept that a civilization-ending set of developments is bearing down on us?....If Trump is reelected there really is nothing I can add to what I have already written in this book about society's sure demise in the face of the forces that are unraveling it and the ecosphere. Trump simply won't address these forces with any meaningful policies. The Democrats are extremely unlikely to win the Senate in any case, so Congress too would be a bystander to our dissolution...... Donald Trump did not create our crises; they are products of 40 years of developments." (I have to wonder if in the first line he meant "It will NOT matter..."}
Thanks, Mike, for showing us the abyss.
From a distance, I’m Australian and live in Australia, neither political party has served the broader US populace well since Reagan became president and the whole political establishment drunk the cool aid of Economic Rationalism (AKA Neo-Liberalism or Chicago School of Economics). Although the US has become increasingly wealthy that wealth has not been shared. Instead it has increasingly been funnelled to the 1% whilst the lives of the poor and middle class have increasingly become more miserable.
Absolutely. And I’ve lived in it nearly my entire life (born a couple years before Reagan). I think part of the problem is that for so long we wobbled back forth between less crappy (Democrat to me) and more crappy (Republican) administrations that we became numb to it. That and, to me at least, it’s hard to see how an average person could have had much effect on it.
Meanwhile, the population grows, the internet brought us great communication which then became even greater information overload and noise. And the divide grew deeper.
Great article. I always find it strange when the NY Times and other major publications begin a story about Trump by saying, "All presidents have bent the rules from time to time" or "every administration has its scandals," which is absurd context for the shocking Trump scandal that inevitably comes after the "everybody does it" table setting. Perhaps this is the difference between journalism and litigation. As a litigator (I am one), I would never begin by creating such a favorable context for a bad actor. Journalists, on the other hand, seem compelled to do it, zapping away the energy from their own story with false equivalence. Even though they are fully aware of the criticism!
I’ll make it simple, Made Simple for MAGA (condescend much?):
I was critiquing the banality of the writing, in the lede, which is trying for “oomph” by using a crayon—a cheap, woolly, rhetorical trick in place of actual argument. And so embarrassingly clunkish, to boot! That’s all I was suggesting. I just prefer adult ledes to kiddy ones, I guess. 🤷♂️
See, instead of showing why we’re / you’re (I’m thankfully not an American) in a constitutional crisis from the jump — citing precedent, outlining erosion, naming culprits, yadda yadda — it settles on false equivalency so rudimentary as to be intellectually disqualifying.
This sort of cheap, lazy, “X is true, Y is true, and therefore Z is ominous” construction would never see the light of day in the pages of a serious publication. But this is just a blog post, right? And you’re not so fussy, obviously. Or discerning, as long as your thoughts are validated by the oh-so revelatory (kinda-not-really) import of the TL; DR-for-most-l’d-bet content.
But I like my writing to take me on a proper, earned journey from start to finish AND have something to say along the way.
So, yeah, the lede’s banal. It’s childish. So sue me! 😉
And this fellow begins his article with such banality…
I sat with this essay for a while. So much of it resonates—the sense of unraveling, the emotional dissonance, the difficulty in naming what is happening while it’s still happening. I recognize the urgency, and I feel the sorrow that runs underneath it. And yet, reading it from outside the U.S., I found myself holding a second awareness alongside one articulated.
There are places where the lens feels intensely focused inward, as if what happens in America inevitably shapes the fate of the rest of the world. That might have felt more accurate once. Now, I’m not so sure. In recent years, I’ve witnessed other democracies making strong, independent choices—refusing imported extremism, safeguarding pluralism, or actively recalibrating their relationships with power. These aren’t perfect systems, and none of them are immune to authoritarian drift. And still, they haven’t been passively waiting to follow America’s lead.
The essay is point on in many places—it’s deeply thoughtful. It’s just that from where I stand, it feels like part of a larger mosaic. One piece, held in place with care. And I wonder what might open if we let in more of the view. The quiet strength in other countries. The resilience that exists outside the frame. The possibility that coherence isn’t only found by returning to something lost—but by noticing what is already rising elsewhere.
Not all parts of the world descend into darkness at the same time, and the empires and dynasties that eventually decline are replaced sometimes by better forms. Hitler was in power for a long horrible 12 years. And then he wasn’t. Not to minimize the human suffering he caused, but no system lasts forever. Even if the worst happens and the trump regime does its worst, it will not last. They are fantasists who have an unstable and unrealistic view of their temporal power. It’s easy to be paralyzed by fear but it helps me to know authoritarian empires die of self-inflicted wounds - arrogance and corruption and overreach.
Maya, yes—exactly this sense of impermanence is something I hold close too. No system, however brutal, is invulnerable or eternal. And yet, I also feel it matters where we place our gaze while we walk through these times.
I often think of it this way: decline and collapse bring openings, and also immense human cost. Both are true. So while I trust that no authoritarian project can fully sustain itself, I also stay attuned to the harm unfolding in the meantime—and to where seeds of something more life-affirming are quietly being planted.
For me, it helps to widen the lens—not to bypass what is happening, nor to offer false comfort, yet to remind myself that many places are already embodying forms of resistance and renewal. These can be threads we learn from, even as one dominant empire flails.
I deeply appreciate how you bring the longer view here. It is a thread of steadiness that matters. And it invites us all to keep discerning where we place our energy and what we choose to tend.
“ noticing what is rising elsewhere”. Thank you for that observation. A reason for hope. An avenue for partnership.
Paul, both. No revolution, no change, no transformation ever begins without hope—and likely also a vision of what can emerge. And if the American people are ready, much of the world will exhale and step alongside again. We are all holding our breath, you know.
Bulls eye! Mr. Brock eloquently articulates exactly what I’ve been feeling. Fortunately there is a community of people that are fully aware of the nature of this threat. Unfortunately that’s lacking in the legacy media more than anywhere, which is where it’s most urgently needed.
What Brock calls “working the system from the inside” is what I call “beltway brain” - the belief that all the problems can be solved in Hill meetings, not taking all that outside noise too seriously.
I agree 100% with everything said here. My hope is that there will be enough of us who do get this and will somehow break through to the wider population.
Have we even dealt with the pandemic we lived through five years ago. I do not believe we have even done that. And the clear threat we face from climate crisis and the constant news about toxins like microplastics in everything. Or mass shootings.
Why would people want to face the loss of a governing system when they can’t even face those threats?
I was wondering if anyone else was thinking along these lines, e.g. about climate change. To me there's an element of magical thinking (if I close my eyes, the monster won't notice me; if I believe hard enough, the bad thing won't happen), of "if we act like all is ok, it will be", inertia, the "snowball effect" (getting enough people on board to drag along the others that haven't "gotten on board" yet), feelings of helplessness or powerlessness optimism, etc. Human (individual and group/mass and social) psychology.
Yeah, little challenging to get too worked up about the collapse of constitutional democracy when many of us have been worked up about the collapse of our habitat for 30 years to absolutely no progress… pick your catastrophes at this point.
It's both/and, brother.
Excellent article Mike. Every day our country is closer to a total collapse of our democratic rule. It is so in our face not to see it for ourselves. For too long I have felt encouragement from brilliant intellectuals who have claimed that Americans are strong and can resist and prevent the fall of our democracy. I will keep hoping but I now have severe doubts. We are in a RED ALERT WARNING!!!
Mike: Outstanding analysis of the situation. That said, there is an additional causal element. George Carlin said it best when he said, “They just want you smart enough to run the machines.” We have devalued the teaching of critical thinking and problem solving skills over the last 4 or 5 decades in our school systems. This was done by design, not accidentally. As a result, a large portion of the population accepts insufficient answers to questions that demand well thought out, detailed responses. Everyone should be taught to ask, “And then what?” when offered a shallow or dismissive response. The inability to do this has led us here, and regaining the ability to do this may be the only thing that can save us.
Such a fantastic article, I ended up discussing with the ChatGPT. It was pretty impressed also lol. Excerpt
That’s such a fitting name — Notes from the Circus — for the surreal, chaotic, and almost carnivalesque disintegration he’s describing. And Mike Brock… wow. I hadn’t read anything of his before, but this is exceptional. Philosophically rich, morally clear, and emotionally precise.
He’s doing something rare: speaking with urgency without sounding alarmist, weaving political analysis with psychological insight, and ultimately appealing to something much deeper than ideology — a shared moral and cognitive responsibility.
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🧠 Mike Brock’s Superpower in This Piece:
He’s not just trying to wake people up politically — he’s trying to reignite their capacity to feel reality.
That line you shared early on —
“The emergency we cannot feel is no less real for our failure to feel it.”
—could easily be the epigraph for our time.
It reminds me of something James Baldwin once said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Mike Brock is trying to make people face it. Not just intellectually, but emotionally, spiritually.
Thanks for this article. I hope many read it though in reality hardly anyone will
Perhaps the most brilliant writing about what is happening now.. required reading along with Tim Snyder.
Personally, I’m in the “learned helplessness” phase. I see all these things and I feel that there is nothing I can do about it due to lack of resources and the way that institutions have been quietly eroded.