The Collapsed Horizon

I. The Number

One third of the US population expects to witness the end of the world within their own lifetime. That is the result of a representative survey of 1,409 people, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (March 2026). The sample is representative of the general population in terms of age, gender and household income. And the result, according to lead author Matthew Billet, is consistent with those of earlier surveys.

One third. This is not a sect. This is not a fringe group. This is a political majority in a polarized democracy where decisions about climate, debt, armaments and global cooperation depend on a few percentage points.

The first reaction is disbelief. The second is a demand for explanation. The third — the productive one — is the question: What does this mean politically? Not as psychopathology. Not as curiosity. But as a structural problem of a democracy in which one third of the electorate has a planning horizon that ends with the end of the world.

II. Not Error — Time Structure

The usual mistake is to dismiss apocalyptic thinking as irrational. Billet explicitly warns against this. He is right — but for a different reason than one might expect.

The apocalypticist is not an irrational. They are someone whose time horizon has collapsed. Someone who expects the end of the world in thirty years — or in ten, or within their children's lifetime — acts with perfect rationality within that horizon. Long-term investments in infrastructure are irrational if the infrastructure will no longer be needed. National debt for future generations is unproblematic if there will be no future generations. A climate agreement that is supposed to take effect in 2050 is meaningless if the world ends in 2040.

This is not a cognitive disorder. This is the consistent application of a false axiom. Those who accept the axiom must accept the conclusions. The problem is not the logic — the problem is the premise.

And that is precisely why the number is so dangerous. Not because one third of Americans are wrong. But because one third of Americans act with perfect coherence within their own premises — and in a democracy, this coherence carries weight.

III. The Five Dimensions of the Apocalypse

Billet and his colleagues identified five dimensions in which apocalyptic beliefs differ: the expected speed of the end, the question of human-made versus divine or supernatural causation, the personal influence one imagines having, and finally — particularly revealing — whether one expects a good or a bad ending.

This taxonomy is politically decisive because it explains why "the apocalypticists" are not a homogeneous group, and why their political consequences are so varied — and so difficult to address.

The secular apocalypticist expects the end through climate change, pandemic, nuclear war or AI. They hold humanity responsible. They assess the risk as higher and favor more drastic measures. They can be mobilized for climate policy — but also for panic, for emergency logic, for the call for strong measures that bypass the democratic process.

The religious apocalypticist expects the end through divine decree. Prevention here is not merely ineffective — it is presumptuous. Those who want to stop God's plan are setting themselves against God. This explains in a single sentence why a significant part of American evangelicals regard climate protection measures not merely skeptically but with active hostility. It is not a question of evidence. It is a question of theology.

And then there are those who expect a good ending — the Rapture, the return of Christ, the heavenly Jerusalem. For them the apocalypse is not terror but promise. The end of the world is the longed-for goal. This group cannot be mobilized for prevention — because prevention would delay the goal.

IV. The Political Tool

Machiavelli described how the prince uses religious convictions as an instrument of power. He would have understood American apocalypticism — and admired it.

The prince who knows that one third of his population is waiting for the end has an extraordinary instrument. He can mobilize fear without generating it — it is already there. He can create urgency that overwrites every long planning horizon: It is about survival. Now. Not in thirty years. He can make long-term costs invisible, because the horizon on which they would become visible has collapsed. And he can present every demand for cooperation — with the climate adversary, with the Chinese competitor, with the European alliance partner — as naive or treasonous, because cooperation presupposes time that no longer exists.

Trump's opening address in 2017 — "American carnage" — was not a gaffe. It was the activation of an apocalyptic register that already existed in one third of the population. The end is near. The corruption is complete. Salvation comes from a single man. This is not politics in the democratic sense — it is eschatology with a campaign budget.

Yet Trump is symptom, not cause. The apocalyptic mood was there before him. He did not create it — he invoked it. That does not make it better. It makes it more structural.

V. The Cooperation Problem

Billet states it plainly: different apocalyptic beliefs impede global cooperation. That is an understatement.

Cooperation requires that all parties share a common time horizon. A climate agreement is a compact between parties all of whom are convinced that the world will still exist in fifty years — and that what is decided today will still be relevant then. A pandemic treaty rests on the assumption that future generations will benefit from the protective infrastructure we are building today.

Those who expect the world to end in ten years have no reason to invest for fifty. Not out of malice. Out of time horizon collapse.

This is the deepest dimension of the problem. One can negotiate with someone who has different interests. Compromises can be found when both sides want to win in the long run. One cannot conclude a long-term agreement with someone who no longer has a long term.

And when that someone is one third of the population of the world's most powerful democracy — that is not a negotiation problem. That is a structural problem of the global order.

VI. The Collapsed Horizon as Zero-Sum Game

In the preceding essay on zero-sum games, we showed how win-win rhetoric systematically conceals who bears the costs and on what time horizon the bill is presented. The collapsed horizon is the radical intensification of this logic.

Those who plan no tomorrow always play endgame. Every political game becomes the last game. In the last game there is no longer a reputation effect — those who know they will no longer be at the table tomorrow have no incentive to play fair. That is game theory, not morality. The collapsed horizon structurally produces defective behavior — not because the players are evil, but because the game structure demands it.

National debt, climate costs, pension burdens — all these instruments of the present at the expense of the future function particularly well when the future does not exist. The debts never fall due. The climate never becomes relevant. The children to whom the burden is left are never born. This is the apocalyptic logic of fiscal irresponsibility that has accumulated in the United States over decades — across party lines, but with apocalyptic tailwind.

VII. What Remains When the Horizon Collapses

It would be convenient to confine the problem to the United States. It is not confined to the United States.

The collapsed horizon is a response to real experiences. Those who have seen their standard of living decline over the past thirty years — who have experienced deindustrialisation, the opioid crisis, the decay of the middle class — have reason not to believe in the future. The apocalypse is sometimes not theology but biography.

This means: the solution does not lie in better education about climate change or pandemic risks. It lies in the restoration of a time horizon — and that requires the present to be bearable enough for people to want a future.

That is a political task that no apocalyptic party can solve. Trump activated the collapsed horizon — but did not repair it. He made power out of fear, not future out of hope. That is the diagnosis. The therapy would be a different politics. Whether it will materialize is an open question.

One third of a society without a long planning horizon is not a marginal phenomenon. It is the description of a democracy that has become structurally incapable of solving the problems whose solution requires time. — beyond-decay.org

The question arising from this analysis is not: Will the apocalypticists turn out to be right? The question is: What kind of world comes into being when one third of a society acts as if they were?

We are watching the answer unfold.