Resignation, Lust for Doom, Longing for Chaos

When a system fails and nobody repairs it, people react in three ways: they give up, they relish the decline, or they wish for the collapse. All three are understandable. All three have the same root. And none of them leads anywhere.

I. The situation

There are times when not just individual things go wrong but the whole loses its credibility. The institutions fail, the promises prove empty, the solutions make things worse.

How widespread this feeling is can be measured. In a 2025 study by the polling institute Ipsos, 77 per cent of Germans said society in their country was broken, 16 points more than in 2021. In April 2026, according to a survey by Infratest dimap for the German public broadcaster ARD, 81 per cent considered prosperity in Germany unfairly distributed. The unease runs from left to right, from top to bottom. The diagnoses differ, the feeling does not.

People react to this in many ways, with engagement, protest, adaptation or flight. Three reactions deserve particular attention because they are widespread and rarely discussed openly.

II. The first reaction: resignation

Resignation is the quiet reaction. It does not protest and does not fight. It withdraws.

The resigned person has tried, perhaps for decades. He has voted, written petitions, argued, demonstrated. The powerful stayed powerful, the problems unsolved. At some point the effort no longer justifies the possible return. He looks after his own life and leaves the world as it is.

Resignation is not indifference. The resigned person suffers, from what he sees and from his own powerlessness. But he has learned to endure the suffering instead of running against it. Many people who function outwardly, work, shop and pay taxes, have given up inwardly without saying so aloud.

The problem with resignation: it confirms itself. Whoever believes nothing can be changed changes nothing, and because he changes nothing, nothing changes. Anyone who knows the daily life of a public authority has seen it. The clerk who has watched his suggestion for improvement disappear into a drawer ten times does not make an eleventh. After twenty years the whole department is like that.

III. The second reaction: lust for doom

The lust for doom is darker. It is the quiet satisfaction that things are going downhill.

The doom-lover sees the decline and enjoys it. At last, he thinks, they are getting what they deserve. At last it shows that I was right. Whoever has warned for years experiences the collapse as confirmation: I told you so.

There is also an aesthetic side. Muddling through is boring; collapse has grandeur. Whoever longs for doom also longs for the end of boredom.

The attitude is found in every camp. The left rejoices when capitalism falters, the right when the open society fails, the ecologist when nature strikes back. In its religious form it is a mass movement. According to a survey published in March 2026 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a third of Americans expect to live to see the end of the world. In “The Collapsed Horizon” we described what this means for a democracy in which a third of the voters have no reason to plan beyond their own lives. Europe, as shown in “After Us the Deluge”, has found a form of it without theology.

The problem with this attitude: it poisons. Whoever enjoys doom loses the capacity to build. He analyses the decline but does nothing against it, because part of him wants it.

IV. The third reaction: longing for chaos

Longing for chaos is the most radical reaction. It is the wish that everything should collapse, not for the sake of doom but for the sake of a new beginning.

The chaos-seeker considers the system beyond repair. Every reform, he believes, merely stabilises what is broken, like a plaster on a wound that needs amputation. Only from rubble, he thinks, can something new grow.

This too can be measured. The Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen and his colleagues surveyed thousands of people in the USA and Denmark. Around 40 per cent agreed that when they think about political and social institutions they cannot help thinking: “Just let them all burn.” Around a quarter thought society should be burned to the ground. The researchers call this a “need for chaos”. It is found above all among people who feel pushed to the margins, and those who have it are more likely to spread hostile political rumours, against whichever camp.

The attitude has a long history. The revolutionary left dreamed of the collapse of capitalism; the religious right dreams of the end times. The accelerationists want to sharpen the contradictions of the system until it breaks. How such ideas are turning into a business model in billionaire circles today we described in “The Antichrist as Business Model”.

The problem with this attitude: it underestimates chaos. Chaos does not hit everyone equally. It hits the weak, the poor and the unprepared. Whoever was strong before usually comes through it best, and whoever can afford a bunker has already built one. From rubble rarely grows something better, mostly just something new, and often a new tyranny. Whoever longs for chaos should ask himself whether he is ready to live in it.

V. The common root

The three reactions are different but related. Their common root is powerlessness.

The resigned person feels powerless and gives up. The doom-lover feels powerless and consoles himself with having been right. The chaos-seeker feels powerless and hopes for catastrophe as liberation. All three have stopped believing that they themselves can change anything.

A control engineer would put it like this. In all three the sensor works correctly: they see that something is going wrong. It is the actuator that fails. In the resigned person it is switched off. In the doom-lover it has been replaced by a spectator. In the chaos-seeker it works in the wrong direction: it amplifies the disturbance instead of compensating for it. Negative feedback becomes positive feedback, and positive feedback, as every engineer knows, ends at the limit stop.

All three are understandable. Whoever has failed for decades, how could he not resign? Whoever has warned and not been heard, how could he not feel satisfaction when the warning comes true? Condemning these reactions is easy. Understanding them is harder. Overcoming them is hardest.

VI. The fourth attitude

In 1942 Albert Camus described an alternative: Sisyphus. The man rolls the stone up the mountain, although he knows it will roll down again. He acts, although he knows his action may change nothing. Camus ends with the sentence: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

This is not a heroic attitude but a sober one. Sisyphus is not a hero; he is a worker. He does not hope for the great breakthrough and does not fear the final doom. He does what needs to be done.

What this looks like, one individual showed in September 1983. The Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov sat in front of an early-warning system that reported incoming American missiles. He could have resigned himself and simply passed the report on, as regulations required. He did the small thing that lay in his power: he doubted, checked and reported a false alarm. He was right. We dedicated “Where Is Petrov?” to him.

VII. What follows

The situation is difficult, but not so hopeless that giving up would be the only option. The room for manoeuvre has become smaller, but it is still there. The question is whether we use it or lose ourselves in resignation, gloating and end-time dreams.

Resignation is understandable, but it is capitulation. The lust for doom is human, but it is poison. Longing for chaos is desperate hope, but it is a delusion.

The fourth attitude is more modest and less dramatic: do what needs to be done. Roll the stone, not because it promises success, but because it is the only sensible thing. An extraterrestrial observer, such as the one we let speak in the “Field Report Homo sapiens”, would probably note: the species has many who expect doom and few who roll the stone. So far it has survived thanks to the few.

Further reading: The Collapsed Horizon · After Us the Deluge · Where Is Petrov? · Field Report Homo sapiens · The Beast