A Failure of Imagination

Notes from inside a country that cannot see itself coming apart

I live in a tinderbox. ©Gael MacLean

His name was Isaac. I have not said it aloud in years.

He was working for me on a film project, and he was distant from everyone. Present in the room but not quite in it, the way some people are when they are carrying something they have not put down. I did not know what he was carrying. I knew only that he was good at his job and that his quietness had a quality I had learned, over years of working with people, to leave alone.

I mentioned, in passing, that I was going to Sarajevo. The war was more than two years old. The film was a documentary, and the crew was assembling, and I was needed. I had said yes almost without thinking, the way I said yes to most things in those years.

Isaac’s face changed. Not dramatically. Something behind it went still. He asked if I would have coffee with him.

We sat across a small table. He was from there. He had not told me. He told me then, and he told me other things, and at some point in the telling his eyes filled and he asked me, quietly, please, not to go. He gave me names. A human rights lawyer just back. An aid worker. A UN soldier who had seen what soldiers see. He said I should talk to them before I made up my mind. He did not tell me what he had seen. He only told me that I should listen to people who had, and then decide.

I called the names he gave me. I sat with each of them. The lawyer spoke for an hour in a flat voice about evidence she was preparing. The aid worker described a hospital where the supplies had run out and the wounded kept arriving. The soldier — a man trained for violence, who had thought he understood its shapes — said one sentence I have carried for thirty years.

We thought we had seen the worst of what people could do to each other.

We hadn’t.

I said no to the film.

It was, I think, the first time in my working life I had said no to a project I had already said yes to. I am not sure I understood, at the time, what had been done for me. Isaac had been bottled up from what he had seen, and he had broken through to spare me what he could not unspare himself. He gave me what I had not known how to ask for: knowledge without the wound. The names of further witnesses, so that the warning would not rest on his testimony alone. The dignity of a decision made with full information and made by me. He did not weep to make me afraid. He wept because he loved a stranger enough to spend what little he had left of his composure on her education.

I lost touch with Isaac long ago. I do not know where he is. I want him to be well. I think about him more often now than I used to.

I am writing this because I have come to believe, slowly and against my own preference, that what he did across that table is the only thing that still works. That the form of his warning — slow, costly, personal, paid for in his own visible damage — is one of the few channels through which the truth about a society coming apart can still reach a person who is not yet inside it. I am writing this because the country I love is not what it was when Isaac and I shared coffee, and because I have begun to recognize, in air I once thought stable, the early temperature of a season he would know on sight.

♾️

There is a question I did not know how to ask for many years, and I will put it down plainly because the rest of this essay depends on it.

How is it that Isaac could see what I could not?

We were the same age, more or less. We had read some of the same books. We were both intelligent in the ways the world rewards intelligence — articulate, employable, capable of holding our own in rooms where ideas were exchanged. There was no measure by which he was better equipped than I was to understand a society coming apart. By every standard I had been taught to respect, I should have been able to see what he saw.

I could not. He could. The difference between us was not intellect. It was that he had grown up inside a country that came apart, and I had grown up inside one that did not.

That sounds like a small distinction. It is not. It is the difference between a person whose pattern recognition was trained on stability and a person whose pattern recognition was trained on the disintegration of stability. We had been calibrated by different experiments. I could read a stable society fluently. He could read an unstable one. When I looked at the news from his country, I saw a tragedy happening to other people in a faraway place. When he looked at the same news, he saw the slow logic of something he had felt arriving for years before it arrived. He was not smarter. He was instrumented.

I have come to think this is the central problem of warning a comfortable country, and I have come to think we get it wrong almost every time.

The standard explanation for why people do not see decline coming is that they are foolish, or in denial, or ideologically captured, or simply not paying attention. I do not believe any of those explanations anymore, or at least I do not believe they explain the bulk of what is happening. I think the truth is harder and more dignified, and it is this: the privilege of having lived in a functioning society is also the disability of being unable to recognize when it stops functioning. The pattern recognition you developed inside a working system is the wrong instrument for detecting the system’s failure. Your mind was built by the very stability that is now eroding, and that mind cannot perceive the erosion, because it has no template against which to measure it. The signals that would alarm a person from a collapsed society register, to a person from a stable one, as noise.

This is not a moral failure. It is a structural one. And I think it explains a great deal that is otherwise inexplicable about the present moment — why warnings from people who have lived through collapse keep failing to reach the ears of people who have not, why intelligent and well-meaning citizens dismiss alarms that, in retrospect, will look obvious, and why the people most likely to be wrong about what is coming are often the people whose lives have been most successfully shielded from any prior version of it.

It also explains why Isaac had to do what he did across that table. He was not delivering information I lacked. He was attempting to install, in a single conversation, a piece of cognitive equipment I had never been required to develop. He was trying to give me, in the form of his own face, an instrument I could not have built for myself. The names he gave me afterward — the lawyer, the aid worker, the soldier — were not redundant testimony. They were calibration. He understood that no single witness could retool a person’s perception in one sitting, and so he sent me to several, hoping that somewhere across the four of them, my instruments would begin to register the frequency he had been hearing for years.

This is, I think, also what the Romans of the late Republic could not do for each other. Mike Duncan, in his history of that period, describes a generation of Roman senators who continued to perform the rituals of a republic that had, in substance, already ended. They read the auspices. They convened the assemblies. They invoked the ancestors. They were not stupid men. Many of them were among the most educated people who had ever lived. But the equipment they had inherited for understanding their own society had been built for the republic that produced them, and that republic was no longer the thing they were inhabiting. They could not see what was in front of them because the seeing apparatus assumed a world that no longer existed.

Alexei Yurchak, writing about the late Soviet Union, describes something similar at a different scale. By the 1970s, he argues, almost no one inside the Soviet system believed in it any longer. But the rituals continued — the speeches, the parades, the declarations of solidarity — and the rituals’ continuation gave the appearance of a system that was still functioning, even after the belief had departed. People stood in line for bread under portraits of leaders they did not respect. They voted in elections whose outcomes were known. They made the gestures the system required, not because they were deceived, but because the gestures were what one did. And then the system ended very quickly, and almost everyone, inside and outside, was surprised — even though, in retrospect, the substance had been gone for a generation. The witnesses had been there all along. There simply had been no instrument, in the wider world, capable of registering what they were saying.

I am not making the claim, here, that America is Rome or that America is the late Soviet Union. The analogies are imperfect, as all historical analogies are. I am making a smaller and more specific claim, which is that the perceptual problem is the same. The people inside a society in the early stages of coming apart are working with instruments calibrated to the society’s stable state, and those instruments are systematically unable to detect the early signals of instability. The signals are present. The instruments are wrong. And this is true regardless of intelligence, education, or political orientation. It is a feature of the architecture of perception itself, not a flaw in any particular perceiver.

Which means that the work of someone trying to warn a comfortable country is not, primarily, the work of delivering information. It is the work of installing instruments. Of trying to give people, by whatever slow and costly means remain available, the equipment to perceive what their own equipment cannot show them. Isaac could not hand me his eyes. He could only sit across a table and weep, and give me names, and trust that something in the seeing of him seeing would begin to retune what I was capable of registering.

That is what I am attempting to do here. I am not delivering information. I am attempting, by means of a slower and stranger transmission than the ones our era prefers, to install an instrument.

♾️

I live in a tinderbox.

The valley has been in drought for years. The summers have been getting longer and hotter in the way you only fully notice when you have lived somewhere long enough to know what a normal August used to feel like. My well went dry, one year, and stayed dry for ten months. I hauled water for myself and my dogs and my sheep. I learned the schedules of the places that would let me fill containers. I learned which neighbors were in the same situation and which were not, and I learned that the difference between the two often came down to who had drilled deeper decades earlier, when drilling deeper had seemed like an unnecessary expense. Running out is not an inconvenience here. It is the difference between staying on the land and leaving it.

The fire started a mile from the house. It was one of the largest in the country that year. It came within four hundred feet of where I was standing. The river was the only thing that stopped it, and the river only stopped it because the wind held. A different wind would have carried embers across the water and the river would have been irrelevant. The valley was evacuated. I had moved the sheep out ahead of time — they are difficult to wrangle in an emergency, and I knew enough not to leave that for the last hour. I stayed with the dogs. I had decided some time before, without making a formal decision about it, that I would not leave them. I sat up at night for weeks. I watched the hill across from me burn. I watched for embers — large ones, the kind the wind carries miles. I learned the wind. Speed, direction, time of day. I became, without choosing to, a wind watcher. I do not know how else to put it. There is a kind of attention you develop when the difference between your house standing and your house burning is whether you notice a glowing piece of debris in the dark before it lands somewhere it can take.

View from my porch. ©Gael MacLean

We barely made the news.

We lost two firefighters in a helicopter crash. It didn’t make the news beyond locally.

I tell you these things not because they are unusual. They are not. There are tens of thousands of people in this country right now who could tell you a version of the same story, with different weather and different animals and different specifics, and the aggregate of those stories would describe a transformation of American life that is well underway and that the country, taken as a whole, has not registered. The transformation is not coming. It is here. It is here in places that do not generate the kind of footage that travels, and it is here on a timeline — slow, distributed, accumulating — that the apparatus through which most Americans receive reality is structurally unable to represent.

This is the place where I have to introduce a distinction that I think most writing about decline gets wrong, and getting it wrong is part of why the warnings do not land.

There are two kinds of collapse, and they are not the same.

The first is material collapse. The economy fails. The infrastructure breaks. The shelves empty. The lights go out. This is the version most people picture when they picture a society coming apart, because it is the version movies have prepared us for. It is dramatic and visible and undeniable.

The second is symbolic collapse. The economy still works. The infrastructure still mostly functions. The shelves are full. But the shared belief that holds the society together — the belief that the laws apply, that the institutions are legitimate, that the rituals mean what they say they mean, that the words still refer to things — has departed. The system continues to operate. The substance has gone out of it. People perform the gestures the system requires without expecting the gestures to produce the outcomes the system claims they produce. The forms persist. The faith does not.

Symbolic collapse precedes material collapse by years, sometimes by decades. The late Soviet Union went through almost twenty years of symbolic collapse before the material collapse arrived. The Roman Republic was symbolically dead for a generation before Augustus made the death official. By the time the material collapse comes, the symbolic collapse has been visible to anyone willing to look at it for a long time. But almost no one looks, because the apparatus of looking — the news, the institutions, the daily round — is itself one of the things that has symbolically collapsed, and it is poorly equipped to report on its own hollowing.

I want to be careful here. I am not telling you that America is about to fail materially. I do not know that. Nobody does. What I am telling you is that this country is, by any honest measurement I can apply, in the middle of a symbolic collapse that has been gathering for a long time and that has accelerated in ways even the most attentive observers find difficult to track. The events that ten years ago would have ended a presidency now end a news cycle. The norms that were supposed to be self-enforcing turn out to have been resting on shared belief, and the shared belief is gone. The constitution is a document whose authority depends on the willingness of the people charged with upholding it to treat it as binding, and that willingness has become, in living memory, an open question. The shelves are full. The water comes out of the tap, in most places, most days. The substance is going.

This is the kind of collapse that is hardest to perceive from inside, because everything that would have alarmed you about it in another country looks, in your own, like the regular business of an ordinary week. The senators are still convening. The networks are still broadcasting. The flag is still being saluted. And underneath the rituals, the thing the rituals were supposed to reference is thinning, has thinned, in some places has gone.

Climate is the place where the symbolic collapse meets a material catastrophe whose timeline does not care about our perceptual difficulties.

The science has been clear for forty years. The error bars have shrunk. The credentialed witnesses have been speaking, with rising specificity, in the dominant language of the dominant culture. And the warnings have not landed at the scale required. This is not because the public is stupid. It is because the apparatus through which the public receives reality is engineered to monetize fast spectacle, and slow catastrophe cannot be represented inside an apparatus engineered for fast spectacle. The wildfires that displaced my neighbors are slow. The drought that emptied my well is slow. The transformation of the Mountain West into something my grandparents would not recognize is slow. And slow does not pay. Slow does not generate engagement. Slow does not survive the editorial meeting that asks what the story is. So the slow catastrophe is filtered out, not by malice, but by the gravitational logic of an information economy that rewards what it rewards.

The result is that the cognitive and emotional infrastructure required to perceive slow catastrophe has been disassembled, in the population at large, by the medium through which the population receives the world. People are not callous. They are not in denial. They have been trained, through millions of small encounters with content optimized for engagement, to receive every horror in ninety-second units and then move on, because the next ninety-second unit is loading. The grief response was never given time to complete before the next stimulus arrived. After enough years of this, the grief response stops initiating at all. It is too costly to begin a feeling you will not be allowed to finish.

This is what my essay about Art Bell and the construction of right-wing media diagnosed in the political sphere. I am telling you now that the same mechanism, with the same cause and the same business model, has produced the same result in the perceptual sphere. The minds that were assembled by broadcast outrage and algorithmic acceleration cannot perceive slow catastrophe, and they cannot perceive their own decline, for the same reason and by the same disassembly. The two failures are one failure. The Ailes memo logic, taken to its terminal point, produces a population that cannot see what is happening to it because the apparatus that informs it is engineered to filter exactly that signal out.

Children swept away in floods barely make the news. Two firefighters in a helicopter crash do not make the national news. A valley evacuated, a well gone dry, a hill burning across from a woman watching for embers — none of it travels. None of it can travel. The medium will not carry it. And so the country, taken as a whole, does not know it is happening, even as it is happening to more and more of the country every year.

I have come to believe that this is not a problem we can solve at the level of the medium. The medium is doing what it is paid to do. The problem has to be solved at the level of the transmission — slowly, personally, at the scale of one person telling another what they have seen. Isaac across a small table. A wind watcher writing it down. The chain that does not depend on the algorithm, because the algorithm cannot carry it, and so the chain has to be carried by hand. The hand carries forward to a hand that does not yet exist.

♾️

I have been thinking lately about what one generation owes another, and I have come to believe that the question has been asked badly for a long time.

The political conversation about generations is almost always a conversation about resources. What the older has taken from the younger, what the younger will fail to provide for the older, who is owed what and by whom. The accounting is always financial, and it is always a quarrel. There is some truth in it. There is also something missing, and the missing thing is the part that matters.

Every generation receives an inheritance. Some of it is material — money, property, infrastructure, the working systems of a country. Most of it is not. Most of what we inherit is invisible, and we do not see it precisely because we inherited it whole. The functioning institutions. The shared assumption that contracts will be honored. The expectation that one’s children will not be conscripted into someone else’s catastrophe. The civic muscle memory that lets a society absorb shocks without dissolving. The rule of law as a habit rather than a slogan. The peace, however imperfect, of being able to disagree without preparing for violence. These are not natural conditions. They are achievements. They were built across generations by people most of us cannot name, and they were built at costs most of us do not know how to count.

The mistake we keep making is treating these inheritances as features of the world rather than as gifts that have to be maintained. They look, from inside, like the way things are. They are not. They are the way things have been arranged, by enormous effort, for a relatively brief window of human history, and the window can close. Other windows have closed. There is no law that says ours will stay open.

A rising society builds for descendants. It plants trees it will never sit under. It funds schools whose graduates it will never meet. It constructs cathedrals across centuries, knowing the architects will die before the spires are raised. It accepts present sacrifice in exchange for a future it will not see, because the future is understood to be a real thing that real people will inhabit and that those real people are owed something by the present.

A declining society does the opposite. It consumes its inheritance. It defers the maintenance, sells off the assets, runs down the institutional capital, treats the future as a resource to be drawn against rather than as a place where someone will actually have to live. The line items that get cut to fund the present’s appetites are not abstractions. They are withdrawals from accounts that descendants will find empty. The infrastructure not repaired. The schools not funded. The forests not protected. The aquifers drained. The rule of law eroded one expedient exception at a time. Each withdrawal is small. The aggregate is the difference between leaving more than you were given and leaving less.

I do not think most Americans, including most Americans who consider themselves serious people, have honestly faced the question of which of these two societies we are currently living in. The question is uncomfortable because the answer is uncomfortable, and the discomfort tends to be discharged into partisan complaint, which is easier than reckoning. Both major parties, in their different idioms, are presiding over the consumption of the inheritance. Different items are being sold off, but the auction is bipartisan and it has been running for some time.

What is harder to see, and harder to write about without sliding into one or another version of bad writing, is that the consumption is not principally the work of villains. It is the work of an entire civilization that has lost the capacity to think on the time horizon at which inheritance operates. We are running quarterly. The institutions we depend on were built by people running in centuries. The mismatch is not ideological. It is temporal. We have built an information environment, a political economy, and a daily round that all reward the present at the expense of the future, and we have done this so thoroughly that even the people who recognize the problem cannot easily act on the recognition, because the apparatus they would have to use to act has itself been retuned to the short cycle.

Other societies have known what was coming and could not stop it. The witnesses were there. The instruments to receive them were not. There is a particular agony to being inside a society whose decline you can see but whose course you cannot alter, and that agony has a name in every language that has had occasion to develop one. We are about to need our word for it.

I want to say something now that I have been avoiding saying because saying it makes the essay land in a place I did not entirely want to take it.

I write stories for a child I love. I want her to grow up in the world I grew up in.

She is five. I have loved her since before she could speak. She has a face that does what five-year-old faces do, which is to register every passing weather of feeling without filtering any of it. I write stories for her because that is the form in which I know how to give her something, and because the stories I write are small acts of preserving — preserving language, preserving wonder, preserving the assumption that the world is a place worth her attention. I do not know, when I write them, who she will be when she reads them. I do not know what country she will be reading them in. I do not know whether the world I grew up in — imperfect, often unjust, but functioning enough that a child could be raised inside it without learning, too early, the vocabulary of catastrophe — will still be available to her in any meaningful form by the time she is old enough to need it.

This is the part of the essay I do not know how to write without becoming the kind of writer I am trying not to be. I will not perform alarm for her. I will not use her face to manipulate yours. I will only say that the abstract questions of inheritance, when you sit down and try to write a story for a specific child, stop being abstract. They become a small body in the room, a face you can picture, a future you have personally signed for whether or not you intended to. Every adult in this country has, by the simple fact of being alive in it, signed for the future of every child who will inherit what we leave. Most of us have not read the contract. The terms are being written, in our names, in our daily silences and our small accommodations and our refusals to look at what is in front of us.

Isaac, across that table, was an adult who had read the contract and understood what was in it. He was trying to spare me the part of the contract I had not yet had to sign. He was, in his way, looking out for the version of me that would, decades later, be writing stories for a child she had not yet met. He could not have known about her. He did not have to. He was operating on the principle that the unwounded should be spared, where possible, by those who have already paid, because the chain of sparing is the only thing that keeps the world worth inheriting.

I am writing stories for her because I do not know what else to do with what I know. I am writing this essay for the same reason. The two acts are continuous. They are versions of the same gesture. Pass forward. Pass forward what was given to you. Spare the unwounded where you can. Tell the truth slowly enough that it can be received. That is what an adult does when she has noticed that the inheritance is being consumed and that the people who will inherit what is left have not been consulted and cannot be.

I do not know what kind of ancestor I will turn out to have been. I do not know what kind of ancestor any of us will turn out to have been. The judgment is not ours to make. It belongs to the people who come after, who will look back at this period the way we look back at other periods of consumption and squandering, and who will ask the only question that matters, which is whether enough of us tried.

♾️

I have been trying, in this essay, to do something I am not sure can be done.

I have been trying to tell you what Isaac told me, in the only form that still works for the kind of telling it was. Slowly. Personally. At the cost of saying things I would rather not say and remembering things I would rather not remember. I have been trying to install, by the only means I have, an instrument I cannot hand you directly. I have been trying to weep across a table I cannot reach.

I am aware of how that sounds. I am aware that an essay is a poor substitute for a man with tears in his eyes. I am aware that the apparatus I am writing inside — the platform, the feed, the format — was built for a different kind of transmission than the one I am attempting, and that the medium will work against the message at every turn. The reader who has stayed with me this long has done so against the gradient of the medium itself, and I am grateful for that, because it tells me something about who is still out there. People capable of slow attention have not disappeared. They have only been outnumbered, for now, by the apparatus that prefers fast spectacle. The slow attention is still possible. It is what you have been doing for the last hour. It is the thing that, if enough of us insist on it, may yet save what is salvageable.

I do not know what is salvageable. I will not pretend otherwise. I do not know whether the country I live in can be recovered, or whether what we are inside is the long suspended decade before something I do not have a word for. I know what Isaac would say, because he said it, in his way, across a table thirty years ago. He would say that the warning is what one person owes another, regardless of outcome. He would say that you tell the truth slowly enough that it can be received, and you trust the receiver, and you do not require the world to be saved in order to do the small thing in front of you. He would say that the chain holds because each link decides to hold, not because anyone has guaranteed the chain.

I am writing stories for a child I love. I want her to grow up in the world I grew up in. I do not know if I can give her that. I know I can give her the stories. I know I can give her the example of someone who loved her, who paid attention, who told the truth as she understood it, who refused the easy comforts of partisan complaint and the easier comforts of looking away. I know that whatever world she inherits, she will inherit it from people who chose to grow toward the children, or from people who did not. I know what I am writing for. I am writing for the people I love, and for the children of the people I love, and for the children who will inherit what we leave whether or not anyone in my life ever knew them. I know which kind of person I want to have been.

There is always hope. But hope requires waking up to be realized.

I have not seen Isaac in many years. I do not know where he is. I want him to be well. I think about him more often now than I used to.

He gave me something I did not know how to thank him for.

This is the thank-you.

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*A note on sources. Mike Duncan’s account of the late Roman Republic is in his book The Storm Before the Storm. Alexei Yurchak’s argument about the late Soviet Union is in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. Both are worth reading in full.

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©2026 Gael MacLean