Watch as I Destroy Your Society, Gradually, Over the Course of One Hundred to Two Hundred Years

Now that I have defeated you, I shall feed my conceit and explain the horrors I will enact upon you…

Behold despair. Behold destruction. Behold the ultimate instrument of my revenge—a multifactorial framework of social, political, and economic pressures to undermine your country via the erosion of its complex systems!

What? Why are you looking at me like that? What did you expect? I can tell from your face that you clearly wanted something different. Trust me when I say I wish it were something cooler too. For my sake and yours, just admit you’re disappointed.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, uh, most societal collapses aren’t really that dramatic. Everyone imagines like a hurricane made of tornadoes or AI cyborgs declaring war on humanity. Or worst yet, AI cyborgs taking white-collar jobs.

I could spend all my time and money on some crazy technological feat. I did consider pouring a ton of baking soda and vinegar into the Yellowstone supervolcano, but luckily for you, I consider myself an artiste—and a realist. We’re talking about the dismantling of the social contract, the collapse of human networks, and the end of life as you know it!

If I wanted to chase delusions of grandeur, I would have become a politician, not a supervillain.

Nuclear hellfire? Yawn, so gauche. What is this? 1982? Oops, I dropped my nostalgia for neon and Stephen King–inspired tales of youthful adventure and lost innocence. How about instead of wasting my time, you go read Ready Player One?

You see, the combination of my PhD in early modern European history and more therapy sessions than I’m willing to admit led me to this, my greatest revelation. Looking in the mirror, I asked myself, Who is my greatest enemy?

Eureka! My greatest enemy is me. Your greatest enemy is you. Get it? Please, don’t take it like that. You’re still a close second on my nemesis list. I’m just trying to make a point.

Sure, it may take ten years, a hundred years, or even a thousand years, but eventually, I will have my revenge. You will, at some indeterminate point in the abstract future, suffer a prolonged period of societal decay due to withering social institutions, economic contraction, and political instability brought about by elite infighting.

You think you’re different? So optimistic. Nothing will impede my efforts, nothing except… no, I fear to even think of it… nothing except…
maybe… just maybe… the aggregate efforts of prosocial forces over the centuries.

HA!

Good luck sustaining, let alone maintaining, institutional memory in the Internet Age. What’s that? Committed nurturing of the social fabric requires dedicated effort over a period of time longer than the average human lifespan?

My rebuttal: Silly kitty wants a cheeseburger.

And the best part of it all, the most devious implication of my plan, is that I don’t even have to lift a finger. It just kinda… uh… happens…

Look, I don’t like admitting that, as an individual, I really have little say over how and when your society collapses. I mean, hell, it might not even be that bad. You don’t have to be treasured British classicist Mary Beard to know that the Dark Ages were really a tapestry of population movement and more of an evolution, rather than an implosion, of existing social norms. I mean, duh. Who’s to say the same won’t happen once my plan takes hold?

You can stop me, you can imprison me, you can even kill me. But you can’t kill the abstract amalgamation of socioeconomic forces that compose history. And that leaves nothing to say about the warm, gooey narrative structure humanity likes to add on top.

So, yes, yes, YES. Right on schedule…

Only fifty short years until the first event in a long, long series of social perturbations. I need only kick back, relax, and watch as it partially unfolds during the rest of my long, long life.