Collapse & renewal: Civilisation at the brink of transformation with Nafeez Ahmed, Ginie Servant-Miklos & Till Kellerhoff

As climate chaos, political polarisation and collapsing trust shake the foundations of society, we stand at a turning point. These overlapping crises are not just signs of collapse but symptoms of a deeper breakdown, a system that puts profit before people, competition before community and short-term gain before the planet we share.

In this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, host Till Kellerhoff speaks with members of The Club of Rome, Nafeez Ahmed and Ginie Servant-Miklos about how this turmoil could seed renewal, a once-in-a-civilisation chance to reimagine how we live, work and care for one another. They explore why the far right gains ground amid chaos, why progressives struggle to respond and how tech billionaires exploit instability to sell the illusion that technology alone can save us.

Examining the psychological toll of losing our shared “normal,” the conversation invites listeners to move beyond despair, challenge outdated assumptions and engage in the collective renewal already emerging through new forms of economics, energy and education.

Watch the episode:

Full transcript:

Till: Today, it feels like everything is falling apart. Climate chaos, political breakdown, collapsing social trust. But what if these aren't separate crises, but symptoms of a deeper systemic decline? At the heart of it lies a way of living based on self-maximisation and extraction from each other, from other species and from the planet itself. But collapse isn't only about ending.

I'm Till Kellerhoff, and in this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, we explore collapse not just as destruction, but as a potential phase shift, a reorganisation of human civilisation, through the flows of energy, technology and culture.

We ask, why does the far right seem to thrive in this chaos? Why do progressive movements struggle to respond, and how can we avoid falling into despair and imagine new systems that deliver wellbeing for all on a finite planet?  

I'm delighted to be joined by not one, but two members of The Club of Rome, Nafeez Ahmed, member of The Club of Rome, systems theorist and investigative journalist, Nafeez has been writing and researching about the intersection of major global ecological crises from climate, energy, food water and how they intersect with social and political crisis.

His most recent book is Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within. Welcome Nafeez.

Nafeez: Thank you

Till: And I'm very happy to welcome Ginie Servant-Miklos, member of The Club of Rome, an environmental educator and Assistant Professor in Behavioral Science at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Science in Rotterdam.

Her most recent book is Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as we know it. Welcome Ginie.

Ginie: Thank you

Till: Ginie, so your recent book carries the term collapse in the title and Nafeez you also wrote an article already in 2016 titled Failing states: Collapsing systems, biophysical triggers of political violence. Before we get into the details of collapse, you both seem to share a certain fascination for this concept of collapse. Where does that come from? Why is that? Maybe we start with you Nafeez.

Nafeez: So, I think collapse is something which is often seen kind of taboo in our societies.

You know, the idea that things can be really falling apart is not something that we hear much systematic discussion of.  But I think increasingly in the last few years, even though the concept, or the, you know, the word collapse, is not something we're always seeing in the news media, but I think it's becoming something which we're all feeling, and a lot of people are now feeling this sense that something isn't right.

Something is falling apart. And it almost feels like everything is falling apart around us, but we don't really know why. So, the idea of collapse, I think, you know, begins to kind of put a bit of a specificity to what we're all experiencing. But what I hope, increasingly, we're seeing is that there's a body of quite strong scientific literature across both the natural sciences and the social sciences, showing that collapse is a real phenomenon in nature, and has therefore massive implications across our societies, our economies, our cultures, precisely because, as we're increasingly beginning to see, our societies, our economies, our cultures, are rooted in the natural world. They're not separate from it. They're actually very much part of it.

So, these life cycles that we can see in the natural systems, where, you know, we see systems growing, thriving, but then also experiencing collapses, and that's kind of a part of this, of a natural process. These are things which we can also see at a big macro scale in human society. And in my view, I think industrial civilisation as we know it is on the cusp of a very similar type of moment that we have seen across living systems. But it's we're seeing a process of breakdown in all the kind of big systems that we take for granted.

Till: Just to follow up here, because you did mention that the events we are currently observing, you describe them as global, systemic decline, in a way, due to a system that is no longer able to keep its current form without sparking father crisis. Which system are you talking about there?

Nafeez: Yeah, there's, I mean, says there's so much to unpack there, but I think at the core of any system you know, is, is energy, and that's not to reduce and kind of take away all the other important factors, because there's many factors, which is about how you organise energy and the way that you see the world in the way that you see and interact, and all of those play a fundamental role.

But I think what we're seeing is that the climate crisis, which is kind of like in a way, it's the in our face symptom of the catastrophes that we're seeing, of that collapse process we're seeing, but it's not the driving cause of the crisis. The driving cause of the crisis is the way in which our civilisation actually works. And of course, energy is at the heart of that. And you know, one side of that is the fact that the energy systems that we currently rely on, basically fossil fuel resources, obviously, are destabilising this natural balance in the carbon cycle when we're getting this increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and greenhouse gasses, and the planet can't cope with that, and it's having all sorts of destabilizing effects which are really difficult for us to understand.

But the other side of that is that the energy system itself, the fossil fuels that we rely on, are, in a way, experiencing their own forms of diminishing returns. And there's a concept called energy return on investment, which my colleague Ginie, has also written extensively about, which is a way of understanding the quality of energy, the amount of energy you use to get a certain amount of energy out. And so now there's, I think, a consensus that you know, amongst experts who've been studying this concept and using this metric, that the EROI of the fossil fuel system as a whole has been in decline for the last decades. And all of this, then, is interconnected. You know, the energy, the economics, the ecology, are all fundamentally actually just facets of one crisis.

So, Ginie, what is your approach? If we look at collapse, I mean, there's systemic factors. There's also something like the lived experience of collapse, right? How do you approach this?

Ginie: Yeah, I love that Nafeez talked about, that we're feeling it, because that's kind of my starting point as a psychologist. I realised, you know, we can look at the impact of energy on the ecology, on the economics, on production, but the key missing element is on the psychology. So, what is it that we understand as normal? What is actually our experience of normality and our experience, your experience, my experience, our experience here of normality is actually a historical aberration. In all of human history, a society with such large amounts of energy available has never existed.

And so what we understand as normal life, that kind of linear model that has been sold to us, packaged in a system that you might call American-style capitalism, something like that, the American Dream, let's say which is you go to school, and the longer you stay in school, the higher your earning potential. You hyperspecialise in a job, then you get married, you buy a house, you have 2.1 kids, you buy a car, and then you retire.

That kind of normality is an aberration that was only made possible by high amounts of energy in the system. This is not how a system with low amounts of energy operates. And the problem is that in psychology, we have this concept called schemas, which is how our brain processes and stores information to allow us to make sense of the work of like the world around us. And our schemas for what normality is are entirely shaped by a very high energy society, and as we enter this series of crises, the psychological reactions to having those schemas challenged, or even to being told what you think of as normal is not going to endure in the next 5, 10 you know, it's already falling apart now, that causes such violent psychological shocks that I think that that is something that can then be very easily manipulated or preyed upon by the kinds of people that Nafeez has done so much research into.

Like it is that psychological fragility, the lack of psychological resilience to collapsing schemas in a way that creates a wide-open door for people to come in with big, beautiful lies, let's say that soothes the psychological collapse that people are experiencing.

Till: Thanks, Ginie, I found that actually very interesting in your book. You do have the psychoanalytical approach to that. You, for example, bring in Žižek reinterpretation of the different stages of grief on how people also deal in times of collapse, right?

You say that there are certain mechanisms that people usually during phases of grief have stages one ideological denial, then anger, then bargaining, then depression, and then seeing the situation as a threat, but also as a chance for a new beginning. How, in this framework, where are we today there? How do you in which stage do you see us in this stage of the collapse?

Ginie: Yeah, I'm seeing a shift, actually, from the moment where I wrote the book, which was 2022, around the time I started writing the book, and the reelection of Donald Trump, I think, like there's, there's been like a sudden psychological phase shift. I like that term, Nafeez uses phase shift a lot in his work, I like that term. So, I think that there is, on a one hand, an acceleration of what I called the phallic-techno magic paradigm, which is the belief that very powerful, very rich men will save us using increasingly phantasmagoric technologies that don't actually work, like carbon capture doesn't actually work on any kind of scale. We can't actually send rockets to Mars to solve anything.

But we are seeing, particularly on certain corners of the far right, an acceleration of that phallic-techno magic discourse, which I think is there's no better embodiment of this than the image of Jeff Bezos sending beautiful women into space, into his phallic shaped object as just a kind of grotesque manifestation of his feeling of phallic omnipotence.

And on the other hand, I'm seeing an acceleration, to an extent that wasn't the case even two three years ago, of despair. So, an acceleration of people just giving up, particularly on the left, so particularly people in the progressive movements who should be the ones leading the charge against fascism and against the right of far right, authoritarian, authoritarian movements have basically given up.

This is actually I'm working on new book, which is called The Left We Need: Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll and Climate Justice for All. Because I want to wake those people up and say, get out of your despair like you owe the world better than to just surrender and give up now, but I think that's kind of the moment we're living through right now.

Till: But Nafeez, Ginie mentioned already your analysis of phase shift and also these different stages, I mean, you basically refer to this concept that originally comes from ecosystems, right?

Referring to the life cycles of living systems and can kind of see that as a framework to also describe human civilisation, through the lens of like material, information, flows of energy. How do you see that coming in there the phase shift analogy of our time, and where are we with that?

Nafeez: Ginie kind of really nails it when she talks about, when you talk about this kind of sense of complete derangement that we're kind of increasingly experiencing from a psychological point of view. And I think the current system is reaching its limits and is now going through this. You know, people will call it a polycrisis, or we ever want to call it, but there is clearly an interconnected continuum of crisis related fundamentally to the way in which this structure of civilisation works.

That has meant that all of the normal, normalised ideas that we have generated to kind of manage this system, they don't make sense anymore. They don't work. They don't actually, you know, neoliberal capitalism, and you know, the kind of consumer, hyper capitalist culture that we've developed, and all the many different assumptions and lifestyles and things that go along with it, they don't actually make sense anymore. And I think so as that's crumbling, and as the business-as-usual approach, you know, which is, let's do more of the same.

Let's maybe try what we tried last time. Let's maybe try some more quantitative easing. Let's, you know, do this, do that, and we're throwing the same toolbox because we're in the same mindset, and that is actually accelerating the crisis, and people are feeling it.

And so, your ordinary people are looking for answers, but that normalised kind of sense of the prevailing norms and values are collapsing, and as it's a rapid change that we're really experiencing. And this is something that we see time and again when we're looking at the precursors to extremism and exterminatory violence in history.

Major social crisis driving that sense of the collapse of norms, existing norms and values is what drives communities and societies apart, and then people often gravitate to the most, simplest common denominator, oh, it's those guys coming across the border who are the problem.  “Oh, it's those, it's those people of color. Oh, they're trans, oh, blah, blah, whatever's on the surface of your consciousness.”

And what obviously makes it worse is that we have a status quo, a technological oligarchy, an economic oligarchy, you know, which is also fraying at the seams, but you have people in those positions of power, many of whom are deliberately weaponising that polarisation because they want to maintain their power, and so essentially turn the rest of us against each other.

And that obviously is extremely chaotic. It feels quite worrying. But I think there's a there's a positive side of this, which is, when we're looking at life cycles in history, the collapse is never the end. It's always a phase transition to something else, and the breakdown of the current order is creating an unprecedented space for renewal, and we're seeing those shoots of renewal in again, two different dimensions. On the one hand, there are these new infrastructural possibilities, which you might see in the way that clean energy is kind of rising up exponentially, and things like that.

At the same time, there are new breakthrough ideas about how to do economics, you know, like doughnut economics, and, you know, governments and local authorities are beginning to realize that, wow, this is a really important approach.

Let's, let's look at this. Let's learn from this. So, there are these opportunities that are emerging. And I think the key thing here is to recognise that there is a possibility space to, in a way, redesign the way we think about civilisation, in society, to create something genuinely new, but that's it's difficult when you're surrounded by this craziness.

Till: You're listening to The Club of Rome Podcast, the place to discover bold ideas from change makers tackling the world's biggest challenges, from the climate crisis and inequality and systems change.

The podcast is over a year old now, and our archive includes episodes on Universal Basic Dividend, changing finance and building climate resilience in the most vulnerable communities.

You can find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the discussion.

Ginie: I'd like to react to something that Nafeez was saying. I think that I wouldn't qualify what's going on with the billionaires right now is status quo anymore.

Because, actually, they're going towards their own phase shift that basically divorces the billionaire class from the rest of humanity, in which and this is a phenomenon which I as a psychologist, and right now a lot of my research is focused on psychedelic drugs, and you see a huge increase in psychedelic use in Silicon Valley and in these places where they have all these like tech utopian ideas, and I'm very worried that these people are very serious indeed about switching to, let's say, silicon based forms of consciousness where they genuinely believe we don't need human bodies anymore, and they genuinely believe that it doesn't matter if we exterminate everybody who's not them on the planet, because future people, or rather, future consciousness, matters more, even if it's a robotic, AI kind of consciousness.

And you'll tell me, well, nobody in their right mind would believe that, but they're not in their right mind if they're well, you know, there's been reports about how much mushrooms, MDMA and Ketamine Elon Musk was consuming on a weekly basis, but he's not the only one.

And I think that's why drugs feature quite prominently in my new work. It's because I do think that that is actually a change in the status quo. So, I think it's dangerous to even call it status quo. I don't know if you agree Nafeez

Nafeez; I think it just depends. I mean, I think I think you're right, I think you're absolutely right to point out that what we're seeing, I think the key point really is that we're seeing a messianic effort to fundamentally re-engineer society in a way which is totally unprecedented and not the same as the current system.

The structures of wealth and power that have allowed these, these groups, to essentially amass their positions, is unraveling. It's this recognition that there is this unraveling that's taking place. And so, in order to maintain that, there's a realisation that will actually it doesn't require just keeping the current system going in its current form, but to maintain their power, they actually have to completely remake the system.

So, you know, while the material infrastructure of the system is going into crisis, the politics, the economics and the culture, are now moving into that phase transition element where there is a plasticity in the system.

So, we're seeing this weird situation where there is this kind of contradictory thing, where, on the one hand, they're going back to bizarre 19th century ideas. You know, traditional eugenics, scientific racist hierarchies. You know black people at the bottom, white people at the top. You know, the ideas of genetic, genetically determined intelligence, and that determining so very traditional ideas, but then those are becoming fused with these really bizarre postmodern technological ideas, which are being packaged in this kind of in a in a new centralised way, and that's creating something quite new, which you're absolutely right. It's not the same system.

It's a different type of system. It's not even capitalism, and people have been, you know, some people call it, is it techno feudalism? Is it hyper capitalism? It's not actually any of those. It's something very different.

But it's very much about maintaining this hyper extractivist power of a very narrow oligarchy.

And I think perhaps the most frightening part, which I think is really, really critical for people to recognise, is that you know you when you start looking at the inspiration that these people are drawing from figures like Curtis Javin, you know this tech bro that Peter Thiel funded, very influential in the Trump administration. And look at what his ideas, not only did he endorse really traditional racist ideas, now he used the N word repeatedly. Talked about how American, you know, again, the N word this group of people were suffered as a result of the end of slavery, you know, and then advocated this idea that there is an existential threat to the white race from a global majority of darker skinned people. That was his kind of founding position. And then he ends up with a combination of, let's talk about resurrecting monarchistic type of societies.

But ends up with, well, we should just get rid of national governments and sovereign borders, and we should just have societies run like Apple and, you know, talking about having a patchwork of authoritarian regimes which are not like anything we've ever seen before, you know?

And I think that's, that's the crucial thing, and you're absolutely right to highlight that if we don't do anything about this, and don't raise awareness of what's coming, then we are not going to be able to respond effectively. And I think right now, we're feeling like we're dealing with something traditional, and we're not. And there's, in my view, there's really two tasks for us on the left. One is really to name and understand what we're really up against in this extraordinary kind of new phase that we're in. But secondly, to really recognise that in that plasticity that's emerging, the only reason that the right wing is currently appearing to win is because there is already an incumbency which is channeling huge amounts of money into it.

But the fact is, is that what these guys are building can't really work, and we know that because it's ecologically illiterate, it's energetically illiterate, it's economically illiterate, it doesn't make sense, and it isn't going to work. And the danger is that it takes all of us down with it. But there is a possibility, as we've seen over the last decades, with the with the ideas and a different way of designing and utilising technology, that it is possible for us to create vibrant societies.

You know, there's brilliant research, you know, by like my colleague, Julia Steinberger, who's done research showing that you can reduce the material throughput of your society and increase wellbeing for an even larger population of up to 10 million people. But it's all about changing our mindset and changing our ideas. And I think right now that people's imaginal capacity to see and recognise those possibilities is being shrunk by all of this stuff. So that's, I think, that that important mission that you're undertaking with your next book, Ginie, I think, is so important. We really need to inject that sense of possibility and dynamism of what actually is possible in order for us to fight back.

Ginie: And it's not just in the book, like I actually do this in practice through the project I set up here in Rotterdam Climate School, which is a place where we take people from the whole education system, including the vocational students, who are all working class. So, I bring in working class people in with people from the middle classes all together through a programme that helps them cope with eco-anxiety and to, so we give them the real truth about the phase shift that's happening in the system, and that's really hard for them.

They get very anxious, but through an approach. It's a Danish approach called Bildung, which is based on, like, personal development and finding joy in aesthetics, music, we do music, dancing, cooking together, boxing, like re-embodying yourself. Because I believe that the key problem, like Nafeez is completely right, the shift in mindset, but the shift in mindset is never going to happen by just telling people: “Hey, but we'll all be better off if we don't use fossil fuels anymore.” Like no rational argument is going to break through it, and that's because we're fundamentally talking about trauma and anxiety as a result of trauma.

People are feeling well already, as Gabor Mate, who's one of my key psychological influences, Gabor Mate, said, in our modern world, everybody's a bit traumatised by the way that capitalism just alienates people and makes them feel detached from each other and has broken down our community and isolates families And so we're all kind of traumatised and on top of that, you're saying, “Oh yeah. and by the way, the world's on fire, and your kids might not have a house to live in, and, you know, there's war, and we're all watching genocide unfold in front of our very eyes.” And like all that trauma, you can't rationalise your way through it. And so, my approach is to really go back to people's emotions, feeling of belonging, a feeling of joy. And I feel like that's where the left has gone completely wrong. Identity Politics has never won any elections. Identity politics should have stayed in academe, where it was born as like an interesting tool of analysis. I am not saying that we should throw it all out. It has its purpose in academia, for the purposes of research and understanding certain things, but as a political tool, particularly when it comes to working with working class people, it just doesn't work.

It creates a whole lot of division. So, where we need to connect with working class people and talk to working class people on things that are hurting for working class people. And yes, that means that women and people of colour, we need to talk to white men. We really have to talk to white men, because they are the ones driving those, like, completely destructive political movements. We have to, we have to get over ourselves. Yes, it's going to be emotional labour. Yes, it's not fair that it falls on us again, but we've got to do it because civilisation, and, like, the future of humanity is at stake.

Till: Thanks, Ginie, and there's so much in there, and I think maybe we need to meet again at some point, but I we have to wrap up soon.  I just want to give Nafeez the possibility to respond to that, and maybe also out of what Ginie just said. Now, you know, it feels like we almost need a strategy for the more progressive groups to deal to, to deal with this current crisis. What, what would that look like? And also, what could be a role of an organisation like The Club of Rome in all of this, an organisation you both are a member of?

Nafeez: No, that's those are really important points, and I really appreciate Ginie's exhortation that we need to, essentially, you know, break through these barriers that we have, you know, assumed exist, but don't really exist. It's not about making people wrong. It's about creating a space where we can allow ourselves to be heard, and everyone has to be allowed to be heard. And I think if we take a different approach, which is, which is not what we've done before, it has to be new. It has to be a kind of a new paradigm approach. We can be we can have a huge impact.

Till: Excellent. Thank you so much. And there would still be many topics to discuss. Father, I recommend everyone to read both of your books. And maybe we have another possibility to speak soon. I want to end this episode with a quote from your book, Ginie, though, where you write:

"Our fate is not written. We are not predestined for uncontrolled collapse, untold misery and possible extinction. If we collectively rise up against the system and its enablers and demand its controlled demolition, we may yet preserve some of the organised civilisation and a habitable planet for generations to come.”

And with that, thank you for listening to The Club of Rome Podcast.

Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about The Club of Rome at clubofrom.org

Thank you, Nafeez and Ginie for being on the podcast today and for your time.

Nafeez: Thank you.

Ginie: Thank you.