The Crack-UpHow individual and civilisational identities collapse.
Peter Hughes
2 Feb 2023
Identity is forged in the struggles of individuals, cultures, and civilisations to protect themselves against collapse. F. Scott Fitzgerald described this struggle in “The Crack-Up,” an essay written for Esquire in 1936. He identified two kinds of blows that lead to individual collapse: “the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come from outside” and “another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it.” These blows aren’t equal. Those that come from outside only seem to do so. The ones that come from inside are the authentic face of the crack-up.
According to Fitzgerald, “a man can crack in many ways—can crack in the head—in which case the power of decision is taken from you by others, or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world; or in the nerves.” Describing his own crack-up, Fitzgerald wrote that “after an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realise that for two years my life had been drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”
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The French poet Paul Valéry wrote that “a civilisation has the same fragility as a life” and that understanding this fragility is crucial to our individual and collective survival. Every empire, like every life, ends. Our deepest fear at the end of life isn’t the nothingness of non-existence. It’s the horror that there is life after the “end”—that the Self cracks and lives on, crushed, depressed, destitute, shattered into pieces. The same fear haunts collective collapse. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno warned that, “as its final result, civilisation leads back to the terrors of nature”—an afterlife of unspeakable cruelty.
The surprising first step on this path to collapse is prosperity. A civilisation in its infancy, when the benefits of expansion far outweigh the costs, will prosper. However, expansion increases complexity, which requires greater energy and investment to sustain itself. Unable to retreat, civilisations invest more resources expanding, even as marginal returns on this growth keep declining. As the Roman Empire grew, the benefits of conquest declined as administrative and defence costs escalated. Between the third and fifth centuries, this led to increased taxation, increased regulation, expanding bureaucracy, and a debasing of the currency. When the return on complexity became unsustainable, the empire collapsed.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/02/02/the-crack-up/
