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psychological toll of losing our shared “normal,” the conversation invites listeners to move beyond despair, challenge outdated assumptions and engage in the collective renewal already emerging through new forms of economics, energy and education.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