No Stupid Questions

Yeah pretty much. We're 2-3 generations deep into a cultural expectation that "some one else" will deal with all these problems.

The constant threat of this being "the most important election of our lives", when the party making that argument campaigned as if the outcomes were irrelevant (because from their privileged perspective, the outcomes are irrelevant).

Back during covid a boat got turned a bit sideways in a canal and it seemed like the whole world economy was going to collapse. The system we have is actually incredibly fragile and built largely on trust, both in one another but also in institutions and systems. Not only the US, but western Europe is about to get smacked up-side the head by the 2x4 of failing to maintain a civil society (US at fault within its borders, EU at fault beyond its borders).

According to history? Yes, but I guess there's a chance that the USA will beat the odds

Assuming you are talking about who won the US presidential election. Happened 8 years ago too, it wasn't the end of America then. It won't be the end of America now.

Don't believe there really is an absolute point of no return without the plot of Genesis of the Daleks happening. The future is long, and we don't know how the next four to eight years will play out, but dictatorships have risen and fallen before. Spain was a fascist dictatorship for decades, now it isn't. Also, lots of people died in the meantime and not all vestiges of the dictatorship are gone.

Just to be the nihilist in the room, I honestly think that the point of no return for humanity occurred the moment we stepped down from the trees and started to evolve. And I'm not actually kidding.

I'm not an evolutionary expert, so I'm more than likely talking out of my ass, but I was an Archaeology Major with a focus on the Bronze Age Collapse and what I can tell you is this...

From a certain perspective, the same evolutionary traits that brought our species to this point, are the very same traits that will keep us from moving forward past it. Selfishness, resource hording, greed, the urge to continually expand at the expense of others. Fear of "others" outside of ones own community; all these things in some form were beneficial to growing from hunter gatherers to urban/agricultural societies. We needed organisation to build cities, so we created monarchies. We needed ways to control the growing population, so we created a fear of a deity.

We needed a reason to not allow too many people in to our society so that we didn't waste resources, so we created borders and the concept of "others" that aren't like us. Now, all of that has to get binned if we have any hope of getting past this point because the only way forward is as single planet, not petty nation states. But every single thing that brought us to this point prevents that from happening. It's ingrained in our very DNA, so to speak.

Every moment is a point of no return, unfortunately.

Did Britain or Rome know the moments when Pax Britannia or Pax Romana had hit their tipping point to decline? I doubt it.

I think the tipping point will only be observable through the lens of history many years from now with a subject heading of: This event was the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.

Doubt it.

The rest of the world isn't lucky enough to never have to hear about the perpetual US election cycle again, and frankly there's just too much money in it for them to give it up.

It'll be a fucking clown show for the next four years though.

I choose to believe that we are not. The true fight for our democracy by the working/middle class hasn't even started yet. Some think it won't. I choose to believe that good will again triumph and life is roller coaster of good and bad.

One definition of a collapse is a sudden drastic reduction in the complexity of a thing.

I'm not sure whether we're going to have a societal collapse or a slow decline, but either way the US is in a downward spiral. I think Trump increases the likelihood of us going into the collapse trajectory.

All that said, on the other side of a collapse, there is some room for hope. The incendiary portion of the collapse will definitely suck to live through (if you're lucky enough to do so), but our country could probably use some simplification long-term because the people within it largely cannot navigate a country this byzantine. A lot of this country's systems are too complex for an average person to understand let alone administer.

Most of these complexities were probably birthed via intentional decisions by the system creators, and others were a product of unintended consequences. I think the gap in education between our commoners and "the elite" -- to borrow a tired trope -- also played a part here.

No matter how we arrived at this point, I don't think the current population can actually operate these systems anymore and long-term one way or another our people require a drastic reduction in the complexity of our society.

There is another path in which the United States invests more in education and scales up the average intelligence of its citizens so that they can handle the complexity of modern life, understand nuance, do research, and create better policy....but at this point I think we're frankly too far fucked to ever go down that path.

Earth will not care. Life on earth may suffer, but Earth will not care.