Recursive Regeneration: Bootstrapping America’s Damaged Civic Psyche to Collective Wellbeing
This past week I was to have participated in some programs in Finland. On the day of my scheduled departure I came to know that entry to the EU is prohibited to people whose passports expire within 90 days of arrival. Mine would have expired in 70 days, — which upended my plans.
I was looking forward to this trip. I’ve been to Finland before and find the social environment there refreshing.
Which is not surprising. According to the 2026 World Happiness Report, Finland is ranked the “world’s happiest country.” It has held this status for nine consecutive years.
From what I’ve read, the main factors that contribute to a people’s high quality of life are strong social safety nets, institutional trust, and personal freedom. Finland is strong in all of these.
The Finnish people also possess a strong sense of social solidarity. I suspect that this solidarity is an underlying factor behind the robust social safety nets and the generous public services they enjoy.
But Finland did not always enjoy social solidarity.
In 1918, Finland experienced a brutal civil war. Death squads undertook unrestrained summary executions of thousands. Rape was a common terror tactic. Conditions in prison camps were atrocious; up to a third of the prisoners died there. Disease and mass starvation accompanied the breakdown of civil society.
Wikipedia’s entry on the Finland Civil War reports that,
In international comparisons the war was the most deadly civil conflict in the world relative to population until the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and it is the most deadly to have happened in Europe.
In the aftermath of the war, an estimated 15,000 children were orphaned. Proportionate to America’s population, this would be equivalent to some 2,000,000 orphans.
The psychological trauma of the war left most heavily scared. The residual bitterness between partisans of the two camps cut deep. Armed conflict ended, but Finland was a profoundly divided nation.
One hundred years ago, no one could have imagined that Finland was destined to become the world’s happiest country.
Finland’s history of rising like a phoenix from the ashes holds lessons for our times. The Finnish people had to find a way to disentangle their deep differences, heal their trauma, and build a society of tolerance and mutual care.
My knowledge of Finnish history is too superficial to speak on how this remarkable transformation occurred, so I won’t.
But it was done — this is the main point. Finland went from Europe’s most miserable country to the world’s happiest, from the most divided people to the most united.
In a world plagued by divided populations, Finland’s experience is a statement of hope for a united world.
Recursive Collapse
Terry Carrilio is Substack’s most insightful commenter on the psychological and sociological dynamics of what MindWar blogger, Jim Stewartson, calls the American Catastrophe.
In her recent article, “Time to Put on Our Big Kid Pants”, Carrilio introduces the process of “recursive collapse” to describe the dynamic behind the disintegrating fabric of American society. Recursive collapse is a downward spiral in which a . . .
. . . degraded [civic] environment → damaged civic psyche → weakened personal capacity → further degraded [civic] environment.
In another article, “We Can’t Rebuild While They’re Still Burning It Down”, Carrilio elaborates on the nature of our degraded civic environment and how it weakens our agency to engage in social repair:
The sickness is visible in elections, courts, presidential spectacle, casual cruelty, and authoritarian threats.
It is visible in the ordinary arrangements of American life . . . medical debt treated as personal failure, poisoned water treated as a budget problem, wage theft treated as less urgent than street crime, predatory fees built into daily survival, public institutions hollowed out, care replaced by punishment, and poverty converted into a trap people are then blamed for falling into.
The decayed civic environment shows up in laws, markets, institutions, and daily routines that normalize extraction, humiliation, abandonment, and impunity. That kind of environment damages the civic psyche. It changes what people think they owe one another. It changes what they accept as normal. It teaches people what not to see. Over time, it also damages personal capacity: trust, agency, moral judgment, mutual obligation, reality-testing, and the ability to repair after rupture.
Then she poses this question:
How can we ask people damaged by that corroded environment to defend democracy with capacities the environment has been eroding for decades?
Reversing Recursive Collapse
Carrilio’s characterization of the degradation of America’s civic environment may seem a bit bleak. However, she makes the following important point:
The recursive collapse I’ve been describing . . . runs in both directions.
Like Finland, America can reverse course. Recursive collapse can become recursive regeneration. We can spiral upwards.
Carrilio adds this advice:
You don’t have to wait for the top to fix the bottom. In fact, such waiting is the one thing we know doesn’t work.
I understand Carrilio to be saying that the top — the American state — is now too dysfunctional to rely on. Recursive transformation to a life-centered society has to come, in the main, from the grassroots. As the Hopi Elders have proclaimed, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
A General Theory of the Dynamics of Losing Social Equilibrium
Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, in his social philosophy PROUT, put forward a general theory of societal degradation. His broad theory of societal collapse complements Carrilio’s insights on the dynamics of America’s current descent. And it contributes to the important conversation Carrilio has initiated.
Sarkar starts out asserting that for a society to grow and flourish it must have balance. If it lacks balance, then in some arenas of life the needs of people get suppressed and oppression sets in. When human needs are suppressed and people are oppressed, the overall collective welfare suffers.
The effect can become so great that society may collapse. The progression toward collapse occurs in three stages.
1 — Derangement
The first stage is derangement. This occurs when people’s thinking becomes imbalanced. For example, if people develop a greedy outlook, they may think that the natural world exists merely for their use. If this kind of deranged thinking is prevalent, a sort of imperialistic attitude dominates the collective psyche, and individuals lose sight of their inherent unity with all life and of the care and reverence that is due the natural world
So derangement occurs when concepts are collectively accepted that do not support reality. Examples of derangement currently prevalent in America include Christian Nationalism, xenophobia, American exceptionalism, and racism.
2 — Disruption
This is the second stage in society’s loss of balance is disruption. If derangement continues and its causes are not corrected, then imbalanced thinking starts to take form in people’s collective actions. Destructive actions arise from deluded thoughts. There is then disruption in social life.
Society becomes fragmented. Exploitation is prevalent. Greed is rampant. The natural world becomes enslaved to human avarice. There are attacks on minorities. Billionaires dominate the direction of society
The lost souls in such a society are ignorant of their foolishness. Righteous living becomes difficult to grasp and beyond the scope of the common people to follow.
3 — Degeneration
This is the third stage in society’s loss of balance is degeneration. If the forces causing disruption are not corrected, society sinks into the state of degeneration.
When degeneration occurs, not only are actions disruptive, but they become self-defeating. People’s way of living causes climate change. Resources are used in a way that is unsustainable. Corporate and individual greed destabilize the economy. Religious zeal divides the society. Like the lemmings that run to their death in the sea, people plunge headlong into self-destruction.
Life cannot be supported which does not have some basic measure of balance with the fundamental cosmic flow and the deep patterning of nature. When balance is sufficiently disrupted, degeneration — and then collapse — are inevitable.
Restoring Balance
Degeneration into social collapse isn’t inevitable. As Carrilio points out, reversal is possible. Recursive regeneration is possible.
It is not easy to reverse course and restore balance to a society that is in the stage of degeneration. A proper approach is required.
There are many big and small actions which can help initiate and sustain recursive regeneration. But an essential condition is to heal and rebuild the damaged human psyche. Without vital human beings, possessing clear thinking and humanistic motivation, little can be done.
People must be inspired. They cannot be forced to change. Even if the intent is good, forced change will lead to failure. It will not progress the society. Communist revolutions proved this to be true.
For progress to occur there must be an approach which emphasizes the development of the people. Give people inspiration, give them hope, give them vitality. Inspire them to rise up. Bring out their innate human nature.
The road from degeneration back to balance must be one in which the spirit of the people is renewed. They must somehow be restored to their original state, to their fundamental nature, and then be given scope to express this heightened humanity in society.
Give them back their hope, their dignity, their humanity, their connectivity. These are the forces that change society. Only when people’s spirits have come alive can the social order be changed. Then, change in the social order will naturally follow.
The process of restoring balance is not done through political rule. Rather, corrupt political rule is purified through the restoration of balance. This must be remembered or else a faulty strategy may be undertaken which will lead to failure.
Compelling appeals must be made to the hearts and minds of people. Give them back their dignity, give them back their autonomy, give them hope. Give them a way to know themselves, to know the greatness that is in them, and to express it in the world.
A spiritually vital people cannot be oppressed, cannot be bought. They will dynamically work to change the society because their spirits are alive. And then, when there is a collective awakening, defective social and political systems will certainly be forced to change.
So there must be a step-by-step approach which renews vitality, restores hope, and gives people the means to know and express the divinity within them.
To inspire people and awaken their divine nature is the pre-eminent requirement for restoring balance and creating happy nations. This approach will foreground love, inclusion, caring, connecting, balancing. The life-centered will then have legs upon which to rise.
Thank you, Ronald, for another thought-provoking article. Joseph Tainter argues that collapse occurs when the costs of sustaining a society outweigh the benefits, which aligns with P.R. Sarkar’s analysis of social breakdown.
Every complex civilization is vulnerable when people are exploited or killed, land and resources are misused, air and water are polluted, basic infrastructure is neglected, and economies are weakened by hyperinflation and declining purchasing power. In the past, such as ancient Rome, Egypt, and China, such a collapse was often more localized, but today the danger is global, especially as capitalism bursts under these pressures.
Rather than feeling despondent, we can view these threats to society and the planet as a necessary wake-up call that will move citizens toward positive, solution-oriented actions. The task ahead is to build a life-centered economy rooted in restorative balance and a transformation of consciousness.
Deep down, we all want love, compassion, and empathy for ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nations. The sooner we realize our full potential as sentient human beings on this planet, the sooner we can shape progressive economic, political, and spiritual policies that create a brighter future for all.
I appreciate the article's emphasis on hope, dignity, and restoring balance, but I found myself wanting much more than broad principles. Complex societies don't drift into imbalance simply because people lose their way, nor do they recover because we remind one another to be kind. I wanted the author to explore the mechanisms: How do fear, greed, propaganda, concentrated wealth, failing institutions, media incentives, and tribal identity interact to move a society from one stage to the next? Likewise, restoring balance requires more than inspiration. Fairness is not the natural state of human societies; it is something we consciously construct and continually defend. Civilization asks us to temper our own impulses in service of the common good. That takes institutions, accountability, shared norms, and a willingness to place principles above personal advantage. Hope matters—but hope alone has never been enough.