While I realize that civilization could begin to accelerate irreversibly into collapse today, tomorrow, or next week; the fact that this has not already happened is more and more astonishing - because essentially every single policy change in the Western world has been destructive for the past three or more decades.
Entropy rules - the trend is against creation and towards disorder.
If you doubt this, take a look at the mainstream media and the major stories it is pushing on any given day - including the major narrative, fictions, images, concepts, and 'facts'; and (assuming you can interpret things from a Christian basis) you will be forced to agree.
Every week, the powers-that-should-not-be seem to unveil another body blow against civilization - piling in another upon another.
The astonishing thing is that civilization has not yet collapsed - I mean, this is really astonishing. On the one side, we have the entirety of the global, national and local leadership class; and the leadership of all the major corporations, professions, and (supposedly-) functional social institutions - all of whom are doing their level best to destroy their own functionality and destroy what remains.
Why have they not yet succeeded? Why has entropy not been able to succeed in reducing civilization to chaos?
What is that which opposes entropy: what is, on other words, the source of negentropy in Western civilization?
I regard this as a genuine mystery - at least at the material level.
Looked at materially, we have most of the world functioning entirely on smoke and mirrors, on lies and delusions.
And yet - here we are!
My best guess is that - although The System is corrupt (i.e. does not aim at functionality, aims primarily at anti-functional leftist goals) most of The System is useless or harmful. Therefore, damaging functionality makes no real difference, or may have a mildly positive effect.
Even within valuable systems - the necessary work is done by relatively few people, in minority sectors of the overall institution. So long as these continue to perform their jobs, then things can keep going for the time being.
Of course, by this material analysis; in the end they will win, civilization will collapse substantially, and billions will die -- unless the trend to destruction and increased entropy is reversed. Because the way things are going the functional aspect of civilization is shrinking towards the point that it cannot be sustained - no matter how effective are the minority of real workers and doers.
Yet this analysis does not account for why the minority of the functional workforce are motivated to keep doing what needs to be done; in a world where everything official, bureaucratic and of media-origin (literally!) conspires against them.
When all the incentives are for more entropy; who is opposing it?
Who is behaving negentropically?
What makes this situation even stranger is that I strongly suspect that most of those few who "do the world's work" are not aware of any compelling reason why they should do so - they just do it.
(Farmers, maintenance engineers, repair men... these are not usually self-consciously aware of the distinctive reasons behind the fact that they maintain an ideal of functionality in a world where the mass majority are indifferent or actively-hostile to it.)
My best answer, so far, is that these are still operating instinctually, unconsciously; with a residue of that Original Participation that used to be almost universal and which once coordinated communities and societies.
They (perhaps) do not (like most people) feel themselves to be wholly alienated individuals; essentially detached from other men, and from The World and Nature. Because they experience themselves (implicitly) as part of Life; they continue to fulfil their roles in the scheme - regardless of incentives.
If so; this cannot last. The irreversible trend for several generations of adults; has been a dwindling to extinction of such unconscious, instinctive communality and service.
We therefore cannot rely upon the dwindling stocks of 'real workers' to sustain civilization. In the first place, they will not be allowed to: the target is painted on them, and the missiles are flying.
(Just consider how quickly the ethos of courageous service in a good cause has been crushed in the US and UK police or military - where it is now essentially illegal to be a good cop/ soldier; just as, much earlier, it was made impossible to be a good scientist or a good teacher.)
The only sustainable positive development will be for individuals to become aware of the needs of the community, and the powers of evil that work to crush it.
And then, in face of this, such people will need to make a conscious choice to know and repudiate evil, and instead seek Good - so far as they are able.
The age of unconscious, automatic, common-sense Good-ness is past; and unless people come to recognize purposive evil explicitly, to discern the root of Good in God, and to ally with God and divine creation; then evil will be unopposed - and entropy will lead to chaos.
