The Collapse of Competence: What Happens When a Government Stops Governing
An elegy for the functioning state
“The good we build may last for a time; the good we maintain may last forever.”
— George Eliot
I’ve been thinking lately about what happens when a government stops governing.
Not when it falls, that’s too dramatic, but when it staggers and drifts. When the lights are still on, the offices still open, and yet the will to do the work has quietly gone out.
I walked through a government building once during a shutdown. The security guards were still there, the lights still humming, the flags still hanging limp. But every desk sat empty, and the silence felt bureaucratic rather than sacred. It struck me then that collapse doesn’t always come with smoke and ruin. Sometimes it comes with humming fluorescents and nobody left to care.
Maybe you’ve felt it too, that strange fatigue in the system, that hum of something hollow.
Every civilization eventually reaches that point, I suppose, when inertia replaces intention. Rome called it destiny. We call it a continuing resolution or shutdown.
I don’t say this with anger, but with a kind of wary sadness.
How did competence, simple, honest competence, become unfashionable?
When Form Outlives Function
There was a time when bureaucracies, for all their flaws, were temples of order. They weren’t glamorous, but they worked. Trains ran. Paychecks cleared. Bridges stood.
Now the rituals remain but the meaning has gone thin. We file forms that vanish into digital voids. We debate budgets no one plans to honor. We speak of “the people’s business” while the business itself lies unattended.
Rome had the same disease. The senators kept meeting long after the Republic was dead, still calling themselves guardians of the state. They confused ceremony for stewardship. I think we’ve done the same.
I believe this is what real collapse looks like: not chaos, but the slow death of competence.
The lights stay on, but nobody remembers why.
What do you think?
The Rot Beneath the Ritual
I don’t believe people set out to destroy what works. It’s more subtle than that.
We get tired, cynical, distracted. We start rewarding noise instead of skill, loyalty instead of judgment.
And so the talented leave, the pragmatic are silenced, and the system fills with those who perform certainty rather than earn it.
That’s how empires die, not with swords at the gates but with mediocrity in the chair.
When being capable makes you suspect, and being loud makes you indispensable.
Sometimes I wonder if we even know what competence feels like anymore.
The steady hand, the patient fix, the quiet professional who gets things done, they’ve become background noise in a culture addicted to spectacle.
The same pattern appeared in the Soviet Union’s final years. Bureaucrats showed up, stamped papers, filed reports that no one read. The system still moved, but it moved like a body without a pulse. That’s the danger of large systems: they don’t die suddenly, they forget they’re alive.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this isn’t collapse but adaptation, a government shedding its skin for something leaner, more digital, less human. But every time I hear that argument, I look around and see fewer people who know how anything actually works. Progress without stewardship isn’t progress; it’s drift.
Are We Really in Collapse?
Here’s where I need to pause and ask myself a hard question: are we actually collapsing, or just slumping?
The Roman Empire lasted five centuries in the West and another thousand in the East. The Ottomans ruled for six hundred years. The British, with all their contradictions, managed three hundred. We, by comparison, are barely two hundred and fifty years into the experiment. By historical standards, we’re still young, still rash, still noisy with possibility.
So maybe what we’re living through isn’t collapse yet, but something like adolescence gone wrong, a nation too self-aware to be innocent and too self-absorbed to be wise.
Civilizations rarely fall all at once. They dim gradually, losing clarity and confidence one institution at a time. Collapse is not an event; it’s a process that begins long before the walls give way.
I think we’re in that early phase, the pre-collapse lull, where the house still stands but the beams have started to creak. Institutions remain, but their purpose thins. The bureaucracy still functions, but without conviction. The republic still speaks of virtue, but only in slogans.
Maybe we’re not collapsing yet, but the conditions are ripening.
That distinction matters, because if this is a slump, it’s still reversible. Collapse, once complete, rarely is.
The Empire of the Everyday
Because empire isn’t only a structure of power; it’s a way of seeing the world.
When the government stops governing, it mirrors the citizen who stops caring.
When institutions rot, they reflect a society that’s forgotten how to maintain anything, including itself.
I see it in small ways: the resignation in people’s voices, the shrug that says “what’s the point.” We’ve internalized the empire’s decay. We’ve let exhaustion become our ideology.
And I’m not immune. There are days I catch myself thinking the same thing, Let it all come down. Maybe it deserves to.
But that’s just despair dressed as wisdom. It solves nothing. It only makes the ruins quieter.
The British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that civilizations don’t die from murder; they die from suicide. He meant that decline begins within, the slow surrender of imagination, courage, and moral effort. The signs aren’t riots or invasions; they’re apathy, distraction, and the normalization of failure.
That’s what I see now. A civilization not yet collapsing, but slowly disengaging from itself.
The Long Arc of Competence
If the great empires teach us anything, it’s that collapse is a long process of forgetting.
Rome forgot how to farm its own land. The Ottomans forgot how to reform their armies. The British forgot that an empire built on subjugation could not survive the century of self-determination.
And now, perhaps, we are forgetting something too: that government is not a spectator sport, but a living trust. It requires maintenance. It requires people who still believe in the dignity of good work.
We don’t have to be ancient to be tired. We only have to stop caring.
That’s why I don’t think it’s premature to sound the alarm. The age of empire doesn’t matter; the pattern does. We’re demonstrating the early symptoms: contempt for expertise, hostility toward governance, the replacement of stewardship with spectacle, and a public too overwhelmed to notice.
Collapse might not come tomorrow, but the habits that make it inevitable are already visible today.
What Power Really Means
So what’s left? What can we actually do, you and I, when the great machine seizes up?
I don’t think salvation lies in letters to Congress or hashtags of outrage. Those are rituals too, small comforts that mimic participation.
The deeper work is nearer, and harder.
Competence begins again when we stop outsourcing responsibility to the incompetent.
When a neighborhood organizes itself instead of waiting for city hall.
When a worker learns the rules better than their boss and uses that knowledge to protect others.
When a teacher refuses to treat students like metrics.
When citizens learn to govern the ground they stand on.
That’s where power still lives: not in the marble halls, but in the muscle memory of people who still remember how to make things work.
I once met a maintenance worker at a federal building who kept showing up during the shutdown because, as he put it, “someone has to make sure the pipes don’t freeze.” He wasn’t defying authority; and, yes, he was still being paid, but he was protecting the future from neglect. That’s the kind of quiet power empires always forget to measure.
I believe every act of local competence is an act of national resistance.
A repaired bridge, a functioning library, a fair ledger, these are not small things. They’re the scaffolding of civilization.
A Culture of Maintenance
There’s something sacred about people who keep things working in spite of the chaos above them. The civil servant who shows up unpaid. The scientist who stays through funding cuts. The janitor who sweeps a government hallway even as the politicians argue about closing it.
They are not symbols of futility. They’re proof that meaning outlasts policy.
A culture that prizes innovation over maintenance will always confuse novelty for progress. We’ve built machines faster than our ethics can service them. Yet the future will belong to those who can repair what still matters. Civilization doesn’t need more disruptors; it needs caretakers.
Maybe that’s where our hope lives, in the discipline of maintenance, in the refusal to let entropy win.
We don’t need to “save democracy” in the abstract. We need to keep the plumbing of democracy from freezing over.
To fix, to tend, to care, these are not small gestures. They are revolutionary in a time that celebrates decay.
The Mirror of Responsibility
And maybe that’s what I’m trying to say, in all this reflection:
Competence isn’t glamorous, but it’s moral. It’s how love wears a tool belt.
We’ve let ourselves believe that politics is a spectator sport, that salvation comes from elections and headlines. But governments are reflections, not engines. If we want something better reflected, we have to become better ourselves.
Collapse begins in the institutions, yes, but also in the spirit.
So maybe renewal must too.
Maybe it starts in the spaces still within reach: our homes, our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our small daily choices. The places empire forgot to colonize.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m being naïve. Maybe competence can’t save a dying empire. Maybe the rot is too deep. But then I think about all the small systems still working because someone, somewhere, refused to give up. Isn’t that government too, in its purest form, people governing what they can touch?
What if the antidote to bureaucratic collapse isn’t revolution, but recollection?
Not outrage, but responsibility?
The Quiet Counter-Empire
Empires don’t die because the powerful stop ruling. They die because the governed stop believing in the worth of order.
So here’s what I believe: the counter-empire begins every time someone does a job well for no audience.
Every time we choose precision over cynicism, care over convenience, truth over performance.
Every time we say, I’ll do it right, even if no one else does.
That’s how we keep civilization alive, not through grand reform, but through the refusal to rot.
The powerful may control the machinery, but the competent still control the pulse.
And if enough of us keep the pulse steady, perhaps, the body can heal.
I don’t know if that’s enough to save a republic, but I know it’s how we stay human inside it. Competence might not be heroic, but it’s faithful. It’s the language of people who still believe in order, not as control, but as care.
If we can remember that, then perhaps collapse is not the end, but the clearing before renewal.
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