Is Chicken Little Right?

As a new year begins, a familiar counterargument has re-emerged in public discourse: the claim that the “collapse narrative” dominating our news cycle is exaggerated, alarmist, even theatrical. Journalists and thought leaders, it is said, are “cosplaying the apocalypse.” Modernity, according to this critique, is doing just fine. All is well. The prospects for 2026 are bright.

At first glance, this challenge appears bracing—an antidote to cultural despair. But upon closer inspection, it rests on two recurring claims: first, that the media lies or distorts reality; and second, that material progress is the primary measure of societal health. Both claims contain partial truths. Neither is sufficient.

It is undeniably true that the modern news ecosystem is shaped by incentives that distort perception. News is a commercial product, calibrated to capture attention rather than convey proportion. This tendency has been dramatically intensified by social media, where outrage outperforms nuance and pessimism signals sophistication. Broadcast outlets are now deeply dependent on digital platforms—especially X—for framing their daily narrative. What trends there increasingly becomes what matters everywhere. It is worth noting that 90 percent of the world's English-language media comes from the United States.

As Angus Hervey, managing editor for Fix the News, observes:

"Nuance doesn’t sell. Pessimism does. It sounds smart, sophisticated—proof that you’re a clear-eyed realist. Doom is dramatically satisfying in ways that incremental progress never can be. You get to use words like atrocity, crippling, and conspiracy. You get to be the prophet who saw it coming, brave enough to tell hard truths while collecting your advance and planning your next speaking tour."

Hervey’s point should not be dismissed simply because it aligns with his professional commitments. The news is a social construction. It privileges problems over solutions. It frames reality through adversarial binaries—left versus right, constitution versus common sense—while lamenting objectivity it does not possess. Serious readers must learn to discount for this bias.

But here is the critical problem: most people do not. This is especially true of the young. A large majority of adults under thirty—and a significant percentage of teenagers—now receive their news primarily through social media. This pattern will only intensify as artificial intelligence further blurs the line between the real and the fabricated. In that environment, truth matters less than emotional reinforcement. The functional purpose of news consumption becomes affirmation of prior beliefs, lubricated by outrage.

For this reason, media literacy rightly requires skepticism toward narratives of imminent collapse. The news machine is structurally calibrated toward the negative.

Yet the counter-collapse response makes a symmetrical error.

To prove their case, critics of the collapse narrative often assemble long lists of positive developments the media allegedly ignored. Malcolm Cochran of the Human Progress blog famously catalogued 1,084 “good news” stories from 2025. But these lists are no less selective or agenda-free than the headlines they criticize. They present isolated data points without interpretive context.

Consider one frequently cited example: the claim that only 40 percent of today’s marriages will end in divorce. While technically accurate, this statistic obscures a more troubling reality—that far fewer people are marrying at all, and that roughly 60 percent of marriages are now preceded by cohabitation, which significantly increases marital instability. The “good news” evaporates upon closer inspection. As Mark Twain observed, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Another celebrated headline announces that “robots are learning to make human babies,” referring to fully automated, AI-supervised IVF procedures. This development is offered as unambiguous progress, with no reflection on its anthropological, ethical, or civilizational implications—implications envisioned with chilling clarity decades ago by Aldous Huxley. Here, technological achievement is treated as self-justifying.

This pattern reveals a deeper commitment among many counter-collapse advocates: an uncritical confidence in modernity’s rationalism and techno-utopianism. Their accounts of “human progress” almost entirely omit culture, moral formation, and spiritual meaning. That omission is not incidental; it is constitutive. And it represents a blind spot as serious as the one they attribute to pessimists.

For cultural analysts—especially those seeking to think from within a Christian anthropology—such optimism is not merely incomplete; it is dangerously naive. It leaves them ill-equipped to recognize that we are living amid a genuine civilizational inflection point, one in which the moral and symbolic sources of social flourishing are eroding.

If culture depends upon the sacred—upon a binding moral authority that orders meaning, restrains appetite, and anchors obligation—and if that sacred order has been consciously abandoned in public life, then no amount of technological or material success can compensate for the loss. When the sacred collapses, society enters a state of desolation: a moral and symbolic wasteland in which meaning no longer coheres and despair becomes epidemiological. The doubling of deaths of despair over the past decade is not an anomaly; it is a signal.

Yes, the media distorts reality. But beneath the churn of headlines, deeper structures are shifting—anthropological, moral, and spiritual structures that no algorithm can repair. These shifts, not the daily news cycle, are the proper object of our concern.

If we are indeed living in a historically unprecedented culture of nihilism—one in which the shared moral order has been evacuated from public life—then responsible leaders cannot console themselves with selective data and reassuring charts. This is not a moment for complacency. It is a moment of consequence.

On the eve of the Second World War, Winston Churchill reflected, “I felt I was walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.” Our moment demands similar clarity. This is for this hour—an hour in which we will be judged by how we discerned the times and stewarded our responsibilities.

There are moments when apocalyptic rhetoric is misplaced. And there are moments when warning is not hysteria but wisdom. The task before us is not to silence the alarms, but to develop the discernment to know whether the fire is real—and to act accordingly.

Some insist that the collapse merchants have gone too far. Perhaps. But even a cursory examination of contemporary society suggests we are far closer to civilizational fracture than to vibrant civic health. The disease may not yet be fatal. But the conditions for fatality are plainly visible.

To act before those conditions, harden into inevitability is not doomsaying. It is prudence.