collapsitarian

English

Etymology

From collapse +‎ -itarian.

Noun

collapsitarian (plural collapsitarians)

1. A person who desires or predicts a social or economic collapse.
   • 2009, Ben McGrath, “The Dystopians”, in The New Yorker‎^[1]:

     Kunstler resists the doomer label—“I’ve never been a complete collapsitarian,” he says—but the fact that one of his bombs detonates in Washington on “twelve twenty-one” is likely to please superstitious adherents of the Maya calendar, which concludes its first cycle on what is now the Internet’s most popular day of reckoning: December 21, 2012.

   • 2014, Tyler Priest, “Hubbert’s Peak: The Great Debate over the End of Oil”, in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, volume 44, number 1, →DOI, page 38:

     According to several self-styled collapsitarians, the world now faces a century of declines, the long emergency, environmental collapse, or peak everything.

Adjective

collapsitarian (comparative more collapsitarian, superlative most collapsitarian)

1. Desiring social or economic collapse.
   • 2009, Virginia Heffernan, “Apocalypse Ciao: Let the End Times Roll”, in Mother Jones‎^[2]:

     Nowhere in the course of this collapsitarian spiel did there seem to be more than a cursory acknowledgment of the misery of mass unemployment and the vertigo that would befall a nation deprived of the foundations of its economy and cultural identity.

   • 2014, David Tompkins, “Weird Ecology: On The Southern Reach Trilogy”, in Los Angeles Review of Books‎^[3]:

     The Dark Mountain project offends a lot of people. It gets called defeatist, misanthropic, “collapsitarian.” But surely there is something in the air (and in the soil, and the ocean) these days.

2. Of or pertaining to collapsitarianism.