Fighting in the Age of Collapse

As institutions fail and collapse becomes constant, the UFC thrives as pure spectacle; yet every movement in the cage still carries older histories of resistance.

For years, commentators described the early twenty-first century as a period defined by deep social isolation and growing atomization. Noreena Hertz later gave this condition a name, calling it ‘The Lonely Century’ in her book of the same title.

Jon Bois and Felix Biederman helped popularize that framing in a very different register with their landmark documentary Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, which used the rise of MMA to illustrate how neoliberal individualization, economic abandonment, and the erosion of social bonds had reshaped American life.

In their telling, loneliness was not just a psychological condition but a structural one: a defining emotional landscape produced by a political economy that left people isolated even in the midst of spectacle.

Hertz similarly argues that neoliberal restructuring, social media isolation, and the hollowing out of public institutions created an era defined by atomization.

This framing made sense when institutions—governments, media, universities—still seemed functional, even if they left individuals psychologically cut off from one another.

This framing made sense when institutions—governments, media, universities—still seemed functional, even if they left individuals psychologically cut off from one another.

But today, that loneliness feels like a relic of a more stable epoch. As political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon warned in a 2022 essay on the risk of the U.S. sliding into a right-wing dictatorship by 2030, democratic systems across the West are beginning to wobble, trust in institutions is collapsing, and societies are entering what he describes as a period of “tectonic stresses” that threaten overall stability.

Economically, the International Labour Organization’s World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2023 report shows that job quality is deteriorating worldwide, with more workers pushed into insecure and lower-paid forms of employment as stable work becomes harder to access.

Ecologically, the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report makes clear that extreme wildfires, floods, and heat waves are no longer future projections but the lived fabric of daily life.

In this unraveling reality, collapse feels less like a catastrophe and more like a permanent background condition.

And yet, amid this disintegration, one institution stands not merely intact but triumphant: the UFC.

As shown in a 2022 analysis by John Nash and Paul Gift at Bloody Elbow, the UFC doesn’t just survive instability — it profits from it, with a historically low “wage share” paid to fighters even as the promotion’s revenue soars.

It is the purest corporate organism built for an age of collapse—authoritarian in structure, indifferent to legitimacy, optimized for spectacle, and astonishingly adaptable to crisis.

At the same time, beneath this hyper-capitalist machine lies something older: what historian Matthias Röhrig Assunção describes in Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art as “embodied archives,” physical systems developed under slavery, colonial surveillance, and political repression.

These systems carry memories of resistance that survive even inside commercialized forms like MMA.

This deep contradiction—between the UFC’s corporate brutality and the subversive histories embedded in martial movement—reveals what it really means to watch ritualized violence in a world coming apart.

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The Age of Loneliness Is Over

Hertz’s framing of neoliberal loneliness captured the emotional structure of early-2000s life: individuals living in increasingly privatized worlds after 9/11, as surveillance increased and algorithmic media drove people into isolated bubbles.

Sociologist Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, shows how Silicon Valley platforms reorganized everyday behavior around data extraction, accelerating this isolation.

But around 2016, the feeling shifted. Pew Research Center data showed trust in government falling to some of the lowest levels ever recorded, a trend later detailed in their report Public Trust in Government: 1958–2024.

What once felt like individual loneliness increasingly looked like institutional failure, as people began to see the systems themselves as broken.

The Economist’s “Democracy Index” illustrates this decline globally. Financial instability followed suit: the Bank for International Settlements has repeatedly warned since 2019 that markets are “decoupled from fundamentals”, and economists have repeatedly warned that crises of this magnitude tend to deepen inequality rather than correct it.

Ecologically, the UN Environment Programme’s 2023 Adaptation Gap Report states bluntly that climate disaster has moved from “anticipated risk” to “current condition.”

The stories societies once told about themselves—progress, stability, shared reality—became impossible to maintain. As media scholar Zeynep Tufekci argues in Twitter and Tear Gas, institutions lost the capacity to mediate truth.

In this context, the UFC’s rise is not anomalous but emblematic: it is built to flourish in a world where legitimacy no longer matters and spectacle is the only stable commodity.

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The UFC: The Perfect Institution of Collapse

The UFC’s structural logic is unusually transparent. As noted in a 2023 Bloomberg investigation and confirmed by a detailed 2020 labor-law analysis, UFC fighters are legally classified as independent contractors — a status that gives the organization near-total control over matchmaking, contracts, and the fighters’ labor conditions.

Fighters receive only a small share of total revenue, far below the levels seen in unionized sports leagues, and the UFC’s exclusive contracts give the organization tight control over athletes’ careers.

This is not a democratic institution. It makes no claims to represent the public good. It does not wrap itself, like Silicon Valley firms, in rhetoric about “community.” It does not justify itself with educational ideals like universities do.

It openly exists to produce spectacle.

This became especially clear during the COVID-19 pandemic: while most sports leagues paused indefinitely, the UFC did not shut down — it relocated production to Yas Island, establishing a bubble called “Fight Island” to continue staging events even as the rest of sports halted.

Even The Washington Post noted that while public institutions faltered in protecting lives, the UFC reorganized itself with astonishing speed.

Wildfires, wars, inflation shocks, and collapsing institutions do nothing to disrupt UFC scheduling. The business model depends on attention rather than stability, making the organization structurally suited to a world where collapse is the norm.

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Precarious Workers in the Content Economy

To understand the UFC’s resonance, it helps to look at its labor force. Fighters operate as gig-economy workers—precarious, easily replaced, and forced into constant entrepreneurial self-management.

They have no union, no guaranteed pension, and no long-term security; under UFC’s independent-contractor classification, many fighters end up paying for their own training camps, coaches, and out-of-pocket medical expenses.

Their income depends not only on athletic performance but on their ability to generate online engagement. This is why fighters run personal channels, cultivate personas, and lean into political theatrics—not because the positions form a coherent ideology, but because recognizable characters thrive in the digital marketplace.

This is not unique to MMA. As sociologist Arne Kalleberg argues in her book Precarious Lives, workers across industries increasingly self-brand, self-market, and monetize their private lives to stay afloat.

The fighter is simply an accelerated version of what many workers are becoming in an era of collapse.

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Vibes, Not Ideology

Political incoherence is not limited to fighters, but the UFC makes it unusually visible. Fighters condemn Marxism, praise Trump, invoke reactionary views, or espouse vague spiritual or ethnic nationalism—not as political programs but as aesthetic gestures.

Media theorist Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death that politics would collapse into entertainment. Political scientist William Davies later argued in Nervous States that emotion and spectacle have overtaken ideological coherence.

The UFC simply reveals this more nakedly. Fighters are not expected to have convictions; they are expected to be interesting.

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Martial Arts as Technologies of Resistance

Despite the UFC’s reduction of martial arts to content, the movements inside the cage carry centuries of historical memory.

Capoeira emerged among enslaved Africans in Brazil as a form of combat training disguised as dance, using music and rhythm to conceal its purpose. It flourished in quilombos—autonomous communities of escaped slaves—before being criminalized by the Brazilian state in the 1890 Penal Code.

Similarly, Mark Wiley, in Filipino Martial Culture, explains that Filipino martial arts—known as Eskrima, Arnis, or Kali—developed under Spanish and later American colonial rule.

Wiley describes how weapon bans forced practitioners to embed techniques within folk dances and community rituals. While academic debate exists, Wiley presents this as a widely held interpretation among practitioners.

For Indonesian pencak silat, anthropologist O’ong Maryono’s Pencak Silat in the Indonesian Archipelago details how Dutch colonial authorities viewed silat with suspicion, leading to its performance within ritual ceremonies that doubled as training.

Maryono also shows how silat practitioners played significant roles in anti-colonial uprisings and later independence movements.

Sambo — by design — originated in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, created for the Red Army and internal security forces as a hand-to-hand combat system.

It fused Japanese judo (brought back from Japan by Vasili Oshchepkov) with a wide variety of traditional wrestling and fighting styles from across the Soviet republics.

Over time, this synthesis developed into Sambo’s modern form, which the Soviet authorities officially recognized as a distinct martial art in 1938. It was designed to produce an efficient and disciplined “revolutionary body,” reflecting the broader ambitions built into Soviet physical culture programs.

Even North Korea’s military includes unarmed and close-quarters combat in its Korean People’s Army training, often referred to in various accounts as Kyeok Sul Do.

Various testimony describe drills that resemble global martial arts traditions — striking, grappling, and short-range techniques — even as the regime presents them as uniquely Korean.

Their spectacular breaking demonstrations function as political theater reinforcing state power.

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When Resistance Becomes Legible, It Gets Hollowed Out

Across these martial histories, a clear pattern emerges. A fighting system develops under conditions of oppression, created by communities seeking protection, resistance, or survival.

Authorities then attempt to ban or suppress it, recognizing the threat contained in its techniques.

Practitioners then adapt by hiding the art within ritual, dance, ceremony, or other coded forms of movement that allow the knowledge to survive beneath the gaze of power.

Eventually, once the political landscape shifts, the state reabsorbs the art—often sanitizing it—and recasts it as national culture, tourism, or competitive sport.

Yet even after this transformation, the deeper logic of resistance remains preserved in the bodily techniques themselves, carrying forward memories of struggle long after the original context has been obscured.

Taekwondo illustrates this pattern clearly. As historian Udo Moenig shows in Taekwondo: From a Martial Art to a Martial Sport, taekwondo evolved from military training programs before being standardized as an Olympic sport—yet its striking mechanics still reflect its militarized origins.

The UFC strips martial arts down to functional biomechanics, but it cannot erase the historical memory encoded in the body.

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Collapse, Ritual, and Memory Stored in the Body

Anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in his landmark work Techniques of the Body, argued that physical practices preserve social memory long after institutions fade. Ritual outlasts ideology.

This is why martial arts survive collapse. A stance repeated thousands of times becomes a lineage. A grip sequence practiced across generations becomes an archive.

Capoeira still carries the logic of fugitivity, Filipino drills retain the rhythm of guerrilla struggle, and silat preserves the timing and evasiveness shaped by life under surveillance.

Even in the UFC—corporate, commodified, algorithmic—the residue of these older worlds remains visible for those who know how to look.

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The UFC as the Cathedral of Collapse

Sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that collective rituals help societies maintain cohesion and restore a sense of order during moments of strain, a point later expanded by theorists like Mary Douglas and Adam Seligman, who show how ritual manages uncertainty and collective anxiety.

In a collapsing world, the UFC functions as a new kind of cathedral — not of faith, but of spectacle — offering drama, sacrifice, and the temporary illusion of clarity.

The UFC embodies collapse: authoritarian structure, labor precarity, algorithmic visibility, and disregard for meaning. But the movements inside the cage—takedowns, sweeps, angles, feints—are older than any corporation. They come from histories where oppressed people learned to survive.

The spectacle conceals collapse. The ritual reveals endurance.

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The Body Remembers When the World Forgets

We live in an age defined by political, economic, and ecological unraveling. The UFC did not create this collapse, but it mirrors it with striking clarity, embodying the logic of a world where spectacle replaces stability and institutions struggle to maintain coherence.

At the same time, martial arts offer something older than collapse and more enduring than spectacle. They function as embodied archives, shaped by long histories of slavery, colonialism, rebellion, and survival.

The UFC can commodify these movements, refine them for broadcast, and package them as entertainment, but it cannot erase the memory stored in the body.

Every punch carries a history. Every choke holds an inheritance. Every movement bears the imprint of worlds that refused to disappear.

In an age of collapse, ritual endures. The body remembers what the world has forgotten.