The Collapse of Reality as a Socially Constructed Reality

In 2008, a mass murder occurred in Akihabara, Tokyo. Sociologist Munesuke Mita diagnosed this as symptomatic of a broader condition: the collapse of reality to live for in contemporary Japan. This chapter subjects that diagnosis to second-order analysis. The parallel with the 2018 Toronto van attack—whose perpetrator self-identified as an incel, the cross-cultural counterpart of Japan’s hi-riajuu—reveals a structural feature of late-modern social reality construction that sociological systems theory is positioned to analyze. Three claims are developed. First, both the collapse and any revival of reality are products of social systems’ observations; the collapse is a socially constructed reality. Second, the ICT revolution has destabilized the function Luhmann attributed to mass media—producing a shared world—by decomposing it into personalized reality streams; social systems that cannot observe such radical change can only observe it as collapse. Third, drawing on Luhmann’s essay “The Self-Description of Society: Crisis Fashion and Sociological Theory” (1984), the chapter shows that negative self-descriptions are structurally more effective for guiding action, creating a deviation-amplifying mechanism in which the diagnosis of collapse propagates because it is functionally effective. This yields the design flaw framing: the collapse of reality is a circuit design failure, not a content problem.