A person who desires or predicts a social or economic collapse.
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, 2012.2009, Ben McGrath, “The Dystopians”, in The New Yorker:
According to several self-styled collapsitarians, the world now faces a century of declines, the long emergency, environmental collapse, or peak everything.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:
collapsitarian
adj
Etymology From collapse + -itarian.
1
Desiring social or economic collapse.
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.2009, Virginia Heffernan, “Apocalypse Ciao: Let the End Times Roll”, in Mother Jones:
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.2014, David Tompkins, “Weird Ecology: On The Southern Reach Trilogy”, in Los Angeles Review of Books: