Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.

Singer imagines a modern apocalypse not as a single cataclysm but as a cascading failure of the systems that make urban life feel stable: infrastructure, energy, military command, and civic order. The escalating images—collapsed buildings, silent power plants, generals bombing their own people—suggest that the gravest danger is internal: institutions turning against those they exist to protect. His focus on New York frames the city as a symbol of modernity’s intensity and volatility, where speed, crowding, and ambition can resemble collective delirium. The passage reads as a warning about technological power without moral restraint and about mass society’s susceptibility to ideological frenzy.