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> Nobody 100 years ago had the slightest clue that the industrialization at the time could cause global warming, for example.

This is incorrect. The first measurements and effects were calculated at the end of the 19th Century (quoted as 1896).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...

Indeed, Arrhenius definitely had a 'slight clue' in 1896. It is probably comfortable to think that we really could not have known, but I think the reality is that it is often so much easier to kick the can down the road than to be careful in the present moment.

Interesting, thanks I had no idea. It doesn’t change my basic premise that the decisions made to do thing such as industrialise weren’t really informed ones when it comes to the long term consequences.

This, again, proves that as an educated society we need to decisively counter the for-profit lies of influential corporations. There is a fundamental problem that may cost us severely in the not too distant future.

Fossil fuel companies have paid large sums to lie about the effects of their products on climate change, just like tobacco companies have directly killed innumerous people by lying about the negative health impact of cigarettes for decades. Nowadays, the evidence that these companies collaborated on misleading the public is openly accessible but back in the 70s or 80s YOU were the enemy for trying to warn about health dangers. Climate is the same now, propaganda has done its work for a long time.

And again, the same cancerous people jump on the bandwagon of an increasingly aware public and try to profit off the new movement by ways of green-washing and other pseudo-helpful bullshit.

These are significant problems where short-term profit motivation is more influential than long-term sustainability and "positive" development of society. Our only hope is the few people in human society who are motivated enough to study, learn, read and act for the greater good.

That's kind of hingey if you ask me.

> This, again, proves that as an educated society we need to decisively counter the for-profit lies of influential corporations. There is a fundamental problem that may cost us severely in the not too distant future.

Who do you think has or rather should have more power than corporations? The state! And who is constantly crying for a less influential state? The current US administration.

As long as we as the voters do not allow the state to be the one in power but rather companies it will be companies doing whats best for them.

Don't we have just as much if not more power over corporations? You effectively vote for a corporation each time you do business with it.

We can choose to buy zero emission cars and purchase products exclusively from environmentally friendly corporations. Corporations will either adapt or go bankrupt.

The difference is, with a decent voting system, it only takes 51% of the population to decide government policy, but with corporations, even 1% of the population can keep harmful corporations from bankruptcy.

Even ignoring the problem of those 1% potentially being the richest 1%, there is the issue that harmful businesses often have lower costs than ethical businesses, and some consumers are too price-sensitive (or don't have time to become informed about every corporation's business practices) to vote "correctly" with their purchasing power.

Is it right that the 51% of the population is able to coerce 100% of the population into paying higher prices for the more ethical businesses?

High and mid income earners can and should choose more ethical/environmental businesses as they have the means to do so.

>Is it right that the 51% of the population is able to coerce 100% of the population into paying higher prices for the more ethical businesses?

Just from the numbers yes because the other side isnt saying more or even same but less.

Awareness of anthropogenic climate change goes back quite a bit further than 1896.

https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte...

Had to look that up, and this was the closest I could get in a few minutes, which is still impressive, thanks for the link!

> Arrhenius saw that this human emission of carbon would eventually lead to warming. However, because of the relatively low rate of CO 2 production in 1896, Arrhenius thought the warming would take thousands of years, and he expected it would be beneficial to humanity.

It still seems that scientists at that point looked at it more from an interesting terraforming perspective and less like a looming catastrophy perspective.

I'm afraid democracies are inherently unstable. Athenian lasted 200 years and got swallowed up by Macedonian autocracy. Roman lasted 500 years and got overthrown by the army. Polish lasted 350 years and the parliament voted to allow neighbouring empires to divide the country. The US is at 250 years and people are seriously worried about it devolving into either Gilead or Cyberpunk any moment now.

Most things have finite lifespans. The benchmark for a form of government is certainly not that it should be eternal and continuous.

Look at some cities in Europe. Many have waxed and waned, some even many times. They have been parts of different countries and empires. Many have influenced the world greatly for the better.

That’s quite plausible. It may be that the only super-stable form of government is a high tech invasive AI powered surveillance state that knows everything about everybody and brooks no dissent. China is very hard at work building exactly that right now. In which case, in the long term were probably in trouble.

The AIs might not need to take over, we might actively hand ourselves over to them.

It's not just democracies. I can't think of a system of governance that's stable over centuries. Oppressive regimes tend to implode once amassed suffering reaches a peak of rebellion, or evolve into something more benign (and potentially get conquered then). Even Rome, the long-lasting empire, wasn't ruled the same way throughout its history.

I think that's what GP meant when they wrote that "we could end up in a super-stable oppressive regime". Because the oppressive regimes so far weren't oppressive for long.

The millenary histories of the Egyptian and Chinese empires disagree. Yes, dynasties came and went, but those polities endured for thousands of years—indeed one could argue that the ongoing governance of China by the Communist Party is just the latest dynastic swing.

I'll have to read up on Egypt and pre-XX-century China. How oppressive were these dynasties typically? What did the life look like for a regular subject?

The Vatican has almost a couple of millennia of continuance, but I'm not sure I'd want to say continual stability per se.

Yes, for any "couple of" smaller two. And more than once it was not clear whether the Vatican was still relevant at all.

The Vatican is also not the same size and breadth as the US or China.

The Vatican as a country, I would agree. The Vatican as the Catholic Church, does seem to be on-par with those, at least in terms of head count.

Compared to today's bureaucracy, taxes, etc, they were free as birds...

We'll probably never know, unfortunately. The literate classes in ancient societies rarely wrote about the lives of subsistence farmers, who were the vast majority of the population, so while some details can be reconstructed it's very hard to speculate about how oppressed a typical farmer would have felt.

I think we’re talking about forms of government and not geographical countries. China definitely doesn’t fit here since it’s governing bodies have shifted so drastically in the last few hundred years. I don’t know much about the specifics of ancient Egyptian government but I imagine it would vary with the dynasty if not with the individual ruler. Traditional monarchies are based on the whims of a ruling elite, family, and individual after all. They have no constitution to provide continuity and all law, secular and religious, is superseded by royal decree.

Chinese dynasties got overthrown pretty regularly every two or three hundred years, with a good amount of divided kingdoms, or foreign invaders ruling over much of China, thrown in between.

Oh, also switching dynasties frequently resulted in the entire previous royal family being summarily executed.

For a brief(?) summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_in_Chinese_history

And cultural knowledge:

Burning of books and burying of scholars, Qin dynasty, 213 BCE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o...

Xianyang Palace Archives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xianyang#History

Whenever I get into this, I come back to the political genius in the 4th century who turned the Roman Empire into the Roman Catholic Church.

Rome continued to rule the world for a ~15 centuries. There is still a sizable chunk of the global population that obeys Rome, even though they are not ruled by anything like the Roman Empire.

Realising that the military empire wasn't going to work any more, and changing Rome's historically laisse-faire attitude to religion into an effective method of rule... that's genius at work.

Lasting 250 years is remarkable stability.

Not if compared to 3000 years of Egypt.

Divide by 30 dynasties, though.

And they were overrun by the Sea Peoples, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Kush, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Persia, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Macedonia. Overrun by Rome. Each of those was an end of an established government.

> Roman lasted 500 years and got overthrown by the army

Byzantium (and the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire) disagrees [0]. They lasted until 1453 - incidentally only 50 years before Columbus sailed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire

in context, I think they are referring to the republic.

The parent is talking about the Roman Republic, not the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire and its continuation the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire were not democracies.

Look, I love the Roman Empire just as much as anyone (and get more than a little miffed whenever someone denies that the Eastern Roman empire was legitimately Roman), but it was in no way a democracy.

It's funny -and not counter to your point- but several of the succession struggles that plagued the Eastern Empire are characterized as "almost elections", by historians. Since its inception, the empire never had an official succession system and hence every new ruler was contested. Constantinople was so easily defendable that a popular usurper had great chances of making himself with the throne if he could take control of the capital. More than once, pretenders rose to power by popular acclaim at the hippodrome.

That's actually kind of a fair point. Another thing to consider is that if you consider only the military (which wouldn't have been that weird for a pre-enlightenment democracy), there are quite a few times during the empire that approached democracy (relative to the time period).

I guess, really, I meant to imply some sort of a modern interpretation of democracy, wherein a single city (or military) voting for the entire empire wouldn't exactly cut it.

> They lasted until 1453 - incidentally only 50 years before Columbus sailed

Sidenote: incidentally not coincidentally. The closure of the Silk Road and other important East-West land routes as a result of the Ottoman conquest was one of the important spurs that kicked off the Age of Discovery, as everyone scrambled to find new routes.

> democracies are inherently unstable. Athenian lasted 200 years and got swallowed up by Macedonian autocracy. Roman lasted 500 years and got overthrown by the army.

The Roman Republic learned from Athens’ democracy. Even late Republicans like Sulla and Cicero and Caesar recognised the Republic’s overuse of checks and balances, as well as its lack of a state army. Caesar almost uniquely recognised Rome’s broken voting system. Unfortunately, they were too late.

America’s founders were not. The lessons of the Republic gave us our strong executive and state-funded armed forces. Our Constitutional amendment process is sclerotic, but there is nothing to suggest our Republic is inherently flawed in the way Athens or Rome were.

> Our Constitutional amendment process is sclerotic, but there is nothing to suggest our Republic is inherently flawed in the way Athens or Rome were.

Analyses abound about [what's wrong with American democracy](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Problems_with_the_curren...). The nail in the coffin though, will be the first part of your sentence. The American Constitution is notoriously hard to amend, which means that it is just too easy to maintain as it is by those who benefit from the status quo. We can already see this by how the will of the majority is routinely ignored through unequal representation. My opinion is that this is not sustainable and will have to be resolved through unlawful means, exactly because of the unflexibility of the law.

I am intrigued, can you refer me to where Polands parliament voted for the empires to devide the country?

Well, it's not like there was much choice. It was formality at this point, with foreign armies already inside the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_Sejm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Partition_of_Poland

> As for examples of pivotal moments, WW2 is a good example. We came very close to the world being completely dominated by Orwell style authoritarian one party states.

I doubt that would have lasted for long. Fortunately enough for humanity, free human are more productive than slaves.

Compare also https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FascistButIneffi... and https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DystopiaIsHard

Total subjugation is surprisingly stable, you end up with a poor society but starving peasants don’t revolt nearly as much as you might think. Looking at say English history you find various factions fighting each other, but it’s the upper crust instigating things. Similarly, Tsarist russia became less stable after industrialization and a rising standard of living.

In the end war is expensive because fighters aren’t producing food etc.

Total subjugation is internally stable - your peasants are not that likely to revolt, but you will fall behind your more open neighbours because you'll be much less productive, and that opens you up to external threats. Tsarist Russia and other nations of the time did not really have a choice to abandon industrialization for the sake of stability, it would just have caused it to be ripped apart by the industrialized nations - perhaps sharing the fate of the Ottoman Empire or the fate of China in the Opium wars.

East Germany vs West Germany; North Korea vs South Korea - and that's in less than a century. On a longer timescale, think Ming and Qing dynasties compared to Europe on the same timeframe - China was much more stable during that time, but stability was not sufficient in the long run. However, the current PRC is perhaps a counterexample, though there is a lot of nuance, external conditions and multiple very different approaches that the China leadership tried out during the last 50 years.

From this you could then make the case for instability in the current developed-world being a healthy phenomenon. Which is a nice thought if true.

The argument cuts both ways:

Early tyrannical states and back-breaking agriculture outcompeted relatively free and comfortable hunter gatherers.

That only works if there is an open neighbour. If we end up with authoritarian control being ubiquitous, as potentially with a victory by the axis powers, or the success of global Communism, there wouldn't be any open neighbours to compete with.

It reminds me of getting on a stand-up paddle board. As you find your balance, there is a wobbling. If you haven't done it in a while, it feels almost certain you will fall. But (usually for me), you find your balance, and suddenly you are floating in the water, like Jesus Christ himself.

With all the new elements in society, I think we're all "finding our balance". And once we have, we'll be able to explore the future much more safely and effectively.

I guess that's the "hinge-y" argument. The negative argument might be that we're a house of cards, destined for greater instability not less, and we're experiencing what it is to fall apart.

Ahh yes, nothing like melting the ice caps and flooding several countries to "find the balance" between being able to be alive and everyone on the planet owning 3 automobiles to ensure GM has a profitable quarter

The anti nuke greens in the mid 20th are as much to blame, industry and electricity make up the other 2/3 after all.

That's actually a great example of my point. Thanks for making it. I agree, not everybody needs 3 cars. And we also can't guarantee everyone soon be alive forever, or didn't you hear we're mortal? The sooner we can stop anchoring on straw men and unattainable dreams, the sooner we can actually solve problems. It doesn't feel as good as tilting against the windmills, but it's the path forward that's available to us.

These jabs we throw at oppressive regimes only signal that we are not ready to deal with our own oppressive regime. We have been the boot for a while now, rosy shaded boot, with lights on the side and WiFi. Having to read such well thought out statements while throwing shade at others only feeds my pessimism in foreign policy/domestic media control. Good luck dealing with the never ending boogeyman.

I don't really understand your point. Are you saying we can't tackle a clear case of oppression because there are other cases of oppression? Why can't we talk honestly about and attempt to address all cases of oppression whenever we see them.

Almost any multicentury period has dramatically changed human society.

Also people knew about and have already experienced pollution and other effects of industrilization. Read about London big stink.

Social aspects too, ludites, social disruption, leading to labor as a political / social force. Urbanizatiin. Communism. Labor laws. Etc.

Since ancient times "birth of civilization" we have deforested, over fished/hunted/farmed.

We have continously, dramatically changed our environment and ourselves. We've already genetically engineered ourselves (modern man and medical man are quite different) and numerous other species.

Everybody in every time period believes their time is different. Is frantic changes. Is etc.

Its only because they know more about recent events. Recent events are in memory.

The more you study human history, the more you realize it has always been a dramatic.

> We came very close to the world being completely dominated by Orwell style authoritarian one party states.

It seems like not only we came close, but it is the very reality we currently live in, we just don't like admitting it. Although instead of one party, we have one class.

If you think that, you have no clue what it's like to live in the real deal.

Correct. Because, you see, I don't live in the real deal. I don't live in anything approaching an authoritarian state, even if you include class as well as party.