Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

However, income inequality is definitely one of the things getting worse with time. And it’s scary for everyone, because if you don’t have money, your ability to survive is reduced, and if you do have money… look back to what happened only a handful of centuries ago or even less when the proletariat revolted.

Sure, we aren’t there currently, but the trajectory is not going in a direction which inspires confidence in our future.

Why? For better or worse, the average person in America is lazy. Arguing online is easy, but actually engaging in kinetic warfare over a sustained period of time is extremely difficult. Even the minor conflicts that erupt at protests are tiny and irrelevant compared to an actual civil war.

There's also not much money to be made in actually destroying things, as compared to drumming up outrage (which is how the media, large and small, Alex Jones to CNN, makes its money.)

My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.

This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's basic geopolitics. Every large state does this to each other. The US to China, China to the US, US to Russia, Russia to US.

What's annoying to me is having to lead coworkers though a rational thought exercise about "do you really think we're divided? as compared to what? how exactly do you measure division?" and so forth just to get them to admit it's mostly some generalized feeling and not some rationally considered measure.

I sometimes wonder why the US gov't doesn't put CCP/Russia on blast and make Americans more aware of this. Americans love a common enemy, and if they caught wind of how much they are truly being manipulated it might shift the narrative. Maybe that would embarrass too many citizens to realize the stuff they mindlessly parrot is largely a planted narrative.

This is not only a terrible American exceptionalism thing to say, but also probably wrong if you look at history of failing states. The Russian emipre was it the brink of collapse before WW1, participation in that war lead to its collapse sooner then it probably would have.

From an outside view much of the world is long since tired of American exceptionalism, and American influence on the rest of the world. For many people the collapse of America would be a preferable option over the status quo. Me personally would prefer no war at all (neither civil nor world). However I would love to see American influence dwindle in favor of a more global solidarity of the workers of the world (including American workers).

Classical liberalism is a necessity for pluralism, and pluralism is necessary for a country as diverse as the United States to survive. As soon as you drop "live and let live" as a fundamental principle and start trying to micromanage personal choice, you're on the road to division.

The Right should stop trying to ban gay marriage or abortion or TG folks from public schools. The Left should stop trying to ban guns or family gatherings or large sugary drinks or the rebel flag or traditional pronouns.

Until American can break the habit of trying to control one another and make other Americans live a certain way, we will never live up to E Pluribus Unum.

EDIT: Case in point...

How is this a conspiracy theory and how is this a bad thing? The so-called Cold War (i.e., WWIII) was won by the USA "without ever firing a shot", by exactly the same method: sowing division within the socialist bloc. Do you think that the U.S.-influenced division of its enemies was a bad thing? Would you have preferred an all-out war between the two nuclear powers?

I don't think the population is capable of a civil war just due to their health.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States

What are they going to do? Fight each other on their Power Wheelchairs?

Yes I am aware of the far right arming themselves and training for years for a coming 'war'. I think with the Parler leaks + Facebook, I suspect the government knows the exact location of the overwhelming majority of these people and wouldn't hesitate to gun them down if some calamity broke out.

I agree that the CCP, Soviets and others are probably devoting some resources to spreading division. It is so cheap to do in the grand scheme of things so I guess that everyone including 'soft allies' might be participating but these tactics only work due to real issues in the society that have been unresolved for decades.

Besides...long term China has more serious problems to contend with. Things such as the coming population collapse, extreme climate change that threatens their food supplies, and growing unrest as the population starts to expect more and more from the CCP.

If those are your options, what is wrong with being destroyed from within? The two sides can split the country and each get a share - say, in proportion to their numbers.

The British aren't exactly suffering after their empire dissolved. Life still looks pretty good for them.

There is no reason to unite people who do not want to be united.

It also wouldn't surprise me if the CCP or Russia or both are conducting propaganda campaigns to break up the U.S. without them firing a shot. These strike me as very shortsighted; the threat of an external adversary is pretty much the only thing holding large empires together, so both of those are next on the break-up list of the U.S. splits. (Arguably, the primary factor behind political divisions in the U.S. was the breakup of the Soviet Union; without the external threat of communism we have nothing to remind us that we're more alike than different.)

It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a full-time job for a large number of Russian KGB, and Chinese state security employees.

Progress toward that point needs to be arrested or reversed judiciously, with rest stops along the way being some of the most useful.

Sometimes it can be worthwhile to point out that after WWII peace had been achieved but there were only three types of people in the world remaining.

Those that won WWII, Those that lost WWII, and those that were saved by the ones that won WWII.

Everyone else was killed.

That's what made it a world war.

Everyone living is descended from only these three types, spawned for better or worse out of their hard-won environment of unprecedented world peace.

Anyone dissatisfied with this, the only way they can change it is to start WWIII.

Got any ideas if there might be somebody willing to take us further down that road anytime soon?

Climate change by greenhouse gas emission is just the cherry on top. The knife to the eye, so to speak.

Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity. Our biological support systems are collapsing all around us. System shaped by natural selection are extremely resilient. That has prevented much of the damage to manifest itself in clear signals. But now the damage has become so big that even nature's resilience cannot cope with it anymore and we start to witness more and more systems fragment and fail. See the Great Barrier reef.

This is just the start. Water is beginning to get critically scarce in many regions of the world. The political upheavals caused by the effects of predatory over exploitation and pollution will bring down nations.

And so forth.

The reason the baby boomer had a much larger share of the national wealth is because they were a much larger share of the population. If you do the same graph per capita, you'll see that there's pretty much no difference between generations.

You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.

... in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about, when taking quantitative state-produced stats at face value, and with naive extrapolation (and ignoring statistical fluctuations, black swans, etc).

E.g. "the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars". Global warming is already a big factor and is only expected to be more so in the future.

And that's not even before any real battle for resources such as water, crops, and dwindling minerals start, mass immigration due to climate change brings its own conflicts and challenges, the decline of the US hegemony brings forth new hegemonical and tons of peripheral claims, and lets not even count inflation and other pressures (including boomer-era people coming to retirement age en masse with lots of savings issues in the US, and broken pension systems in Europe). I haven't even mentioned a possible permanent (or long term) covid mutations situation (we're already 2 years in, and measures already had a huge impact on economies).

>Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me.

Not to make it sound like equivalent times, but jewish people had an extremely hard time imagining their German co-patriots would try to kill them too, plenty of such historical accounts from pre/early WWII, even up to the point they were already dealing with force registration in ethnicity lists, deportations, and so on.

so this seems sort of like the old joke about jumping off the skyscraper and as you fall past the 10th floor say "so far so good", only now the person falling is doing cocaine and says "things are only getting better!"

We're in a sports car hitting the gas as we head towards a cliff and you're talking about how much better the interior is on this new model compared to the last.

This is orthogonal as to whether a collapse is around the corner or not. If you look at the science in the IPCC report, combine with the inability to hit every single emissions target defined in every single climate treaty. It seems civilization collapse is on the table.

Also:

We probably are already at 2C locked in: https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-26...

Billions of refugees by 2100: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648...

Etc.

If we don't drastically reduce emissions in the next decades, it seems very probable that this global civilization will end. Which might not be a bad thing in the long run, but in the short term it will cause a lot of suffering.

The Kingdom of Italy also maintained Roman institutions like the consuls and Roman senate, which continued to exist as an organization until the 7th century.

With Odoacer acknowledging Nepos as the nominal ruler, referring to himself with Roman honorifics (usually as a patrician), and Roman institutions being preserved, I bet the average Roman civilian wouldn’t have experienced too big of a difference between 474 and 478 even if the Western Roman Empire had already been ‘replaced’ by the Kingdom of Italy.

This framing is also relevant to present-day conversations. Claiming that our civilization is collapsing makes people eyes roll. Claim that we're losing state capacity is a message people are more receptive to.

By the way, is there any sort of memoirs from ordinary people before WW2? Like did people at the time see it coming 1 years, 5 years etc. before?

The pressure we are putting on other species and flora is immense but humanity’s future has never been so certain.

The only way to claim civilization collapse is to move the goal posts to a population decimation. But even that would still only put us where we were less than 200 years ago.

Oh and don’t forget the French Empire fell in the 1700’s.

But does that count or did thet just evolve into a new form?

There is a really interesting talk on this: https://longnow.org/seminars/02009/feb/13/social-collapse-be...

I'm old enough to have known a lot of people who lived through the Depression _because_ of FDR's programs. Whether the New Deal alone could have saved the country is literally academic to the tens of millions who were saved by jobs in the CWA, WPA and CCC, or the relief provided by the FSA, SSA and economic aid to businesses under the NIRA. It seems unusually cold hearted for any historian or economist to ignore the tremendous suffering those measures spared so many, just because they didn't meet some theoretical threshold for full recovery.

A more complete collapse might have rendered the US too damaged to focus any effort outside of itself. As it was, many people opposed entering the war on precisely those grounds-- that the US should deal with its own internal problems rather than those a continent away. FDR plowed through those objections, and incidentally sparked the economic recovery fueled by massive industrial mobilization.

Whether or not you agree with FDR's handling of the Great Depression, you cannot separate that from the course of events that shaped the outcomes of WW II (both good and bad)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/19/histo... https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B01M34NBLZ&preview=new...

What amazes me is people's ability to put their fingers into their ears and go "Lalala, I'm not hearing you. I'm not seeing the problem, lalala!"

Every rational observer should be able see the calamity we're headed for. I guess even the prospect of /possible/ having to give up /some/ comfort is enough for most people to just stop thinking and retreat into the ivory towers of wishful thinking.

"There's nothing wrong with our current societal setup. It's going good for me, isn't it? And of course there will be a magical mystery technology that will save us all."

We're so fucked.

Africa too, is capable of supporting a much higher population IF we want to get really serious about doing so.

the fallback, then, is to "change the system" (eg constitutional law changes, new checks and balances etc) so that people do the "right thing" by default

sounds great (even if a tall order). except this won't work either. there is no real "system" to change. you can write perfect laws and people will simply agree to ignore or subvert them if they are not internalized. we are after all just a collection of homo sapiens with our transient and volatile mental states

if I had a magic wand with a single spell I'd change the teachers. and hope that the generation they educate grows and takes control fast enough...

That certainly makes sense. The existence of organized crime does represent some failing of the state towards collapse.

The power of a sovereign to directly tax, and indirectly inflate its currency says otherwise.

You also need to quantify what it means for the economy to 'run off state subsidies'. There are particular sectors of the economy that are subsidized in China. The rest stand on their own. Smart subsidies reduce the overall cost to the economy, by building the foundation on which the rest could be built on.

100% of a state's economy obviously can't run off subsidies. But a smaller percentage can - and when invested smartly, grows the rest of the economy. Do you have any numbers for which fields of China's economy depend on these subsidies, and which percentage of those fields those subsidies represent?

People say this all the time to try to sound wise, but in reality it's sort of a meaningless distinction.

There's a wide range of functioning models for democracy, and a democratic republic is just one form of representative democracy:

Nearly all modern Western-style democracies function as some type of representative democracy; for example, the United Kingdom (a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy), India (a federal parliamentary republic), France (a unitary semi-presidential republic), and the United States (a federal presidential republic).

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