Declinism | Hacker News Reader

Declinism

en.wikipedia.org

14 pointscainxinth13 comments

> Particularly, it is the predisposition, caused by cognitive biases such as rosy retrospection, to view the past more favourably and the future more negatively.

This sounds like an attempt to bypass the need for an actual argument for your position by painting your opponents as dupes who are in thrall to their cognitive biases.

One could just as well write about "improvism" that it's "the predisposition, caused by cognitive biases such as rosy prospection, to view the future more favourably and the past more negatively." This would bring the same amount of valuable content to an argument, i.e. nearly zero.

It's obvious that it's possible both for things to get better and to get worse, so if you want to argue for one or the other, please bring some actual evidence, not just generalities about an "ism" with which the other side is afflicted.

Sometimes the problem with what people believe isn't that it isn't true but that they talk and think about it all the fucking time. Questions their headspace is often the more emphatic way to act.

You've rightly hedged with "sometimes", the article on the other hand is very whiggish and seems to incline that any perception of decline at any time in any place is a cognitive bias and not representative of reality. What about in the UK during and in the years after WW2, when rationing continued and in some cases got even worse even after the war ended and average body weights were dropping? Where people who perceived a decline there and then operating under delusions and believing things which weren't true? Do their experiences at the time not count because a generation later things started to recover? Or maybe their experiences don't count because the decline of the British empire was actually a good thing from certain points of view and anybody who saw it as a decline had an invalid opinion?

Or maybe because technology seems to march inexorably onward, decline in other aspects of life are wholly negated and therefore anybody who perceives any decline is wrong. If rent and groceries now account for a larger portion of an average worker's spending but ipads got twice as fast, does that mean that people who perceive a decline are objectively wrong?

> "The great summit of declinism" according to Adam Gopnick, "was established in 1918, in the book that gave decline its good name in publishing: the German historian Oswald Spengler's best-selling, thousand-page work The Decline of the West."

This is so true, Declinism isn’t what it used to be.

Declinism, also known as reality.

I'm often gloomy about the state of my home country, the United Kingdom. When you look at just about any statistic, the country is objectively worse off than it used to be. Real wage collapse, increasing food bank use, increasing crime, growing healthcare waiting lists, the list goes on. There is very little to be cheerful about.

Not every country is as badly run as the UK.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series takes this to an extreme level. Everything’s in decline, how to we plot our way back up, while minimising the down time?

The characters are somehow hollow, females ones in particular, but despite this it’s excellent stuff and I really enjoyed them.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/43939-foundation-chronologi...

Decline is an inevitable consequence of overreaching and then slamming into material constraints. Prosperity is not exactly sustainable. Inequality can only occur when wealth creation outpaces the distributive functions of an economy.

One can view every human organization as a Tower of Babel in the making, or look toward the overall success of humanity as having intermittent setbacks.

Declining, therefore, is simply an overly narrow foxus.

This is just some 2nd rate philosopher's attempt to be relevant by inventing a term that describes an already existing aspect of pessimism.

If you think of what is true as goodness and lightness then you'll never error and look at the darkness and think of the darkness as the truth. You have already made a choice which way to lean, maybe today you'll be one of the 10,000.

Advice for everyone: don't embrace the darkness. Reject the "darkness as truth".

I consider this an over-correction that serves to benefit the status quo. I’m interested to hear why you think otherwise.

Not the OP, but it’s a choice. The “why” here isn’t really a reason. People have children, or don’t have a belief with which they can expect an afterlife. They try to stay optimist with all the Read Live Love whatever books and motivational social media posts circulating right now. I believe in Islam and thus that 1) The world is in decline since the very beginning and 2) There is an afterlife with absolute justice, so this world declining doesn’t mean pessimism for me, as it’s all temporary anyway and my life spent here is less than a blink of an eye compared to my total lifespan (infinity).

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