I surrender. A major economic and social crisis in the US seems inevitable
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Which means that if you are looking for reasons to be pessimistic, you can find endless websites which will tell you why you should be pessimistic. And vice versa, of course.
Things are rarely as good as they seem, but they are rarely as bad as they seem either.
What you're describing is called "normalcy bias" or "negative panic".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
During an unfolding crisis or disaster, 80% of people minimize genuine threat indicators and consistently underestimate the probability and consequences of the disaster.
Most people tend to cherry-pick the positive indicators to pay attention to, while ignoring or minimizing the negative indicators.
For the referenced article, a reasonable person who is not operating under normalcy bias might contradict the author's evidence, logic and assertions with different evidence, logic and assertions.
But to just dismiss all of it with a wave of the hand and a one-sentence heuristic is the very essence of normalcy bias.
Instead, he just rehearses a jumble of pessimistic conclusions from what he himself describes as coming from "diverse disciplinary directions" and that "the causal diagnoses differ somewhat."
I.e. the article just a grab-bag of quotes from talking heads who agree neither on the cause of the crisis, nor the nature of the crisis, nor what we should be doing to advert the crisis. The only thing they have in common is their marketing strategy: you can sell more books if you get people all riled up.
For example, Daniels cites Howe as predicting that we are due for a "turning", a "bone-jarring Crises" like there was in the 1760s, 1850s and 1920s". Um. Ok, that really narrows it down, eh? :-) Sounds suitably bombastic, but oh-so-conveniently ambiguous. No matter what happens, he can claim he predicted it, because surely it will have something in common with either 1760, or 1850, or 1920....And Howe's knock-down proof? Well, history follows "saeculum" of 80 years or so. A pseudo-scientific term for when one generation dies off and is replaced by another... great rhetoric, but there's no "there" there.
And the rest of the article just adds ambiguity to ambiguity.
I.e. Daniels doesn't lay out any coherent case. The only common theme of his citations is pessimism, and not even pessimism about the same things! I.e. what brings it all together isn't any rational reason. Daniels is a super-smart guy who is generally very rational, but when you are depressed, the whole world seems depressing. And being in a pessimistic mood makes pessimistic conclusions seem salient and cumulative, even if they really are not. Can't blame him, we've all been through a lot the past couple of years, but its important to be able to catch yourself when you are in one of these loops and not let it overwhelm you, especially when there's really no rational reason to do so.
Its a pretty extraordinary hypothesis that we are so inevitably doomed to crisis that just giving up (as he says in his title) is a rational response, I think we have the right to demand some pretty extraordinary evidence, don't you?
But LLMs face no such restriction :-) I mean, Michael Cohen just got in trouble for citing non-existent court cases. We are at the point where a lawyer smart enough to represent the president of the united states cannot tell the difference between real and hallucinated arguments.
LLMs amplify, automate, and mass produce our ability to fool ourselves into believing what we desperately want to be true.
It's scary, but I don't want to fall into the same trap that Mitch Daniels did in the OP, and conclude that an epistemic apocalypse is inevitable. Eventually, we will all acquire the necessary skepticism to not fall victim, the same way we learned to cope with chain letters, "satanic panic" over D&D, and other parasitical side effects of new technology and changing times.
The mainstream media once again show that anything positive, or exhibiting the human capability to pull out of crises and create a decent future are boring, whereas gloom and doom are newsworthy.
One might speculate how things might be if we hadn't built up such an insane concentration of wealth, with consequent insane amounts of waste, or if humanity had been spending on beneficial uses of wealth and technology instead of some 50% or more (estimated) on war and preparations for one or more.
The old saying "no weapon goes unused" has migrated down to our streets, schools and other gathering places. Only nuclear weapons seem to have escaped this "rule".
So far.
Nothing is "inevitable". People make choices. They often choose poorly.
What about death and taxes? Well, the rich are working on those. They are pretty successful with the latter.
There is one inevitability: if a thing cannot go on forever, it will stop.
Ballooning debt cannot balloon forever.
Concentration of wealth cannot concentrate forever.
Exponential growth cannot grow exponentially forever.
These things will all stop.
There are hard social and physical limits.
It is inevitable.
In 1984, Bezmenov gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin ... His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and “demoralization.” It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit.
...
“What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”
Bezmenov described this process as “a great brainwashing” that has four basic stages. The first stage is called “demoralization” which takes from 15 to 20 years to achieve. According to the former KGB agent, that is the minimum number of years it takes to re-educate one generation of students that is normally exposed to the ideology of its country — in other words, the time it takes to change what the people are thinking.
He used the examples of 1960s hippies coming to positions of power in the 1980s in the government and businesses of America. Bezmenov claimed this generation was already “contaminated” by Marxist-Leninist values. Of course, this claim that many baby boomers are somehow espousing KGB-tainted ideas is hard to believe but Bezmenov’s larger point addressed why people who have been gradually “demoralized” are unable to understand that this has happened to them.
Referring to such people, Bezmenov said:
“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”
Demoralization is a process that is “irreversible.” Bezmenov actually thought (back in 1984) that the process of demoralizing America was already completed. It would take another generation and another couple of decades to get the people to think differently and return to their patriotic American values, claimed the agent.
In what is perhaps a most striking passage in the interview, here’s how Bezmenov described the state of a “demoralized” person:
“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” said Bezmenov. “A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.”
It’s hard not to see in that the state of many modern Americans. We have become a society of polarized tribes, with some people flat out rejecting facts in favor of narratives and opinions.
Once demoralization is completed, the second stage of ideological brainwashing is “destabilization”. During this two-to-five-year period, asserted Bezmenov, what matters is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. Basically, the subverter (Russia) would look to destabilize every one of those areas in the United States, considerably weakening it.
This seems to be more or less where we are even though the subverter (Russia) does not seem to be the one pulling the strings anymore. Who does is a good question, it is quite possible the subversion of academia was so thorough that it has gone rogue and started their own revolution.
The third stage would be “crisis.” It would take only up to six weeks to send a country into crisis, explained Bezmenov. The crisis would bring “a violent change of power, structure, and economy” and will be followed by the last stage, “normalization.” That’s when your country is basically taken over, living under a new ideology and reality.
This will happen to America unless it gets rid of people who will bring it to a crisis, warned Bezmenov. What’s more “if people will fail to grasp the impending danger of that development, nothing ever can help [the] United States,” adding, “You may kiss goodbye to your freedom.”
It bears saying that when he made this statement, he was warning about baby boomers and Democrats of the time.
In another somewhat terrifying excerpt, here’s what Bezmenov had to say about what is really happening in the United States: It may think it is living in peace, but it has been actively at war with Russia, and for some time:
“Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime,” said the former KGB agent. “False. United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system.”
Much of what Bezmenov said checks out and many of his predictions have come to pass even though the subversion has outlived the subverter. It is hard not to see the parallels between what he described and the current madness around DEI, BLM, 'gender', 'decolonisation' and other examples of identity politics.
Creating a Communist Paradise on Earth | Jack Barsky
Jack Barsky (born Albrecht Dittrich, Jack being at first an American alias) is a German-American author, IT specialist and former sleeper agent of the KGB. He spied on the United States from 1978 to 1988, and was exposed after the Cold War. Barsky then became a resource for U.S. counterintelligence agencies, which secured his citizenship. His autobiography, “Deep Undercover,” was published in 2017.
Just rationalisation. Society and culture is messy anyway so you could prove a bunch of predictions without them having any meaning. But I would say he was just predicting future trends that were already in motion and then imagining their efforts were moving the needle where in fact they achieved nothing of note.