The end is nigh and here's why
experimental-history.com
experimental-history.com
Most people aren't nasty or getting nastier but nasty people are likely over represented in those with power and there seems to be a current swing to having more such people getting into positions of power.
Added to that is that modern technology and weapons make it easier for a few "bad apples" in power to cause more grief to more people than before.
I finally caved to one of those "balanced news" sites because someone had a 50%-off sale. They have a feature where you can see news stories that are being ignored by either liberal or conservative outlets.
It's damned fascinating, tempered by the fact that it's also damned terrifying that the populace as a whole is being controlled by it... and also that the future President of the US is trying to control it.
But maybe that's just me falling into the trap TFA talks about. :)
It is good that gentle people still exist and may, in fact, be very numerous, but is it still as good if their ability to contribute to societal norms is diminished?
Their willingness to ignore their conscience gives them serious business advantages, and their enormous profits have given them too much power. It's all "ends justify the means" fools.
In some aspects I would argue so as well - partially on the basis of our societies having a lower complexity amount back then.
The last two decades we enabled high throughput information flows via real-time video streams, social media, news feeds, etc.. At what cost? Did we actually gain anything over the 1999s in exchange for all that complexity?
The article talks about “good cup bad cup” and how negative news is much more impactful - again, at what cost did we enable all these information flows with potentially negative information?
Will personalized AI agents allow us to reduce the complexity coming from these information flows?
lol, just lol.
But that specific question was restated wrongly. Again in footnote [2] and in the link itself, it says it was 14% of Christians who answered "definitely" or "probably" with another 37% saying "not sure".
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/08/about-fou...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant
There are ways to justify that answer. One can believe in the moral tenets of Christianity, while also believing that its supposed leader was a fiction, or a conflation of real people. You can see the story as a myth, which is not the same as fiction. I don't know any such people, but it is a realistic version of Christian theology.
But I suspect it's mostly just cranks lying to pollsters.
Or maybe we are seeing unprecedented levels of CO2, cleared land, and population? I guess that's just bias too, then, right?
An alternative explanation is that every time someone thought society was getting worse, it WAS, and here we are, at the worst point.
Like, people in the 20th century were living in constant fear of mutually assured destruction for dozens of years. Is that better or worse than the guaranteed collapse of the ecosystem? I couldn’t tell.
But these days, no one really cares about a nuclear war, it seems, even if one of the nuclear power is currently fighting a war; and it’s appearing to lose it.
It is successfully using its nuclear arsenal to deter aid for the country it's invading. A lot of materiel is sent, but its uses are limited. A massive attack on the capital would be entirely justified, and is well within their capability, but is forbidden for fear of escalating to nuclear weapons.
Because of that, they are continuing to prosecute the war, and making minor gains. They cannot continue that forever, but in another month, their target is likely to be hamstrung even further. They may yet win, or negotiate a peace that they can pass off as a win (which would include Ukraine never joining NATO).
People may not have that immediate fear of nuclear war that characterized the 50s through the 80s. But the threat is in play, and it's being kept out of daily discourse only because the US refuses to challenge it.
Maybe in two or three decades we’ll discover that Russia was nearer to using nukes than we assume.
The fallacy in your argument is that climate disaster is already happening. We have already rendered hundreds of species extinct. It is not a future risk.
Likewise in reverse, there are ways a nuclear war could be relatively good for almost every species except humans, our livestock, and our pets.
Given the trends on renewables, I think we're going to solve the climate… but also a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated trends start implying silly things starting in the early 2030s, so expect something else to become a problem soon enough.
Yep. Compare to, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_late_Middle_Ages .
> here we are, at the worst point
Not even close. (But things are likely to change radically after Jan 20, so check back in a few months.)
Of course, now this reduces to how we define catastrophe, and we obviously have a difference. But I see a halving of the human population hardly a catastrophe at all, whereas the permanent extinction of species a much worse thing.
Fair enough, but then I'll point you to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events
No matter how you slice it, these are far from the worst of times.
We are literally in an extinction event right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
or even:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
BTW, humans would almost certainly not exist were it not for the KT event.
And it's worse than it's ever been. Before, it's not like we were pumping sulphur into the air until it rained acid, or lead from gasoline into the air where everybody breathed it, or CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer, or pumping so much pollution into rivers that they literally caught fire. No, this is the worst, right now.
/s
Look, there are serious environmental things going on. Plastic particulates. Forever chemicals. Estrogenoids. CO2. There's a lot that's real, serious, and is having real, damaging effects. I don't want to minimize that.
At the same time, you seem to be hyper-fixated on one thing. You seem to be an example of what the article is talking about.
I don't doubt there is still a lot of ecological damage being done and at least some of it is cumulative, getting worse with time even if what we're doing year-on-year gets better, but a lot of it is not. We wantonly destroyed common supplies of air and water 40+ years ago in ways you almost never see any more and somehow this gets totally ignored.
Sometime after Covid, hen turned atheist. Still has incredible anxiety though.
- lovers of themselves
- lovers of money
- boastful
- proud
- abusive
- ungrateful
- without love
- unforgiving
- slanderous
- without self-control
- brutal
- not lovers of the good
- treacherous
- rash
- conceited
- lovers of pleasure
- hypocritical
Certainly we should not be electing them to office. That would be a terrible idea, IMO.
Edit: idk really, but toxic/fake positivity is not helpful in a competitve env, and to sales is just lying/over promising
> anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
There's an important difference between ambition for selfish gain and ambition to better help others.
> but toxic/fake positivity is not helpful in a competitve env
That's why I counsel real positivity that comes from having tuned one's moral compass towards compassion, or at least trying to.
As to competitive environs, we would be much less wasteful and destructive if we cooperated instead of competing.
> sales is just lying/over promising
Merlin explained in Excalibur that honesty is the most important virtue via, "When a man lies, he murders some part of the world."
The communist countries have some of the most polluted areas on the planet.
> There's an important difference between ambition for selfish gain and ambition to better help others.
Everybody is selfish. The beauty of the free market is it enables selfish behavior to help others. All attempts at creating selfless societies have resulted in misery and poverty.
They were not cooperating, my friend, they were manifesting a ruling class that was above the law and pillaged the land for personal gain and sometimes even for the state.
> Everybody is selfish.
We are only as selfish as we choose to be, likewise our sense of ethics is only as developed as the virtues we embrace. Yes, we begin life selfish and most of our cultures are selfishly oriented towards others, but these are all the result of the citizens' choices. And, yes, our beliefs are chosen as well, and are as adaptable as we like.
> The beauty of the free market is it enables selfish behavior to help others.
I would say, rather, that the free market is good at letting people act selfishly, for either good or ill. That's why I like my capitalism with fetters, plenty of fetters. But, yeah, capitalism that doesn't destroy the powerless is the best path forward.
> All attempts at creating selfless societies have resulted in misery and poverty.
No, most humans that say they're creating selfless societies are really just grifters who want to be the new royalty. Selfishness always results in misery on some level, for some person or persons.
We can develop systems that reward those who innovate and improve our life on Earth, without jeopardizing our environment and the peace among people. We could choose that, my friend. The problem is that most people don't care enough about others to be generous.
We could each choose to learn how to be virtuous and then dedicate ourselves to helping implement a compassionate, sensible, and sustainable world society.
All that's holding us back is our unwillingness to admit we each have the ability to be a part of the solution, as opposed to our currently sadass status quo.
The free market relies on free exchange, which means each party to the deal is better off making the deal. Forcible or fraudulent exchanges are not part of the free market.
That is not true at all.
Totally Free markets are 'buyer beware', If fraud can exist, then that is fine, you should have done your homework before buying a lemon. Each side is responsible for verification.
Markets where fraud is caught and removed, have rules, and laws, regulations, enforcement.
And thus many say are 'not free'. Add regulation and then people complain, "Why are you regulating me, I want my free market".
You can make up your own definitions, but the free market requires a government to protect rights. Defrauding people is stealing, not free market. You cannot have a free market when people are allowed to say "either your signature goes on the contract or your brains."
Buyer beware is because the government cannot always protect people against fraud, no matter how much regulation and enforcement there is. Buyer beware also means people should read contracts before signing them. That's not fraud.
A lot of people like to believe free market means no government, but that's simply not true.
For another example, if someone sells you a jar marked "grape jelly" and you open it later and it's just water, you've been defrauded. This is a crime, not the fault of the buyer, and not free market.
I took your sentence as the opposite. And so was making the extreme point on totally free markets are chaos that would allow fraud.
Perhaps I'm too sensitive to the 'right' narrative that government is evil and markets should be 'free' of regulation or laws. So now when someone starts talking free-market, I assume they are in that group.
There are groups, sometimes libertarians, that argue all regulation is bad, for example, if I buy the "Grape Jelly" and it is water, then the 'Free' Market will self correct by people not buying your "Grape Jelly" and you would go out of business.
I agree, laws and regulations are needed for a market to work. Was just pushing back on the group that thinks even that is not 'free' enough.
William Gibson is, by far, my favorite author.
> "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith."
> Chatterjee criticized her for promoting a "cult of suffering" and a distorted, negative image of Calcutta, exaggerating work done by her mission and misusing funds and privileges at her disposal.
> Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, mayor of Calcutta from 2005 to 2010, said that "she had no significant impact on the poor of this city", glorified illness instead of treating it and misrepresented the city: "No doubt there was poverty in Calcutta, but it was never a city of lepers and beggars, as Mother Teresa presented it."
While I am not a confidante of hers (and neither are you) I expect her selfish reward was the satisfaction in her work, the gratitude of those she helped, and the approbation from others.
Selfish desires are not only about money.
It's possible my father was an Altar Boy in Pennsylvania. Some real monsters found a place to stay in those Parishes. My theory is that that's why PA is the home of some of the best wrestlers in the world. PA's report on CC sexual abuse of children was, IIUC, 800 pages long. And, to keep those collection baskets full, they covered it all up.
I like how Robin Wiliams said it, "It's not just a sin, it's a felony!"
We must treasure all children, and protect them with the most stringent consequences for the monsters of this world.
And, yes, not very many people (less than 10% throughout history, IIUC) make the effort necessary to transmute any of their vices into virtues, but that doesn't mean it's not possible. What it means is that most people are a bunch of Dunning-Kruger low-achievers. The humble among us are the ones who can reach true-expert level on the paths we take in our life.
Humility is essential to make progress as we must reach for a Power beyond ourselves to deal with our pathetic, selfish, weak-willed ego. Anything we are allowed to achieve only demonstrates our utter incapacity to make such progress on our own.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
It awaits our connecting with It. Religion is always personal, between the person and our Creator, Maintainer, and eventual Destroyer. No one escapes the fact that we all draw a last breath.
Just send a thankful, loving vibe out towards the universe's Creator, my accomplished friend. And then perhaps read some Castaneda; that sh_t's craaaaazy, but not completely untrue.
The resistence inside of us is the enemy of our happiness. Castaneda is very clear about that in his 10th (IIRC) and final book. Not all aspects of our mind are "ours"; he calls it a "foreign installation".
Peace be with you, Mr. Bright. It's an honor for me to serve you this way on this day.
> But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. (1 Tim 3, ESV)
For good or for bad, Judeo Christian morality was always rooted in a fear of God. As the belief in God has warped and wained away from biblical moorings, we shouldn't be surprised that morality has gone with it. To such an extent that, seemingly, moral character has very little impact when evaluating leaders, as long as other ideological boxes are checked.
On the other hand, given the context of this writing, it seems that these kinds of people are always present... in all times and all cultures. So maybe there isn't so much uniquely bad about our current times? I don't know, just wondering out loud.
The Great(est) Command(ment) is "To love God with all your being, and then love your neighbor as yourself."
Society improves a little when someone chooses to not do bad because they're afraid to get punished.
Society improves much more when someone chooses to do good by having evolved their sense of ethics and self-control.
Our most important human ability, and the reason we have a {moral compass, mind, and free will} is our ability to self-evolve our ideals, attitudes, and behaviors out of the selfish and animalistic towards the compassionate and humanitarian.
Our Creator loves us and prefers us to live in peace and prosperity, but we must choose to implement such a societal system that better rewards virtue and minimizes the harms caused from vice. And such a system must be our choice (i.e. democracy) because there must be no compulsion in religion (which pervades life as an ethos of compassionately positive contribution to the whole).
> As the belief in God has warped and wained away from biblical moorings, we shouldn't be surprised that morality has gone with it. To such an extent that, seemingly, moral character has very little impact when evaluating leaders, as long as other ideological boxes are checked.
Yes, that is indeed the case, but Christianity is no more or less guilty than most all of the other religions, their majorities taking the selfishly divisive road over the compassionately unifying road.
> it seems that these kinds of people are always present... in all times and all cultures.
As we live and breath, my friend. We are each those people, to more or less extent as per the predilections of our individual nature and those of the cultures we inhabit. The key is that we all(1) have the power both how to learn to be better as well as to choose to be better. [(1) There are the mentally ill and physically damaged and developmentally disabled folks that do not have the power to control themselves, but they are very rare.]
The universe helps, though, in that the human-only Law of Karma determines our happiness or unhappiness by how we have treated others. It is the applied aspect of "You reap what you sow." It is our environment's feedback system to let us know if we've been naughty or nice, whether we are headed in the right direction or not.
> So maybe there isn't so much uniquely bad about our current times?
Not for individual human beings; vice is vice and virtue is virtue and we have many inertias against our becoming better. But our technological progress has facilitated greater destruction to the Earth via war and pollution. It drives a more efficient systematic greed that oppresses the poor more brutally, and the rich have used their power to hire attorneys to craft the laws that let them rise above other human beings like royalty. The codifying of the MBA ethos that changed the "personnel" department into "human resources" is quite the tell.
> I tell you, my friends, don’t be afraid of people. They can kill the body, but after that they can do nothing more to hurt you. I will show you the one to fear. You should fear God, who has the power to kill you and also to throw you into hell. Yes, he is the one you should fear.
So although love may be seen as the primary teaching, there is definitely a dollop of fear mixed in their. This is common in Abrahamic traditions, with some notable exceptions such as the early Sufi mystic Rabia Basri, who said
> If I adore You out of fear of Hell, burn me in Hell! If I adore you out of desire for Paradise, lock me out of Paradise. But if I adore you for Yourself alone, do not deny to me Your eternal beauty.
Conversely, many Eastern religions encourage individuals to understand fear's root causes and work towards overcoming them through mindfulness and insight.
As such, fear is a great way to get people to jump start entering the Path of Love. No one should be comfortable living their life in ignorance to the gentle lovingkindess we should be working to transform ourself into. It certainly kick-started my reestablishing my connection with God in my late 20s.
As to Rabia Basri's quote, I don't get that from my Sufi Murshid's teachings. Though he has passed away now, our fundamental command is:
Always love. Teach to always love.
Never hate. Teach to never hate.
In that vein, I don't even know if we're Sunni or Shi'ite, because it doesn't matter. We are to not divide into sects, and that extends to all of humankind, where one's religious path and even lack thereof should not be a divisive factor in our love for one another. Love is our responsibility alone, not that of those we encounter. We are merely to exemplify love and then teach it as best we can, to those who care to learn.
> Conversely, many Eastern religions encourage individuals to understand fear's root causes and work towards overcoming them through mindfulness and insight.
There is great wisdom in tackling fear's causes and unsavory effects, as much of fear's causes and results are due to the internal enemy's (nefs, selfish ego) urgings and justifications.
The Quran says of those who love God with all their being:
On them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.
Thanks you for this loving conversation this morning. Peace be with you, friend. I love you, and am at your service.
The way I understand it is by comparing it to a romantic relationship. If you stick to it out of being scared of being alone ("fear of hell"), it will not fulfill. If you stick to it for superficial reasons ("desire for Paradise"), it will not fulfill. But if you stick to it out of genuine love for the other person, then it has a chance of lasting.
I consider the greatest song of all time to be "Love is the Truth" by Jack White, whose chorus is:
It's the right thing to do
And you know it
And it's inside of you
So just show it
Love is the truth
And it's inside of you (bop ba ba ba ba)
It's the right thing to do
That negative force presses upon our thoughts and feelings, and is our downfall should we not fight it and try to become virtuous. We must try with all our heart, my friend, and our only hope is to beseech the Creator of this magnificent and mysterious universe.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
The thing with narcissists is that they're extremely confident. People love confident leaders, even if they're terrible in every other way.
As the recent US election has shown, it's not what you say - but how you say it, that counts.
Hell, you see this with startups, too. When a founder appears extremely passionate and enthusiastic, pitching something as if they're at the top of the world, investors are willing to suspend their disbelief.
One can get away with lots of things, if you're just confident enough.
Are you implying that Biden spoke with more confidence than Trump, but Harris did not?
We can only hone our perception of what people are really up to by sharpening our own moral compass and then acting virtuously as an act of volitional self-evolution.
Once one begins learning how to be more virtuous and behaves appropriately, one gets better at recognizing the vices other people manifest, e.g.: greed, dishonesty, hate, enmity, jealousy/envy, ...
But, yeah, they sure do take the rubes for a ride, don't they?
Yes, narcissism is the apotheosis of selfishness. Compassion for others is the most important tool we have to combat its tendencies within our own hearts and minds. And, yes, we all have selfishness in us, and it is a long road to rid ourselves of it all, though I'm not speaking from even within sight of that glorious achievement.
Why are you confident of this?
There's plenty of small high-fertility sub-populations, why not just assume they'll become dominant?
Dunbar's number is small, suggests that the influence of society doesn't need to be considered at the level of an entire nation or even an entire city.
The Amish, for instance, though somewhat insulated from the "conversion", buy and use John Deere tractors. What happens when the rest of the world is gone, do you think they'll start building them in factories for themselves? (And if they did, would their fertility remain high?)
Yeh, confidence above 90%.
Some are as you say. Some are more insular, don't want to mix with everyone else. Some groups are less well defined, because rather than being a named group it's a heritable trait for taking more risks.
> What happens when the rest of the world is gone, do you think they'll start building them in factories for themselves?
If everything collapsed around them overnight, rapture/left behind style, so that they didn't have a chance to simply displace everyone else over a few generations in the way I'm actually expecting given the population is currently still going up despite the falling fertility, then they'd probably have problems — but even then they'd likely be able to make something like a 1750s era blacksmith making horseshoes and ploughs without huge difficulty.
They don't mine ore. Once they've scavenged all the scrap, they couldn't make nails. That probably wouldn't be the biggest disadvantage though... they couldn't make much of any manufactured good, and their lifestyle depends on it. Whatever institutional knowledge they had for how to live in the 18th century is long gone.
When they're back to a single-row iron plow pulled behind draft animals, they're not going to be getting 70 bushels of wheat per acre, they'll be getting 10. And then they won't be able to feed large numbers. None of what they do now works if our society fails, they need us. And they don't know how to do things they way they used to do, either.
All rusty metal is indistinguishable from high-quality ore. They'll only "run out" when all the rust finally washes into the oceans.
And even then, iron-rich bacteria are where John Plant (the Primitive Technology guy) gets his small quantities, and he starts many of his videos at the level of showing the stick he uses to dig the clay out of the ground to build the furnace in which he bakes the pot he uses to collect and concentrate the bacteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
Before that becomes necessary, current production of the metal (not just the ore) is around the gigaton/year level, so there's going to be a lot of scrap to get through.
> That probably wouldn't be the biggest disadvantage though... they couldn't make much of any manufactured good, and their lifestyle depends on it. Whatever institutional knowledge they had for how to live in the 18th century is long gone.
Even if there was a literally overnight displacement, which there won't be, libraries with printed texts still exist.
> And then they won't be able to feed large numbers.
What do you mean by "large numbers"? At a minimum, 791 million — because that's what we actually did feed in 1750.
That's not "extinction". That's not even close to extinction.
And that's without any assumptions about any modern knowledge that could be applied to low-industrial society, such as knowing how cholera is transmitted in order to prevent it.
So maybe this whole thread should be talking about mining coal as more the limit. The survivors wont have enough energy.
The required level is achievable with a furnace made from clay, with an air pump made from sticks and leaves and mud, heated by charcoal made from heating logs in the absence of oxygen: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGnWLXjIDnpBVRqu5lz5JGaQx...
(And again, this guy is starting basically from scratch each time; he's more interested in that than in practical re-industrialisation).
Coal is nice to have, not mandatory.
With smaller number, are smaller breading opportunities.
So after the population collapse, yes, humans will still exist. But might take hundreds of years again to reach our current population levels, and in the interim, societies would have gone through huge upheavals.
Just sometimes I hear people on the 'right' say we don't really need to take action on X,Y,Z problems, because humans will adapt, and we've been around for thousands of years, so we are really just over-reacting.
They ignore that, yeah, humans will be here on a geologic scale, but the US wont, Congress wont, Constitution wont, we're going to collapse into a bunch of warring city states, and where is their precious outrage then? It wont matter if they believed it was all a hoax, when they are dead, but we'll all be dead.
So discussing time scales in short term, <100 years is important. Generally, for planning.
But even on the timescale of 2100 — and 75 years was enough time to go from the height of the British Empire to what is widely considered to be its final end in the form of handing back Hong Kong, so quite reasonable to guess the US will be gone by then — only the most extreme forecasts have a lower global population than today.
It seems to me some of our worst problems would ease up if populations declined a bit.
In most of the western world, they dipped that high decades ago. Anything below 2.1 is sub-replacement. The US is below this (ignoring immigration, it is already shrinking). East Asia is way, way below it. China deliberately forced theirs to 1.0, but can't force it back the other direction. The Japanese population is already shrinking year-over-year. Europe's no better. Only central Africa is above replacement fertility, and they're trending downward sharply.
>Is it that stable/declining populations will cause
Declining populations cause something far worse than war. They cause fertility to drop further. It's a vicious downward spiral.
>It seems to me some of our worst problems would ease up if populations declined a bit.
They decline in a very specific way, where there are far more older people than younger. So the young have to pay more into taxes to support a bunch of old geezers who can't work. Retirement age recedes into the distance faster than you can chase it. The economy falters, infrastructure can't be maintained (let alone built new).
It seems like we currently have a glut of people looking for work, and having fewer working age people would make it much easier for people to negotiate better wages and working conditions.
Big picture, immigration is what is keeping the US going. US Citizens, don't like to pick strawberries, so when immigration is gone, no more fruits/vegetables.
The negative population replacement has been covered up by immigration filling the gaps.
I mean, there also won't be industrialization, or western civilization, or democracy, or electricity, or antibiotics, or a bunch of other stuff we think is good. But if human population crashes in the way you describe, yes it will rebound - just from far lower than you wish.
In that scenario, no one does well. Back when we lived primitively, there was a large young population, tens of millions globally. Any single death or small group of deaths didn't really threaten extinction except locally (usually not even that). But though total population will be high even well into this era, it will be top-heavy with geriatric humans. A few deaths of those of reproductive age could have grim consequences.
Everything works counterintuitively with declining populations.