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Comment by jdkee | Hacker News Reader

Build stable societies.

Stable societies fundamentally require increasingly large energy inputs. What we're seeing happening right now, in a large part, is due to a system whose complexity has exceed the available energy required to sustain it.

The idea that what we're seeing is because "too many people voted for the wrong guy" fails to recognize the larger condition for which all of this is merely emergent phenomena. We no longer have the resources to sustain the society we life in so it begins to uncomfortably revert to lower energy states in ways we haven't seen in a long time.

For anyone wanting to explore that topic, there's Nate Haggens: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/podcast Or in French, pretty much anything Jean-Marc Jancovici writes.

However both of them argue that a stable society can exist with stable energy inputs, but with much less than now.

But be prepared for the society you live in to vote for an obviously, significantly destabilising leader...

Trump and his acute destabilizing actions are the symptoms of the chronic, broad, deep destabilization of our society in the form of differing perceived realities, caused by....the internet and its exploitation by sick, greedy social media founders, investors/owners, and, yes, employees.

Further more, know your neighbors, join mutual aid groups, build social connections before bad things happen. The idea of a single prepper surviving the apocalypse is a farce, humans work in communities.

Some societies can be stable for a while, but all of them eventually become unstable, collapse, and make room for new ones.

Care to name any examples?

My relatively stable high trust society has bunker space for more or less the entire population; if the world goes to hell I'd much rather be* among people who (even on our right wing) habitually put solidarity into practice than be worrying about generators, ice augers, and looters.

* one of the best pieces of advice I ever got, related to skating to where the puck is going to be: "if you know where to be, you can let the young guys run"

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

A one hundred year old farmer's collective with deep assets and a membership that makes US preppers look ... uhhh, unprepped.

Literally established well outside what one US astronaut called the most remote city in the world, it is made up of individuals that are all capable of survival in harsh environments and yet choose to work together to lower collective costs and ensure fires are kept in check, floods don't knock out individuals, roving scam artists get talked about on bush telegraph, etc.

Many individual monasteries have been cohesive, stable, wealthy and relatively secure societies for a millennia.

Any group strongly united by a common goal (in this particular case, their religious order) can do surprisingly well.

That's like saying "Everyone be friendly and helpful to one another"

Easier said than done

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