This led me down a Wikipedia hole where I learned about John B. Calhoun’s experiments with mice - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experi...
Very interesting - once the “mouse universe” reached a high population density, it descended into violence and chaos, which was succeeded by massive behavioral changes across the entire population - male mice became introverted, ceased fighting and attempting to reproduce, and simply ate, drank, slept and groomed themselves until the population collapsed.
Sorry for my potential ignorance, since I have a very limited view of what's happening in Japan. But this sounds a lot like what I hear what is happening in Japan with the men.
Man, sharing this link in January 2021 is just brutal :D
It made me wonder though, who here legitimately thinks their society is nearing collapse? Which society? By which measures are you evaluating the situation?
Do you feel you have any control over the collapse, or a participation mandate at any level? How much does it seem to parallel your current personal life situation? Are things similarly chaotic, or do you find yourself at peace?
I have a friend who is convinced that we're already mid-collapse and have been for decades. He cites many of the same causes found in the link above. He says, "just look at what happens to any wild animal when there aren't enough resources or they're stressed, they start going crazy: self harm, eating young, death by refusing to eat."
He sees echos of behavior patterns like a fractal, so tiny patterns of behaviors in mice emerge as patterns in larger human society. He has said that he thinks human societies are just another organism that lives, ages, and dies. He doesn't really prep or anything, just expects he and most people he knows to die in food riots sometime in his life. He doesn't even bother prepping (so he says) because such a collapse likely would come from a way that he can't expect and wouldn't likely survive anyway. He realizes there isn't enough ammo to hold off millions of starving people, and the people who survive likely would do so accidentally or through freak luck, but a new society would emerge again in a few generations to repeat the cycle again. Fun guy, my friend.
I have multiple ant colonies in my garden and when I was younger spent a whole lot of time trying everything imaginable to get rid of them (induce collapse you could say). But with each attempt my admiration for them just kept growing. Cause these fuckers with their spec of dust sized brains keep chugging along the next day morning as if nothing at all happened. Its like every calamity is just a minor interruption to whatever they are upto.
So I just use their model. My mantra over time has become - "Dont sit around appreciating the pain. Get back to work"
But the caveat here is, as with the ants, you must have a goto list of things to do. When I was younger I had no idea what I wanted to do so the mantra worked terribly. But the older I have gotten the list of things to do has grown. So like the ant no matter what happens theres always something to do.
> It made me wonder though, who here legitimately thinks their society is nearing collapse? Which society? By which measures are you evaluating the situation?
>It made me wonder though, who here legitimately thinks their society is nearing collapse? Which society? By which measures are you evaluating the situation?
Not exactly, but I can completely see why some people think so.
What's happening fundamentally is that the boomers are on the verge of retirement. The worker shortage of 2030 is set in stone and the only way to mitigate the damage is very large amounts of immigration.
the problem is that housing is limited, worker shortage means housing wont be built to required capacity, and our top industries are becoming parasitic at best. This creates political pressure.
Then add in the consequences, women entering the workforce has been wonderful but not for the average worker. Supply increased by demand decreased because political policy of globalism shipped jobs out of the country. Thus we have income inequality that's out of control. We also have historic lows of marriage and births.
The blame is 100% in the hands of the government. you then look at the government's failure and it's a disaster. So many federal governments are functionally bankrupt and the debt is higher than ever. the government cant afford to fix their mistakes.
What's the point of society? It's the humans. We have failed in this regard. Will it be collapse?
Nope, but I know what's coming to prevent the collapse. the governments know how to do this each time.
I have been learning more about biology and the immune system. I’ve realized that genetic engineering of viruses is something far easier than making a nuclear weapon and could easily wipe out humanity. It doesn’t have to be a government some crazy cult might just do it 50 years from now and create a pathogen immune to most vaccines.
I'll take the liberty to share some notes from unscientific sources, because I find the official sources plain boring.
A civilization is generally started by great people that put grand ideals into its foundation. A sign of such founders is their borderline unbelievable holiness, that makes them a legend. During its lifespan, great minds get replaced by small minds. The typical lifespan is about a million years, but maybe this time things move a lot quicker. The latter are attracted not to the ideals, but to the earthly things, such as shiny metals and power over others. I believe we are here now. In all cases, such people eventually discover the secret of black magic (I know, many would cough here) and the dark age begins. A sign of that phase is cyclopic brutalistic architecture that worships human body (that's an important detail). We've had a glimpse into that already: nazism. We seem to be moving rapidly in that direction: powerful dictatorships are plenty, while democracies are few. Another sign of that phase is abandoning liberty and reason, because the evil (the dark side of every human) has neither, and embracing chaos and fatalism. Example: the idea that voting doesn't matter, whether it's technically true or not. The terminal stage of every big civilization is a collapse into a sort of a black hole: people are paralyzed by fear and hate, the dominating ideology is a dark cult. There's no coming back from that stage, as that kind of dark cult has real power. At this point, the civilization always gets an external "help" that wipes everything out, so the few survivors could start it over, but now at the next level.
I saw an intriguing comment yesterday on here about how the Extreme Ultra Violet Lithography machines that are producing our cutting edge processors are "the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet"[1]. I can believe it. And it's fascinating how that affects geopolitics, much as other science and technology has in the past (the printing press, nuclear energy, etc)
I'm not OP, but why I think this Wikipedia article is relevant is because the more I actually learn about the world and history the more I begin to wonder whether in fact _mercenarism_ not technology is the defining trait of modern civilisation (and by extension I wonder about whether this is true for HN as a whole too). The great leaps were made by traders, rather than scientists, those willing to exploit and enslave rather than innovate and create. Of course they feed each other, think of the Marine Chronometer[2]. But if indeed mercenerism is the defining characteristic then it makes a lot more sense to think about societal collapse, because the fundamental design of the West, like many other civilisations, is based on logistical exploitation, which, unlike technological innovation, is fundamentally unsustainable.
And as a hacker, to me, such a design flaw cannot be patched away. Not that I advocate surrender, but rather, how do we, as hackers, minimise the impending destruction of a failing system? I wonder if one of the first steps is to stop wasting energy on any efforts based on the idea that we can fix this? Rather how can we, if it is even possible, gracefully manage the collapse?
I wonder if I am an outlier here (physically the US) and think society is not collapsing, but diversifying. Also, given the state of the environment, national debt, employment prospects for many in the generations proceding me, and civic unrest, it seems prudent that we evaluate our socioeconomic activities.
Immigration is addressed in the article as a potential cause of societal collapse.
I do think we (the US in particular, and the western world in general) are undergoing a process that, if it continues to fruition, is societal collapse. That said, I don't think it is imminent or unavoidable.
I do think there's a gray area between immigration generating diversity and immigration serving the same ultimate purpose as invasion. At some point you go from becoming diverse to being supplanted. Immigration rates high enough to drastically change the culture of a society within the lifespan of one human being can be catastrophic. It naturally creates division and strife.
It really doesn't matter if the cultures are both equally advanced, good, if one is being mean to the other, etc. There will be friction. When this happens slow enough, over a few generations, newcomers adopt prevailing norms, and the incumbent culture adopts some newcomer customs. Also, the stronger the incumbent group hold to their customs and take pride in them, the more immigration they can handle, because this creates peer pressure on the newcomer group to assimilate.
The combination of massive immigration and social pressure to view our own customs as unimportant or even inferior is potentially a bad combination for the survival of our society. I hope to see it survive, I do like it, I wouldn't want an entirely homogenous society.
Rome didn't collapse, it just diversified into several other smaller states. The Aztec empire wasn't overthrown by the Spanish, but just fractured. The empire of Genghis Khan didn't collapse, it just got successfully split until what remained resembled nothing of what it once was.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but rather pointing out that -- in the grand scheme of history -- every collapse can be recast as a 'diversifying' of the original society, even if the end state of the society has little in resemblance to the original.
For example, the Roman empire lasted -- in the form of the byzantines -- until 1453, only a few decades before Columbus discovered America, but the Byzantines were not really Roman in the way we think of ancient Rome, despite having every claim to being one and the same with the Roman empire.
"In a speech to Roman nobles, the Emperor expressed his pressing concern over the low birthrates of the Romans elite. He said that freed slaves had been granted citizenship and Roman allies given seats government to increase the power and prosperity of Rome, yet the "original stock" was not replacing themselves, leaving the task to foreigners.[66] Roman poet Ovid shared the same observation."
Well well. It's truly remarkable to see how our current laws and religious texts have roots in history.
note that augustus said this at the beginning of what is called the "pax romana", a ~200 year period of unprecedented stability and affluence for the empire.
Fascinating. This quote from Toynbee in the section on decay is is particularly eerie given current events in the United States:
First the Dominant Minority attempts to hold by force - against all right and reason - a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence when it executes its acts of secession. Yet the whole movement ends in positive acts of creation - and this on the part of all the actors in the tragedy of disintegration. The Dominant Minority creates a universal state, the Internal Proletariat a universal church, and the External Proletariat a bevy of barbarian war-bands.
I am certain that Trump's efforts to retain power will fail. Unfortunately he has laid the groundwork for someone competent to seize power. It feels like only a matter of time.
I think our collapse began before Trump with the advent of Machine learning. ML was then hitched to advertising and click generation. Now individuals entire view of the world are shaped by algorithms designed to keep you clicking so they feed you to an echo chamber. This is the reason for the massive chasms between the 2 political sides, Brad Parscales was just able to harness that power for Trump.
If you step back and think about how almost everything you see on the internet is designed to keep you coming back for more and the way it can shape peoples world view, it is quite terrifying.
I don't think the British Empire is a good example. It has divested/separated areas under its influence without any sort of societal collapse affecting neither the individual former piece of the Empire, nor Britain itself.
I learned about it while reading Dawkins’ “The God Delusion,” and since then, Jaynes and Hofstadter have been the biggest influences on my personal philosophy.
"It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism."
- Mark Fisher.[1]
I think the next hundred years will show us how fundamental capitalism is to our society. Making a living now gets in the way of having a life (and reproducing life) for the majority of people.[2] Whether or not capitalism can survive without growth has long been debated. (See e.g. [3], [4] for recent popular-media examples.)
2. https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2050/ Look especially at the expected trends for the major economies of the world--Europe, Japan, China, RoK, Russian Federation, USA--and upcomers--Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, and so on.
[+] [-] tomdell|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koonsolo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themodelplumber|5 years ago|reply
It made me wonder though, who here legitimately thinks their society is nearing collapse? Which society? By which measures are you evaluating the situation?
Do you feel you have any control over the collapse, or a participation mandate at any level? How much does it seem to parallel your current personal life situation? Are things similarly chaotic, or do you find yourself at peace?
Just curious.
[+] [-] JackMorgan|5 years ago|reply
He sees echos of behavior patterns like a fractal, so tiny patterns of behaviors in mice emerge as patterns in larger human society. He has said that he thinks human societies are just another organism that lives, ages, and dies. He doesn't really prep or anything, just expects he and most people he knows to die in food riots sometime in his life. He doesn't even bother prepping (so he says) because such a collapse likely would come from a way that he can't expect and wouldn't likely survive anyway. He realizes there isn't enough ammo to hold off millions of starving people, and the people who survive likely would do so accidentally or through freak luck, but a new society would emerge again in a few generations to repeat the cycle again. Fun guy, my friend.
[+] [-] op03|5 years ago|reply
But the caveat here is, as with the ants, you must have a goto list of things to do. When I was younger I had no idea what I wanted to do so the mantra worked terribly. But the older I have gotten the list of things to do has grown. So like the ant no matter what happens theres always something to do.
[+] [-] throw0101a|5 years ago|reply
Since you ask:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/
The more pratically-minded lean more towards:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/preppers/
There's a certain minimum effort that most people should probably do (even if you don't live in a earthquake zone or hurricane area)
* https://www.ready.gov
* https://www.getprepared.gc.ca/index-en.aspx
[+] [-] jdkee|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/us/crime-poverty-pandemic...
[+] [-] zymhan|5 years ago|reply
Indeed, it seems passive-aggressive to just post this link without any further commentary.
[+] [-] sleepysysadmin|5 years ago|reply
Not exactly, but I can completely see why some people think so.
What's happening fundamentally is that the boomers are on the verge of retirement. The worker shortage of 2030 is set in stone and the only way to mitigate the damage is very large amounts of immigration.
the problem is that housing is limited, worker shortage means housing wont be built to required capacity, and our top industries are becoming parasitic at best. This creates political pressure.
Then add in the consequences, women entering the workforce has been wonderful but not for the average worker. Supply increased by demand decreased because political policy of globalism shipped jobs out of the country. Thus we have income inequality that's out of control. We also have historic lows of marriage and births.
The blame is 100% in the hands of the government. you then look at the government's failure and it's a disaster. So many federal governments are functionally bankrupt and the debt is higher than ever. the government cant afford to fix their mistakes.
What's the point of society? It's the humans. We have failed in this regard. Will it be collapse?
Nope, but I know what's coming to prevent the collapse. the governments know how to do this each time.
[+] [-] thewarrior|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frongpik|5 years ago|reply
A civilization is generally started by great people that put grand ideals into its foundation. A sign of such founders is their borderline unbelievable holiness, that makes them a legend. During its lifespan, great minds get replaced by small minds. The typical lifespan is about a million years, but maybe this time things move a lot quicker. The latter are attracted not to the ideals, but to the earthly things, such as shiny metals and power over others. I believe we are here now. In all cases, such people eventually discover the secret of black magic (I know, many would cough here) and the dark age begins. A sign of that phase is cyclopic brutalistic architecture that worships human body (that's an important detail). We've had a glimpse into that already: nazism. We seem to be moving rapidly in that direction: powerful dictatorships are plenty, while democracies are few. Another sign of that phase is abandoning liberty and reason, because the evil (the dark side of every human) has neither, and embracing chaos and fatalism. Example: the idea that voting doesn't matter, whether it's technically true or not. The terminal stage of every big civilization is a collapse into a sort of a black hole: people are paralyzed by fear and hate, the dominating ideology is a dark cult. There's no coming back from that stage, as that kind of dark cult has real power. At this point, the civilization always gets an external "help" that wipes everything out, so the few survivors could start it over, but now at the next level.
[+] [-] tombh|5 years ago|reply
I'm not OP, but why I think this Wikipedia article is relevant is because the more I actually learn about the world and history the more I begin to wonder whether in fact _mercenarism_ not technology is the defining trait of modern civilisation (and by extension I wonder about whether this is true for HN as a whole too). The great leaps were made by traders, rather than scientists, those willing to exploit and enslave rather than innovate and create. Of course they feed each other, think of the Marine Chronometer[2]. But if indeed mercenerism is the defining characteristic then it makes a lot more sense to think about societal collapse, because the fundamental design of the West, like many other civilisations, is based on logistical exploitation, which, unlike technological innovation, is fundamentally unsustainable.
And as a hacker, to me, such a design flaw cannot be patched away. Not that I advocate surrender, but rather, how do we, as hackers, minimise the impending destruction of a failing system? I wonder if one of the first steps is to stop wasting energy on any efforts based on the idea that we can fix this? Rather how can we, if it is even possible, gracefully manage the collapse?
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361028
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lazyjeff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neartheplain|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8JVdpWCKeM
[+] [-] hyperpallium2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idiocrat|5 years ago|reply
I personally agree with the message of and support the The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement [0].
There is good introduction in form of a short film "Thank You For Not Breeding" [1].
[0] http://vhemt.org/ [1] https://vimeo.com/7652051
[+] [-] backing|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhowell|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betwixthewires|5 years ago|reply
I do think we (the US in particular, and the western world in general) are undergoing a process that, if it continues to fruition, is societal collapse. That said, I don't think it is imminent or unavoidable.
I do think there's a gray area between immigration generating diversity and immigration serving the same ultimate purpose as invasion. At some point you go from becoming diverse to being supplanted. Immigration rates high enough to drastically change the culture of a society within the lifespan of one human being can be catastrophic. It naturally creates division and strife.
It really doesn't matter if the cultures are both equally advanced, good, if one is being mean to the other, etc. There will be friction. When this happens slow enough, over a few generations, newcomers adopt prevailing norms, and the incumbent culture adopts some newcomer customs. Also, the stronger the incumbent group hold to their customs and take pride in them, the more immigration they can handle, because this creates peer pressure on the newcomer group to assimilate.
The combination of massive immigration and social pressure to view our own customs as unimportant or even inferior is potentially a bad combination for the survival of our society. I hope to see it survive, I do like it, I wouldn't want an entirely homogenous society.
[+] [-] iridium_core|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasogare|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tathougies|5 years ago|reply
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but rather pointing out that -- in the grand scheme of history -- every collapse can be recast as a 'diversifying' of the original society, even if the end state of the society has little in resemblance to the original.
For example, the Roman empire lasted -- in the form of the byzantines -- until 1453, only a few decades before Columbus discovered America, but the Byzantines were not really Roman in the way we think of ancient Rome, despite having every claim to being one and the same with the Roman empire.
[+] [-] nine_zeros|5 years ago|reply
Well well. It's truly remarkable to see how our current laws and religious texts have roots in history.
[+] [-] leetcrew|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway9980|5 years ago|reply
First the Dominant Minority attempts to hold by force - against all right and reason - a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence when it executes its acts of secession. Yet the whole movement ends in positive acts of creation - and this on the part of all the actors in the tragedy of disintegration. The Dominant Minority creates a universal state, the Internal Proletariat a universal church, and the External Proletariat a bevy of barbarian war-bands.
I am certain that Trump's efforts to retain power will fail. Unfortunately he has laid the groundwork for someone competent to seize power. It feels like only a matter of time.
[+] [-] wonderwonder|5 years ago|reply
If you step back and think about how almost everything you see on the internet is designed to keep you coming back for more and the way it can shape peoples world view, it is quite terrifying.
[+] [-] chewz|5 years ago|reply
From Antonine Plague to Plague of Justinian and from Roman Climate Optimum to Late Antiquity Ice Age.
[2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period
[3] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Antique_Little_Ice_Age
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34427005-the-fate-of-rom...
[+] [-] lxe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SimeVidas|5 years ago|reply
Burn.
[+] [-] fipar|5 years ago|reply
I learned about it while reading Dawkins’ “The God Delusion,” and since then, Jaynes and Hofstadter have been the biggest influences on my personal philosophy.
[+] [-] Simulacra|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuatoru|5 years ago|reply
- Mark Fisher.[1]
I think the next hundred years will show us how fundamental capitalism is to our society. Making a living now gets in the way of having a life (and reproducing life) for the majority of people.[2] Whether or not capitalism can survive without growth has long been debated. (See e.g. [3], [4] for recent popular-media examples.)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fisher
2. https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2050/ Look especially at the expected trends for the major economies of the world--Europe, Japan, China, RoK, Russian Federation, USA--and upcomers--Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, and so on.
3. https://www.degrowth.info/en/2014/06/the-good-news-no-capita...
4. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-end...