We are entering a period of overlapping crises
hamishcampbell.com
hamishcampbell.com
That said, all societies rise and all appear to eventually fall. It’s equally reasonable to consider that the US/Western Civilization/humanity might actually be nearing a fall.
It's also true that as the scope of power humanity has over itself and its environment, it equally manages to create ever larger crises, and it seems like we truly are reaching the ecological and environmental limits of what the planet's life support systems can give us before breaking down.
Fires majorly destructive for example. Humans did a lot of environmental damage with that over the years
Present levels of environmental degradation due to human actions far exceed Earth's capacity to self-heal.
People struggle with judging that, after all, at best you get a bunch of numbers and the claim, they would show this (or not). Without actual scientific background, what are you supposed to do?
Human society is based on trust. You depend on "experts" on a given subject to give truthful accounts of things. When you don't have that, society breaks down sooner or later: nobody adapts anymore to reality.
That's where we're at.
Do we think that there is going to be a major break from that?
The scariest ingredient as I see it is AI. Overproduction of elites is always a destabilizing factor, and much of the well educated workforce may now turn out to be overproduction.
Let me put the question to you: what metrics do you use to verify whether elite overproduction is happening or not?
Civilizational collapse occurs when society runs afoul of its basic contract and cannot provide its foundational services anymore. That can mean starvation, it also is given e.g. in the situation of elites running low on trust. Leading to social unrest spinning out of control, or former allies refusing to play along with political shenanigans.
In order to evade catastrophic civilizational collapse, you need viable and timely avenues for course-correction or adaptation. Those are presently being blocked by the very elites profiting from the system they bleed dry.
People who lack enough of those req will actively get in the way.
Things like building a house for little Jimmy in it self isn't hard at all. You can also give him some [digital] textbooks, answer his questions and create a position as an apprentice wizard. There is nothing hard about doing that.
Sure, some people will try to get in the way but one unmotivated saboteur vs an army of millions isn't going to change anything.
Sometimes constructive is to preserve and protect. Don't argue with those trying to stop sensible efforts and don't pay them to get out of the way. You put them in cages or otherwise ruin their everything until they get out of the way.
But if you fail to do that and their numbers grow there is no alternative but to wait until they've destroyed enough of the good stuff for them to become miserable enough to change sides. It might take a thousand years but we will build a new glorious civilization and it will sit there waiting for people to stop caring again.
We are of course far over that hill already but destroying everything takes quite a bit of time.
If society decides that it doesn't want science, disease control, or software engineering, and gets rid of the jobs those people were doing up until two years ago, and then calls them "overproduced elites" and tells them to get "real jobs" (when many of their jobs weren't even automated, just abandoned at the cost of their output), that is a political decision.
But not necessarily an explicit one. It may turn out to be the natural path forward and the political decision is then to not do anything to prevent it.
Not as much of a parallel as people tend to think, but the Roman empire fell apart partly because it was based on the theory of constant outward expansion. If your model, say economic, is based on infinite expansion in a finite arena you'll have trouble.
Other Roman influences on the USA include Christianity and to a lesser extent Judaism (since the major US versions come out of post-Roman Judaism.)
The European Renaissance and the Enlightenment both used Roman and Greek ideas as inspiration. You can see this in early US architecture, and the models for some institutions such as the Senate. Some of this was ironically as a revolt against English institutions (even though England and Wales were successors of a Roman province).
The early USA's language(s) and Judaeo-Christian heritage are partly products of the Roman Empire. (Spanish most definitely is, and French is. English is heavily influenced by French and Latin.)
By this logic, Turkey is a continuation of the Roman Empire too. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_claim_to_Roman_success...
At what point does something stop being a continuation of something else?
Byzantium was certainly a continuation of Rome and its subjects called themselves Romans. It all depends on whether you consider the Ottoman Empire to be a continuation of Byzantium or not (there are arguments both ways).
Taking a semi-opinionated swag, the core went from Rome to Constantinople, then Venice, then London.
Looking from a Finnish perspective, Sweden and Estonia are culturally closest to us, but Russia is also pretty close. Britain and France already feel less familiar, not to speak of something like Italy or the US.
What is interesting or valuable about that? I don't think it's even true, but at best, you offer "perhaps". Great. Perhaps, perhaps not.
It's reasonable to consider that you are simply complacent.
At some point, this view point, and this predicament is just "The Human Condition".[0]
[0] That's not a excuse to not try to fix the broken things around us. But perspective is important.
That out of the way, I'm close to 50, and things over the last year definitely seem different in a more precarious way than anything before them. It feels closer to my memories of August 1991, or the days immediately after 9/11 or January 6th, only all the time, where I've gotten a little numb to the dissonance, but not nearly enough for it to feel close to normal. It feels like what I imagine the run-up to WWII might have felt like to those living then.
That's my perspective.
I've lived through crises such as Nixon, Iran-Contra, the Arab gas embargoes, the Savings and Loans (S&L) crisis, and the 2001 tech collapse, in addition to the events you've mentioned. It seems, though, that we lived through all of those, but we were able to survive the events, and we may still have been a bit dented, but we could function. We (I) didn't feel hopeless.
I think you are dead on with the observation that what we are going through now is like previously intense but much shorter-lived events, except it's going all the time. Because it's not stopping, we're not getting a chance to breathe and figure out what the next thing to do is.
I think of the previous events; only COVID-19 and the 2008 banking crisis were similar multi-year persistent events and have increasingly cemented a sense of precariousness.
Trump is a continuation of a multi-tentacled, longer-timeline octopus that encompasses all of our collective traumatic events.
Complex systems can be interpreted as trajectories in high dimensional spaces. When a complex system is pushed out of equilibrium too far, it "runs up against its constraints", the borders of the space it can operate in.
It follows those towards edges and along those finally into corners (so to speak), reducing the degrees of freedom along the way. "Being cornered" is an accurate visualization of a complex system out of options: you have nowhere to go.
Our society is such a cornered complex system. "Crises" are themselves symptoms of reduced resilience: the system cannot evade them. They compound, eventually overwhelming the coping abilities, leading to catastrophic break down of entire subsystems and further domino effects.
The same observation is correct for our natural environment, whether you look at biodiversity, climate or other pollution-induced stressors.
So no, it's not "the human condition". It's the end-state of a prolonged lack of course-correction.
Societal collapse has happened before, many times actually (but usually with great spans of time between them). Western culture doesn't particularly like to speak about it, lest people get the idea, such cataclysm might repeat.
A society doesn't exist after it collapses, so "reporting" on it is usually rather scant and framed from the view of those left to talk about it (often not many).
Consequently, historians struggle with pinpointing the reasons for those collapses. People often had no clue themselves and didn't see it coming. Complexity theory is a rather new development.
They were heading up towards large catastrophy. In fact.
And factually both 20s and 39s ended up in massive unprecedented catastrophes.
So negotiations and solutions must be too
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_(1953%E2%80%931962)
That's the average HNer. Academic smart but devoid of empathy or awareness of the world outside their socioeconomic circles.
Your comment says a lot about how you view things that don't affect you personally, in the vein of "Après moi, le déluge."
This, too, has basically always been true at every point in time across history.
1 person, right now, could launch a large enough portion of the worlds nuclear arsenal to cause a near simultaneous response of the also nuclear kind, immediately wiping out the bulk of the human population, infrastructure, food, educational institutions, factories, housing, transportation and shipping, etc and effectively dooming much of the remaining population.
That's comparatively new over the past 20k years of human history.
The Late Bronze Age collapse in 1200 BC.
The Dark Ages, 500-1500 AD. Ended with the Renaissance (literally, “Rebirth”).
Both of these times saw significant ‘backward motion’ in the amount of technical capability people could wield.
I suppose there are probably people out there snorting in disbelief and saying "you're one to talk", but that's how I feel.
2. Assigning what I think is a difference of motive.
One is using particular language to talk to a certain group, for either shorthanding communication and/or signaling.
Another is using it in a way to attempt to sprad knowledge without considering a broader audience appeal.
> I feel like you rephrased what I said, as if it would correct my understanding?
3. Well, I feel like you're a touchy one.
My name is Max.
My world is fire and blood.
Why are you hurting these people?
It's the oil, stupid.
- Oil wars.
- We are killing for guzzoline.
The world is running out of water.
Now there's the water wars.
Once, I was a cop.
A road warrior searching
for a righteous cause.
- to the terminal freak-out point.
Mankind has gone rogue, terrorizing itself.
Thermonuclear skirmish.
The earth is sour.
Our bones are poisoned.
We have become half-life.
As the world fell...
...each of us, in our own wayWatch the birds, squirrels, etc and compare their general behavior to that of humans. What I've observed is that unlike us, they're not worried or panicked. They just live. A threat may appear and startle them, but assuming there isn't one, they just carry on. No 'bird news,' or 'bird notifications,' or 'opinions about <other bird> to have at the feeder.' They just flap around and eat the fucking seed.
Humans seem to be obsessed with turning life into an endless cycle of stress and 'critical' moments.
Need I remind everyone: we're floating in what we call 'space' on a giant ball (one of ~billions) protected by a relatively thin atmosphere, hurtling at a thousand miles per hour, convinced of our own brilliance despite barely having left the neighborhood. I think our next evolutionary step, the one that moves us further up the Kardashev Scale, is realizing just how much of our existence is consumed by human-manufactured nonsense and distraction or, "crises."
On the level of society, it's a catastrophic maladaptation.
The problem for normal people is to discern between "fearmongering" and honest warnings by competent people who actually know and understand the situation.
While I find nature “beautiful” certainly, I also find myself rather dissatisfied with it being a horrific trap of nonstop callous selfish violence, at a scale beyond human capacity to ever understand or accept.
Squirrels can't solve the problems they face, we, however can do more than "flap around and eat the fucking seed".
>But any one with any sense can see there is no #stupidindividualism exit from #climatechaos. There is no technological #dotcons platform that allows us to escape social relationships.
I checked the "hashtags" link and was met with the following: "Hashtags are a critique and a rallying cry to gather round. They are the protest banners of the openweb"
Nothing says protest banner of the "openweb"(?) like a convention invented by Twitter.
They're both a symbol-with-label text convention for users, and in each case it designates a topic and mechanism for users of the service to converge-on the topic.
I didn't see any comments on this page, nor did the linked Mastodon accounts have much engagement, and that suggests the latter.
Also, both the number of and length of posts started increasing dramatically in 2024, which might just be a strange coincidence.
#'s are for signaling root access, and bash comments.
edit: and also IRC channels.
- The Cincinnati Enquirer, Ohio, February 21, 1947
https://tbsky.app/profile/weatherprof.bsky.social/post/3mxvy...
Should be "romanticise" rather than "romanticism".
World is on fire so join whatever the hell Open Media Network is?
- 1970s: multiple oil crises, war in the middle east, iranian revolution
- 1980s: latin american debt crisis, soviet-afghan war, ethiopian famine
- 1990s: collapse of USSR, yugoslavian war, bosnian genocide, ethiopian genocide, asian financial crisis
- 2000s: dot-com bubble burst, darfur genocide, african food crisis, global financial crisis (due to US housing bubble burst)
Very weak opening. These were never separate problems. If the author is just beginning to notice, it doesn’t bode well for what insights they have to share.
The world has always been in overlapping crises, the only difference now is that it's constantly blared into your face by your pocket screen. Ignorance is bliss. Delete the news, buy index funds, and relax.