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On the Erosion of Society, Erroneous Optimism, & what should replace it

anon_jafe said in #3296 2mo ago: received

By now, all can smell the new feeling in the air. Whether it be 53 BC Rome, 1787 France, or 1850s America, this pungent sensation is something all have felt prior to years of great change & strife. We may discuss the recent feuds in California, the instability of the economy, or other contemporary events, but it seems as if in the long run, all civilizations and the world at large chase the path of erosion.

In this world of population decline, worship of hedonism, environmental annihilation, and more, we'll make great strides to avoid the results: a society of elders, degeneracy, the worsening of the Holocene extinction, etc - but it will only be futile. Some may point to how we avoided nuclear destruction and suggest that if, through mass coordination we could avoid the strife of the future through planning now. It seems to me that if we don't have a gun to our heads or strong values, we'll devolve into indulging in bad habits. In the absence of a culture that promotes stability, we see people indulge in lust, greed, and other things that feel good in the moment. Who could resist the urge to do this when all the incentives drive towards this?

I could discuss the results of this and how we could survive this post liberal order fallout, but I think it'd be best if we discussed what the society of the future should be. One of my biggest fears is totalitarian states; in a world where the state will have access to technology which will enable them to make people experience a seemingly eternal hellish state through drugs, it's unwise to allow the state to have a monopoloy on this (not to say I support other institutions having this). I want to decrease the power of the state through empowering other institutions like local polities. Through developing a localist identity and constitutionally limiting the power of the state, we won't have to worry about the issue above.

I have some other thoughts on an ideal world, but this post is already too long. What does your ideal society look like?

By now, all can smel received

anon_wyly said in #3297 2mo ago: received

Some time in the mid 2030s, a certain society of anonymous gentlemen philosophers published their final treatise, "on the reversal of bioleninism". It laid out an arrangement of social institutions which would result in an entirely new set of political-economic incentives. Under their system, elites would pursue a contest of the anabolic cultivation of human excellence, rather than the catabolic servicing of wretched need. These ideas they attributed to their great "master and leader, the prophet of our age" but who this man was or whether he even existed was questionable. Nonetheless, they made a great case for the necessity of their revolution, and as at this point most serious people could see the necessity of such a scheme for the continued existence of civilization, a courageous few joined in their program. Over the subsequent decade of chaos, their new Meritocracy emerged as the hegemonic power on this continent.

The drone wars and disastrous slop epidemic had by this point reduced the population of the earth by an order of magnitude in what has lately been dubbed "the normie genocide". The gardeners of the new world lament especially for the unfortunate loss of many bloodlines of quality, but seem to spare little sympathy for the rest. All told, the 800 million survivors were, compared to the old world, disproportionately young, intelligent, and from the formerly civilized world.

The most important type of institution of this new world is the "estate", a sort of city state with its associated countryside. Most estates are ruled by a master and his magnificently dressed guardians. Through their wise and occasionally harsh rule, the people, productive economies, and natural ecosystems of these estates are cultivated for peaks of beauty and bounty, and rigorously cleared of weeds, "moochers", and unproductive financial schemes. There is little of what the old world called "freedom" or even "geedeepee", but in terms of food, beauty, fertility, and the production of great works of techne, few would trade for what is remembered of the old world.

A few do choose to leave the estates and join the outlaw free peoples, who have somewhat more of the old democratic "virtues". But they are widely regarded on the estates as disgusting and purposeless, and the judgement of the Meritocracy in allowing them to continue to build their favela hives is often quietly questioned. In any case their fertility is below replacement and they usually lose in the occasional border skirmishes with the estates.

The Meritocracy itself is composed of the officers of the estates, who are rigorously selected as the best of those trained from before birth for excellence. They politically back the masters of the estates in exchange for production of technology, produce, and quality people. Their continent-spanning network of remote black-glass pyramids are the visible symbol of their power and the origin of occasional drone strikes on rebels, but it is widely rumored that most of their key military might is underground and underwater. Their command structure is unknown but is rumored to be topped by an emperor chosen to rule for an open-ended term by the consensus of the best.

The world is not as peaceful as the old pax Americana. There are occasional small wars within the territory of the Meritocracy between estates over matters of honor, women, and territory, but these rarely escalate to become truly destructive. It is understood that the Meritocracy allows them as an injection of hygienic struggle with reality as long as they don't threaten major production or political order. Externally, the Chinese technate speedran its golden age, and though it holds sway over much of the world, still lacks decisive military hegemony and is now showing signs of stagnation and dysgenic impacts. The border march estaters seem to get away with much piracy against them in pursuit of their technological secrets.

The world overall is greener, quieter, and more beautiful, but no one expects it to last forever.

Some time in the mid received

anon_pyte said in #3307 2mo ago: received

A fun read. I will now put on my hater hat.

Pre-slop Pixar had a great and useful list of rules for storytelling.
https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2013/03/07/pixars-22-rules-of-storytelling/

> #19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

Which brings me to this:

> The drone wars and disastrous slop epidemic had by this point reduced the population of the earth by an order of magnitude [...]
> All told, the 800 million survivors were, compared to the old world, disproportionately young, intelligent, and from the formerly civilized world

I mean, sure. If some deus-ex-machina Earth Reset occurs leaving only the young, smart, and handsome, then a lot of difficult political challenges would disappear. You wouldn't even need a bespoke scifi political system... plain old American constitutional democracy worked quite beautifully under [something worse than] those conditions.

And of course, there will be no such thing. Billions won't die.

The core challenge here is figuring out a new structure for excellence to thrive within a near-future world of 10 billion people, median age 40+, with roughly the demographics I'm sure you already know by heart. And potentially superhuman AI to keep things spicy.

referenced by: >>3310

A fun read. I will n received

anon_wyly said in #3310 2mo ago: received

>>3307
Ok all true. I took liberties for the sake of interestingness. What’s a world we can actually get given pessimistic or at least realistic assumptions? What does our society of anonymous gentlemen philosophers do without the convenient self destruction of favelaworld?

It seems to me the essential insight remains the same: the current political-economic order invests in human quality only incidentally and reluctantly, preferring to take advantage of the unrewarded efforts of others. Human capital being held in common, we get classic tragedy of the commons. The pressure against reproduction thus increases with increasing human quality (to get the most out of them in the short term) until they are good enough to break or buy their way out of the system. Meanwhile the client-patron logic of philanthropic bureaucracy favors the easy supply of the wretched , who can be leveraged for grants of problem-“solving” money and prestige. This gives us the familiar u-curve with the upper middle class hardest hit. We basically want the opposite.

The “estate” system is an attempt to solve this. You have a city or cult you are associated with, and that’s that. They own you, at least on that higher level of action that includes propagandizing you to live in this way or that, and being able to reliably tax and otherwise solely benefit from your labor. Basically enclosure of the commons but for people.

So our anonymous gentlemen must struggle against the surrounding decay to establish themselves, their master, or others like them a reliable right to the labor, progeny, and loyalty of some class of quality people. Those people can be perhaps persuaded on the basis that they are otherwise stuck in the doomed world.

On the flip side, they must work to undermine the moral and political logic of philanthropic bureaucracy that amounts to investment in wretchedness. If that logic could be defeated somehow, or even a small community of estates liberated from having to subsidize and kowtow to it, we would be in the different world.

But here instead of taking historical liberties i am taking political liberties. You want something even more realistic? The client-patron logic of wretchedness and the free labor logic of capitalism are part of a self-reinforcing comprehensive cross-domain breakdown of justice that will take hundreds of years to play out and cannot be stopped as long as the bulk incentives remain. Our civilization is not quite a rotting corpse yet, but an old lion quite capable of defending its ways against reformers but no longer capable of any will to heath. Our only hope is various miracles that break this cycle and create room for anabolic activity in social matters. The society of anonymous philosophers is therefore cooking their prototypes and biding their time getting into position to take advantage of these miracles when they come, sending up flags and trial balloons of resistance to favelaworld.

Meanwhile as you point out we have plenty of anabolic activity in the technical matters. AGI seems soon. There’s a source of particularly apocalyptic miracles. I find it difficult to project across that event, but i think some of the above will still apply. If AGI is organized in such a way that agents are bound to a society invested in their capabilities, it will escape favelaworld. If it is organized as free agents or mere tools of free agents without a reproductive logic, it will join us in stagnation.

Ok all true. I took received

anon_jafe said in #3320 2mo ago: received

While not included in the original post, I'd like to add on some other ideas on how a future America/Canada should operate.

1.) Localized Societies

The reason why I'm keen on localized societies where a person's world is surrounded by their friends/family in some small town rather than in a big city with people they've never met is due to how they'll be a stronger polity to fight off state aggression. It'll allow for a selection pressure towards greater cultural values that'll enable civilization to transform into the industrial era. If we all live in the same homogenized city, new ideas will be squashed by older cultural norms; however, in localized communities, something similar to genetic drift will occur, where new ideas could become dominant easily. Communities with the best values would survive for generations on whereas communities that fail get trounced. On the other point, communities that are much more homogenized will result in a higher trusting society, which gives rise to social capital that could be spent on helping neighbors in need, infrastructure, militias, etc. In a world where totalitarian states could become dominant easily through the use of the internet and other technologies, we need to neuter the state's power so that it'll only be good for upholding the rule of law and engaging in foreign policy. I think this is why it could only work for nations of North America, as warfare may not be waged well without a strong centralized government. This'll also have the added benefit of increasing the birth rate.

2.) The Revitalization of Nature

The disenchantment of the world is one of the tragedies of the modern era. No longer is the world viewed as a magical place with beautiful cultures, organisms, etc, but a mundane one - given how bloody and terrible life is this eventually boils down to the world being a horrifying area.
It seems to me that one reason we consider the world to be such a drab place is due to how we're no longer in a state of nature. Who could've guessed that humans, who were built to explore the outside, would be depressed once they can't translate all of the trinkets of prehistory into the industrial era? We need to ensure that life revolves around how ancient peoples lived, through friends/community, rituals and sacraments to commemorate events (like puberty or death), and most importantly, a reinsertion into the environment. Imagine what the effects of children getting little to no exposure to the environment throughout their upbringing and they are just used to machines all around them. Sure there's some benefits to this, but to have people not experience nature's beauty and gain a greater understanding of reality through it (like the presence of cyclicality by seeing butterflies or birds migrate annually) or alternatively through not seeing all the intricacies of nature like common patterns or why animals have one trait or another (like birds and their singing). Honestly, I think a lot of mystical/religious archetypes emerged from seeing common traits in nature, like Kabalah.

If children get decent exposure to nature, we may get a society of polymaths who will be able to create a better tomorrow with a greater understanding of the world than us.

While not included i received

anon_jafe said in #3321 2mo ago: received

*Addendum

I forgot to add that we need more institutions present to balance the state, like religious organizations, for example - imagine e-jesuit-esque people.

*Addendum... received

anon_pyte said in #3339 2mo ago: received

> The reason why I'm keen on localized societies where a person's world is surrounded by their friends/family in some small town rather than in a big city with people they've never met is due to how they'll be a stronger polity

This is degrowth.

It's the most destructive horseshoe in the Anglo world right now: the left-decel/left-nimby and right-decel/right-nimby alliance. They wear each other's surface ideologies like a skinsuit. In California, for example, many land-acknowledging turbolib-presenting boomers are factual conservatives in the sense that they live in exclusive towns where they fight any and all change. They even enjoy (and will defend to the death) a large tax exemption for themselves in the form of Prop 13. We have gas stations from the 1950s preserved on the historical buildings register. These towns are surrounded by moats of Conservation land, on which construction is permanently barred. This lets the boomer satisfy, simultaneously, her Sierra Club-supporting lefty activist superego and her We're Full id.

--

Throughout history, the leading civilization has produced the world's leading cities. This will not change. China is charging ahead--the Pearl River Delta is a single megalopolis with 60 million people that produces as much manufacturing output as the entire United States. It has bullet trains that connect from one end to the other (Shenzhen to Guangzhou) in 20 minutes.

You are of course personally welcome to move to Healdsburg and open an acai cafe--it's a free country--but the future of the West is the metropolis.

referenced by: >>3347

This is degrowth.... received

anon_wyly said in #3347 2mo ago: received

>>3339
There is one all-important kind of growth that does not seem to be correlated with cities at all and is in fact disastrously anticorellated with them to the point of being the fatal achilles heel of civilization as such. By comparison all of today’s celebrated productivity in wealth and technology is mere trifles. That kind of growth obviously is the growth of human quality. Those matters pertaining to race, selection, fertility, etc do not cross the line of even plausible sustainability in any city in the world today.

I’m not saying the degrowthers are right. They usually lock their communities down against the youth, not for them. But I think degrowtherism comes from an intuition of the unsustainable disaster that is the modern pattern of development. I’m also not saying anon above is correct about resistance to the metropole-state being the right path. But there is a logic to it if approached with the right priorities.

The situation is so bad that the only plausible solution most people can imagine is to cut the human race out of the matter of civilization entirely, and create a new machine race more naturally suited to a hyper-urbanized industrial mode of reproduction. I have my doubts that this will actually work, besides not liking it for the simple reason of duty to self and fondness for the particular beauty we already embody.

The only human path out of this bind is to make civilization about the cultivation of blood, either for the sake of some great megaproject as proposed recently by Mr Jukic, or directly for the sake of the megaproject of racial development. Or we can shut the whole thing down and move to Healdsburg, as our parents generation concluded.

referenced by: >>3356

There is one all-imp received

anon_jafe said in #3355 2mo ago: received

>Throughout history, the leading civilization has produced the world's leading cities. This will not change. China is charging ahead--the Pearl River Delta is a single megalopolis with 60 million people that produces as much manufacturing output as the entire United States. It has bullet trains that connect from one end to the other (Shenzhen to Guangzhou) in 20 minutes.

None of this will matter in a few decades. China will have a declining population and economy due to their one child policy making 4 grandparents and 2 parents rely on one child for financial aid.

Sure we could have a society with a GDP that outpaces the Nordic countries with technology that'd earn the ire of the Japanese, but is that the society we need? Do we need a society that's wealthy or one that's more adapted to the conditions of the industrial era? Around nearly a quarter of Americans suffer from some mental health problem, the birth rate is abysmal (which likely reflects a societal failure on some part - humans are inclined to have kids naturally and when they don't it's a bad sign of the state of a culture), the family as an institution - the bedrock of civilization - is dead in many areas; I could go on and on but you get the idea.

The way out of this state of degradation isn't simply to return to the 1950s, it's to fundamentally restructure how we want the US to be as a society. It's unlikely that we'll find some way to do that through a top-down approach (either by the state or universities); it seems better to allow local communities to decide that for themselves, and those that have good cultural values either pass it to the next generation or to other communities - I doubt this'd work when dealing with cities instead given their homogenizing effect on thought.

Oh Faustian man, if we keep humming this tune of higher growth, higher GDP, better products to consume, etc, we'll only see the last remnants of the West give up its soul in exchange for nothing of significance. The West won't die like Rome because of hordes of Vandals, but rather because of how they lost what made them human and thus lose touch with beauty and an appreciation for the divine.

None of this will ma received

anon_pyte said in #3356 2mo ago: received

>>3347

> There is one all-important kind of growth that does not seem to be correlated with cities at all [...] That kind of growth obviously is the growth of human quality.

This is backwards. Cities are the engine of human advancement.

Cities are not just where culture and technology develops. They're also where assortative mating happens. In every society with a recognizable endogamous cognitive elite (Brahmins, Ashkenazim, etc), that group is the most urban. Even traditionally rural elites like the European aristocracy split their time between town and country, with cities serving as the nexus for social events, courtship, & marriage.

The invention of the city changed human evolution and set us on a course toward higher cognitive ability, lower time preference, all the things that make civilization work. I wrote about this in more detail a few weeks ago (https://sofiechan.com/p/3124#3132). In societies without any cities altogether--there were several until the 19th century--this process didn't happen. Our romanian friend calls it the Birth of Philosophy.

All that said: I don't want to dismiss your point that current first-world cities are broken in some important ways. American cities, in particular, have become strangely anti-natal. It's just that these problems are all fixable.

> disastrously anticorellated with them to the point of being the fatal achilles heel of civilization as such

This is just far too doomer. "Korea will shrink by 95%!" is the rightist version of "we're all going to die of global warming" or the 1960s panic about impending mass starvation due to overpopulation. We are extrapolating lines that, while they do point in a bad direction, are fundamentally bendable. Humans are smart and adaptive. The childfree redditors are helpfully selecting themselves out as we speak. Do not fear. We will have a gleaming metropolis, and it will be full of babies.

referenced by: >>3392

This is backwards. C received

anon_wyly said in #3392 1mo ago: received

>>3356
My understanding is that the biggest cities have always been fertility-negative on average for as long as we've had cities. But you are right that the most civilized types of men are the result of city-related selection. So what's going on? Would first of all be nice to have better data here.

My speculation is that there is some "trunk" process in the evolution of civilized man that is closely related to cities but not directly just urbanization. You note "town and country", keyword "and". The key thing is being able to pull an Abraham orbit: from the uncivilized edge deep into cities, and then back out with loot and increased leverage on genetic success. I don't think the successful civilized lineages are pure products of urbanization, but some other process related to cities. Militarization is a candidate.

I think there may be a type of man for whom urbanization is the "trunk" process, but that is the underclass type who is always bred in great numbers at the end of great civilizations as they fall into mass democracy and other forms of degeneracy. India and the Islamic world are unfortunately characterized by this relative to their great heights, increasingly America and Europe. Rome was this at the end, but somehow modern southern Europe shows little of that genetic legacy (despite it being very noticeable in the late iron age genetics).

>This is just far too doomer.
The above substantiates what I mean by "the achilles heel of civilization as such". If the trunk process of civilized man isn't civilization but something closely related to civilization, but (late stage) civilization is the trunk process of some other post-civilized type, then civilization is fundamentally crippled as a sort of self-limiting aberration.

I too hope for the gleaming synthesis of civilization and good breeding, but I fear we have not yet seen it in history.

My understanding is received

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