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

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?

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.

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.

>>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.