Our Collapsing Civilization

[Friday]

This has been twenty years now, but I remember taking a health class in high school and, for some reason, the teacher asked us if we thought our generation had it harder, or our parents' did. I was the only kid in the class who said our parents' generation had it tougher.

(Keep in mind this would have been the spring of 2000. Before Bush, the dotcom collapse, Enron, Iraq, the Great Recession, and every single moment from January 2017 to present, and back when we still thought Columbine was a horrible isolated incident, not a roadmap for what the next twenty years were going to look like. If you asked me today if Boomers or Millennials had it tougher growing up, I'd answer differently. But back in the spring of 2000, we had it pretty fucking good compared to the generation that grew up during the era of violent crackdowns on civil rights protests, political assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate.)

Not only did none of my classmates seem to know what Vietnam was, but several of them repeated the same line that "there's a lot more pressure to do drugs now than when our parents were kids." You know, in the 1960s and '70s.

Well, that's just human beings always doing that thing where their problems are worse than anyone else's problems. Not kids, human beings.

But yeah also ignorance and schools failing to do what they're fucking designed to do.

[zaratustra]

This has been twenty years now, but I remember taking a health class in high school and, for some reason, the teacher asked us if we thought our generation had it harder, or our parents' did. I was the only kid in the class who said our parents' generation had it tougher.

(Keep in mind this would have been the spring of 2000.

BOY THAD WAY TO FUCKING JINX IT

[Mongrel]

xD

[Cait]

A frightening number of younger American's don't know about the Holocaust or believe it's a myth.

I'm kind of struggling to believe this one. The numbers are just so... how can 2 of every 3 people my age be completely unaware of the Holocaust?

https://twitter.com/nataliemj10/status/ ... 4952788992 - Pretty good breakdown on sensationalist headlines and the actual data. The issue is far less that people don't know about the Holocaust and more that most of them weren't sure about the specific magnitude involved.

[Blossom]

This whole time. This whole time.

[Blossom]

This is what we mean when we say the democrats aren't interested in governing or making anything better for anyone, they are only interested in getting paid to run as opposition and lose.

[Friday]

This isn't in reply to anything, just random bullshit as I sit here at 5am thinking about what's going on in the world.

Back in the year 2000 or so when I first started paying attention to the world, (I was 19) I noticed that this shit couldn't last.

And by "this shit" I mean, society as it is currently structured.

There's an old saying that people say, and it's "The Rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

Whenever they hear it, they nod, yep, of course, business as usual, what else is new?

But what they don't really think about it how that's both absolutely true and absolutely unsustainable.

Climate Change aside, you cannot have a society where the Rich just keep getting richer and the Poor just keep getting poorer. It will, eventually and inevitably, topple. Even if stopgaps are applied. If the rule remains Rich = richer and Poor = poorer as time passes, it doesn't matter what else you do, what laws you pass, what measures you take to slow the process.

Of course, wealth inequality isn't the only thing on the menu right now. There's 10 other things or more, and Climate Change is even worse.

But my 19 year old self understood the concept that you literally CAN NOT have a society where over time the wealth concentrates. This wasn't, like, an amazing genius observation or anything. Historically tons of countries, regimes, kingdoms, and even empires have fallen due at least in part to this truth. What baffled me then and still baffles me now is how people can believe that it cannot happen here, now. Even with all the problems going on all around them, delivered to them 24 hours a day by the rectangle in their pocket.

I know, I know. This also is not unique to our current iteration of society. I'm absolutely sure lots of the people in history who lived in the times of their societies downfalls also did not believe it could happen to them. Right up to the point where the trouble arrived right at their doorstep and killed them, raped them, or forced them out of their houses and stole everything they owned.

And so this pattern of history has given rise to the belief that this process, this ... iteration, this cycle, is also inevitable. As though humans are just eternally condemned to repeat this lesson forever because they cannot figure out a way to create a just society where people can live equally and in harmony.

I don't know if I believe that. I mean that statement literally. I'm unsure.

Can we as a species stop being greedy to the point where it destroys society? Is the tragedy of the commons an insurmountable problem? All these problems have plagued us for our entire existence, but now things are different. When a kingdom or even an empire fell, it would fuck up a localized part of the world. Sure, trade partners would feel the effects, but by and large the fall of the Roman Empire did not fuck over China, and China's repeated shatterings did not fuck over Europe.

But now we're all trade partners. Moreso than ever before. There isn't a country on earth that wouldn't keenly feel the collapse of the United States, or any Super Power. So the stakes are now much much higher. Where before thousands could die, now billions stand to. The US is the breadbasket of the world, and China the factory of the world.

Revolutionaries are always laughed at. "We need a new system," they say, and the reply is always "This is all there is, so shutup with your pipedreams of utopias, commie hippie idiot." But I don't dream of a utopia. I don't believe in a perfect system. I just want a system that does not allow Greed to rule.

[Mongrel]

The thing I find most uncomfortable about that problem is that we DO have real-world examples of societies that, in the latter half of the 20th century got it much more right than wrong - Scandinavia, and to a lesser extent, Japan and a few other heavily socialist nations. I mean I'm not saying they're perfect, but they do have economic and social systems largely based on a shared social burden.

I would say also say justice, but Japan's justice system is LAWLZZZZ NO. That said, the Scandinavian justice systems are very on point with things like real rehabilitative prisons and fines which are proportional to income.

The problem there is that it's generally agreed that this really only happened in those nations because those societies are homogenous as fuck.

So it seems to be that greed can be beaten, but racism and fear of the other are problems we've never conquered, not in a lasting way or across a large territory, and in countries with even slightly different population groups those differences are the single most accessible lever for the rich or would-be rich to pull to start ripping people off. Inland vs coastal, dark vs light, native vs non-native, most nations of the world have one or more divisions along those lines.

Which is also why, when you look at the US, I feel like America winds up being the worst expression of this in the world due to how deeply slavery, and the bullshit justifications for it, ended up embedded in the collective psyche and law of the nation.

There is however one small positive note to mention. In a huge number of countries - I mean really huge - cultural and racial divisions were exacerbated by a ruling British (or other colonial power but the British were best at this BY FAR) administration. The state of the world now is one which is still dealing with the greatest crime of the British Empire, which used division and greed to create the closest thing the world has ever seen to true global rule. The US for all it's horrible interference in other nations, has never matched the scope of that (not for lack of trying) and I'm not sure anyone else ever will. The world, taken as a whole and averaged out, is basically slowly coming off a historic level of racial trauma.

It hasn't been pretty, and the depth and scale of the trauma mean that the effects will likely linger for centuries - at least - but things are slowly getting better as the trauma recedes and, one by one countries find a way to reconciliate. Not every country is getting that chance of course, as neocolonial powers still exploit those old divisions. But a country that does find a true peace based on justice has found a place that makes it very hard to go back.

Economically, in the mid-term, there's a chance here for enough nations to recover sufficiently that eventually more just systems of rule will come to more countries, and once enough countries go that way, it won't just be a case of "But Scandinavia".

[Büge]

more like SCANDAL-navia, am I right

[Mongrel]

I want to say things about Wheeler which would get me put on an FBI watchlist.

[Friday]

Collapsing Levels of Trust are Devastating America.

This brings us to the third marginalized group that scores extremely high on social distrust: young adults. These are people who grew up in the age of disappointment. It’s the only world they know.

In 2012, 40 percent of Baby Boomers believed that most people can be trusted, as did 31 percent of members of Generation X. In contrast, only 19 percent of Millennials said most people can be trusted. Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” according to a Pew survey from 2018. Seventy-one percent of those young adults say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.”

Many young people look out at a world they believe is screwed up and untrustworthy in fundamental ways. A mere 10 percent of Gen Zers trust politicians to do the right thing. Millennials are twice as likely as their grandparents to say that families should be able to opt out of vaccines. Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67 percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of people who are not like them. Fewer than a third of Millennials say America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64 percent of members of the Silent Generation.

Human beings need a basic sense of security in order to thrive; as the political scientist Ronald F. Inglehart puts it, their “values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.” In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away. Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home that leaves young people incapable of handling real-world stress. But the true insecurity is financial, social, and emotional.

First, financial insecurity: By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth. As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Next, emotional insecurity: Americans today experience more instability than at any period in recent memory—fewer children growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.

In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the ideology of those who feel betrayed. Contempt for “insiders” rises, as does suspicion toward anybody who holds authority. People are drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more political extremism. People seek closed, rigid ideological systems that give them a sense of security. As Hannah Arendt once observed, fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind. Donald Trump is the great emblem of an age of distrust—a man unable to love, unable to trust. When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do.

There's some stuff in this article that I think is pretty stupid (especially in the second half) but it's a good read I think, nonetheless.

[Thad]

I assume there's a segue between those two quoted sections, because it ain't Millennials who gave us Trump.

[KingRoyal]

Story by David Brooks

There's your problem.

[Mongrel]

The biggest problem is that this time around the wealthy have been so effective at destroying or denying leftist forms of populism that the only contender which remains is Fascism.

But the fact that the US even has these cycles is fucking damning. The only reason the US doesn't resemble a teetering Sub-Saharan nation is because of it's sheer size and collective wealth (i.e. most of the time, even the tiny scraps left to the 99% - or more correctly - the white part of it, which controls the political process - put their standards of living above the world average. That hasn't been the case for decades.)

Zealotry and Greed.

[Mongrel]

Guardian: Trump aide Stephen Miller preparing second-term immigration blitz consisting of executive orders deemed "too extreme for a president seeking re-election"

Those items are expected to include attempting to eliminate birthright citizenship, making the US citizenship test more difficult to pass, ending the program which protects people from deportation when there is a crisis is their country (Temporary Protected Status) and slashing refugee admissions even further, to zero.

Miller’s rooted position in the White House was underlined late last year, when a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report showed the presidential adviser endorsing white supremacist views in emails to a writer at Breitbart News. It was a discovery that would have brought down prominent figures in other administrations, but not in the Trump White House.

In the wake of the report, seven Trump officials in anonymous interviews with the Daily Beast said the story didn’t endanger Miller’s position and two people laughed at the suggestion.

I'd keep an eye on this shit even if Trump loses.

Incidentally, it blows my mind that Miller's only 35. They really aren't kidding when they say evil people age faster.

[mharr]

Pity it seems to boost life expectancy at the same rate.

[Yoji]

Often do I feel I need to ask: What the hell would his mother think?

[Mongrel]

Often do I feel I need to ask: What the hell would his mother think?

Depends on if he's a family pariah or a family scion.

[Mongrel]

Still reading this, but it's a good summation so far.

https://scheerpost.com/2020/10/19/chris ... al-despair

The moral life is a matter of circumstances. Moral consideration, as I saw in the wars I covered, largely disappears in moments of extremity. It is the luxury of the privileged. “Ten percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction,” Susan Sontag said.

[...]

Those overwhelmed by despair seek magical salvations, whether in crisis cults, such as the Christian Right, or demagogues such as Trump, or rage-filled militias that see violence as a cleansing agent. As long as these dark pathologies are allowed to fester and grow–and the Democratic Party has made it clear it will not enact the kinds of radical social reforms that will curb these pathologies–the United States will continue its march towards disintegration and social upheaval. Removing Trump will neither halt nor slow the descent.

[...]

Only one thing matters to the corporate state. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate crisis. It is the primacy of corporate power — which has extinguished our democracy, taken from us our most basic civil liberties and left most of the working class in misery — and the increase and consolidation of its wealth and power.

[Mongrel]