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You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of establi

You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old". "Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the goals and priorities of a nation, and it loses its drive to be scrappy, make sacrifices, and do the innovative things when one does when young and poor. You have generations who want to extract the gains put in by past generations. Or it costs too much to change people's behavior. That's what I think is happening to western Europe and the US. Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices that the generation previously were forced to, by unfortunate circumstance. Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans. Unless you have a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves, this sets in. Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country...

jlawson 8y ago
I'm pretty sure "getting old" has always been a big part of the collapse of civilizations. I can think of few that were truly destroyed by unstoppable external forces (maybe the Byzantine Empire being attacked by Muslims?). Most of them seem to have rotted from the inside and were easily knocked over by opportunists (Rome). That said I'm no historian so examples would be interesting. Also interestingly, America is 243 years old - 93 years to go! Sounds reasonable.
digitaltrees 8y ago
Get rid of multi generational transfers of wealth. Make each generation start from scratch. I know it's easier said than done as not all assets are fungible or distributable (social networks, geography etc) but it would make a difference. I read recently that the same families that controlled most the wealth in Florence in the 1600 still control most the wealth now, that's probably not good for scrappy innovation.
- avinium 8y ago
  A death/inheritance tax seems an absolute no-brainer to me - and I consider myself fairly conservative. That doesn't mean increasing the overall tax burden, either - it could be introduced to offset income tax reductions. It seems much "fairer" to me.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    A fair tax is one that lands on someone else.
    - avinium 8y ago
      I'll assume you're being glib. One of the most attractive features of a death tax is that it applies to everybody. After all, nobody escapes death. Of course, that doesn't mean it'll be loved universally. Some people just hate taxes. Others don't like the idea of not being able to pass on their life's work to their children. But most reasonable people understand the need for taxation. It's a lot easier to stomach the tax man dipping into your wallet after you're gone than before.
      - AstralStorm 8y ago
        The problem is lack of control. The tax man (politicians, find managers) could make any number of appropriations instead of using the money for society and dead people cannot challenge him. Current living people have less of a stake to do that.
      - skookumchuck 8y ago
        > I'll assume you're being glib. The death tax doesn't apply to everybody, as hardly everybody leave behind a significant estate. Lots of people die with a negative net worth. The death tax is also often sold as "only affecting estates worth over $xx million", so it safely doesn't apply to the vast majority of voters, it only applies to those they are envious of.
      - Frqy3 8y ago
adrianN 8y ago
I don't think we're past the age of physical conquering. It's been less than a hundred years since the last World War. That's not particularly long, historically speaking. The pattern seems to be that a new major war starts not long after the eyewitnesses of the last one have all died. If that holds true, the next few decades or so will be interesting.
- discodave 8y ago
  Remember that the bulk of the worlds population doesn't live in the Anglosphere, or Europe. E.g. if you're from the Middle East, or Africa then you might know a thing or two about revolution, if not war itself. Additionally, the US has now been engaged in Afghanistan longer than they were in Vietnam. There's a whole generation of Americans who know all about war. In the US, the generation who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, then lived through the Great Recession are about to go into politics. My prediction is that if we ain't seen nuthin' yet.
  - riffraff 8y ago
    also, right at the border of continental Europe we had that "russia just annexed a part of ucraine" a couple years ago. Have people already forgotten that?
    - Gibbon1 8y ago
      That felt to me like the US neocons thought their cunning plan[1] would separate Russia from the Sevastopol Naval Base. That backfired bigly. Me I can't think is any Russian Government that would tolerate that. [1] With the utterly incompetent Sen Clinton running the State Department no less.
  - zanny 8y ago
    Thats the thing though, generations didn't serve in Afghanistan or Iraq. Even if you counted the some ~3 million service members engaged in those wars over their duration of the ~70 million Americans between 25 and 45 as all being in that age group thats 4% of those generations participating in the wars.
muse900 8y ago
More to your point, we have vilified death a bit too much. In the past they had poems about death, sung death, created legends. Dying in the battlefield in an honorable way was seen as a good way to leave this place and go to the next one. The world needs to renew itself, or else there won't be enough resources to feed one another. We are at peaceful times but one thing history can show us is our future, and in history there have been times of peace, although they only lasted for a few years.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  > Dying in the battlefield in an honorable way was seen as a good way to leave this place and go to the next one. Do you really not see that this was sick propaganda, propagated by evil dictators in need of cannon (sword?) fodder? There's nothing honorable about war or battlefields. It's the worst of the human condition, distilled to the highest concentration. War is repugnant, evil, and unnecessary. We humans should move to rid ourselves of it, not spread fucked up fairy tales about it on the internet. Honorable, pff. Say that again when you're slowly bleeding out in a ditch somewhere fighting someone else's battle.
  - muse900 8y ago
    I am not too narrow minded so I see war as a not good thing and a as a not bad thing. I don't like seeing anything in this world as a good or a bad thing. War is something that comes to us by default. Its in our nature, as its in every animals nature for survival. Its not something pushed to us by dictators and what not. Also I don't agree with your sentence of removing poems, legends and whatever from the internet. Let each person decide for himself whats to be filtered in his head or not. The internet should be free, accessible and non filtered.
    - skrebbel 8y ago
      About war being neither good or bad but unavoidable, I don't think we'll come to an agreement. I truly believe that we can make the world free of war through a combination of honesty about the horrors of war (so that well-fed people stop supporting it) and the technological progress which will inevitably give all humans food on their table and a roof over their heads (iff we don't fuck up the climate first). Your argument is well formulated, however, and while I disagree with it I appreciate the way you bring it. Thanks for that. > Also I don't agree with your sentence of removing poems, legends and whatever from the internet. But I didn't suggest anything of the sort. You didn't cite these poems as a matter of historical fact, you referred to them in mild agreement to make a point. There's a major difference. I'm surprised that you interpret an attack on your argument as an attempt to censor history. Not every pacifist is a marxist. In fact, I suspect that we strongly agree that ideas that people used to support but most Westerners now think of as barbarian (eg "homosexuals are evil", "black people are animals but they can harvest cotton pretty well" and IMO also "dying for your warlord is honorable") should remain accessible in history books, online and offline.
pjc50 8y ago
Despite hiding it well, this is an extremely fascist post in ideology - the idea that the west is decadent and needs a bit more violence was very prevalent in the 30s.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  This reasoning does not substantiate your accusation: The idea was prevalent not just in the facist countries.
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    Those ideas were at the core of the fascist ideology and that should be enough to allow using the word.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  The fact that Stalin believed 2+2=4 doesn't invalidate math by association with mass murder. Do you have a reason to suspect GP is in fact maliciously trying to push fascist ideology? Because that's what your comment implies, and does not hide it well.
  - retsibsi 8y ago
    The post is all about the need for a decadent nation to 'refresh' itself. It toys with the idea of 'a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves', before concluding that (sadly) mass death and destruction is the answer. Maybe that doesn't fill a political scientist's checklist for fascism, but you don't need to look very hard to see some unsettling parallels.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    I should probably have bothered to write more but was on mobile. Anyway, the core of the OP arguments are (a) "Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives", (b) "I think you need a good war to refresh a country..." and (c) "sacrifice" (twice) (a) is not an uncommon sentiment, but usually leads either to to the "fully automated luxury communism" argument that everyone should lead lives of luxury, or that nobody should live in luxury (which is more Pol Pot Maoist). This post leaves it rather ambiguous where the luxury should go. I would accept the argument that the post is Maoist rather than fascist if it came with some elaboration. (b) is the dead giveaway. The idea of war as stiffener of moral fiber, or renewal of the "people", is the core of Nietsche / Mein Kampf / Triumph of the Will kinds of ideological material. Someone writing that before WW1 could be naive. Someone writing it after WW2, when it became apparent what all this actually meant in practice, is effectively saying that mass murder is better than "indifference and lethargy" or "2nd homes and retirement plans". It's one thing to want to die before you get old, quite another to want to abolish retirement for everyone else through war. (c) The word "sacrifice" appears twice in the original post, loosely linked to (b). At no point is it clear who is expected to sacrifice what, to whom, and for what purpose. This makes me suspicious that the intended (human?) sacrifice might be ... whom exactly? (A quick scan of the OP's comment history does not reveal any other comments that look even slightly fascist, so I'm willing to assume this was simply poor taste rather than active malice)
taurath 8y ago
Personal sacrifice has really fallen by the wayside especially with the already wealthy. Altruism is probably not the solution though. The most charitable people are those who can empathize with the poor, and that seems to be in real short supply.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  If you've ever been poor or on the receiving end of cult of personality of bullying you really quickly realize in how short supply altruism is in the world.
- kbenson 8y ago
  > The most charitable people are those who can empathize with the poor I wonder. The most charitable, or most people that are charitable? According to this[1] (which references a paywalled report), middle-class Americans account for nearly two-thirds of charitable giving. That doesn't necessarily mean the rest is from upper class giving, but I think it's a fairly safe assumption (especially given some of the other points in the article). And if the rich are giving, it might be less of an empathy, and more of a sympathy (or even guilt). Then again, perhaps you meant the most charitable as in giving the largest percentage of their income. Or maybe of their disposable income, in which case, maybe the poor would actually be the most charitable in some areas. In any case, I think charitable giving is actually a fairly complex topic that might not be accurately summed up as easily as your comment implies. 1: https://www.philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Divide/156175 https://www.philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Di...
- pizzazzaro 8y ago
  The problem here? The only people who share with the poor are those who can relate. And that happens to be... the poor. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129068241 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129068...
pesmhey 8y ago
Perhaps civilizations are born, live and die. With luck, they pass on their memes and genes to the next one.
tanilama 8y ago
> Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices ....Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans. Really? That is at least not what I saw happens in the US, most of the old people could be impoverished by unexpected disease. What you described isn't like 5% of the whole population really...
- deleted 8y ago
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crimsonalucard 8y ago
People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages. According to all observations the most likely end to modern civilization is over exploitation and over usage of natural resources. The amount of resources available and the amount we use point to a trend that has one conclusion. The irony is that even with the knowledge of our impending doom we are still unable to see it despite the obviousness of it. The original poster makes a chancy prediction on how wealth inequality will take us to our ends while all trendlines and data point to the real way our civilization will end. One day there will not be enough oil in the world for you to drive to work or fly to another state. Technology is not our savior. The trendlines in tech are far too slow do make any meaningful difference. What you're actually observing with technology like the tesla is the trendline in hype.
- onion2k 8y ago
  People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages. Throughout history poor people were happy because they believed they were born to that life so they didn't have the stress or jealousy of believing life was unfair to them. If you read any old philosophy book it's all lessons about being happy with what you have. Believing you can raise yourself up and improve your life is a relatively new phenomenon, and society stopping people doing that leads to unhappiness.
  - crimsonalucard 8y ago
    >Believing you can raise yourself up and improve your life is a relatively new phenomenon, and society stopping people doing that leads to unhappiness. Such a speculative statement. You cannot predict the behavior of a group of people anymore than you can predict a stock. I would say a more realistic statement to your topic is: People can be happy with what they have and be unhappy with what they have and throughout history many people have felt either way. It is not a new phenomenon. Whether these feelings lead to revolution in the future is impossible to determine. You need to look at trendlines, data points and evidence.
deleted 8y ago
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stcredzero 8y ago
Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices that the generation previously were forced to, by unfortunate circumstance. Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans. Also voting for politicians who pass laws that hamstring the house buying ability of the next generations.
tomc1985 8y ago
Given this website attracts loads of innovators and wannabe innovators I'm inclined to take this thought with a grain of salt. There is so much blind faith in the vigor of youth and new ideas that I wonder if many of you can even imagine a world that runs at any slower pace than today. Given that we are supposedly past the age of aggression and conquering, do you think a peaceful society that keeps to itself is capable of surviving on its own, with a level of happiness that is high by their own (if not world) standards?
ekianjo 8y ago
A good war? In this time and age you would not get a refresh, rather a complete reboot to the stone age after utter destruction. Be careful what you wish for...
_Microft 8y ago
Unless you have a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves, this sets in. This is exactly the problem we need to solve as well if we ever manage to increase the human lifespan. Instead of society advancing one funeral at a time (c.f. Max Planck on science) as in the past, permanent change would have to come from every individual at a much higher rate than now.
sametmax 8y ago
> You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. Not sure. First, the US did invade a lot of places in the last decades, and while they didn't officially turned the countries into US colonies, they still do have massive political and economical influence there, and benefit from the local resources. But even if you discard this, it's assuming the future will be the same as today, which is unlikely. In the entire human history we never had a single day without a war somewhere on earth. The possibility that our countries will __never__ be at war again on their on soil is slim: we have many tomorrows to create situations where it can happen. We massively consume limited resources in a close system. We destroy systems that regerate resources we need, a destabilize the balance our organisms a based on, and we have hugely powerful weapons. Conquerying one another is still a tempting solution to many problems. E.G: India has more than 1 billion people, almost no water, extremly strong social tensions, hot borders, pollution in mass and the nuclear bomb. Anything triggering here can easily creep on to the entire world.
lm28469 8y ago
You should check out Raoul Vaneigem, he develops similar ideas, but focusing on the middle class stuck in their "everyday life" and routines. Whatever you do at work, 8 hours a day, leaves you with just enough energy to consume entertainment and wait for the next day. The cycle doesn't end until you're 65 and are allowed to retire, by the time you don't have any kind of energy (physical and/or mental), most people don't even have money to live the dream they've been forced to believe in all their life. I don't think getting old is the cause, not in the physical sense anyway. The problem to me is that we've been delivered from the "work to survive" in the 1900s, now most people are getting out of the "work to live", which is promptly replaced by the "work to consume", and this is no place for fulfillment, happiness or will to do things bigger than ourselves. I'll probably get blasted because a lot of HN readers see everything through the lens of software engineering, living comfortably with 2-20 times the minimum wage of their countries. Let's not forget that we're part of the lucky ones. > Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives Too many middle class people barely making a living and spending all their effort/time to keep up on the social ladder. They're so blinded by the repetitiveness of their life that they don't even think there could be more to it. Past generations were at least fighting for their rights, somehow it got lost somewhere in the last century, now we're left with parodies of social movements that were once making a dent (black panthers vs blm, first wave feminism vs current feminism, &c.). People are fed up just as much, but instead of acting on it they rant on twitter and feel like they did their part. --- "It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage, estranged from everything except the cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything outside the bars. it would have been abnormal — impossible in fact — to escape into something which had neither reality nor importance. Absolutely impossible. For inside this cage, in which they had been born and in which they would die, the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real" "The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology." "No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin? let nobody say these are minor details or secondary points. There are no negligible irritations; gangrene can start in the slightest graze." "While it was placing happiness and freedom on the order of the day, technological civilization was inventing the ideology of happiness and freedom. Thus it condemned itself to creating no more than the freedom of apathy, happiness in passivity. But at least this invention, perverted though it was, had denied that suffering is inherent in the human condition, that such an inhuman condition could last forever." "People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them." "And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no-one can breathe, and many say “We will breathe later”, and most do not die, because they are already dead."
zubspace 8y ago
I blame inheritance of wealth and the possibility of unlimited accumulation of richness for this. In my opinion, property and money, which someone amassed during his lifetime, should automatically be devoted to the common good after that person's gone. In my opinion it's insane, that someone lucky can inherit a fortune by basically doing nothing. There are things which make sense to inherit, like family enterprises, but there should be a limit. I also believe, that as an individual, there should be an upper bound to how rich you can be. Does it really make sense, that an individual person can have more than a seven-digit pool of money on his bank? Is there a way to limit the crazy strive for individual richness? If there would be a limit, we could basically invest the free money collectively into old and new enterprises which would not simply act as money printers for a few individuals, but actually profit society as a whole... Just a crazy idea...
retsibsi 8y ago
> Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country... Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price?
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price? Depends on two things: 1) One's priorities. Some might view the aggregate (the country) as bigger thing than individual people. Under this view, the importance of the lives (or worse, the importance of having comfortable lives) for a present generation can be deemed worth it to the freedom, prosperity, etc. of generations to come (and to the continuance of the country itself and its state and way of life etc., which in some cases might be totally obliterated by decline, e.g. Rome). 2) The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things.
  - retsibsi 8y ago
    > The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things. Sure; if you can convince me that any given war will avert more harm than it causes, I'll (intellectually at least) agree that it's justified. But at large temporal and geographical scales, with insanely complicated and only vaguely understood systems at work, you need an extremely strong argument to justify an action that will definitely lead to terrible consequences in the near term. The comment we're discussing falls far short of such an argument. In fact it doesn't even seem to aim at making one -- and not just in the sense that it's (understandably) very abstract and lacking any kind of detail. As far as I can tell it is motivated by nationalism, and certainly not by any desire to prevent greater suffering. Its idea of failure sounds more like a (relatively) peaceful transition: > You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. > And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old".
coldtea 8y ago
>And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old". "Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the goals and priorities of a nation, and it loses its drive to be scrappy, make sacrifices, and do the innovative things when one does when young and poor. You have generations who want to extract the gains put in by past generations. That's the case for now, sure. But that's also exactly what got ancient Athens and Sparta, Rome, Byzantium, and other empires of the past. Outsiders wouldn't do scratch if those empires weren't already rotting from inside for reasons such as those that you've mentioned. In Rome and Byzantium, for example, such a decline is more or less the established historical narrative.
tim333 8y ago
Those ideas have a history “War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war." Friedrich Nietzsche, in his 1878 book that was one of the inspirations for WW1, WW2 and all that. Not one of humanities best times. Though you could have a more positive take on war as in war on poverty and the like rather than the shooting people stuff.
rlucas 8y ago
Please read some intellectual history of the period between around 1870-1914. The modern nation state was newish, industrialization was newish, a sense that “decadence” was feminizing or draining nations of their vigor was adopted by myopic elites. There’s nothing novel in your comment here in the history of ideas. And, what we’ve empirically learned is that that thread of ideology in an industrialized world (to say nothing of a nuclear armed world) leads to slaughter. I realize this is HN but even so I feel it’s poor form inveighing with a well worn warmongering trope on the course of world history.

jlawson 8y ago

I'm pretty sure "getting old" has always been a big part of the collapse of civilizations. I can think of few that were truly destroyed by unstoppable external forces (maybe the Byzantine Empire being attacked by Muslims?). Most of them seem to have rotted from the inside and were easily knocked over by opportunists (Rome). That said I'm no historian so examples would be interesting. Also interestingly, America is 243 years old - 93 years to go! Sounds reasonable.

digitaltrees 8y ago

Get rid of multi generational transfers of wealth. Make each generation start from scratch. I know it's easier said than done as not all assets are fungible or distributable (social networks, geography etc) but it would make a difference. I read recently that the same families that controlled most the wealth in Florence in the 1600 still control most the wealth now, that's probably not good for scrappy innovation.

avinium 8y ago
A death/inheritance tax seems an absolute no-brainer to me - and I consider myself fairly conservative. That doesn't mean increasing the overall tax burden, either - it could be introduced to offset income tax reductions. It seems much "fairer" to me.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  A fair tax is one that lands on someone else.
  - avinium 8y ago
    I'll assume you're being glib. One of the most attractive features of a death tax is that it applies to everybody. After all, nobody escapes death. Of course, that doesn't mean it'll be loved universally. Some people just hate taxes. Others don't like the idea of not being able to pass on their life's work to their children. But most reasonable people understand the need for taxation. It's a lot easier to stomach the tax man dipping into your wallet after you're gone than before.
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      The problem is lack of control. The tax man (politicians, find managers) could make any number of appropriations instead of using the money for society and dead people cannot challenge him. Current living people have less of a stake to do that.
    - skookumchuck 8y ago
      > I'll assume you're being glib. The death tax doesn't apply to everybody, as hardly everybody leave behind a significant estate. Lots of people die with a negative net worth. The death tax is also often sold as "only affecting estates worth over $xx million", so it safely doesn't apply to the vast majority of voters, it only applies to those they are envious of.
    - Frqy3 8y ago

adrianN 8y ago

I don't think we're past the age of physical conquering. It's been less than a hundred years since the last World War. That's not particularly long, historically speaking. The pattern seems to be that a new major war starts not long after the eyewitnesses of the last one have all died. If that holds true, the next few decades or so will be interesting.

discodave 8y ago
Remember that the bulk of the worlds population doesn't live in the Anglosphere, or Europe. E.g. if you're from the Middle East, or Africa then you might know a thing or two about revolution, if not war itself. Additionally, the US has now been engaged in Afghanistan longer than they were in Vietnam. There's a whole generation of Americans who know all about war. In the US, the generation who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, then lived through the Great Recession are about to go into politics. My prediction is that if we ain't seen nuthin' yet.
- riffraff 8y ago
  also, right at the border of continental Europe we had that "russia just annexed a part of ucraine" a couple years ago. Have people already forgotten that?
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    That felt to me like the US neocons thought their cunning plan[1] would separate Russia from the Sevastopol Naval Base. That backfired bigly. Me I can't think is any Russian Government that would tolerate that. [1] With the utterly incompetent Sen Clinton running the State Department no less.
- zanny 8y ago
  Thats the thing though, generations didn't serve in Afghanistan or Iraq. Even if you counted the some ~3 million service members engaged in those wars over their duration of the ~70 million Americans between 25 and 45 as all being in that age group thats 4% of those generations participating in the wars.

muse900 8y ago

More to your point, we have vilified death a bit too much. In the past they had poems about death, sung death, created legends. Dying in the battlefield in an honorable way was seen as a good way to leave this place and go to the next one. The world needs to renew itself, or else there won't be enough resources to feed one another. We are at peaceful times but one thing history can show us is our future, and in history there have been times of peace, although they only lasted for a few years.

skrebbel 8y ago
> Dying in the battlefield in an honorable way was seen as a good way to leave this place and go to the next one. Do you really not see that this was sick propaganda, propagated by evil dictators in need of cannon (sword?) fodder? There's nothing honorable about war or battlefields. It's the worst of the human condition, distilled to the highest concentration. War is repugnant, evil, and unnecessary. We humans should move to rid ourselves of it, not spread fucked up fairy tales about it on the internet. Honorable, pff. Say that again when you're slowly bleeding out in a ditch somewhere fighting someone else's battle.
- muse900 8y ago
  I am not too narrow minded so I see war as a not good thing and a as a not bad thing. I don't like seeing anything in this world as a good or a bad thing. War is something that comes to us by default. Its in our nature, as its in every animals nature for survival. Its not something pushed to us by dictators and what not. Also I don't agree with your sentence of removing poems, legends and whatever from the internet. Let each person decide for himself whats to be filtered in his head or not. The internet should be free, accessible and non filtered.
  - skrebbel 8y ago
    About war being neither good or bad but unavoidable, I don't think we'll come to an agreement. I truly believe that we can make the world free of war through a combination of honesty about the horrors of war (so that well-fed people stop supporting it) and the technological progress which will inevitably give all humans food on their table and a roof over their heads (iff we don't fuck up the climate first). Your argument is well formulated, however, and while I disagree with it I appreciate the way you bring it. Thanks for that. > Also I don't agree with your sentence of removing poems, legends and whatever from the internet. But I didn't suggest anything of the sort. You didn't cite these poems as a matter of historical fact, you referred to them in mild agreement to make a point. There's a major difference. I'm surprised that you interpret an attack on your argument as an attempt to censor history. Not every pacifist is a marxist. In fact, I suspect that we strongly agree that ideas that people used to support but most Westerners now think of as barbarian (eg "homosexuals are evil", "black people are animals but they can harvest cotton pretty well" and IMO also "dying for your warlord is honorable") should remain accessible in history books, online and offline.

pjc50 8y ago

Despite hiding it well, this is an extremely fascist post in ideology - the idea that the west is decadent and needs a bit more violence was very prevalent in the 30s.

wallace_f 8y ago
This reasoning does not substantiate your accusation: The idea was prevalent not just in the facist countries.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  Those ideas were at the core of the fascist ideology and that should be enough to allow using the word.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
The fact that Stalin believed 2+2=4 doesn't invalidate math by association with mass murder. Do you have a reason to suspect GP is in fact maliciously trying to push fascist ideology? Because that's what your comment implies, and does not hide it well.
- retsibsi 8y ago
  The post is all about the need for a decadent nation to 'refresh' itself. It toys with the idea of 'a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves', before concluding that (sadly) mass death and destruction is the answer. Maybe that doesn't fill a political scientist's checklist for fascism, but you don't need to look very hard to see some unsettling parallels.
- pjc50 8y ago
  I should probably have bothered to write more but was on mobile. Anyway, the core of the OP arguments are (a) "Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives", (b) "I think you need a good war to refresh a country..." and (c) "sacrifice" (twice) (a) is not an uncommon sentiment, but usually leads either to to the "fully automated luxury communism" argument that everyone should lead lives of luxury, or that nobody should live in luxury (which is more Pol Pot Maoist). This post leaves it rather ambiguous where the luxury should go. I would accept the argument that the post is Maoist rather than fascist if it came with some elaboration. (b) is the dead giveaway. The idea of war as stiffener of moral fiber, or renewal of the "people", is the core of Nietsche / Mein Kampf / Triumph of the Will kinds of ideological material. Someone writing that before WW1 could be naive. Someone writing it after WW2, when it became apparent what all this actually meant in practice, is effectively saying that mass murder is better than "indifference and lethargy" or "2nd homes and retirement plans". It's one thing to want to die before you get old, quite another to want to abolish retirement for everyone else through war. (c) The word "sacrifice" appears twice in the original post, loosely linked to (b). At no point is it clear who is expected to sacrifice what, to whom, and for what purpose. This makes me suspicious that the intended (human?) sacrifice might be ... whom exactly? (A quick scan of the OP's comment history does not reveal any other comments that look even slightly fascist, so I'm willing to assume this was simply poor taste rather than active malice)

taurath 8y ago

Personal sacrifice has really fallen by the wayside especially with the already wealthy. Altruism is probably not the solution though. The most charitable people are those who can empathize with the poor, and that seems to be in real short supply.

wallace_f 8y ago
If you've ever been poor or on the receiving end of cult of personality of bullying you really quickly realize in how short supply altruism is in the world.
kbenson 8y ago
> The most charitable people are those who can empathize with the poor I wonder. The most charitable, or most people that are charitable? According to this[1] (which references a paywalled report), middle-class Americans account for nearly two-thirds of charitable giving. That doesn't necessarily mean the rest is from upper class giving, but I think it's a fairly safe assumption (especially given some of the other points in the article). And if the rich are giving, it might be less of an empathy, and more of a sympathy (or even guilt). Then again, perhaps you meant the most charitable as in giving the largest percentage of their income. Or maybe of their disposable income, in which case, maybe the poor would actually be the most charitable in some areas. In any case, I think charitable giving is actually a fairly complex topic that might not be accurately summed up as easily as your comment implies. 1: https://www.philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Divide/156175 https://www.philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Di...
pizzazzaro 8y ago
The problem here? The only people who share with the poor are those who can relate. And that happens to be... the poor. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129068241 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129068...

pesmhey 8y ago

Perhaps civilizations are born, live and die. With luck, they pass on their memes and genes to the next one.

tanilama 8y ago

> Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices ....Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans. Really? That is at least not what I saw happens in the US, most of the old people could be impoverished by unexpected disease. What you described isn't like 5% of the whole population really...

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crimsonalucard 8y ago

People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages. According to all observations the most likely end to modern civilization is over exploitation and over usage of natural resources. The amount of resources available and the amount we use point to a trend that has one conclusion. The irony is that even with the knowledge of our impending doom we are still unable to see it despite the obviousness of it. The original poster makes a chancy prediction on how wealth inequality will take us to our ends while all trendlines and data point to the real way our civilization will end. One day there will not be enough oil in the world for you to drive to work or fly to another state. Technology is not our savior. The trendlines in tech are far too slow do make any meaningful difference. What you're actually observing with technology like the tesla is the trendline in hype.

onion2k 8y ago
People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages. Throughout history poor people were happy because they believed they were born to that life so they didn't have the stress or jealousy of believing life was unfair to them. If you read any old philosophy book it's all lessons about being happy with what you have. Believing you can raise yourself up and improve your life is a relatively new phenomenon, and society stopping people doing that leads to unhappiness.
- crimsonalucard 8y ago
  >Believing you can raise yourself up and improve your life is a relatively new phenomenon, and society stopping people doing that leads to unhappiness. Such a speculative statement. You cannot predict the behavior of a group of people anymore than you can predict a stock. I would say a more realistic statement to your topic is: People can be happy with what they have and be unhappy with what they have and throughout history many people have felt either way. It is not a new phenomenon. Whether these feelings lead to revolution in the future is impossible to determine. You need to look at trendlines, data points and evidence.

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stcredzero 8y ago

Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices that the generation previously were forced to, by unfortunate circumstance. Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans. Also voting for politicians who pass laws that hamstring the house buying ability of the next generations.

tomc1985 8y ago

Given this website attracts loads of innovators and wannabe innovators I'm inclined to take this thought with a grain of salt. There is so much blind faith in the vigor of youth and new ideas that I wonder if many of you can even imagine a world that runs at any slower pace than today. Given that we are supposedly past the age of aggression and conquering, do you think a peaceful society that keeps to itself is capable of surviving on its own, with a level of happiness that is high by their own (if not world) standards?

ekianjo 8y ago

A good war? In this time and age you would not get a refresh, rather a complete reboot to the stone age after utter destruction. Be careful what you wish for...

_Microft 8y ago

Unless you have a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves, this sets in. This is exactly the problem we need to solve as well if we ever manage to increase the human lifespan. Instead of society advancing one funeral at a time (c.f. Max Planck on science) as in the past, permanent change would have to come from every individual at a much higher rate than now.

sametmax 8y ago

> You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. Not sure. First, the US did invade a lot of places in the last decades, and while they didn't officially turned the countries into US colonies, they still do have massive political and economical influence there, and benefit from the local resources. But even if you discard this, it's assuming the future will be the same as today, which is unlikely. In the entire human history we never had a single day without a war somewhere on earth. The possibility that our countries will __never__ be at war again on their on soil is slim: we have many tomorrows to create situations where it can happen. We massively consume limited resources in a close system. We destroy systems that regerate resources we need, a destabilize the balance our organisms a based on, and we have hugely powerful weapons. Conquerying one another is still a tempting solution to many problems. E.G: India has more than 1 billion people, almost no water, extremly strong social tensions, hot borders, pollution in mass and the nuclear bomb. Anything triggering here can easily creep on to the entire world.

lm28469 8y ago

You should check out Raoul Vaneigem, he develops similar ideas, but focusing on the middle class stuck in their "everyday life" and routines. Whatever you do at work, 8 hours a day, leaves you with just enough energy to consume entertainment and wait for the next day. The cycle doesn't end until you're 65 and are allowed to retire, by the time you don't have any kind of energy (physical and/or mental), most people don't even have money to live the dream they've been forced to believe in all their life. I don't think getting old is the cause, not in the physical sense anyway. The problem to me is that we've been delivered from the "work to survive" in the 1900s, now most people are getting out of the "work to live", which is promptly replaced by the "work to consume", and this is no place for fulfillment, happiness or will to do things bigger than ourselves. I'll probably get blasted because a lot of HN readers see everything through the lens of software engineering, living comfortably with 2-20 times the minimum wage of their countries. Let's not forget that we're part of the lucky ones. > Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives Too many middle class people barely making a living and spending all their effort/time to keep up on the social ladder. They're so blinded by the repetitiveness of their life that they don't even think there could be more to it. Past generations were at least fighting for their rights, somehow it got lost somewhere in the last century, now we're left with parodies of social movements that were once making a dent (black panthers vs blm, first wave feminism vs current feminism, &c.). People are fed up just as much, but instead of acting on it they rant on twitter and feel like they did their part. --- "It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage, estranged from everything except the cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything outside the bars. it would have been abnormal — impossible in fact — to escape into something which had neither reality nor importance. Absolutely impossible. For inside this cage, in which they had been born and in which they would die, the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real" "The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology." "No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin? let nobody say these are minor details or secondary points. There are no negligible irritations; gangrene can start in the slightest graze." "While it was placing happiness and freedom on the order of the day, technological civilization was inventing the ideology of happiness and freedom. Thus it condemned itself to creating no more than the freedom of apathy, happiness in passivity. But at least this invention, perverted though it was, had denied that suffering is inherent in the human condition, that such an inhuman condition could last forever." "People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them." "And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no-one can breathe, and many say “We will breathe later”, and most do not die, because they are already dead."

zubspace 8y ago

I blame inheritance of wealth and the possibility of unlimited accumulation of richness for this. In my opinion, property and money, which someone amassed during his lifetime, should automatically be devoted to the common good after that person's gone. In my opinion it's insane, that someone lucky can inherit a fortune by basically doing nothing. There are things which make sense to inherit, like family enterprises, but there should be a limit. I also believe, that as an individual, there should be an upper bound to how rich you can be. Does it really make sense, that an individual person can have more than a seven-digit pool of money on his bank? Is there a way to limit the crazy strive for individual richness? If there would be a limit, we could basically invest the free money collectively into old and new enterprises which would not simply act as money printers for a few individuals, but actually profit society as a whole... Just a crazy idea...

retsibsi 8y ago

> Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country... Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price?

coldtea 8y ago
>Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price? Depends on two things: 1) One's priorities. Some might view the aggregate (the country) as bigger thing than individual people. Under this view, the importance of the lives (or worse, the importance of having comfortable lives) for a present generation can be deemed worth it to the freedom, prosperity, etc. of generations to come (and to the continuance of the country itself and its state and way of life etc., which in some cases might be totally obliterated by decline, e.g. Rome). 2) The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things.
- retsibsi 8y ago
  > The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things. Sure; if you can convince me that any given war will avert more harm than it causes, I'll (intellectually at least) agree that it's justified. But at large temporal and geographical scales, with insanely complicated and only vaguely understood systems at work, you need an extremely strong argument to justify an action that will definitely lead to terrible consequences in the near term. The comment we're discussing falls far short of such an argument. In fact it doesn't even seem to aim at making one -- and not just in the sense that it's (understandably) very abstract and lacking any kind of detail. As far as I can tell it is motivated by nationalism, and certainly not by any desire to prevent greater suffering. Its idea of failure sounds more like a (relatively) peaceful transition: > You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. > And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old".

coldtea 8y ago

>And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old". "Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the goals and priorities of a nation, and it loses its drive to be scrappy, make sacrifices, and do the innovative things when one does when young and poor. You have generations who want to extract the gains put in by past generations. That's the case for now, sure. But that's also exactly what got ancient Athens and Sparta, Rome, Byzantium, and other empires of the past. Outsiders wouldn't do scratch if those empires weren't already rotting from inside for reasons such as those that you've mentioned. In Rome and Byzantium, for example, such a decline is more or less the established historical narrative.

tim333 8y ago

Those ideas have a history “War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war." Friedrich Nietzsche, in his 1878 book that was one of the inspirations for WW1, WW2 and all that. Not one of humanities best times. Though you could have a more positive take on war as in war on poverty and the like rather than the shooting people stuff.

rlucas 8y ago

Please read some intellectual history of the period between around 1870-1914. The modern nation state was newish, industrialization was newish, a sense that “decadence” was feminizing or draining nations of their vigor was adopted by myopic elites. There’s nothing novel in your comment here in the history of ideas. And, what we’ve empirically learned is that that thread of ideology in an industrialized world (to say nothing of a nuclear armed world) leads to slaughter. I realize this is HN but even so I feel it’s poor form inveighing with a well worn warmongering trope on the course of world history.