9 ms·

Shall the West Pass Too? Whispers from Fallen Civilisations

74 points by sheefrex 6y ago

sheefrex 6y ago
This is the first chapter from a book I am writing about the decline of the West, and how to reverse it. This chapter summarises a number of indicators of decline and implications for the future, while also touching on the potential causes by applying the thoughts of Spengler and Toynbee. Enjoy and feedback welcome!
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  thanks I look forward to reading it. Jacques Ellul's 1979 "The Betrayal of the West" [0][1] was way ahead of it's time. You might find it useful during your research. [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004057367903600119?journalCode=ttja https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004057367903600... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-West-Continuum-book/dp/0816493383 https://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-West-Continuum-book/dp/08164...
  - sheefrex 6y ago
    Many thanks for your comment and this reference -- he looks like a very interesting thinker.
- DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  Interesting, and (so far) well-sourced. You picked a good day to post here. For some reason, Sundays is always it's-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it on HN. Every week I see variations around the same theme. It's cool to have the topic covered with reduced scope (societies, not the planet at large), and in-depth. Which brings me to my questions. One, what is "The West"? Would the French Revolution count as a civilization-wide failure? The Bronze Age collapse? Sea Peoples? The Long March? The Hellenic Era ending? Perhaps this is explained elsewhere, but some clarification would be helpful. Two, it might be good to cover all of the "false positives" when it comes to predicting civilization collapse. It's been quite the cottage industry over the centuries. Romans were quite concerned with the lack of morals and corruption the Greeks brought them. Many believed that signaled the end of Rome. Why, some of the "new" Romans weren't even sleeping on the ground any more! They were using beds! Three, and I apologize for so many queries, but "collapse" or "failure", or whatever you're using could also use a bit of definition. The Western Roman Empire collapsed and failed, that much is obvious. But just when that occurred is much less clear. People in Europe thought of themselves as Romans long after modern historians view Rome as being gone. I believe there are a couple of other examples of unclear failures, where the people involved in the failure couldn't see what was happening right in front of them, but none come to mind right away. Good work. Look forward to seeing more of it!
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    > You picked a good day to post here. For some reason, Sundays is always it's-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it on HN. I’ve noticed this too but I wasn’t sure if it was in my head/confirmation bias or an actual pattern. I wonder whether the Sunday Scaries could be to blame for the uptick in that sort of reading material.
    - DanielBMarkham 6y ago
      Fascinating idea. I've noticed it for a couple of years or more now. I figured most readers of HN have also noticed it, so I thought I would throw it out there to see if my observation was shared or not. I know that people cycle through moods in their lives. I also know that people require some amount of drama in order to feel as if they have meaning (Even/especially people who say they don't like drama). Doomscrolling and the associated content promotion, curation, and aggregation probably tap into that primal need. The internet at scale and the associated Markov-chain-like content selection and promotion we're seeing is hacking the species in some very significant and unexplored ways. Between the folks completely in denial and those claiming that the end is near, there needs to be some real philosophy and science going on (I don't think either one by itself is going to help much since this is a completely new area of intellectual exploration) *(Reference to phrase "Sunday Scaries" for those who haven't seen it before: www.sunday-scaries.com/what-are-sunday-scaries )
  - sheefrex 6y ago
    Thank you for this positive response and good questions. 1. I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If W. Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does. 2. I would define failure as a near complete and permanent loss of control by a society over itself and its internal territory. So the Bronze Age Collapse would definitely qualify, as some of those societies never rose again. But under this definition the French Revolution and the Long March would not qualify. The conquest of Greece by Rome could count, but the re-emergence of Greece in the Byzantine Empire complicates things. Some see the latter as a different culture -- I would need to read more myself before coming to a view on this. It's true that some thought of themselves Roman well into the 600s -- such as Gregory the Great, for instance. But they weren't in control anymore, so that would be a partial collapse under my definition (as the Eastern Roman Empire persisted)
- pstuart 6y ago
  So far you're on point as far as I'm concerned. I'm eager to see what you have to say about reversing course. An issue that bothers me no end is the fact that we very well could get out of this mess if we collectively wanted to.
  - ssb1 6y ago
    "to no end" means: uselessly, futilely. 'no end" means: endlessly.
    - pstuart 6y ago
      Thank you for the correction. Edited accordingly.
  - rpiguy 6y ago
    Everyone collectively wants to, we just can’t decide how. Half the population wants the post-capitalist, ecologically sound, anti-racist path forward. The other half wants to lean hard into capitalism and traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”) with an emphasis on innovating our way to the future and out of our current problems. The post-capitalists look too much like communists to be trusted by the freedom folks, and the freedom folks look too much like history’s economic oppressors and robber barons to be trusted. Historically these divides take a long time dissolve (unless there is a bloody conflict and clear winner).
    - rtsil 6y ago
      I believe you're trying to apply the US model to the rest of the West. For instance, I'm not sure there is a conflict between ecologically sound and innovation in most other western countries, or the same perception of "communism" as the Bogeyman: for most, it's just a failed experiment/ideology, not an imminent threat to their way of life like how some US discourses view it.
    - tristor 6y ago
      > traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”) There's no such thing as "freedom from", which is probably one of the main sticking points between these two groups. "Freedom from" is just a nice way to say "loss of agency due to oppressive external control". I realize this may seem like a pointless semantic quibble, but I think at it's root it points out a philosophical divide, where-in I personally believe one side is divorced from reality. There are reasonable discussions to be had about where on the sliding scale from totalitarian to libertarian that society should fall for the best results for everyone, but in no case is there ever a situation in which "freedom from" is a real thing. You are trading off "freedom" for "safety".
- EliRivers 6y ago
  If you've read "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future" by Oreskes and Conway, what did you make of it? The collapse they portray (and they're not so much saying "this is how it will happen" as just running with an idea) is driven by climate change and a refusal (political and social inability?) of the West to save themselves, if I recall correctly. You certainly touch on this in your first section, although Spengler and Toynbee discuss other ways for a civilisation to collapse.
  - sheefrex 6y ago
    Thank you for the comment. I haven't read that but I will take a look!
- Alex3917 6y ago
  IMHO this misses the mark. For me the crux of it is that it's only possible for liberal western values to exist in contexts where most people have enough wealth to not have to seriously worry about their physiological- and safety-related needs.[1] And the reason we're at this level of wealth now is only because we've been unsustainably borrowing wealth from the future, and as per all unsustainable things by definition, sooner or later this situation is going to come to an end. Saying things like climate change or political corruption or whatever might cause western civilization to collapse is accurate, but that's not really a good starting point. There's a bigger pattern here that you should be mentioning. [1] I realize Maslow's Hierarchy is not an accurate model, but close enough for the point I'm making.
  - jules 6y ago
    Different regions have had vastly varying levels of liberalism with vastly different levels of wealth. Look at Saudi Arabia. And remember that rich countries 100 years ago were much poorer than poor countries now. There is some correlation for sure, but there is a certain tendency to say that everything is due to the level of wealth, which is empirically false.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      And yet, those examples do fit. Saudi Arabia has "vastly different levels of wealth" but much less liberalism precisely because of how that wealth was achieved (not through competition, building an internal market, developing a middle class etc, but by digging holes on the ground where basically money comes out in the form of oil - holes which are tied to the owning families). So the development is still economic it's just not merely about "amount of wealth" but about the process in which the wealth was created too. A self-made guy with a 1 billion wealth is more likely than not a savvy businessman. A guy who won 1 billion in the super-lottery is not - even though both have 1 billion.
      - jules 6y ago
        I agree with that, but that's not what the comment said: > For me the crux of it is that it's only possible for liberal western values to exist in contexts where most people have enough wealth to not have to seriously worry about their physiological- and safety-related needs.[1] And the reason we're at this level of wealth now is only because we've been unsustainably borrowing wealth from the future Which is rather the opposite of what you're saying, particularly if "unsustainably borrowing from the future" refers to things like fossil fuels. While your changed hypothesis matches empirical data better than the original hypothesis, I think you have to be careful in how you interpret it. Countries like Norway and the Netherlands have large amounts of fossil fuels, yet are very culturally liberal, even compared to neighbors like Germany. So it doesn't seem to be the case that the presence of natural resources turns cultures away from liberalism, though that's probably not what you meant anyway. There's the question of the direction of causality. The comment I responded to only considers one direction, but could the other direction not be an important factor? Is it that wealthier societies develop certain kinds of cultures, or is it also that certain kinds of cultures tend to develop more wealth, even in the absence of vast locally available natural resources? For example, if we had an alternative timeline in which Saudi Arabia had no oil yet was rich, isn't it plausible that they'd also have a culture that focuses on scientific inquiry, education, and economic freedom, not because those things are a result of wealth but because they are a prerequisite for it in the absence of natural resources. There is obviously a relationship between economy and culture, but the relationship is not one-way, and it's far from simple.
- pkkim 6y ago
  Quite interesting work. My main questions are: What is the West? Which countries? and What do decline and death mean, and what don't they mean? These, I think, should be established as early as possible, and the ideas of Spengler and Toynbee presented afterwards, with points of similarity and difference with your own definitions highlighted. Some minor points: - Section 1.2 begins by discussing a crisis in creativity and the changing relationship between the elites and the masses. But then it switches to a list of "challenges" including aging and growing sovereign debt. This is rather jarring and needs to be reorganized. - It's very surprising to read that Greek philosophers switched focus from political philosophy to individual virtue once the Macedonians and Romans invaded. All of Plato's dialogues that I've read are about individual virtue. Even the Republic is only fifty percent politics and the rest is about the soul. Aristotle too is very concerned with what the personal virtues are and how they can be cultivated.
- andi999 6y ago
  I read it, and am still puzzled what precisely you mean by 'the West'. Spengler meant western Europe; is this also your definition? Or do you mean same vague idea, including countries like North America (with or without Mexico?), New Zeeland, Australia? What about South America?
  - sheefrex 6y ago
    Thank you for reading. This is a very difficult question. I am sympathetic to the view of Spengler, which is similar to that of Toynbee. But in practise, I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If Western Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does. If one was to scientifically determine it they would look at how strong cultural transmission is across the different units -- probably looking at the distribution of movies and other media, as well as how quickly new phrases and political ideas spread across social media.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  As mentioned earlier, this is a well trodden field whose results depend heavily on how you choose to define collapse or decline. I didn't see any indication of that kind of discussion. Secondly, you seem to make use of historical examples as demonstrations, but without discussing the context around them (if they were even collapses!). There's a huge risk in doing that of making superficial comparisons with no actual basis in reality. This is the trap most works on the subject fall into, because it's almost impossible for any single person to have high level expertise across multiple disparate periods and history of any particular collapse is very much unsettled, expert level territory.
  - sheefrex 6y ago
    Thank you for commenting. These are very reasonable criticisms and I will take them into account.
- morelisp 6y ago
  > feedback welcome You're a racist piece of shit.
  - gguevaraa 6y ago
    How has this not been flagged or removed lmao. Dang pls!
    - morelisp 6y ago
      If HN is going to spread Identity Evropa onboarding documents like this one, it would be incredibly immoral not to also spread my comment. (Or at least grant it the same policy of moderator non-intervention.) This article is not worth engaging intellectually with; it is warmed over colonial racist drivel; it deserves shutting down immediately; it survives only because so many of HN's participants are deeply historically ignorant. If HN moderators won't get rid of it out of their own moral sense, we must force them to do it by driving the cost of such threads up until they cannot tolerate them for practical reasons.
Proven 6y ago
Various States are failing because big government (itself a result of moral and financial corruption delivered by social welfare and crony capitalism) have destroyed the West. Reasons are more than one, but CO2 and climate changes have nothing to do with this topic. Not everyone is equally bad - it's easy to see some have failed worse than others.
eastasian 6y ago
Jesus Christ, you West fanboys can't let it rest, can you? You need to realise that Western European dominance is a historical anomaly resulting from the industrial revolution Europe has no minerals or natural resources to exploit. If anything you guys have been on borrowed time. From the time of Sumerians Asia has been at the fore front of civilization and growth. Until the colonizations started. The world is reverting to this natural equilibrium. As you can see from the response to Covid, the future is most definitely East Asian. Europe will not be missed.
omosubi 6y ago
I love reading stuff like this, but wow does it put my mental state in a bad place, maybe this is part of the problem...
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Thanks for commenting, and sorry for that side-effect. I don't experience it myself anymore, and that may be due to exposure. I guess to solve the issues you need to tolerate staring them in the face for quite a while! To repeat what I said below: I'm personally optimistic -- I think the ideas are there to avoid protracted decline and there's also a historical awareness which most previous civilisations didn't have.
kingkawn 6y ago
All things pass
- sheefrex 6y ago
  This is mostly true -- but knowledge, perhaps that can persist.
KirinDave 6y ago
It's not at all clear to me why we should be concerned with the decline of a proposed "west." Many of the traits folks laud the "West" for were in fact the products of a series of influences from many other cultures at the time. Desirable traits for a society inviting growth, prosperity and egalitarianism can exist in nearly any industrialized society today, and many of them currently fall short of their stated ideals when difficulty is encountered. Further, society as a whole seems to make lots of progress when small and large overturnings (or revolutions?) happen. Poorly formulated ideas are refined or discarded, and values are reaffirmed. Counter-revolutionary elements seek to roll them back, but even in success they're irrevocably changed for the experience and cannot help but define their mission in terms of their challengers. Let's worry more about creating a sustainable, distributed, and well-understood technology base. Unlike culture, that actually takes time and infrastructure to build.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  Spot on! The decline of West was invented as a tool to mobilize certain groups of Western population, just like any cultural and/or political narrative. To name one obvious narrow prejudice: The prosperity in China was brought by market economy and Western corporation mechanisms. The rise of China is the rise of West. And often cited as one indication of the decline of the West.
  - tristor 6y ago
    The rise of China is /not/ the rise of the West. It's something we haven't exactly seen before, it's the rise of a new type of Totalitarian Fascism which is supplanting Totalitarian Communism to intentionally enrich a blessed few through state-run corporations. There is nothing even resembling a "free market" in China, and most of the official economic reporting in China is falsehoods and outright lies. As Benito Mussolini said "“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” and what would be a more accurate description of how China creates and structures SRCs? What created prosperity in China was not adoption of Western corporate mechanisms and a market economy, it was the realization of party leadership that if they created an appropriate facade it would allow Western Neoliberals to create the necessary messages to shift economic policy and allow foreign money to flood into China, enriching party officials and their cronies by using the massive population of destitute people ripe for exploitation as unskilled labor. Both before and after, China remains a totalitarian country run by despots, but now they are able to put a veil of acceptability over their actions which has greatly helped their propaganda machine in the West as people eat it up.
justicezyx 6y ago
There is no west decline, it's just individual across the globe reclaimed their rightly productivity. That by itself is a victory of western value: the democracy and freedom of economic power. Now it's the time for west to advance to the next stage and herald the new chapter of human civilization, instead of wrongly reminiscent of its past glory that was not really meaningful nowadays.
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Thanks for your comment. I'm agree with your second sentence. For the first, I would shy away from discussing rise and decline in purely geopolitical terms. I'm more referring to internal aspects of decline -- social cohesion, creativity, quality of governance, and so on. It's possible to be in relative geopolitical decline but culturally and economically quite vibrant e.g. with Austria-Hungary between 1866 and 1914, and I wouldn't say they were in decline then.
Aperocky 6y ago
Should we be worried? From the very first paragraph: > the Medieval Era was the spring of the West, the Renaissance its summer, and the Baroque era its autumn. He predicted that the West would enter its Winter around the year 2000, which would be characterised by a decline of democracy due to excessive influence from moneyed interests, and a resultant rise of authoritarianism. I can't help notice how decline of democracy is painted as the 'end of the West', meanwhile Medieval Era was the 'spring of the West'. There is no democracy in Medieval West, there were kings, theocracies, crusades, burning of heretics and women. I immediately starts smelling hypocrisy, the only thing about Medieval West is that it is almost entirely white. So here comes the real question: What is the west? Culturally, the west now is way more different then the west in 1500 as versus the East today. Why is it that people start feeling that the west will pass - and that it somehow coincide with demographic changes. Is it a coincidence or subconscious bias? US have been through much worse, from the America First nazi sympathizer of the 30s to McCarthyism of the 50s, that's not even mentioning the civil war of the century before that. We as humans tend to characterize what we're currently moving through as more significant than they are - put it into historical perspective and it could just be a 'nah'.
- noname1001 6y ago
  The period when Spengler published his work (1918 and 1922) was a period of deep pessimism for obvious reasons. At that time, the Baroque era was actually pretty close, less than 200 years ago. The medieval era, while atrocious in the aspects you mention, was also the start of the liberation of cities and the beginning of some sort of "somewhat free" commerce. So it does not surprise me that he'd name it the spring. After all, the spring is not an all-pleasant season. What does surprise me is that German romanticism in the 19th century would already fall in the winter period. But I suspect that he blames Marx, the revolutions of 1848 for the decline and ignores the staggering achievements in art, literature, mathematics and physics in that era.
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    To expand, I disagree with the underlying premise of his/similar works. That somehow all culture exist in a perpetual state of competition, and the spread/growth of one necessitate the decline of other. While cultures usually can claim a direct ancestry down the ages, the truth is that the cultures and norms existing today in different part of the world is MUCH closer to each other than say their direct ancestral culture 500 years ago - and it happened because cultures are NOT in a competition, rather it adapts to the new technologies and outside cultural influences. As a result the world is closer together than it ever has, and that's a good thing.
29athrowaway 6y ago
After watching "Pumped Dry: The global crisis of vanishing groundwater", I think future conflicts will be over water. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q I think the West will eventually we faced with a decision: either learn to live sustainably or get used to living in an irreversibly ruined environment. Reduce and reuse come before recycling.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  We're already living in an irreversibly ruined environment. You don't notice because you didn't live to see it in its prior state. You never saw half a billion ducks take flight over North America. You never saw, and you will never see, a seasonal salmon migration on the San Joaquin river that can support a fishery catching 11 million pounds per year. My kids have never seen a Sierra Nevada conifer forest that wasn't sterile and dead, and they think forests just look that way. Our society does not have the facility to remember the ecosystems of the past. We just forget and adapt to the new one.
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    That happens when you replace a population that lives sustainably (Native Americans) with a population that does not care about sustainability (Modern Americans). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Bison_skull_pile_edit.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Bison_sk... Converting material wealth with an intrinsic value (a healthy environment, biodiversity) into abstract wealth without an intrinsic value (a number in a bank account) is really the dumbest thing to do. Once we are done converting every resource into a money, the resulting balance will surely be very useful to satisfy our needs. "When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money."
    - andi999 6y ago
      Honestly, you need to level up your argumentation. No material is (except in form of waste) converted to anything abstract without an intrinsic value. Capitalism generally reduces waste. What happens though, is that material is turned into products which a lot of people find useful/desirable. This problem is a problem, but it is a much harder problem to 'solve' than the one you are claiming.
hyko 6y ago
It’s fun to think about the decline of civilisation and ponder where we might be in the history of the West, but the truth is we have no idea. Being a student of decline does lend you an air of gravitas that optimism or even indifference just doesn’t I suppose. These studies often involve panning the rubble of previous civilisations for clues about decline, but without much in the way of generally applicable theories those clues aren’t really much use to us. Yeah, civilisations that are collapsing have agricultural, economic, military, ecological, and demographic problems. So do the thriving ones. Is it the destiny of the West to die? Well, sure – it requires a huge wobbly stack of things to keep it alive (from physics to poetry), so one day it will almost certainly end. It’s not prophecy unless you can tell me when these things will happen. It could conceivably be ten years or ten thousand years away.
Aaronstotle 6y ago
I'd really like to think that the "West" will survive. Yet, part of me has a hard time shaking the feeling that we're all living in a period of decline. I think about the world my parents and grandparents grew up in, and then I think about what life is going to be like in the next 50 years (I'm in my mid 20s) and it makes me anxious. The only bright spot about Covid is that it rapidly accelerated social changes (work form home) and gave people time to think about the kind of society they want to have.
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Thanks for this comment. I'm personally optimistic -- I think the ideas are there to avoid protracted decline and there's also an awareness which most previous civilisations didn't have.
woodruffw 6y ago
This website appears to be a (not very subtle) collection of dogwhistles masquerading as historiography. From the "Introduction to Metasophism"[1]: > The above proposals may seem sweeping, but we are only getting started. Particularly concerning is European demographics arising from low fertility and deepening social divisions. A society is beginning to divide along ethnic lines is one where any debate will be tribal; higher ideals such as discovering the meaning of life will be ignored. Ethnic issues must therefore be de-dramatised. The Fellowship programme described earlier would help unify society by engaging diverse groups in common tasks. > But we must go further: to dispel ethnic tensions within Europe, asylum-related migration needs to be limited. Chapter Nine therefore discusses a way of doing this that would prevent further asylum immigration while ensuring that migrants would have prosperity and security. The central idea is to rent a small amount of land on the coast of Africa for one century, give it a basic constitution and access to EU markets, and ensure legal and physical security. Such an area would become an attractive place for investment, thus providing jobs for migrants. [1]: https://www.themetasophist.com/chapter/introduction https://www.themetasophist.com/chapter/introduction
- Waterfall 6y ago
  How is it wrong? Too many people in a new environment where they're fish out of water that don't understand the customs will destroy the culture there. It's dilution. Foreign people should be intergrated into society or they'll be outcasts and not understand how it works. My friend got a credit card at 16 since his mom understood the financial system. My family used cash all the time only and I'm far behind because I was raised to hate credit. In Italy everyone is furbo and lies to get ahead. People rely on honesty in the US, I remember reading a story where an Italian man complained about his room and he got another one, instantly. He was astonished, and said it would never work in Italy since everyone would lie about it.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    My experience as a life long resident of the bay area is the children of immigrants very quickly adapt. In the bay area you have first world highly trained engineers whose parents were iron age dirt farmers in Southeast Asia.
taurath 6y ago
My great-grandparents lived in an era before the car. They lived through seeing cars, planes, and finally moon landings. The internet is the crowning achievement of this age, but that also means that in a way physical achievements have lost their focus and luster - that doesn’t mean they haven’t existed.
throwaway-8c93 6y ago
Given the content of the linked article, I heartily recommend taking a peek at Peter Turchin's work on Secular Cycles (1). He also keeps a blog, where he expands on some of the ideas. Not a light reading, though. The best introduction to his work was a book review at now deleted slatestarcodex - maybe it can be retrieved by internet archive. Based on the dataset he and his colleagues compiled, civilizations big enough for internal dynamics tend to exhibit these characteristics during their stagnation phase: * stagnating or declining real wages * increasing rents * decrease in social cohesion * increasing inequality * increasing urbanization (mostly due to no rural opportunities) * more people pursuing education, arts and crafts in hopes of joining the elite. This sounds as a plus, until you realize it's caused by inability to keep a decent standard of living in traditional occupations * sharpening intra-elite competition, leading to a gradual abandonment of previous norms. Dirty tricks become more and more commonplace * crisis amplification - non-issues turn into crises, challenges turn into disasters * 'overproduction of elites' leads to increasing corruption and rent seeking * stagnating wages and increasing corruption leads to strain on public finances Turchin's contribution lies mainly in providing historical statistics to back these claims, the novel mechanics of 'elite overproduction' and 'elite aspirants', and overlaying a secondary generational cycle, when a clique of elites keep power for too long (30-50 year cycle, think of Boomers in US or WW2 veterans in USSR). (1) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8778747-secular-cycles https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8778747-secular-cycles
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Thanks very much for this detailed and rigorous comment. I have already read part of that book (along with the book review), but haven't finished it yet. I find that model highly plausible, and think it offers useful insights into what is happening today (even though there is a major difference between the agricultural societies which provide all of his cases, and the modern situation). I will address the overproduction of elites theme in the chapter on selecting and training a new elite. My central innovation is to try to create an alternative to top-down elite selection and training. Essentially, requiring an aspiring elite member to work with others in small groups at a young age, after which their performance would be peer assessed -- which determines whether they could enter the elite. I hope that this could dissolve the tendency of hierarchies to select people who look/think/talk just like themselves, and thus create an elite more reflective of the diversity in society. This component of the elite would be numerically limited (1 per 100, or 1 per 200). I address the issue of inequality in other chapters. One idea follows from the above: if the groups above choose to spend their time together to form companies, then some of the shares should go into a Public Equity Fund, in which each citizen would have an account (a fair exchange in return for facilitating the activities of the group). This would mean that everyone would benefit from the formation of new companies. More details on all this in the coming weeks.
simonh 6y ago
The reason the rest of the world is rapidly catching up with the developed world (are Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore part of ‘The West’?) is because they are copying as much of it as possible as fast as they can. The cultural and economic template of the developed world is taking over everywhere, it’s spectacularly successful. Spengler would have hated this because he was afraid the non-white races would adopt our technology and use it’s against us. However since I’m not a racist, with a zero sum fear of the foreign, I think that’s fine. They’re part of our civilisation, or at least are rapidly becoming part of it just like Japan, Korea, Taiwan etc. The one outlier is China, which against the odds has managed to ditch Communism, adopted radically laissez faire Capitalism, yet retain one party authoritarianism. They seriously worry me, but not for anything to do with Spengler and the inherent instability of civilisations.
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Thanks for this comment. To repeat what I said below, I would shy away from discussing rise and decline in purely geopolitical terms. I'm more referring to internal aspects of decline -- social cohesion, creativity, quality of governance, and so on. It's possible to be in relative geopolitical decline but culturally and economically quite vibrant e.g. Austria-Hungary between 1866 and 1914, and I wouldn't say they were in decline then. Some countries (or at least their governments) are also starting to reject the Western secular cultural template -- Turkey, Pakistan, Hungary, and Poland.
ncmncm 6y ago
I don't see any need to invoke grand themes. We are perfectly capable of collapsing via our own unique failings. Global climate disruption followed by mass migration, triggering fascist government, and then global thermonuclear war, could be our generation's unique mode of collapse. In particular, you don't need to blame the Woke movement or the US's failed pandemic response. Exxon suffices.
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Many thanks for this remark. That scenario is unfortunately within the realm of possibility -- indeed in a later chapter I will address the topic of climate. But there are other ways of failing which I think also need to be insured against -- hence my engagement with the cyclical models of history, to see what insight they have to offer.

74 points by sheefrex 6y ago

This is the first chapter from a book I am writing about the decline of the West, and how to reverse it. This chapter summarises a number of indicators of decline and implications for the future, while also touching on the potential causes by applying the thoughts of Spengler and Toynbee. Enjoy and feedback welcome!

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
thanks I look forward to reading it. Jacques Ellul's 1979 "The Betrayal of the West" [0][1] was way ahead of it's time. You might find it useful during your research. [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004057367903600119?journalCode=ttja https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004057367903600... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-West-Continuum-book/dp/0816493383 https://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-West-Continuum-book/dp/08164...
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Many thanks for your comment and this reference -- he looks like a very interesting thinker.
DanielBMarkham 6y ago
Interesting, and (so far) well-sourced. You picked a good day to post here. For some reason, Sundays is always it's-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it on HN. Every week I see variations around the same theme. It's cool to have the topic covered with reduced scope (societies, not the planet at large), and in-depth. Which brings me to my questions. One, what is "The West"? Would the French Revolution count as a civilization-wide failure? The Bronze Age collapse? Sea Peoples? The Long March? The Hellenic Era ending? Perhaps this is explained elsewhere, but some clarification would be helpful. Two, it might be good to cover all of the "false positives" when it comes to predicting civilization collapse. It's been quite the cottage industry over the centuries. Romans were quite concerned with the lack of morals and corruption the Greeks brought them. Many believed that signaled the end of Rome. Why, some of the "new" Romans weren't even sleeping on the ground any more! They were using beds! Three, and I apologize for so many queries, but "collapse" or "failure", or whatever you're using could also use a bit of definition. The Western Roman Empire collapsed and failed, that much is obvious. But just when that occurred is much less clear. People in Europe thought of themselves as Romans long after modern historians view Rome as being gone. I believe there are a couple of other examples of unclear failures, where the people involved in the failure couldn't see what was happening right in front of them, but none come to mind right away. Good work. Look forward to seeing more of it!
- elliekelly 6y ago
  > You picked a good day to post here. For some reason, Sundays is always it's-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it on HN. I’ve noticed this too but I wasn’t sure if it was in my head/confirmation bias or an actual pattern. I wonder whether the Sunday Scaries could be to blame for the uptick in that sort of reading material.
  - DanielBMarkham 6y ago
    Fascinating idea. I've noticed it for a couple of years or more now. I figured most readers of HN have also noticed it, so I thought I would throw it out there to see if my observation was shared or not. I know that people cycle through moods in their lives. I also know that people require some amount of drama in order to feel as if they have meaning (Even/especially people who say they don't like drama). Doomscrolling and the associated content promotion, curation, and aggregation probably tap into that primal need. The internet at scale and the associated Markov-chain-like content selection and promotion we're seeing is hacking the species in some very significant and unexplored ways. Between the folks completely in denial and those claiming that the end is near, there needs to be some real philosophy and science going on (I don't think either one by itself is going to help much since this is a completely new area of intellectual exploration) *(Reference to phrase "Sunday Scaries" for those who haven't seen it before: www.sunday-scaries.com/what-are-sunday-scaries )
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Thank you for this positive response and good questions. 1. I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If W. Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does. 2. I would define failure as a near complete and permanent loss of control by a society over itself and its internal territory. So the Bronze Age Collapse would definitely qualify, as some of those societies never rose again. But under this definition the French Revolution and the Long March would not qualify. The conquest of Greece by Rome could count, but the re-emergence of Greece in the Byzantine Empire complicates things. Some see the latter as a different culture -- I would need to read more myself before coming to a view on this. It's true that some thought of themselves Roman well into the 600s -- such as Gregory the Great, for instance. But they weren't in control anymore, so that would be a partial collapse under my definition (as the Eastern Roman Empire persisted)
pstuart 6y ago
So far you're on point as far as I'm concerned. I'm eager to see what you have to say about reversing course. An issue that bothers me no end is the fact that we very well could get out of this mess if we collectively wanted to.
- ssb1 6y ago
  "to no end" means: uselessly, futilely. 'no end" means: endlessly.
  - pstuart 6y ago
    Thank you for the correction. Edited accordingly.
- rpiguy 6y ago
  Everyone collectively wants to, we just can’t decide how. Half the population wants the post-capitalist, ecologically sound, anti-racist path forward. The other half wants to lean hard into capitalism and traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”) with an emphasis on innovating our way to the future and out of our current problems. The post-capitalists look too much like communists to be trusted by the freedom folks, and the freedom folks look too much like history’s economic oppressors and robber barons to be trusted. Historically these divides take a long time dissolve (unless there is a bloody conflict and clear winner).
  - rtsil 6y ago
    I believe you're trying to apply the US model to the rest of the West. For instance, I'm not sure there is a conflict between ecologically sound and innovation in most other western countries, or the same perception of "communism" as the Bogeyman: for most, it's just a failed experiment/ideology, not an imminent threat to their way of life like how some US discourses view it.
  - tristor 6y ago
    > traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”) There's no such thing as "freedom from", which is probably one of the main sticking points between these two groups. "Freedom from" is just a nice way to say "loss of agency due to oppressive external control". I realize this may seem like a pointless semantic quibble, but I think at it's root it points out a philosophical divide, where-in I personally believe one side is divorced from reality. There are reasonable discussions to be had about where on the sliding scale from totalitarian to libertarian that society should fall for the best results for everyone, but in no case is there ever a situation in which "freedom from" is a real thing. You are trading off "freedom" for "safety".
EliRivers 6y ago
If you've read "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future" by Oreskes and Conway, what did you make of it? The collapse they portray (and they're not so much saying "this is how it will happen" as just running with an idea) is driven by climate change and a refusal (political and social inability?) of the West to save themselves, if I recall correctly. You certainly touch on this in your first section, although Spengler and Toynbee discuss other ways for a civilisation to collapse.
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Thank you for the comment. I haven't read that but I will take a look!
Alex3917 6y ago
IMHO this misses the mark. For me the crux of it is that it's only possible for liberal western values to exist in contexts where most people have enough wealth to not have to seriously worry about their physiological- and safety-related needs.[1] And the reason we're at this level of wealth now is only because we've been unsustainably borrowing wealth from the future, and as per all unsustainable things by definition, sooner or later this situation is going to come to an end. Saying things like climate change or political corruption or whatever might cause western civilization to collapse is accurate, but that's not really a good starting point. There's a bigger pattern here that you should be mentioning. [1] I realize Maslow's Hierarchy is not an accurate model, but close enough for the point I'm making.
- jules 6y ago
  Different regions have had vastly varying levels of liberalism with vastly different levels of wealth. Look at Saudi Arabia. And remember that rich countries 100 years ago were much poorer than poor countries now. There is some correlation for sure, but there is a certain tendency to say that everything is due to the level of wealth, which is empirically false.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    And yet, those examples do fit. Saudi Arabia has "vastly different levels of wealth" but much less liberalism precisely because of how that wealth was achieved (not through competition, building an internal market, developing a middle class etc, but by digging holes on the ground where basically money comes out in the form of oil - holes which are tied to the owning families). So the development is still economic it's just not merely about "amount of wealth" but about the process in which the wealth was created too. A self-made guy with a 1 billion wealth is more likely than not a savvy businessman. A guy who won 1 billion in the super-lottery is not - even though both have 1 billion.
    - jules 6y ago
      I agree with that, but that's not what the comment said: > For me the crux of it is that it's only possible for liberal western values to exist in contexts where most people have enough wealth to not have to seriously worry about their physiological- and safety-related needs.[1] And the reason we're at this level of wealth now is only because we've been unsustainably borrowing wealth from the future Which is rather the opposite of what you're saying, particularly if "unsustainably borrowing from the future" refers to things like fossil fuels. While your changed hypothesis matches empirical data better than the original hypothesis, I think you have to be careful in how you interpret it. Countries like Norway and the Netherlands have large amounts of fossil fuels, yet are very culturally liberal, even compared to neighbors like Germany. So it doesn't seem to be the case that the presence of natural resources turns cultures away from liberalism, though that's probably not what you meant anyway. There's the question of the direction of causality. The comment I responded to only considers one direction, but could the other direction not be an important factor? Is it that wealthier societies develop certain kinds of cultures, or is it also that certain kinds of cultures tend to develop more wealth, even in the absence of vast locally available natural resources? For example, if we had an alternative timeline in which Saudi Arabia had no oil yet was rich, isn't it plausible that they'd also have a culture that focuses on scientific inquiry, education, and economic freedom, not because those things are a result of wealth but because they are a prerequisite for it in the absence of natural resources. There is obviously a relationship between economy and culture, but the relationship is not one-way, and it's far from simple.
pkkim 6y ago
Quite interesting work. My main questions are: What is the West? Which countries? and What do decline and death mean, and what don't they mean? These, I think, should be established as early as possible, and the ideas of Spengler and Toynbee presented afterwards, with points of similarity and difference with your own definitions highlighted. Some minor points: - Section 1.2 begins by discussing a crisis in creativity and the changing relationship between the elites and the masses. But then it switches to a list of "challenges" including aging and growing sovereign debt. This is rather jarring and needs to be reorganized. - It's very surprising to read that Greek philosophers switched focus from political philosophy to individual virtue once the Macedonians and Romans invaded. All of Plato's dialogues that I've read are about individual virtue. Even the Republic is only fifty percent politics and the rest is about the soul. Aristotle too is very concerned with what the personal virtues are and how they can be cultivated.
andi999 6y ago
I read it, and am still puzzled what precisely you mean by 'the West'. Spengler meant western Europe; is this also your definition? Or do you mean same vague idea, including countries like North America (with or without Mexico?), New Zeeland, Australia? What about South America?
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Thank you for reading. This is a very difficult question. I am sympathetic to the view of Spengler, which is similar to that of Toynbee. But in practise, I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If Western Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does. If one was to scientifically determine it they would look at how strong cultural transmission is across the different units -- probably looking at the distribution of movies and other media, as well as how quickly new phrases and political ideas spread across social media.
AlotOfReading 6y ago
As mentioned earlier, this is a well trodden field whose results depend heavily on how you choose to define collapse or decline. I didn't see any indication of that kind of discussion. Secondly, you seem to make use of historical examples as demonstrations, but without discussing the context around them (if they were even collapses!). There's a huge risk in doing that of making superficial comparisons with no actual basis in reality. This is the trap most works on the subject fall into, because it's almost impossible for any single person to have high level expertise across multiple disparate periods and history of any particular collapse is very much unsettled, expert level territory.
- sheefrex 6y ago
  Thank you for commenting. These are very reasonable criticisms and I will take them into account.
morelisp 6y ago
> feedback welcome You're a racist piece of shit.
- gguevaraa 6y ago
  How has this not been flagged or removed lmao. Dang pls!
  - morelisp 6y ago
    If HN is going to spread Identity Evropa onboarding documents like this one, it would be incredibly immoral not to also spread my comment. (Or at least grant it the same policy of moderator non-intervention.) This article is not worth engaging intellectually with; it is warmed over colonial racist drivel; it deserves shutting down immediately; it survives only because so many of HN's participants are deeply historically ignorant. If HN moderators won't get rid of it out of their own moral sense, we must force them to do it by driving the cost of such threads up until they cannot tolerate them for practical reasons.

Proven 6y ago

Various States are failing because big government (itself a result of moral and financial corruption delivered by social welfare and crony capitalism) have destroyed the West. Reasons are more than one, but CO2 and climate changes have nothing to do with this topic. Not everyone is equally bad - it's easy to see some have failed worse than others.

eastasian 6y ago

Jesus Christ, you West fanboys can't let it rest, can you? You need to realise that Western European dominance is a historical anomaly resulting from the industrial revolution Europe has no minerals or natural resources to exploit. If anything you guys have been on borrowed time. From the time of Sumerians Asia has been at the fore front of civilization and growth. Until the colonizations started. The world is reverting to this natural equilibrium. As you can see from the response to Covid, the future is most definitely East Asian. Europe will not be missed.

omosubi 6y ago

I love reading stuff like this, but wow does it put my mental state in a bad place, maybe this is part of the problem...

sheefrex 6y ago
Thanks for commenting, and sorry for that side-effect. I don't experience it myself anymore, and that may be due to exposure. I guess to solve the issues you need to tolerate staring them in the face for quite a while! To repeat what I said below: I'm personally optimistic -- I think the ideas are there to avoid protracted decline and there's also a historical awareness which most previous civilisations didn't have.

kingkawn 6y ago

All things pass

sheefrex 6y ago
This is mostly true -- but knowledge, perhaps that can persist.

KirinDave 6y ago

It's not at all clear to me why we should be concerned with the decline of a proposed "west." Many of the traits folks laud the "West" for were in fact the products of a series of influences from many other cultures at the time. Desirable traits for a society inviting growth, prosperity and egalitarianism can exist in nearly any industrialized society today, and many of them currently fall short of their stated ideals when difficulty is encountered. Further, society as a whole seems to make lots of progress when small and large overturnings (or revolutions?) happen. Poorly formulated ideas are refined or discarded, and values are reaffirmed. Counter-revolutionary elements seek to roll them back, but even in success they're irrevocably changed for the experience and cannot help but define their mission in terms of their challengers. Let's worry more about creating a sustainable, distributed, and well-understood technology base. Unlike culture, that actually takes time and infrastructure to build.

justicezyx 6y ago
Spot on! The decline of West was invented as a tool to mobilize certain groups of Western population, just like any cultural and/or political narrative. To name one obvious narrow prejudice: The prosperity in China was brought by market economy and Western corporation mechanisms. The rise of China is the rise of West. And often cited as one indication of the decline of the West.
- tristor 6y ago
  The rise of China is /not/ the rise of the West. It's something we haven't exactly seen before, it's the rise of a new type of Totalitarian Fascism which is supplanting Totalitarian Communism to intentionally enrich a blessed few through state-run corporations. There is nothing even resembling a "free market" in China, and most of the official economic reporting in China is falsehoods and outright lies. As Benito Mussolini said "“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” and what would be a more accurate description of how China creates and structures SRCs? What created prosperity in China was not adoption of Western corporate mechanisms and a market economy, it was the realization of party leadership that if they created an appropriate facade it would allow Western Neoliberals to create the necessary messages to shift economic policy and allow foreign money to flood into China, enriching party officials and their cronies by using the massive population of destitute people ripe for exploitation as unskilled labor. Both before and after, China remains a totalitarian country run by despots, but now they are able to put a veil of acceptability over their actions which has greatly helped their propaganda machine in the West as people eat it up.

justicezyx 6y ago

There is no west decline, it's just individual across the globe reclaimed their rightly productivity. That by itself is a victory of western value: the democracy and freedom of economic power. Now it's the time for west to advance to the next stage and herald the new chapter of human civilization, instead of wrongly reminiscent of its past glory that was not really meaningful nowadays.

sheefrex 6y ago
Thanks for your comment. I'm agree with your second sentence. For the first, I would shy away from discussing rise and decline in purely geopolitical terms. I'm more referring to internal aspects of decline -- social cohesion, creativity, quality of governance, and so on. It's possible to be in relative geopolitical decline but culturally and economically quite vibrant e.g. with Austria-Hungary between 1866 and 1914, and I wouldn't say they were in decline then.

Aperocky 6y ago

Should we be worried? From the very first paragraph: > the Medieval Era was the spring of the West, the Renaissance its summer, and the Baroque era its autumn. He predicted that the West would enter its Winter around the year 2000, which would be characterised by a decline of democracy due to excessive influence from moneyed interests, and a resultant rise of authoritarianism. I can't help notice how decline of democracy is painted as the 'end of the West', meanwhile Medieval Era was the 'spring of the West'. There is no democracy in Medieval West, there were kings, theocracies, crusades, burning of heretics and women. I immediately starts smelling hypocrisy, the only thing about Medieval West is that it is almost entirely white. So here comes the real question: What is the west? Culturally, the west now is way more different then the west in 1500 as versus the East today. Why is it that people start feeling that the west will pass - and that it somehow coincide with demographic changes. Is it a coincidence or subconscious bias? US have been through much worse, from the America First nazi sympathizer of the 30s to McCarthyism of the 50s, that's not even mentioning the civil war of the century before that. We as humans tend to characterize what we're currently moving through as more significant than they are - put it into historical perspective and it could just be a 'nah'.

noname1001 6y ago
The period when Spengler published his work (1918 and 1922) was a period of deep pessimism for obvious reasons. At that time, the Baroque era was actually pretty close, less than 200 years ago. The medieval era, while atrocious in the aspects you mention, was also the start of the liberation of cities and the beginning of some sort of "somewhat free" commerce. So it does not surprise me that he'd name it the spring. After all, the spring is not an all-pleasant season. What does surprise me is that German romanticism in the 19th century would already fall in the winter period. But I suspect that he blames Marx, the revolutions of 1848 for the decline and ignores the staggering achievements in art, literature, mathematics and physics in that era.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  To expand, I disagree with the underlying premise of his/similar works. That somehow all culture exist in a perpetual state of competition, and the spread/growth of one necessitate the decline of other. While cultures usually can claim a direct ancestry down the ages, the truth is that the cultures and norms existing today in different part of the world is MUCH closer to each other than say their direct ancestral culture 500 years ago - and it happened because cultures are NOT in a competition, rather it adapts to the new technologies and outside cultural influences. As a result the world is closer together than it ever has, and that's a good thing.

29athrowaway 6y ago

After watching "Pumped Dry: The global crisis of vanishing groundwater", I think future conflicts will be over water. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q I think the West will eventually we faced with a decision: either learn to live sustainably or get used to living in an irreversibly ruined environment. Reduce and reuse come before recycling.

jeffbee 6y ago
We're already living in an irreversibly ruined environment. You don't notice because you didn't live to see it in its prior state. You never saw half a billion ducks take flight over North America. You never saw, and you will never see, a seasonal salmon migration on the San Joaquin river that can support a fishery catching 11 million pounds per year. My kids have never seen a Sierra Nevada conifer forest that wasn't sterile and dead, and they think forests just look that way. Our society does not have the facility to remember the ecosystems of the past. We just forget and adapt to the new one.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  That happens when you replace a population that lives sustainably (Native Americans) with a population that does not care about sustainability (Modern Americans). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Bison_skull_pile_edit.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Bison_sk... Converting material wealth with an intrinsic value (a healthy environment, biodiversity) into abstract wealth without an intrinsic value (a number in a bank account) is really the dumbest thing to do. Once we are done converting every resource into a money, the resulting balance will surely be very useful to satisfy our needs. "When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money."
  - andi999 6y ago
    Honestly, you need to level up your argumentation. No material is (except in form of waste) converted to anything abstract without an intrinsic value. Capitalism generally reduces waste. What happens though, is that material is turned into products which a lot of people find useful/desirable. This problem is a problem, but it is a much harder problem to 'solve' than the one you are claiming.

hyko 6y ago

It’s fun to think about the decline of civilisation and ponder where we might be in the history of the West, but the truth is we have no idea. Being a student of decline does lend you an air of gravitas that optimism or even indifference just doesn’t I suppose. These studies often involve panning the rubble of previous civilisations for clues about decline, but without much in the way of generally applicable theories those clues aren’t really much use to us. Yeah, civilisations that are collapsing have agricultural, economic, military, ecological, and demographic problems. So do the thriving ones. Is it the destiny of the West to die? Well, sure – it requires a huge wobbly stack of things to keep it alive (from physics to poetry), so one day it will almost certainly end. It’s not prophecy unless you can tell me when these things will happen. It could conceivably be ten years or ten thousand years away.

Aaronstotle 6y ago

I'd really like to think that the "West" will survive. Yet, part of me has a hard time shaking the feeling that we're all living in a period of decline. I think about the world my parents and grandparents grew up in, and then I think about what life is going to be like in the next 50 years (I'm in my mid 20s) and it makes me anxious. The only bright spot about Covid is that it rapidly accelerated social changes (work form home) and gave people time to think about the kind of society they want to have.

sheefrex 6y ago
Thanks for this comment. I'm personally optimistic -- I think the ideas are there to avoid protracted decline and there's also an awareness which most previous civilisations didn't have.

woodruffw 6y ago

This website appears to be a (not very subtle) collection of dogwhistles masquerading as historiography. From the "Introduction to Metasophism"[1]: > The above proposals may seem sweeping, but we are only getting started. Particularly concerning is European demographics arising from low fertility and deepening social divisions. A society is beginning to divide along ethnic lines is one where any debate will be tribal; higher ideals such as discovering the meaning of life will be ignored. Ethnic issues must therefore be de-dramatised. The Fellowship programme described earlier would help unify society by engaging diverse groups in common tasks. > But we must go further: to dispel ethnic tensions within Europe, asylum-related migration needs to be limited. Chapter Nine therefore discusses a way of doing this that would prevent further asylum immigration while ensuring that migrants would have prosperity and security. The central idea is to rent a small amount of land on the coast of Africa for one century, give it a basic constitution and access to EU markets, and ensure legal and physical security. Such an area would become an attractive place for investment, thus providing jobs for migrants. [1]: https://www.themetasophist.com/chapter/introduction https://www.themetasophist.com/chapter/introduction

Waterfall 6y ago
How is it wrong? Too many people in a new environment where they're fish out of water that don't understand the customs will destroy the culture there. It's dilution. Foreign people should be intergrated into society or they'll be outcasts and not understand how it works. My friend got a credit card at 16 since his mom understood the financial system. My family used cash all the time only and I'm far behind because I was raised to hate credit. In Italy everyone is furbo and lies to get ahead. People rely on honesty in the US, I remember reading a story where an Italian man complained about his room and he got another one, instantly. He was astonished, and said it would never work in Italy since everyone would lie about it.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  My experience as a life long resident of the bay area is the children of immigrants very quickly adapt. In the bay area you have first world highly trained engineers whose parents were iron age dirt farmers in Southeast Asia.

taurath 6y ago

My great-grandparents lived in an era before the car. They lived through seeing cars, planes, and finally moon landings. The internet is the crowning achievement of this age, but that also means that in a way physical achievements have lost their focus and luster - that doesn’t mean they haven’t existed.

throwaway-8c93 6y ago

Given the content of the linked article, I heartily recommend taking a peek at Peter Turchin's work on Secular Cycles (1). He also keeps a blog, where he expands on some of the ideas. Not a light reading, though. The best introduction to his work was a book review at now deleted slatestarcodex - maybe it can be retrieved by internet archive. Based on the dataset he and his colleagues compiled, civilizations big enough for internal dynamics tend to exhibit these characteristics during their stagnation phase: * stagnating or declining real wages * increasing rents * decrease in social cohesion * increasing inequality * increasing urbanization (mostly due to no rural opportunities) * more people pursuing education, arts and crafts in hopes of joining the elite. This sounds as a plus, until you realize it's caused by inability to keep a decent standard of living in traditional occupations * sharpening intra-elite competition, leading to a gradual abandonment of previous norms. Dirty tricks become more and more commonplace * crisis amplification - non-issues turn into crises, challenges turn into disasters * 'overproduction of elites' leads to increasing corruption and rent seeking * stagnating wages and increasing corruption leads to strain on public finances Turchin's contribution lies mainly in providing historical statistics to back these claims, the novel mechanics of 'elite overproduction' and 'elite aspirants', and overlaying a secondary generational cycle, when a clique of elites keep power for too long (30-50 year cycle, think of Boomers in US or WW2 veterans in USSR). (1) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8778747-secular-cycles https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8778747-secular-cycles

sheefrex 6y ago
Thanks very much for this detailed and rigorous comment. I have already read part of that book (along with the book review), but haven't finished it yet. I find that model highly plausible, and think it offers useful insights into what is happening today (even though there is a major difference between the agricultural societies which provide all of his cases, and the modern situation). I will address the overproduction of elites theme in the chapter on selecting and training a new elite. My central innovation is to try to create an alternative to top-down elite selection and training. Essentially, requiring an aspiring elite member to work with others in small groups at a young age, after which their performance would be peer assessed -- which determines whether they could enter the elite. I hope that this could dissolve the tendency of hierarchies to select people who look/think/talk just like themselves, and thus create an elite more reflective of the diversity in society. This component of the elite would be numerically limited (1 per 100, or 1 per 200). I address the issue of inequality in other chapters. One idea follows from the above: if the groups above choose to spend their time together to form companies, then some of the shares should go into a Public Equity Fund, in which each citizen would have an account (a fair exchange in return for facilitating the activities of the group). This would mean that everyone would benefit from the formation of new companies. More details on all this in the coming weeks.

simonh 6y ago

The reason the rest of the world is rapidly catching up with the developed world (are Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore part of ‘The West’?) is because they are copying as much of it as possible as fast as they can. The cultural and economic template of the developed world is taking over everywhere, it’s spectacularly successful. Spengler would have hated this because he was afraid the non-white races would adopt our technology and use it’s against us. However since I’m not a racist, with a zero sum fear of the foreign, I think that’s fine. They’re part of our civilisation, or at least are rapidly becoming part of it just like Japan, Korea, Taiwan etc. The one outlier is China, which against the odds has managed to ditch Communism, adopted radically laissez faire Capitalism, yet retain one party authoritarianism. They seriously worry me, but not for anything to do with Spengler and the inherent instability of civilisations.

sheefrex 6y ago
Thanks for this comment. To repeat what I said below, I would shy away from discussing rise and decline in purely geopolitical terms. I'm more referring to internal aspects of decline -- social cohesion, creativity, quality of governance, and so on. It's possible to be in relative geopolitical decline but culturally and economically quite vibrant e.g. Austria-Hungary between 1866 and 1914, and I wouldn't say they were in decline then. Some countries (or at least their governments) are also starting to reject the Western secular cultural template -- Turkey, Pakistan, Hungary, and Poland.

ncmncm 6y ago

I don't see any need to invoke grand themes. We are perfectly capable of collapsing via our own unique failings. Global climate disruption followed by mass migration, triggering fascist government, and then global thermonuclear war, could be our generation's unique mode of collapse. In particular, you don't need to blame the Woke movement or the US's failed pandemic response. Exxon suffices.

sheefrex 6y ago
Many thanks for this remark. That scenario is unfortunately within the realm of possibility -- indeed in a later chapter I will address the topic of climate. But there are other ways of failing which I think also need to be insured against -- hence my engagement with the cyclical models of history, to see what insight they have to offer.