> lead people to believe that humans are getting nastier over time, even when they’re not
Most people aren't nasty or getting nastier but nasty people are likely over represented in those with power and there seems to be a current swing to having more such people getting into positions of power.
Added to that is that modern technology and weapons make it easier for a few "bad apples" in power to cause more grief to more people than before.
Its the media (or more generally group dynamics) too. One side exaggerates how nasty the other side is, which gets people outraged and engaged, then they act nasty to them because its 'justified.' It also creates a feedback loop where regardless of what the other side did originally they are now much more likely to be nasty to your side simply because you were nasty to them. Maximizing engagement like this necessarily destabilizes discourse. There is a huge monetary incentive to maximizing engagement, while there is only a mild philosophical one to stabilizing discourse, so guess which one loses.
I finally caved to one of those "balanced news" sites because someone had a 50%-off sale. They have a feature where you can see news stories that are being ignored by either liberal or conservative outlets.
It's damned fascinating, tempered by the fact that it's also damned terrifying that the populace as a whole is being controlled by it... and also that the future President of the US is trying to control it.
But maybe that's just me falling into the trap TFA talks about. :)
Social network algorithms tend to promote nasty people and their polarizing comments, so for a person which lives online, their belief that humans are getting nastier is colored by their everyday interactions.
It is good that gentle people still exist and may, in fact, be very numerous, but is it still as good if their ability to contribute to societal norms is diminished?
Their lawyers have recrafted the laws/regulations/courts that used to keep them in check. And now it's a combination of the callously indifferent and the belligerently selfish.
Their willingness to ignore their conscience gives them serious business advantages, and their enormous profits have given them too much power. It's all "ends justify the means" fools.
I highly doubt this. It feels like just another symptom of what they're describing here about memory versus present experience. Ask me if I think Trump seems nastier than Reagan and yeah, he does. But that's because I have a living impression of both of them and I was a child when Reagan was president. I can't say Putin is nastier than Stalin, or Trump is nastier than Andrew Jackson. Macron isn't worse than Napoleon. Merkel isn't worse than Hitler. History has some really shitty, nasty leaders in it, and I can't look at today and say this is worse than notable really bad times.
The Matrix is a shared simulation in 1999, the ideal circumstances allegedly.
In some aspects I would argue so as well - partially on the basis of our societies having a lower complexity amount back then.
The last two decades we enabled high throughput information flows via real-time video streams, social media, news feeds, etc.. At what cost? Did we actually gain anything over the 1999s in exchange for all that complexity?
The article talks about “good cup bad cup” and how negative news is much more impactful - again, at what cost did we enable all these information flows with potentially negative information?
Will personalized AI agents allow us to reduce the complexity coming from these information flows?
From the linked article in footnote [2] where that question is asked, the question above says that 2% of Christians answered "I don't believe in Jesus". Makes me wonder what they think a Christian is!
But that specific question was restated wrongly. Again in footnote [2] and in the link itself, it says it was 14% of Christians who answered "definitely" or "probably" with another 37% saying "not sure".
There are ways to justify that answer. One can believe in the moral tenets of Christianity, while also believing that its supposed leader was a fiction, or a conflation of real people. You can see the story as a myth, which is not the same as fiction. I don't know any such people, but it is a realistic version of Christian theology.
But I suspect it's mostly just cranks lying to pollsters.
I would laugh if I didn’t interpret this as a disturbing dearth of evidence-based critical thinking. Homo Sapiens has immense power over the world and other species and very little rationality to temper and guide that power.
I was Christian in 2000 and we thought Jesus would come again definitely, probably then too. There have been soo many disappointed millenarians in the past 2000 years.
This is why its a wonderful thing, an act of rebellion and of bravery, to create something, to love someone, to laugh and smile at another human being. Yeah, the world feels terrible. Smile anyway!
Just a note that you can buy that "Visions of Daniel and John" apocalyptic timeline chart online from a bunch of places and, of course you should. What better way to greet guests?
> If you have a vague feeling that your Bad Cup didn’t used to be so full, and then you conclude we’re slip-sliding toward catastrophe, you haven’t discovered anything. You’ve just taken your biases for a walk.
Or maybe we are seeing unprecedented levels of CO2, cleared land, and population? I guess that's just bias too, then, right?
An alternative explanation is that every time someone thought society was getting worse, it WAS, and here we are, at the worst point.
Just because we have a cognitive bias, it doesn’t mean that bias is leading us in the wrong direction on every topic. A stopped clock is right twice a day and all that. It just means we have to be more careful when assessing evidence.
I am actually panicking as much as you are about it, but, thinking about it, maybe it is just bias?
Like, people in the 20th century were living in constant fear of mutually assured destruction for dozens of years. Is that better or worse than the guaranteed collapse of the ecosystem? I couldn’t tell.
But these days, no one really cares about a nuclear war, it seems, even if one of the nuclear power is currently fighting a war; and it’s appearing to lose it.
It's not doing great, but it's not really losing, either.
It is successfully using its nuclear arsenal to deter aid for the country it's invading. A lot of materiel is sent, but its uses are limited. A massive attack on the capital would be entirely justified, and is well within their capability, but is forbidden for fear of escalating to nuclear weapons.
Because of that, they are continuing to prosecute the war, and making minor gains. They cannot continue that forever, but in another month, their target is likely to be hamstrung even further. They may yet win, or negotiate a peace that they can pass off as a win (which would include Ukraine never joining NATO).
People may not have that immediate fear of nuclear war that characterized the 50s through the 80s. But the threat is in play, and it's being kept out of daily discourse only because the US refuses to challenge it.
MAD came extremely close to kicking off at least twice during the Cold War (Cuban Missile Crisis and that time a Soviet officer chose to ignore a malfunctioning early warning system). We can’t conclude from the fact that it didn’t kill us that it wasn’t a serious possibility.
Maybe in two or three decades we’ll discover that Russia was nearer to using nukes than we assume.
> Like, people in the 20th century were living in constant fear of mutually assured destruction for dozens of years. Is that better or worse than the guaranteed collapse of the ecosystem? I couldn’t tell.
The fallacy in your argument is that climate disaster is already happening. We have already rendered hundreds of species extinct. It is not a future risk.
The nature and severity of climate change risks to other species is something I can be sad about, without it being also a risk to us.
Likewise in reverse, there are ways a nuclear war could be relatively good for almost every species except humans, our livestock, and our pets.
Given the trends on renewables, I think we're going to solve the climate… but also a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated trends start implying silly things starting in the early 2030s, so expect something else to become a problem soon enough.
I'm still in fear of nuclear holocaust. That problem hasn't gone away even if it's not top of zeitgeist now that other existential threats are so popular.
What difference does that make? Why does the mode of the catastrophe matter? The examples I cited actually killed half the population at the time. Nothing since has even come close.
Is that a bad thing? All other animals have population collapses from time to time and it redresses the balance. I don't see it as particularly catastrophic.
Of course, now this reduces to how we define catastrophe, and we obviously have a difference. But I see a halving of the human population hardly a catastrophe at all, whereas the permanent extinction of species a much worse thing.
Right, the thing you're currently freaked out about is ecological damage. Got it.
And it's worse than it's ever been. Before, it's not like we were pumping sulphur into the air until it rained acid, or lead from gasoline into the air where everybody breathed it, or CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer, or pumping so much pollution into rivers that they literally caught fire. No, this is the worst, right now.
/s
Look, there are serious environmental things going on. Plastic particulates. Forever chemicals. Estrogenoids. CO2. There's a lot that's real, serious, and is having real, damaging effects. I don't want to minimize that.
At the same time, you seem to be hyper-fixated on one thing. You seem to be an example of what the article is talking about.
This is already starting to get grayed out as of 13 minutes from being posted (which hopefully reverses later), but Jesus man, it really makes me wonder where people's sense of perspective comes from. We had an ozone hole growing past the entire continent of Antarctica. We were at best a decade from driving all whales extinct. When I was a kid in Los Angeles, around 5-10% of an average year we were banned from playing outside and had recess canceled because the air quality made it dangerous to breathe. Eastern Canada was effectively unfishable and industries and food stuffs were collapsing because of acid rain from the American rust belt.
I don't doubt there is still a lot of ecological damage being done and at least some of it is cumulative, getting worse with time even if what we're doing year-on-year gets better, but a lot of it is not. We wantonly destroyed common supplies of air and water 40+ years ago in ways you almost never see any more and somehow this gets totally ignored.
I also believe that, as a broad trend, life gets harder, scarier, and more painful as you age, especially once you pass some critical threshold. Your personal experience of life colors your view of those around you, so you begin to think "the world is worse" when what you probably should think is "my life is worse".
Lich fits better according to the stories. Zombies are mindless undead who eat the flesh of the living. Liches are kings sustained in unlife through magical means, and retain their minds.
I would count the "times" as terrible if we chose leaders with the following characteristics:
- lovers of themselves
- lovers of money
- boastful
- proud
- abusive
- ungrateful
- without love
- unforgiving
- slanderous
- without self-control
- brutal
- not lovers of the good
- treacherous
- rash
- conceited
- lovers of pleasure
- hypocritical
I think we should have nothing to do with such people.
Certainly we should not be electing them to office. That would be a terrible idea, IMO.
Churchill said "_it has been said that_ democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time," so Churchill himself acknowledged that the quote wasn't his.
> As to competitive environs, we would be much less wasteful and destructive if we cooperated instead of competing.
The communist countries have some of the most polluted areas on the planet.
> There's an important difference between ambition for selfish gain and ambition to better help others.
Everybody is selfish. The beauty of the free market is it enables selfish behavior to help others. All attempts at creating selfless societies have resulted in misery and poverty.
> The communist countries have some of the most polluted areas on the planet.
They were not cooperating, my friend, they were manifesting a ruling class that was above the law and pillaged the land for personal gain and sometimes even for the state.
> Everybody is selfish.
We are only as selfish as we choose to be, likewise our sense of ethics is only as developed as the virtues we embrace. Yes, we begin life selfish and most of our cultures are selfishly oriented towards others, but these are all the result of the citizens' choices. And, yes, our beliefs are chosen as well, and are as adaptable as we like.
> The beauty of the free market is it enables selfish behavior to help others.
I would say, rather, that the free market is good at letting people act selfishly, for either good or ill. That's why I like my capitalism with fetters, plenty of fetters. But, yeah, capitalism that doesn't destroy the powerless is the best path forward.
> All attempts at creating selfless societies have resulted in misery and poverty.
No, most humans that say they're creating selfless societies are really just grifters who want to be the new royalty. Selfishness always results in misery on some level, for some person or persons.
We can develop systems that reward those who innovate and improve our life on Earth, without jeopardizing our environment and the peace among people. We could choose that, my friend. The problem is that most people don't care enough about others to be generous.
We could each choose to learn how to be virtuous and then dedicate ourselves to helping implement a compassionate, sensible, and sustainable world society.
All that's holding us back is our unwillingness to admit we each have the ability to be a part of the solution, as opposed to our currently sadass status quo.
> that the free market is good at letting people act selfishly, for either good or ill
The free market relies on free exchange, which means each party to the deal is better off making the deal. Forcible or fraudulent exchanges are not part of the free market.
" fraudulent exchanges are not part of the free market."
That is not true at all.
Totally Free markets are 'buyer beware', If fraud can exist, then that is fine, you should have done your homework before buying a lemon. Each side is responsible for verification.
Markets where fraud is caught and removed, have rules, and laws, regulations, enforcement.
And thus many say are 'not free'. Add regulation and then people complain, "Why are you regulating me, I want my free market".
You can make up your own definitions, but the free market requires a government to protect rights. Defrauding people is stealing, not free market. You cannot have a free market when people are allowed to say "either your signature goes on the contract or your brains."
Buyer beware is because the government cannot always protect people against fraud, no matter how much regulation and enforcement there is. Buyer beware also means people should read contracts before signing them. That's not fraud.
A lot of people like to believe free market means no government, but that's simply not true.
For another example, if someone sells you a jar marked "grape jelly" and you open it later and it's just water, you've been defrauded. This is a crime, not the fault of the buyer, and not free market.
I took your sentence as the opposite. And so was making the extreme point on totally free markets are chaos that would allow fraud.
Perhaps I'm too sensitive to the 'right' narrative that government is evil and markets should be 'free' of regulation or laws. So now when someone starts talking free-market, I assume they are in that group.
There are groups, sometimes libertarians, that argue all regulation is bad, for example, if I buy the "Grape Jelly" and it is water, then the 'Free' Market will self correct by people not buying your "Grape Jelly" and you would go out of business.
I agree, laws and regulations are needed for a market to work. Was just pushing back on the group that thinks even that is not 'free' enough.
Truly, but kleptocracies do not have free markets, either, where the peasants are not better off for their 'betters' making such deals for the benefit of their cronies.
> "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith."
> Chatterjee criticized her for promoting a "cult of suffering" and a distorted, negative image of Calcutta, exaggerating work done by her mission and misusing funds and privileges at her disposal.
> Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, mayor of Calcutta from 2005 to 2010, said that "she had no significant impact on the poor of this city", glorified illness instead of treating it and misrepresented the city: "No doubt there was poverty in Calcutta, but it was never a city of lepers and beggars, as Mother Teresa presented it."
While I am not a confidante of hers (and neither are you) I expect her selfish reward was the satisfaction in her work, the gratitude of those she helped, and the approbation from others.
Yeah, I don't think the reports about her after her death were kind to the Church's claims of her having had a loving nature.
It's possible my father was an Altar Boy in Pennsylvania. Some real monsters found a place to stay in those Parishes. My theory is that that's why PA is the home of some of the best wrestlers in the world. PA's report on CC sexual abuse of children was, IIUC, 800 pages long. And, to keep those collection baskets full, they covered it all up.
I like how Robin Wiliams said it, "It's not just a sin, it's a felony!"
We must treasure all children, and protect them with the most stringent consequences for the monsters of this world.
We all start that way, but we are capable of self-evolving out of it, with dedication, honesty, study, and, most importantly, with the help of our Creator.
And, yes, not very many people (less than 10% throughout history, IIUC) make the effort necessary to transmute any of their vices into virtues, but that doesn't mean it's not possible. What it means is that most people are a bunch of Dunning-Kruger low-achievers. The humble among us are the ones who can reach true-expert level on the paths we take in our life.
Humility is essential to make progress as we must reach for a Power beyond ourselves to deal with our pathetic, selfish, weak-willed ego. Anything we are allowed to achieve only demonstrates our utter incapacity to make such progress on our own.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
It awaits our connecting with It. Religion is always personal, between the person and our Creator, Maintainer, and eventual Destroyer. No one escapes the fact that we all draw a last breath.
Just send a thankful, loving vibe out towards the universe's Creator, my accomplished friend. And then perhaps read some Castaneda; that sh_t's craaaaazy, but not completely untrue.
The resistence inside of us is the enemy of our happiness. Castaneda is very clear about that in his 10th (IIRC) and final book. Not all aspects of our mind are "ours"; he calls it a "foreign installation".
Peace be with you, Mr. Bright. It's an honor for me to serve you this way on this day.
I think you missed some of the most important bits at the end:
> But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. (1 Tim 3, ESV)
For good or for bad, Judeo Christian morality was always rooted in a fear of God. As the belief in God has warped and wained away from biblical moorings, we shouldn't be surprised that morality has gone with it. To such an extent that, seemingly, moral character has very little impact when evaluating leaders, as long as other ideological boxes are checked.
On the other hand, given the context of this writing, it seems that these kinds of people are always present... in all times and all cultures. So maybe there isn't so much uniquely bad about our current times? I don't know, just wondering out loud.
> Judeo Christian morality was always rooted in a fear of God
The Great(est) Command(ment) is "To love God with all your being, and then love your neighbor as yourself."
Society improves a little when someone chooses to not do bad because they're afraid to get punished.
Society improves much more when someone chooses to do good by having evolved their sense of ethics and self-control.
Our most important human ability, and the reason we have a {moral compass, mind, and free will} is our ability to self-evolve our ideals, attitudes, and behaviors out of the selfish and animalistic towards the compassionate and humanitarian.
Our Creator loves us and prefers us to live in peace and prosperity, but we must choose to implement such a societal system that better rewards virtue and minimizes the harms caused from vice. And such a system must be our choice (i.e. democracy) because there must be no compulsion in religion (which pervades life as an ethos of compassionately positive contribution to the whole).
> As the belief in God has warped and wained away from biblical moorings, we shouldn't be surprised that morality has gone with it. To such an extent that, seemingly, moral character has very little impact when evaluating leaders, as long as other ideological boxes are checked.
Yes, that is indeed the case, but Christianity is no more or less guilty than most all of the other religions, their majorities taking the selfishly divisive road over the compassionately unifying road.
> it seems that these kinds of people are always present... in all times and all cultures.
As we live and breath, my friend. We are each those people, to more or less extent as per the predilections of our individual nature and those of the cultures we inhabit. The key is that we all(1) have the power both how to learn to be better as well as to choose to be better. [(1) There are the mentally ill and physically damaged and developmentally disabled folks that do not have the power to control themselves, but they are very rare.]
The universe helps, though, in that the human-only Law of Karma determines our happiness or unhappiness by how we have treated others. It is the applied aspect of "You reap what you sow." It is our environment's feedback system to let us know if we've been naughty or nice, whether we are headed in the right direction or not.
> So maybe there isn't so much uniquely bad about our current times?
Not for individual human beings; vice is vice and virtue is virtue and we have many inertias against our becoming better. But our technological progress has facilitated greater destruction to the Earth via war and pollution. It drives a more efficient systematic greed that oppresses the poor more brutally, and the rich have used their power to hire attorneys to craft the laws that let them rise above other human beings like royalty. The codifying of the MBA ethos that changed the "personnel" department into "human resources" is quite the tell.
> I tell you, my friends, don’t be afraid of people. They can kill the body, but after that they can do nothing more to hurt you. I will show you the one to fear. You should fear God, who has the power to kill you and also to throw you into hell.
Yes, he is the one you should fear.
So although love may be seen as the primary teaching, there is definitely a dollop of fear mixed in their. This is common in Abrahamic traditions, with some notable exceptions such as the early Sufi mystic Rabia Basri, who said
> If I adore You out of fear of Hell, burn me in Hell! If I adore you out of desire for Paradise, lock me out of Paradise. But if I adore you for Yourself alone, do not deny to me Your eternal beauty.
Conversely, many Eastern religions encourage individuals to understand fear's root causes and work towards overcoming them through mindfulness and insight.
Well, most -- like 90% -- people don't have any contact with God or Its teachings and, therefore, have no interest in learning the principles It has laid down for how we should live our life.
As such, fear is a great way to get people to jump start entering the Path of Love. No one should be comfortable living their life in ignorance to the gentle lovingkindess we should be working to transform ourself into. It certainly kick-started my reestablishing my connection with God in my late 20s.
As to Rabia Basri's quote, I don't get that from my Sufi Murshid's teachings. Though he has passed away now, our fundamental command is:
Always love. Teach to always love.
Never hate. Teach to never hate.
But I think the gist of what Basri is saying is that we should desire to self-evolve ourselves towards the beauty best exemplified by the Unfathomable beauty of our Creator, for love's sake, for our neighbors' sakes.
In that vein, I don't even know if we're Sunni or Shi'ite, because it doesn't matter. We are to not divide into sects, and that extends to all of humankind, where one's religious path and even lack thereof should not be a divisive factor in our love for one another. Love is our responsibility alone, not that of those we encounter. We are merely to exemplify love and then teach it as best we can, to those who care to learn.
> Conversely, many Eastern religions encourage individuals to understand fear's root causes and work towards overcoming them through mindfulness and insight.
There is great wisdom in tackling fear's causes and unsavory effects, as much of fear's causes and results are due to the internal enemy's (nefs, selfish ego) urgings and justifications.
The Quran says of those who love God with all their being:
On them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.
That is a person who has both "mindfulness and insight", because they have not only put their entire life in God's hands, but understand that the past is in the past, and all we can do is keep doing God's loving work going forward.
Thanks you for this loving conversation this morning. Peace be with you, friend. I love you, and am at your service.
> the gist of what Basri is saying is that we should desire to self-evolve ourselves towards the beauty best exemplified by the Unfathomable beauty of our Creator
The way I understand it is by comparing it to a romantic relationship. If you stick to it out of being scared of being alone ("fear of hell"), it will not fulfill. If you stick to it for superficial reasons ("desire for Paradise"), it will not fulfill. But if you stick to it out of genuine love for the other person, then it has a chance of lasting.
We all start that way, both 50% selfish and 50% selfless, but we are each capable of self-evolving our selfish vices into their corresponding compassionate virtues.
I consider the greatest song of all time to be "Love is the Truth" by Jack White, whose chorus is:
It's the right thing to do
And you know it
And it's inside of you
So just show it
Love is the truth
And it's inside of you (bop ba ba ba ba)
It's the right thing to do
We each have the choice to embrace greater compassion for others in our lives. That thing inside us that tells us we can't, or that guy's a liar, or he's trying to convert you to his religion, or he's trying to get your money -- that thing is the liar. It is arguing against our human race's embracing love, and is brutally successful at convincing us to act out of our selfish ego, which is what it spurns and goads. It is pleading for its life, that selfish ego inside each of us. It knows that embracing the Path of Love, it will wither away and be utterly replaced by the joy of loving service to all those we come into contact with.
That negative force presses upon our thoughts and feelings, and is our downfall should we not fight it and try to become virtuous. We must try with all our heart, my friend, and our only hope is to beseech the Creator of this magnificent and mysterious universe.
The thing with narcissists is that they're extremely confident. People love confident leaders, even if they're terrible in every other way.
As the recent US election has shown, it's not what you say - but how you say it, that counts.
Hell, you see this with startups, too. When a founder appears extremely passionate and enthusiastic, pitching something as if they're at the top of the world, investors are willing to suspend their disbelief.
One can get away with lots of things, if you're just confident enough.
Confidence game, or "con game" as we call it in english, relies on the gullibility of the mark, the target of the swindle.
We can only hone our perception of what people are really up to by sharpening our own moral compass and then acting virtuously as an act of volitional self-evolution.
Once one begins learning how to be more virtuous and behaves appropriately, one gets better at recognizing the vices other people manifest, e.g.: greed, dishonesty, hate, enmity, jealousy/envy, ...
But, yeah, they sure do take the rubes for a ride, don't they?
Yes, narcissism is the apotheosis of selfishness. Compassion for others is the most important tool we have to combat its tendencies within our own hearts and minds. And, yes, we all have selfishness in us, and it is a long road to rid ourselves of it all, though I'm not speaking from even within sight of that glorious achievement.
The end times are nigh because the human fertility rate is plummeting and there won't be a rebound. Small children grow up in a society that favors low fertility, they internalize it as normal, and when mature they do not buck that trend. Human extinction looms.
There's plenty of small high-fertility sub-populations, why not just assume they'll become dominant?
Dunbar's number is small, suggests that the influence of society doesn't need to be considered at the level of an entire nation or even an entire city.
Those small high-fertility clusters are still embedded in society as a whole. Their kind are converted at a far quicker rate than they can make kids. The Duggars won't have 400+ grandchildren, for instance, despite having 20+ of their own.
The Amish, for instance, though somewhat insulated from the "conversion", buy and use John Deere tractors. What happens when the rest of the world is gone, do you think they'll start building them in factories for themselves? (And if they did, would their fertility remain high?)
> Those small high-fertility clusters are still embedded in society as a whole. Their kind are converted at a far quicker rate than they can make kids. The Duggars won't have 400+ grandchildren, for instance, despite having 20+ of their own.
Some are as you say. Some are more insular, don't want to mix with everyone else. Some groups are less well defined, because rather than being a named group it's a heritable trait for taking more risks.
> What happens when the rest of the world is gone, do you think they'll start building them in factories for themselves?
If everything collapsed around them overnight, rapture/left behind style, so that they didn't have a chance to simply displace everyone else over a few generations in the way I'm actually expecting given the population is currently still going up despite the falling fertility, then they'd probably have problems — but even then they'd likely be able to make something like a 1750s era blacksmith making horseshoes and ploughs without huge difficulty.
>but even then they'd likely be able to make something like a 1750s era blacksmith
They don't mine ore. Once they've scavenged all the scrap, they couldn't make nails. That probably wouldn't be the biggest disadvantage though... they couldn't make much of any manufactured good, and their lifestyle depends on it. Whatever institutional knowledge they had for how to live in the 18th century is long gone.
When they're back to a single-row iron plow pulled behind draft animals, they're not going to be getting 70 bushels of wheat per acre, they'll be getting 10. And then they won't be able to feed large numbers. None of what they do now works if our society fails, they need us. And they don't know how to do things they way they used to do, either.
> They don't mine ore. Once they've scavenged all the scrap, they couldn't make nails.
All rusty metal is indistinguishable from high-quality ore. They'll only "run out" when all the rust finally washes into the oceans.
And even then, iron-rich bacteria are where John Plant (the Primitive Technology guy) gets his small quantities, and he starts many of his videos at the level of showing the stick he uses to dig the clay out of the ground to build the furnace in which he bakes the pot he uses to collect and concentrate the bacteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
Before that becomes necessary, current production of the metal (not just the ore) is around the gigaton/year level, so there's going to be a lot of scrap to get through.
> That probably wouldn't be the biggest disadvantage though... they couldn't make much of any manufactured good, and their lifestyle depends on it. Whatever institutional knowledge they had for how to live in the 18th century is long gone.
Even if there was a literally overnight displacement, which there won't be, libraries with printed texts still exist.
> And then they won't be able to feed large numbers.
What do you mean by "large numbers"? At a minimum, 791 million — because that's what we actually did feed in 1750.
That's not "extinction". That's not even close to extinction.
And that's without any assumptions about any modern knowledge that could be applied to low-industrial society, such as knowing how cholera is transmitted in order to prevent it.
It would be more accurate to say that 'a rebound is difficult'. Not extinct or impossible.
With smaller number, are smaller breading opportunities.
So after the population collapse, yes, humans will still exist. But might take hundreds of years again to reach our current population levels, and in the interim, societies would have gone through huge upheavals.
Sure, but I'd say mere hundreds of years is brief, almost but not quite negligible, on the scale of human history — the Greek dark ages was about 400 years long.
Just sometimes I hear people on the 'right' say we don't really need to take action on X,Y,Z problems, because humans will adapt, and we've been around for thousands of years, so we are really just over-reacting.
They ignore that, yeah, humans will be here on a geologic scale, but the US wont, Congress wont, Constitution wont, we're going to collapse into a bunch of warring city states, and where is their precious outrage then? It wont matter if they believed it was all a hoax, when they are dead, but we'll all be dead.
So discussing time scales in short term, <100 years is important. Generally, for planning.
For personal planning I'd make it much shorter than a century: in one decade I bought my first home, lost both parents, Brexit happened, I moved country, Covid triggered lockdowns worldwide, and Russia invaded Ukraine.
But even on the timescale of 2100 — and 75 years was enough time to go from the height of the British Empire to what is widely considered to be its final end in the form of handing back Hong Kong, so quite reasonable to guess the US will be gone by then — only the most extreme forecasts have a lower global population than today.
I see this sentiment expressed pretty frequently, and I'm not sure what to think of it. Are fertility rates expected to dip so low that humans will simply die out? Is it that stable/declining populations will cause political instability and all-out war? Something else?
It seems to me some of our worst problems would ease up if populations declined a bit.
>Are fertility rates expected to dip so low that humans will simply die out?
In most of the western world, they dipped that high decades ago. Anything below 2.1 is sub-replacement. The US is below this (ignoring immigration, it is already shrinking). East Asia is way, way below it. China deliberately forced theirs to 1.0, but can't force it back the other direction. The Japanese population is already shrinking year-over-year. Europe's no better. Only central Africa is above replacement fertility, and they're trending downward sharply.
>Is it that stable/declining populations will cause
Declining populations cause something far worse than war. They cause fertility to drop further. It's a vicious downward spiral.
>It seems to me some of our worst problems would ease up if populations declined a bit.
They decline in a very specific way, where there are far more older people than younger. So the young have to pay more into taxes to support a bunch of old geezers who can't work. Retirement age recedes into the distance faster than you can chase it. The economy falters, infrastructure can't be maintained (let alone built new).
I agree that there will be some challenges due to the population aging, but if our numbers are shrinking we won't need to build as much new housing and other infrastructure. Also, for all its faults, industrialized agriculture makes it possible to grow enough food for everyone with remarkably few workers.
It seems like we currently have a glut of people looking for work, and having fewer working age people would make it much easier for people to negotiate better wages and working conditions.
Not sure about that. Current un-employment is at 4-5%, and a lot of people not finding jobs seems to be skills miss-match.
Big picture, immigration is what is keeping the US going. US Citizens, don't like to pick strawberries, so when immigration is gone, no more fruits/vegetables.
The negative population replacement has been covered up by immigration filling the gaps.
Well, see, if human population plunges enough, then there wont be the society that favors low fertility. There also won't be birth control pills.
I mean, there also won't be industrialization, or western civilization, or democracy, or electricity, or antibiotics, or a bunch of other stuff we think is good. But if human population crashes in the way you describe, yes it will rebound - just from far lower than you wish.
>Well, see, if human population plunges enough, then there wont be the society that favors low fertility.
In that scenario, no one does well. Back when we lived primitively, there was a large young population, tens of millions globally. Any single death or small group of deaths didn't really threaten extinction except locally (usually not even that). But though total population will be high even well into this era, it will be top-heavy with geriatric humans. A few deaths of those of reproductive age could have grim consequences.
Everything works counterintuitively with declining populations.
Most people aren't nasty or getting nastier but nasty people are likely over represented in those with power and there seems to be a current swing to having more such people getting into positions of power.
Added to that is that modern technology and weapons make it easier for a few "bad apples" in power to cause more grief to more people than before.