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Why don't users on theMotte take the idea of societal collapse more seriously? It's not just things like resource depletion and climate change that could cause something like this. Rather I think there are many layers of various pillars of society going towards the shitter that I think makes some kind of collapse of Western Civilization inevitable. I'll list a few below
Resource Depletion/Peak Oil: Although we seem to have stemmed off global peak oil for about 50 years, it seems like the peak is finally actually coming into sight. Some say 2018 was actually the peak, others say it won't arrive until 2030. Whatever the case, it is an inevitability given the fact that discoveries of deposits have been outpaced by demand for the past fifty years. Barring a scientific miracle like effective hydrocarbon synthesis by bacteria, the alternatives don't look promising. Ethanol from corn has an abysmal energy return on energy invested (EROI). Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks, and even for passenger vehicles, we don't have enough lithium in the whole world to replace the current fleet of cars. It's not just oil: copper is being mined at extremely low-grades (because we have exhausted the high-grade deposits), uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves, and we've already hit peak phosphorous. Further reading: Art Berman, Simon Michaux, Alice Friedman
Climate Change/Environmental Degradation: Anyone with two eyes can see that climate change is happening. It's not just that temperatures are getting warmer, but variation seems to be increasing as well, which is really bad for parts of our civilization that require fairly regular climatic conditions like agriculture. Here in Maryland we had one of the hottest summers on record, followed by an extremely warm fall. Now we're in the middle of one of the coldest winters in the last twenty years. Even if you don't believe that climate change is happening, other aspects of environmental degradation are harder to deny. For the past few summers we've had massive wildfires across most of the Northern hemisphere, and in California during the winter. Some of these are natural, but many are the result of poor management and ecological practices. We've contaminated our drinking water with birth control, our soils have been largely stripped of nutrients by industrial farming, and microplastics are literarily everywhere. None of this is sustainable
Pandemic risk from industrial agriculture: Although COVID was likely a lab leak, one of the initial hypotheses as to its origin was a cross-over event from bats to humans at bushmeat market. We create millions of such crossover opportunities in our agriculture system every day, and it's only a matter of time before the current bird flu pandemic, which has decimated US chicken and cow populations (spiking the price of eggs to $6 / 12 eggs) crosses over to humans. This has happened before in both 1918 and in the 1960s.
Birthrate collapse: Everywhere that modern Western society touches seems to experience a rapid and catastrophic decline in birth rates to far below replacement levels. There's been a lot of discussion of this issue at least here, and it seems like nothing any government does is effective at turning things around. While declining populations may be good for our resource consumption/pollution problems, without some kind of reversal in birth rates, there will tautologically be a death of Western culture. A somewhat related issue is the general collapse of community in the West, which is talked about a lot in books like Bowling Alone.
Brainrot: modern society is incredibly complex and requires a lot of smart people at the helm keeping the systems that keep us alive going. Many of these people are aging out of the workforce, and there aren't many zoomers and millennials who can replace them. Part of this is an issue of desire: few people want to run a wastewater treatment plant or work as a mining engineer when you can just grift with things like crypto and OnlyFans. But I also think we're all just getting dumber to some extent. I put a lot of blame on addictive technologies on the internet (and so does Jonathan Haidt), but I'm sure there's also crossover with the issue of environmental pollution.
There's many more specific issues I could list, but I think you get the gist. Why isn't this community more concerned about these kinds of issues, as opposed to worrying about AI (which is not profitable, or efficient). I think it may have something to do with TheMotte severely overrating the utility of human intelligence in solving large scale problems, but I'm not sure. Is there something I'm completely missing here?
Further reading/listening. DoTheMath, Rintrah, The Great Simplification.
The primary reason is founder effects. Being a part of the rationalist diaspora, this community started out with a disproportionate amount of techno-optimist libertarians and has mostly shrunk since then. There are ways to get here from the collapsnik corner of the internet, but the path is much less straightforward than from the tech world, especially these days. I came by that road once upon a time, but it has since become overgrown and the markers have been lost.
You'll find a more receptive audience in the comments section at John Greer's blog, assuming you're not already a regular. His posts about astrology and magic may be offputting to some (then again, we have a lot of kooky ideas floating around here ourselves), but he wrote most of what he needed to about collapse at his old blog (archived here and several other places) and seems like the kind of person you might have found posting in some alternate universe 70's environmentalist version of the Motte.
I'll give the response to your 5 points from Greer's perspective (I read every post of his for about a decade, so I have a pretty good sense of it) rather than my own, because my beliefs are both more uncertain and less interesting than his:
While it's true that our society is in a downward spiral, these things take many lifetimes to play out (insert a reference to The Long Emergency by Kunstler) and worrying about imminent doom is simply the inverse of the idea that the AI singularity will solve all our problems overnight and usher in an age of fully-automated luxury space communism. In both cases, it serves as an excuse to abdicate responsibility for the future, since who cares what we do now if we'll all either die from climate change or be uploaded into a virtual utopia by our benevolant AI overlords?
What things will look like on the ground is that each successive generation will use a little less energy than their parents. There will be no abrupt discontinuity, outside of the wars and conflicts to which humans are prone in any age. The future won't look like a carbon copy of some period in the distant and barbaric past, as though you rewound the tape of history, but many innovations and inventions of our modern world will persist in some form, even if you falsely assume that all remaining nuclear or fossil fuels will be completely used up or inaccessible (the radio, the printing press, the bicycle, ultralight solar-powered aircraft, the germ theory of medicine, trains, hydropower, etc. don't need oil or coal to work). We aren't the first civilization to decline and we won't be the last; this cycle of birth and decay is something the Greeks, Indians, and Chinese all figured out and learned to live with thousands of years ago.
Climate change may render parts of the world undesirable to live in, but the Earth's flora and fauna, humans included, will rearrange themselves and find ways to adapt to this (in geologic terms) puny extinction event. Pandemics are nothing new either, and the Black Death didn't destroy Latin Christendom. If all our chickens and cows die from bird flu, then I guess that serves us right for factory farming, but it's not as though we'll run out of food (unless you're Jordan Peterson and on a carnivore diet or something). The birthrate problem is one that solves itself, as people who want to have children will quickly replace the ones who don't. Lastly, we won't have to worry about maintaining industrial civilization, because industrial civilization is by its nature unsustainable.
If you want someone else's very different thoughts on that last point, then check out Anatoly Karlin's series on Malthusian industrialism. The long and the short of it is that maybe dysgenics will trap us temporarily in a bad equilibrium where our descendants are just smart enough to preserve civilization but too dumb to make any advancements, living in crowded slums like third world megacities today, but this situation will itself provide eugenic selective pressure and bring IQ's back up enough to climb out of the hole.
Thanks for this reply. I am indeed a Greer-nik, and it seems that my post was too doomerish (judging from many other comments) to convey that. I share many of the perspectives that you write here as a Greer-sockpuppet. If I were to rewrite my original post reflecting this, I think I would probably reframe it terms of that perspective. Instead of the framing of "why aren't we more worried about these slow moving, natural, and impossible to stop problems", I would try and state instead: "why is the motte so concerned about things like AI/colonizing mars etc. when those things are energetically impossible pipe dreams?" I'm also not advocating we do nothing, but rather I see our resources (energy, but also human intelligence) as being misspent on futile treadmilling rather than "collapsing now to avoid the rush" as Greer might say. Localizing agriculture and manufacturing are really important for preserving the innovations that this civilization has built, and we are really not doing that at all.
I would like to take the time to reply to a lot of those down thread, but I think, because of what you state in the first paragraph, there is not much point. We are looking at different the world through two completely different narratives. Inconvenient facts like declining EROI of every fuel source we are using and greater and greater dependence on fragile global supply change can be brushed away in the name of technological innovation or market efficiency. At the end of the day our system is predicated on infinite growth, which is impossible on a finite planet, and when we bump up against those limits there will be some kind of collapse.
Welcome to the club. I've been posting along similar themes on here for several years, and it is nice to see someone else taking his points seriously. I've personally eaten vast numbers of downvotes for advocating his position on nuclear energy, but a lot of his other articles have gotten decent receptions here.
I think that this is something that can only be done by people in their own individual lives. I'm personally doing what I can (though part of me protests and says I could be doing more...), and while it would be nice if society actually turned around and wanted to implement this, I don't think the incentive structures and interest groups that actually run and control western governments would endorse this in the slightest.
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