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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32153 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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TikTok is a Chinese Superweapon

Basic argument of the article is simple:

  1. Social media addiction has clear psychological and societal downsides. It can shrink and monopolize our attention, make us more anxious and lead to damaging fads like stupid "challenges" that kids do.

  2. TikTok is very good at this due to its ability to adapt to the user and the short attention span videos require.

  3. China is aware of this and has demanded that Bytedance moderate TikTok moderate TikTok for China (so as to encourage people to wish to be things like engineers instead of influencers) and banning it for Chinese kids, while allowing it to run rampant in the West.

  4. This is sort of a practical proof of the degeneracy and internal contradictions of Western capitalism and a deliberate attack.

An interesting look at how the Chinese view the West through the eyes of a powerful Chinese policy-maker:

Wang writes:

“Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification… Commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems. These problems, in turn, can increase the pressure on the political and administrative system.”

Thus, by turning everything into a product, Western capitalism devours every aspect of American culture, including the traditions that bind it together as a nation, leading to atomization and polarization. The commodification also devours meaning and purpose, and to plug the expanding spiritual hole that this leaves, Americans turn to momentary pleasures—drugs, fast food, and amusements—driving the nation further into decadence and decay.

For Wang, then, the US’s unprecedented technological progress is leading it into a chasm. Every new microchip, TV, and automobile only distracts and sedates Americans further. As Wang writes in his book, “it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people.” Though these words are 30 years old, they could easily have been talking about social media addiction.

Wang theorized that the conflict between the US’s economic system and its value system made it fundamentally unstable and destined for ever more commodification, nihilism, and decadence, until it finally collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. To prevent China’s own technological advancement leading it down the same perilous path, Wang proposed an extreme solution: neo-authoritarianism. In his 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture,” Wang wrote that the only way a nation can avoid the US’s problems is by instilling “core values”—a national consensus of beliefs and principles rooted in the traditions of the past and directed toward a clear goal in the future

The bolded is especially relevant to the final solution to what the author (speculatively) considers an attack by a civilizational competitor:

That leaves only one solution: the democratic one. In a democracy responsibility is also democratized, so parents must look out for their own kids. There’s a market for this, too: various brands of parental controls can be set on devices to limit kids’ access (though many of these, including TikTok’s own controls, can be easily bypassed.)

The article first concedes that China is right that the market will drive us to the bottom of short-attention-span content and degeneracy, but then its solution is the platitude of "parental responsibility" in the face of an unprecedented technological challenge.

We've never dealt with this problem before. The idea that individual parents are going to figure this out when they're in competition with some of the most sophisticated companies in the world who've totally saturated the web with their influence seems patently absurd to me.

Especially in a system where the state is usurping more and more responsibility for child welfare. But, when it comes time to regulate tech companies, the state is powerless?

This sort of learned helplessness is common in the West, even when China is providing a counter-example of what can be done (i.e. regulation, which the author writes off because people will just make a new site*). But the argument is: in an ideologically fractured world the state has no right to impose its preferences in terms of the good life on citizens who may disagree. Now, it may be that the West is too far down the anomie and moral anarchy road to change course. But then the question is whether this is palatable to anyone else who is shopping for a civilizational model?

Especially since there's a strong argument that it is precisely this sort of liberal-influenced learned helplessness that leads to the very fracture of core values that could help mitigate such crises. I would bet that a 1950s America would have more social cohesion to push back against some of these things, but that's due to a shared culture that has been destroyed by...well, take your pick: neoliberalism, secularization, individualism, mass immigration, therapy and the breakdown of homogeneity, racial animus.

So it may be true that liberals - once their culture has become sufficiently fractured - cannot solve this problem (due to the ideology's resistance to compelling certain choices). But that may be an argument to never become liberal in the first place.

* If only someone had applied this insight to the drug war.

People have been claiming that Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad to degeneracy and collapse for more than a century. It never happened. So we are supposed to think this time will be different because of Tiktok?

People have been claiming that Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad to degeneracy and collapse for more than a century. It never happened.

If Bill the Butcher were alive today, he would almost certainly say that it DID happen, and that America is now a corpse being animated to do the bidding of the Catholics, Jews, and Europeans who infest it.

Historical American reactionaries have been more or less vindicated, and it’s hard to imagine Poole or his contemporaries being impressed by your stock portfolio or the advances of modern medicine when the culture is so unrecognizable. The only thing separating them from the reactionaries of the 1950s is that Woodrow Wilson and Adolf Hitler poisoned the Overton window badly enough that you can no longer join the American military without pledging to “defend democracy around the world.”

If history repeats itself, it’s reasonable to conclude that America as we know it will be more or less “dead” and replaced by something else in 200 years. Even if the new owners keep the old place’s name to save money on a new sign.

That is a claim that Western liberal democracy has led to "degeneracy." And if you define "degeneracy" as "change in moral values," I guess that is true. But what about the collapse part? That is the dubious part of the original claim.

you can no longer join the American military without pledging to “defend democracy around the world.”

So, the US asks its soldiers to defend their principles, not merely their self-interest? A very strange thing to complain about from someone who is ostensibly is worried about moral degeneracy; that seems like a moral step forward to me.

People have been claiming that Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad to degeneracy and collapse for more than a century. It never happened. So we are supposed to think this time will be different because of Tiktok?

Agree. These pundits have been crying wolf forever. Everything is threat to democracy.

From important metrics we are already degenerated in physical health, mental health, and cultural taste. The cultural promotion of twerking women and naked homosexual men dancing is, for all intents and purposes, the clearest sign of degeneration. The only thing I can imagine worse than that would be if large record companies were signing artists who extolled the value of doing opiates and fentanyl, but luckily Lil Peep is already dead.

metal health

This is, itself, a modern measure. Psychologists would judge ancient men to be extremely mentally unhealthy, suppressing their emotions, prone to outbursts of rage, not tolerant of others, etc.

The broader point is that the naked homosexual men dancing aren't stopping TSMC from making 3nm chips or amazon from delivering you shit.

Exactly. The pundits were right. When they were worried about "degeneracy" 100 years ago, the current state of affairs is exactly what they worried about: the breakdown of the family, dependence on drugs, violence, atheism, celebration of homosexuality. It all happened.

Likewise, the people who worry about future degeneracy will also be correct. Except that, in the future, the degenerates will not see it that way. They will see it as the true and natural way of being.

Artists extolling the value of using marijuana(which is probably bad for heavy users, at least), however, is common as dirt.

And songs about drinking. I heard a song by Metallica recently called Whiskey in the Jar and I thought how such a celebration of alcohol consumption/violence would never be found in earlier, more civilized periods of Western culture.

Songs about drinking go way, way back. Classic country is mostly about alcoholism, although often not positively, for example.

Martin Luther wrote a hymn thanking God for wine. So this isn't new.

Clearly, the age of degeneracy of Western civilization goes back much further than we thought.

I also just learned that Plato's Symposium features a drunken party and homosexuals, so it goes further back than Plato too.

I mean, degeneracy and collapse is a common feature of almost every empire for which we have historical records.

Presumably there's many more that experienced the same decline yet didn't leave a record.

Why do we suppose ourselves to be the exception?

Every past civilization has by definition collapsed, but what is "degeneracy" and what does it have to do with those collapses? Major civilizational collapses have been caused, at least in part, by at least the following set of different factors: Foreign invasion, climate change, natural disaster, disease, religious conflict, over-spending on public works, failure to maintain physical infrastructure, rebellion, civil war and other internal power struggles, changes in technology, changes to the surrounding economic situation, and resource depletion. And these causes may overlap, or cause one another. So, what counts as degeneracy and what is the evidence that it's related to collapse?

So, what counts as degeneracy and what is the evidence that it's related to collapse?

If I were to be broad, it's basically the social/material weaknesses that are exploited by or vulnerable to outside forces and hollow out the wealth and power of the nation if they are not repaired/corrected.

That is, the features and factors that allowed a civilization to rise to prominence can be acknowledged as a core part of that civilization's success. "Degeneration" occurs when those features or factors are allowed to slip away without efforts to preserve them. And if a civilization depended on those factors to maintain their success, then seems almost definitional that losing them will lead to some sort of collapse.

Lot of arguments to be had about what the features/factors of civilizational success are, but it's probably possible to measure the factors and determine if they are degenerating relative to the past.

Take a simple example: what do you think would happen to Saudi Arabia if it lost it's ability to extract and process crude oil?

Would you say that the availability of crude oil within it's borders is a big reason for Saudi Arabia's success in the last hundred years?

If so, would it be fair to say, then, that if Saudi Arabia were to allow it's oil reserves to be depleted without investing in some other means of supporting it's economy, it would be 'degenerating?' It would certainly be 'degeneracy' if Saudi Arabia started setting it's oil fields and extraction equipment on fire for no good reason, no? Or, at least, they would call it such.

I like them as an example since quite a many civilizations have risen and fallen in that general geographical area. No reason to think they'll escape it.

That all seems reasonable, but it sounds then like "degeneracy" is simply any cause of a collapse, or perhaps just a description of collapse/decline. So what's special about TikTok, or any of the other things that are normally referred to as "degeneracy"? How do we use this concept? Is there a prediction beyond "if a civilization loses the things that made it successful, it will no longer be successful?" Is that even true, or do the needs of a civilization change as it develops?

To give an example in a different direction, consider the Bagan Empire of the 9th to 12th century in what is now Myanmar (formerly Burma). This society had a system of state-supported religion, where kings built temples and supported monks working in them with land and precious metal. They derived their public legitimacy from this support, as well as it providing widespread employment. But over time, since the Buddhist monks were immune to taxes, they accumulated more and more of the wealth of the country. Adhering to their ancient traditions contributed to their downfall!

edit: there's a choice quote to this extent around 1:29:50 into the linked episode.

I didn't say otherwise. The initial claim was not, "like all societies, the West will someday collapse." The claim was that said collapse is relatively imminent, specifically because the basic premise of liberal democracy renders it vulnerable thereto. That is the claim that has been made repeatedly.

The problem with the collapse debate is it inevitably involves moving goalposts as to what is defined as collapse. It's hard to agree on what is means for a society to have collapsed. Is it conquered, split, dissolved, or morph into something unrecognizable from its original state?

At a bare minimum, the birthrates have collapsed... indeed to below replacement. A naive projection of this trend would mean some kind of decline is inevitable because of this, alone.

It's entirely possible to chalk a lot of this up to liberal democracy, or, perhaps, the wealth and freedom this brings to the average citizen.

Material conditions have improved, but a lot of basic stats regarding human happiness have declined, and unless people start having more kids or we crack the aging problem, in 50 years we aren't going to have the manpower needed to maintain the services we depend on.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Tiktok is a source of this issue but more like a warning sign. Such an app wouldn't, one would argue, be able to take such strong root in a healthy culture.

It's entirely possible to chalk a lot of this up to liberal democracy, or, perhaps, the wealth and freedom this brings to the average citizen.

But wealth and freedom are distinct from liberal democracy. India was a liberal democracy in the 1950s, despite being dirt-poor. Hong Kong and Singapore have a lot of wealth and freedom (and the concomitant shortage of children) today, without being liberal democracies (especially HK). China is heading in the same direction, despite the end of the One Child Policy.

in 50 years we aren't going to have the manpower needed to maintain the services we depend on.

50 years? Probably optimistic. The problem is pressing now with Boomers - the largest generation - retiring. The amount of healthcare money eaten up by the old is disproportionate and there isn't an equally large generation behind them to balance them out.

Canada already has a healthcare crunch and privatization or not is the topic of the day. It's probably only going to get worse from here. I heard some alarming population estimates for Japan in 2050, let alone 2070.

There's some hope that robotics and automation are going to stave off the impact. Life extension/anti-aging tech will probably be too late for the most part.

If we get AGI then no point in trying to predict the world after that.

But more to the point, Gen Z is the smallest generation (in the west) yet. Even if they started popping out kids like particularly horny rabbits there will be a protracted squeeze waiting on those kids to become productive citizens. And they don't seem to be having kids. So that's whence my 'fifty years' vague estimate comes from.

Will we even have enough people with the capacity to keep an increasingly advanced civilization functional?

It's entirely possible to chalk a lot of this up to liberal democracy, or, perhaps, the wealth and freedom this brings to the average citizen.

How does this square with the fact that China's TFR is only ~80% of the Untied States' TFR? If birth rate collapse = national collapse seems authoritarian China is ahead of liberal democratic United States on that front.

How does this square with the fact that China's TFR is only ~80% of the Untied States' TFR?

One-Child-Policy compounded with rapid urbanization?

The Chinese made policy choices that cratered their birthrates before they began to crater globally.

national collapse seems authoritarian China is ahead of liberal democratic United States on that front.

Yes?

One nation being on course for collapse doesn't preclude it happening to others. The argument is that this is a general trend of all nations, and that empires are not excluded from this.

Indeed, if the West is still overly dependent on Chinese labor when that happens, the ripple effect will accelerate issues over here.

(This is basically Peter Zeihan's thesis, incidentally)

in 50 years we aren't going to have the manpower needed to maintain the services we depend on.

That's why God created immigration

Is this intended as satire or did you just admit that the GOP's "uncharitable strawman" of people like you is actually 100% accurate?

I'm not sure what you mean by "people like you," unless you mean people who occasionally pick up a book or a newspaper, and so are aware that a common response to demographic concerns is to increase immigration, as Canada is doing, and are aware that immigration is why the long term outlook for the US re geopolitical power is much rosier than that of most peer countries. Because that was what I was referring to.

And, I fear it is you who is confirming the "uncharitable strawman" of "people like you", because we are talking about the future of liberal democracy, or of the United States, not the future of the white race, which I take it is what you are referring to. Here is a new flash for you: People who are obsessed with declining white population numbers and the like imagine that people who support immigration are equally obsessed with the fate of the white race, but the truth is that most people don't care. They don't care what race their coworker is, or what race the person in the voting booth next to them is. Let's suppose that 300 years from now, due to immigration, the US is only ten percent white. Or five percent. Or one percent. Who cares?

What will that imply for the countries that the immigrants are drawn from?

Given the higher productivity levels in the west, they can just pay the poorer countries a fee for every immigrant the West takes, and still leave everyone better off.

The west's ideology got to you. I know with all the controversies around your comments people where telling you to come back to your country. I say better stay with us, and don't ruin it.

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Brain drain that further reduces them relative to the US.

The loss of the most successful and mobile members of their middle class.

But I doubt it poses a great internal political impediment to the host nation; in Canada this is seen as a virtuous act and, tbh, I can see why the importing of a few hundred thousand Indians every couple of years (iirc they make up around 20% of migrants) doesn't rank highly in the Canadian mind as a moral outrage.

There are many reasons why the US may be an exception to this trend of empires rising and falling.

The US is much more dominant, head and shoulders above the rest relative to past empires. The closest competitor to the US is China, which does not really have imperialistic ambitions. What could conceivably replace the US? Nothing. Supposed degeneracy may mean loss of economic growth, but not being displaced or conquered.

which does not really have imperialistic ambitions

There was a time when the US didn't either. Some Americans must be rolling in their grave at the postwar empire subsidizing Europe for 80 years.

China does seem like a downgrade from the USSR in terms of imperialism. So this would require for China to create a bloc , which it has slightly hinted at and has been much less successful compared to the USSR. Ironically, China being a communist country probably works to the US advantage. Historically, conflicts have always arose from imperialism, the takeover of land for economic reason. The US acting as a 'world police' does not even meet this criteria.

China does seem like a downgrade from the USSR in terms of imperialism

Partly it's due to old conceptions of what China is and specific Russian geographic weaknesses driving incentives. But part of it is that the US bribed China into the global trade system precisely to weaken the USSR and communism. Why would it need to fight when it can get everything it needs to industrialize without that? Especially when surrounded by US allies... This also calmed other previously martial powers like Japan (who were also isolationist and showed no signs of wanting an empire...until they did)

However, the situation is changing: the US is being more hostile to China specifically and, arguably, the global trade system in general and China imports huge amounts of food and fuel from very far away in order to maintain its newfound wealth. It's no longer the Middle Ages; technologically advanced nations require way more inputs and thus economic interconnections to compete.

These are the pressures that create navies and imperial incentives. I don't think it'll be some mass annexation of another nation into a formal empire nowadays but more than one way to skin a cat.

For a small-scale example: arguably China claiming the South China Sea and building artificial islands is a prelude.

What could conceivably replace the US?

Barbarism?

Or more likely whatever successor entity(s) coalesce in the aftermath... which is pretty much how it went with Rome.

Imagine the collapse looks a lot less like the world stage completely upending, and more likely that the U.S. fractures into a handful of entities composed of various states who have similar interests and maybe they do some warring against each other or politely agree to leave each other's interests alone and dealing with the rest of the world on their own terms.

At which point the American continent is probably still secure from invasion and takeover by a hostile power, but can't project force around the globe.

The US is much more dominant, head and shoulders above the rest relative to past empires.

And this is why Afghanistan is now being ruled as a distant colony of the empire after successful subjugation of the native population.

It seems facially evident that the U.S. empire isn't going to be able to maintain an ongoing presence around the globe capable of suppressing every regional dispute through military superiority if only because of our disfavorable demographics.

I'm going to read a book on the topic and see if I find this version convincing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_World_Is_Just_the_Beginning

Or more likely whatever successor entity(s) coalesce in the aftermath... which is pretty much how it went with Rome.

But Rome was literally surrounded by hostile entitles, like the Goths. Rome's demise was hastened by competing groups. Rome was also fractured by the rise of Christianity, but the US does not have such a similar schism. The left-right divide is not like this.

Imagine the collapse looks a lot less like the world stage completely upending, and more likely that the U.S. fractures into a handful of entities composed of various states who have similar interests and maybe they do some warring against each other or politely agree to leave each other's interests alone and dealing with the rest of the world on their own terms.

I think a breakup is more plausible, but though still unlikely

Rome was also fractured by the rise of Christianity, but the US does not have such a similar schism. The left-right divide is not like this.

In that there is not literal inquisitions going on to root out ideological heretics, perhaps not.

Do you think that the mental firmware that most people in the population are running is substantially different from that which was in play during the decline of Rome?

I think a breakup is more plausible, but though still unlikely

And a breakup would almost certainly mean the collapse of the 'empire,' is my point.

It's the inverse of your point about Rome being surrounded by enemies. The U.S. can easily afford to defend it's own borders... but it remains exceedingly expensive for it to project power overseas far from it's population centers if the host country doesn't welcome them.

The '50s specifically cited as a time when degeneracy could have been resisted were themselves criticized as being degenerate by conservative observers at the time including the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood iirc.

Sayyid Qutb visited the US in the 1950s. You'd think he visited Sodom and Gomorrah the way he wrote about it.

Church youth dances were full of "seductive passion" in his view. And sometimes he would look at an American woman and she would smile at him. That struck him as deserving of condemnation.

How is either of your or Gdanning's comments proving that we haven't, in fact, degenerated since then?

The irony of using Qutb and his problem with promiscuity is that America could be argued to have degenerated below its usual critics' expectations; who probably at least thought liberal society would be numbing everyone from the problems they thought they perceived with increasing amounts of "free love".

People are apparently having less sex now.

If this wasn't likely due to rising anxiety, obesity, shrinking real life friend groups and/or pornography it might actually be a good counterpoint to the degeneracy thesis.

The point is that we were apparently already degenerate then, in the 50s, so already degenerat-ing before then, which suggests we've always been degenerate and degenerating, which takes away the notion's give-a-shit power.

The point is that we were apparently already degenerate then, in the 50s, so already degenerat-ing before then

This is actually an argument used by critics of the West : liberalism is always "degenerating" because you're consuming stocks of social resources (e.g. the Church, hegemonic social mores) that it doesn't replenish.

So the argument would be that "every man does what was right in his own eyes" was inherently degeneracy-facilitating back then too - but there were countervailing social and material forces.

It's possible for 50s people to be degenerates to Qutb especially and for modern society to have degenerated well past that.

I would argue there are places where the degeneration has been clear and undeniable; most obviously obesity. We're not just more degenerate than the people in the 50s, we may be so degenerate in comparison that we might have been dismissed as pushing a slippery slope fallacy and fear-mongering if we talked about it back then.

More obesity but on the other hand bodybuilders today put bodybuilders of the past to shame. Certainly the average has gotten worse.

No one says you have to give a shit, I just find it odd to deny it given the assurances about slippery slopes I heard even just within my lifetime.

Well, I think critics were wrong about the 50s being degenerate but they're not that wrong now.

Tangentially, I think San Francisco is outrageously degenerate. But it generates wealth and competence in a way you would never guess by just looking at what's going on on the street. I think America at large is similar. Wanting congruence between the kind of people who can pump out a vaccine in a year and heroin addicts is very compelling, but apparently society can live with a messier arrangement.

Does it actually generate wealth and competence or merely attract it? If you raise a middle class kid in San Francisco is he going to be better off than the same kid raised in San Diego or San Jose or San Houston? If you found Twitter in Miami, does it do better or worse than if it were founded in San Francisco?

It attracts talent and that talent generates wealth. If you found Twitter in Houston, it would absolutely do worse than Twitter founded in San Francisco (a la 2005 when San Francisco was liberal).

People who are natural out-of-the-box thinkers are going to gravitate to places where they're allowed to occasionally do out-of-the-box ("degenerate") things in public and private. And that nature is going create those economic powerhouses when they go to work.

That's an interesting question. For years conservatives have wondered why the economic powerhouses are not salt of the earth places like Iowa but degenerate coastal cities.

Question: If one of those people from a century ago who believed “Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad [sic] to degeneracy and collapse” were able to view our current society, do you believe that he or she would feel vindicated? (Gestures around, gesticulating wildly.)

I’m not asking whether you believe that we are in a state of degeneracy and collapse. I’m pointing out that any worthwhile theory that liberalism will lead to degeneracy and collapse would necessarily contain a sub-belief that the people living through that degeneracy and collapse are, by definition, unable to recognize it as such. Our standards for what counts as degeneracy and collapse have been so warped that, like fish in water, we cannot even conceptualize that there’s a problem. Surely you can recognize that the reactionaries of a century ago would identify our current society as suffering from precisely the sorts of problems their theory predicted we’d be suffering through, even if you think their standards are bad or useless.

Answers:

  1. Yes.

  2. As @Stefferi states, they would probably have predicted that society would collapse more or less instantly upon the achievement of several prior levels of degeneracy. If they're wrong on every sub prediction, it might be fair to ignore or soften their future predictions.

  3. Try to rank the Roman Emperors. The Biblical Jewish kings. Hell, American Presidents. All of them. The first few slots are bitterly contested, who was a better king Solomon or David? What order do Diocletian, Augustus, Hadrian go on the list? Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln are quite easily seen as GOAT or goat, depending on who is doing the rankings. Do leaders over bigger territories get extra credit over those who lead diminished geographies? But pretty quickly, you realize that none of those lists contains a preponderance of good leaders. Despite three very different polities, choosing their leaders by very different methods, the net result is similar: there are a handful of really great leaders, historically important geniuses who set their country's path for decades, sometimes centuries, to come; who are succeeded by mediocrities and losers, who fritter that momentum away over time. But it takes many mediocrities to lose the path, "There's a lot of ruin in a nation." Rome spent most of its history in "decline." The Old Testament is mostly just a series of kings turning away from the true faith, the modern Jews essentially are still running off the software created by a handful of great leaders between Moses and Solomon. This might just be a result of historiography, but it seems to me that decline and degeneracy are the normal state rather than an exceptional one; collapse comes much, much, much later than degeneracy can first be identified.

The colapse to which these people were referring, and to which the OP is referring, is far more literal than that.

You'd have to look at the culturally-invariant metrics like GDP, stock market performance, dominance of Silicon Valley, consumer spending, etc. Or the dominance of the US and “Western liberal democracy" to see that in spite of social norms changing, that the western democratic hegemony and America is still largely unchallenged and unassailed.

Surely we can distinguish technical developments from social developments. If there were no technical developments like computing, robotics, jet aircraft, standardized container shipping, then we would be in a much worse position economically and socially. Prosperity can paper over a lot of deeper issues.

Detroit used to be called the Paris of the West! It's now a byword for urban decline. It's only that advances in technology have been rapid enough to compensate for social decline. Maybe technology will save us from complete civilization collapse due to plummeting fertility. Medicine managed to suppress rising murder rates for example. In terms of purely social technology, we've declined massively.

I mean, I’d point out that the usual Rome comparison degeneracy and collapse narrative tends to lead out that the Romans themselves believed they were going through a collapse at the time it was happening.

They would probably have believed that current society has degenerated compared to theirs (which they'd already feel to be degenerate enough already), but they might be surprised that it hasn't collapsed. Indeed, if you were a reactionary in 1923, you might well believe that the entire Western civilization is going to destroyed inevitably by the onmarch of Jewish-Asiatic Bolshevism of the Soviet Union and generally the teeming hordes of Mongolic Asiatics breeding uncontrollably in China and such countries, and currently the Soviet Union is no more and, while China presents a challenge, it is certainly no longer due to uncontrollable breeding. Meanwhile, the Western liberalism chugs happily onwards.

Do you believe 17th century Puritans if shown Belle Epoque would believe that society had degenerated? My answer will mirror yours, turning on the fulcrum of whether technological progress can make up for a supposed societal malaise. The question is, do these social restrictions (since this is all historical social norms have ever been) exist as ends themselves, or solely due to their influence on the material basis of that polity? And if the former, how exactly IS the prognostic of degeneracy supposed to be declared if not from the factors that should be downstream of that taint?

If social norms can be essentially good in and of themselves then they must by worthwhile of themselves, and any supposed or perceived deficiencies of them must be either illusory or not of importance compared to the moral/eschatological rectitude of the principals. In which case it's as unfair to say that people in a degenerate society can't notice said degeneracy as to say that a morally assured people should be capable of seeing their own self-righteousness: they're right because they are, and they are because they're right. Anything beyond that doesn't have any verifiable basis in reality.

I personally think - if collapse happens* - there's more long-range factors like the exhaustion of any tradition that balances out liberalism (which Western liberal democracy has had for most of its existence) and the total failure to solve the fertility problem (another atypical situation) to blame. New territory.

But yeah, TikTok & social media in general add their own drag here.

Of course, a final argument - or rather question- can be raised: and? Yes, defying the naysayers for "more than a century" is good but we're not talking about Coptic Christians saying "this too shall pass" about the Muslim conquerors are we? The Soviet Union lasted from the 20s to the 90s while facing seriously challenges (to say the least) and the most powerful nation to ever exist.

* Clearly some forms of degeneracy (e.g. mass obesity) have proliferated.

Yes, defying the naysayers for "more than a century" is good

Flippantly, a civilisation that lasts forever preserves itself one century at a time.

More seriously, my social circle includes people involved with long-term planning at some of" the longest-lived Western institutions (the old universities), and 100 years is the longest timescale that they find useful to think about. I was just reading this Freddie de Boer comment thread where someone pointed out that Japanese companies that see themselves as perpetual also plan out to 100 years (but most of the long-term planning energy goes int 20, 30 or 50 year plans). The "Longtermist" movement within rationalism/EA are thinking about the far future, but their plans for getting there all play out in considerably less than 100 years.

Everything that can happen will happen eventually, and nothing lasts forever, so a prediction that something will eventually collapse is as valuable as predicting that the sun will rise tomorrow. Predictions have shelf-lives - if they expire unfulfilled then they are wrong, not just early. And 100 years is too long a shelf-life for a meaningful prediction. Saying that western civilisation is degenerate is a statement about something that is happening now. Saying that western civilisation is collapsing is a statement about something that is happening now with consequences that should be undeniable soon. Right now I see obvious downward trends (mostly high-IQ fertility) which are affecting all advanced human societies roughly equally badly. But if I look at the West vs the Rest at the highest levels of civilisational achievement, I see our weapons triumphant on the battlefield in Ukraine, I see the ARM/TSMC/ASML axis of semiconductor excellence consolidating its supremacy in a way which gives its customers in Silicon Valley and other Western countries a permanent edge over their Chinese competition, I see Gwynne Shotwell ignoring her boss's inane social media antics and building bigger, better rockets, and above all I see talent continuing to move west voluntarily.

Tiktok is bad, and a threat to corrupt our youth. But I don't see why it is scarier than the sort of challenge we eat for breakfast on every page of the history books.

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