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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?
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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.
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.
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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?
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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.
One-Child-Policy compounded with rapid urbanization?
The Chinese made policy choices that cratered their birthrates before they began to crater globally.
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)
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That's why God created immigration
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.
Oh I agree, I'm a Westerner through and through. My internal moral system is thoroughly guilt based (like a Westerner) rather than shame based (like the inhabitants of my homeland). I recognise the great Past Masters of the West as being above what my culture produced, for instance I would wholeheartedly rank Goethe higher than Rumi.
What I'm not though is a Westoid. The two things are very different and current modern western culture is Westoid culture, not Western culture. I would much rather live under Western culture than my own (it's better in like, almost every way), but equally I far prefer my own culture over Westoid culture (now that, that's worse in like, almost every way).
Until the west renounces the social experiment of the last 70 years I will continue to advocate for the replacement of large amounts of its core tenets, since I genuinely think that would lead to an improved state of affairs for humanity as a whole.
Am not convinced. "I'll pay you to hand over your most talented people, this way we'll be both better off" is peak Westoidism. You've never seen a project fall apart, because key players moved on, and no matter how much money was thrown at it, it just stagnated or degraded?
Nah, pay the poor countries enough and they'll be able to hire actually competent white people from the west to come over and work, it's what places like Dubai do for their managerial class (to direct the low end migrants they get from my homeland etc.) and they've done really well as a country when you consider the underlying natives are at the level of uneducated pearl divers.
Only problem is corruption/incompetence will lead to the money being squandered pretty quickly. The solution is probably for western governments to pay for competent westerners to go spend 5-10 years overseas on an expat salary to rule justly over us in return for the permanent migrants we send your way. It's like America's "military aid": all that money goes to American firms that then provide weapons, the countries getting the "aid" don't see a dollar in the form of a dollar to spend as they please (almost certainly a good thing). Same principle here, but with people.
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Brain drain that further reduces them relative to the US.
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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.
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