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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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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