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This is a secular space, so I try to reserve my belief in divine intervention to the side. ;)

More seriously, I know you were joking, but I think that in Christianity it's a grave mistake to assume that divine favour clearly correlates or anti-correlates with worldly power or success. God tests and tries his people, and uses them in unexpected ways. Sometimes the church may be powerful and accepted in society; sometimes it may be reviled and persecuted. We shouldn't read too much into either situation.

I'm a doomer on the U.S., and I want to know what you guys think, in general, will be the trend for the next decade or further on. Here's my theory for how all this ends:

  • Politically, conflict theory has totally won. Extremists from both parties keep trying to outdo each other. This can lead to outright civil war or government breakdown down the line. Democracies all around the globe host more and more unhappy populations that, no matter which politicians they vote in, never seem to get what they want, leading them to vote in more and more strange and radical candidates.
  • Government spending will never recede. Too many groups need to stay satisfied with their welfare, otherwise the party that cuts them will never win an election again. This will lead to an eventual collapse, someday, with more and more economic pain as time goes on and as less productive people exist to support the invalids and growing number of leeches.
  • Dating sucks and gender relations are likely going to get worse as the social media experiment continues, to South Korea levels. It can only get worse from here.
  • As someone mentioned downthread, I could easily see status becoming harder and harder to get, as the players in the game optimize towards the most awful way to live: constant striving in every arena. Anyone left playing the game is a tiger mom. This is the one I'm least sure about, but it could change rapidly as economic circumstances shift.
  • I have no idea if the country will fail slow or fast, but it will likely decline in the next decade by a noticeable amount.

My friend is more of an optimist. Here's his theory on the first one:

  • Eventually, one party is going to realize their extremists never win races. They elect a moderate. Things normalize, politically.

Unfortunately, I didn't quiz him on all the rest of it. But now, somehow, it is making me wonder about the outlook of most of the Mottizens. I certainly see the doomer take on things pretty often.

I see a factoid sometimes that says conservatives are happier with their lives than liberals. Maybe that's a factor of rural living, maybe that's a factor of less thinking about serious issues, and less reading. I am pretty sure that conservatives on this site, on average, do not live in rural areas and, on average, think a lot more about serious issues, and read more. So maybe some bad, anecdotal science testing on The Motte is in order.

Are you a doomer, or a "bloomer"? What are some factors that lead you to your conclusion that the country is trending downwards or upwards? Please explain yourself, and please fight it out with everyone who thinks you're wrong.

Are those women not settling down leaving a number of men who want to? Or are they just part of the urbanite endless casual dating scene?

All that remains is him being economically right wing.

Errrr...which Trump? Tariff Trump? Giant deficit-exploding OBBB Trump? Like, I could be convinced these things are "right wing" - OBBB does roll back some Medicaid expansion, and insofar as the extra spend is to lock-in the 2017 tax cuts and pay for a lot more ICE, I could see it. But the definition of what constitutes "right wing economics" is pretty flexible right now.

while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture

Since when? In them I see no love for wisdom and erudition, no study in perfection.

Religion as whole in the US is still declining

There have been some signs that the decline is tapering off. I would not be shocked if it continued to slide, but I also would not be shocked if it didn't go lower.

Of course part of this is the question of "what counts as religious"? The rise of the nones, for instance, hasn't really corresponded with the rise of secular atheist types (and many nones indulge in religious practices) - so has the decline of religion been essentially false, and it's just been that organized religion is on the decline? Or do we really need to look at practice and church attendance? That seems like a more serious and better measurement in many ways (as I understand it it actually is a better predictor for many religious benefits) but does that unfairly discount religious practices that are by their very nature disorganized? There's some methodological questions there. I'd simply confine myself to observing that the "decline of religion" mostly doesn't mean "the rise of secular liberal atheism" or anything like that. It means people aren't going to church, not that they have become transhumanist Star Trek liberals or something.

They are also massively less influential than they were in the 80s and 00s and they'd have to work pretty hard to get that power back.

One notable difference since the 00s, I think, is that evangelicals will be more comfortable being in a political coalition with Catholics, and even Mormons and Muslims. They're still going to have serious reservations, but Obama-era liberalism made the misstep of putting "conservative religious people" broadly on the same team in some areas. I think this is tremendously important - all the little parts of these coalitions have their own organizations and patronage networks. Exercising political power is not just about counting heads, you need networking and institutions, and "all religious groups in the US that are relatively conservative" is much more powerful a coalition than "evangelicals."

I'm curious to see if organized Christianity adopts a more hardline position on immigration

Regarding america, I'm pretty sure the only organized christians worth talking about are the mormons and the catholics. Sure, there are plenty of random protestant churches, but they can hardly be called organized. Now, I can't speak for the mormons, but it will be really, really weird if the catholic church takes a more hardline position. The most consequential modern group of immigrants is latin americans, who the church loves because they're already disproportionately catholic. It might come around to some sort of de-facto restrictions on muslim and hindu immigrants-- like a christian-flavored acculturation in compromise with the protestants. But the international nature of the church causes it to trend away from strictly cultural or ethnic xenophobia.

The problem's not "they will turn 30". The problem's in "they turned 30 before you started dating them". If you want four kids, you want to give the woman a rest between pregnancies, and it takes a couple of years before you get close enough to make babies, you're looking at the last pregnancy starting around age 38. That's starting to get dicey in terms of fertility. Certainly, you're going to have problems if you want to date a woman much over 30 (I say woman, because men can in fact have kids in their 50s or 60s, although not so much 70s because they might be dead by then).

You might be thinking that "wanting four kids" is unrealistic. My answer to that is: a society in which this is unrealistic is a society that will die out. Women need to have over 2 kids on average to replace themselves - because slightly more men than women are born - and we're in a technological state where "having kids accidentally" is not really a thing due to contraception but "not having kids accidentally" very much is. So a large chunk of people need to be intending 4+ kids in order to get the average up to 2.1 or so. If this isn't realistic, halt and catch fire; something needs to be done to fix that ASAP as a matter of societal survival, which is of course the position you're arguing against.

There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position

I think it's worth at least considering the possibility that we are backed directly by God :P

As other people point out, it's unlikely that an african war will cause a truly large migration surge to the US. Afrigan wars are bloody, but relatively small scale. For them to become larger-scale would require african states to experience chinese-warring-states-esque darwinian evolution in state capacity, that would ironically make them better at retaining and mobilizing their populations.

No, african famine is likely to cause migration surges... but given the global climatic conditions that will be causing it, it's unlikely that anyone will be particularly sympathetic since the entire planet would end up being worse off.

If you haven't learned the violin by 12, you probably aren't going to learn it very well if at all.

Musicians can actually, you know, improve past what they’ve learned by age 12. That’s when serious musicians start grinding, learning new techniques, expanding their knowledge of theory, etc. My high school’s band program (of which I was a part) was small and pathetic compared to wealthier schools in our district, but a number of the musician kids I knew even then were spending a lot of time practicing to get good enough to potentially pursue it further into college and beyond. A disproportionate number of them, as I’m sure you can imagine, were Asian. Far from the Tiger Mom caricature — toiling away miserably at an instrument they hate in order to farm Extracurricular Points — most of them seemed to genuinely love the opportunity to get better at creating beautiful music.

I had a summer job between my sophomore and junior years of high school. Your classic fast food job, working mostly with dudes 5+ years my senior. After that, though, as I started to get more serious about extracurricular, my parents encouraged me to quit in order to focus on schoolwork, summer reading assignments, summer band practice, etc. I also similarly had a job — this time a restaurant job — for over a year during college, which directly and negatively impacted my ability to participate in many of the projects which would have been very helpful for preparing my professional development in my chosen major.

I agree that these jobs were enriching in the sense that they forced me to develop time management, a thick skin when being given negative feedback or undesirable tasks, and an exposure to a broad cross-section of society. I further agree that many of the individuals at whom you’re taking aim would certainly have benefited considerably in the same way. I’m just not convinced that these are strictly superior qualities to develop for the specific class of people who are genuine candidates for the Ivy League in 2025.

I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind. The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.

I've wondered about this. I'm not sure if I'll live long enough to see the whole effects. Even post 1965 homosexuality only became fully normalized like 15 years ago.

Regardless of whether or not it's unkind to say the truth, it isn't up for debate that there are massive differences on average between the kind of child OP could have (if not infertile) and the kind up for adoption.

That said, I suspect this is mainly due to the much larger population of non-practicing Catholics?

Yes, I think this is right. I also think there are a lot of people in the Catholic church who are very left-wing (...even on positions like abortion) and who want to reform the church from within.

Whereas as you say evangelicals who are dissatisfied with, say, the evangelical teachings on abortion just leave.

That said I would not be surprised if this changes - if younger people who leave Catholicism increasingly drop the label entirely, rather than continue to call themselves Catholic and just not do anything, then Catholicism will become more meaningful as a signal.

I think this is likely. My guess is that in the US over the next 40 - 50 years, Catholic numbers drop considerably (or if they hold steady, it's due to immigration) but the remnants are more dedicated and more "conservative" as far as such things go.

In that case, people who would have been sysadmins are either paid to become brick layers or are forced to do it because that's the only job left.

There's a reason you rarely see Asian-Americans working low end jobs in the US, while those positions are filled back in their native countries. A society of Einsteins will have a need for janitors, until they automate the solution away. It is still better to be such a society with such a population.

Side note, my highest aspiration these days is to earn enough unrealized capital gains to retire, and live off the 0% tax rate on the first $100,000-ish I realize a year. Even after that it's only 15% up to $500,000. Fuck paying into this system that hates me and my family.

But the population of 19th century Europe was booming, not shrinking during that time period. Europe was growing and filling whole continents with Europeans. A European country might be individually unstable but European civilization as a whole was not in danger, it was the danger. The TLDR of history from 1000-1918 is basically 'Europe gets stronger and stronger and wrecks everyone else'. European empires expanded even after WW1, finally dealing the death blow to the Ottoman Empire.

Today Europe is shrinking rather than growing. Individual countries may be 'stable' under the EU system. Elect social democrat, get excited for next social democrat! But the system as a whole cannot handle change precisely because of its stability. A united, 'stable', rich Europe of some 450 million apparently cannot deal with a poor Russia of 140 million without America. Europe is not grappling with new technologies in space or AI, they're not leading the frontier anymore, they're in a passive situation dealing with the rise of China, with refugee crises. That's the kind of stability that's unstable.

Strength in a changing universe (in a universe that one's very presence is changing) requires constant change that's easily conflated with instability. Surface-level stability can just be inflexibility that inevitably leads to catastrophe and disaster.

Look a single dude straight in the eye and say "Yeah she's banged 6-12 dudes prior to you, but I'm sure that she won't ever be thinking about any of them or comparing your performance and YOU'RE the one she's going to stick with" with a straight face.

Ok but this is entirely normal in Western culture and has been since like the 70s so about 50 years now. And it's not just her that's expected to have 6-12 previous partners it's you as well. If you don't well that's probably part of it but the vast majority of men in modern Western society would not be at all phased by a body count of 6 and thinking they would be shows you as an extreme outlier. I realize modern Western culture is also an extreme outlier but nevertheless that's the culture you live in.

Now it's actually not that hard to marry a virgin in the US you just need to sincerely convert to one of the dozens of conservative religious denominations that enforce this many of which have more women than men. The other way is to ingratiate yourself into a more conservative nonwestern culture and try for marriage there. But acting like a body count of 6 is some damning thing when that is what is culturally expected of modern secular women is not going to get you very far. Modern secular women and men are expected to have several previous relationships and flings from high school and college that's the cultural expected norm. It's totally fair to not like that but understand you are like a Saudi woman searching for a sensitive feminist hipster plenty of those exist but you are going to have to go out of your cultural comfort zone to find them.

Serious question. Would ever consider an arranged marriage in India or dating a Filipina overseas, in order to find a match?

I appreciate this post. Too many people view the past as something like Saudi Arabia and don't realize how much freedom and independence women had in Northern Europe historically or how late the marriage ages were there. Settling down in your 30s was just what sensible middle class people did to have a good life. Just like going to university or putting money into a 401k today. At least in Northern Europe it wasn't girls getting married at 15 to much older men.

Depends on the restaurant. Chick-fil-A feels the opposite. There are also some local Burger joints that seem to be all English as a first language teenagers, but naming them would dox me.

'Elites' are more likely to be punished for imaginary crimes (like fucking 16 and 17-year-olds) than real ones.

To a point, they have qualified/sovereign immunity from prosecution when they commit the real crimes, that's why you have to get them hard on the public morals stuff.

It's not a problem that can be fixed with self improvement. But it's a pretty easy problem to solve, for any non-obese, non-insane, white guy 45 and under, just outsource. Open Filipina Cupid.com or go study some bullshit continuing education course in Manila and you'll have dozens of eligible pretty slim women falling over you. Yes there will be pure gold diggers and green card hunters but also don't discount the natural attraction being wealthy and high status induces is women.

If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.

Absolutely right but getting to be a doctor, academic, high-ranking officer, lawyer isn't a game. It's not designed for fun. Becoming a doctor is one of the least fun things I can think of.

Does Korean hyper-intensive education of young people really pay off? Well it's a highly developed advanced manufacturing powerhouse. But we can't be sure that the extra stress and strain of intensive meritocracy is helpful. 90% of their edge could be from doing good industrial policy, not wrecking their economy, having a population of high-IQ Koreans... Perhaps Korea would do better with a less stratified economy, more emphasis on zero-to-one innovation, more start-ups and entrepreneurship rather than chaebols eating everything.

Perhaps shredding the nerves of young people with high-intensity tests and competition (I've seen this happen with some Chinese kids) is just too much meritocracy, I think that's 2rafa's main point.