This is the best summary of the debate about climate change I've seen -
Unfortunately, some experts believe such tough decisions exceed our political and psychological capabilities. “The world will not rise to the occasion of solving the climate problem during this century, simply because it is more expensive in the short term to solve the problem than it is to just keep acting as usual,” says Jorgen Randers
> one of the most important lessons from Rome’s fall is that complexity has a cost. As stated in the laws of thermodynamics, it takes energy to maintain any system in a complex, ordered state – and human society is no exception.
That is an interesting thought. We tend think of that law in terms of raw energy, but the inertia of society is no exception. We see this over and over whenever anybody goes on strike. Business grind to a halt. Sometimes entire industries. The Russian revolution was an example of several key industries doing this at the same time, and that society collapsed, eventually replaced by another.
It's not just a matter of supplying the raw power to keep everything running. It's also the sheer amount of continually supplying human effort and willpower. Much more nebulous concepts, but arguably more important.
Great points. However, equally important is the notion of "stability" -- there are large differences in how resilient complex processes can be against external forces.
For humans, this can be both a good thing and a bad thing. E.g. the "anti-fragile" nature of some decentralized endeavors vs. an unstoppable crazed mob during a fever pitch social or political crisis.
> Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour
Often the argument is made that automation = abundance which can resolve a lot of problems. However, this assumes that the abundance will be equally distributed, and that is not necessarily true in a capitalistic society (especially within the last decade with the top centile owning most of wealth and income). And if some of Piketty's arguments from Capital in the 21st century hold (particularly r > g), than wealth inequality will continue to increase.
However, inequality increasing itself is not a bad thing (in fact you need inequality for capitalism to work) if the overall quality of life for the bottom improves. If we can reach a point of diminishing marginal returns of just owning wealth (if it's true that people stop caring about collecting wealth once they have enough), than yes I think automation can help stop a collapse because working population won't care because they have enough wealth to be happy.
However, it is human tendency to base satisfaction and happiness RELATIVE to others (look at equity theory from management) so we may still end up in a situation where the quality of life for everyone has improved, but the working population still views that they're still inequal relative to the top (even though they're both better off) and we lead to instability. You can argue that has happened in our modern world today.
There's a difference from envying the haves, while having not, --and starving or being unable to clothe yourself, or even not being able to buy a low-end smartphone at all. Not saying everyone needs an iphone to be happy, but having low end feature comforts -will satiate people enough that they will be a LOT less likely to rebel -- it's when people become desperate that we have problems
> However, it is human tendency to base satisfaction and happiness RELATIVE to others
Yea I thought that historically inequality has lead to violent uprisings due to general resentment and anger, but the article seemed to imply that the elites collapse because they still implicitly need people to be willing to work for them, and that's less true with automation.
I wasn't thinking abundance at all. Frankly the term "collapse of the elites due to absence of labor" is pretty vague.
I am unconvinced, both by the comparison of the modern social order to a bicycle and by historical comparisons to Rome.
In the first place, economic growth slows down and reverses from time to time. Society doesn't collapse. People paint the Great Depression as having been "saved" by WW2, not as a sequence of events that all fed into each other. In other words, if the Great Depression and subsequent world war wasn't a perfect example of the worst that could possibly happen, I dare you to point out a plausible worse scenario.
No, nuclear war doesn't count, even the worst nuclear war imaginable won't be as bad as WW2 was. Nuclear winter is a myth, the particles fall out of the air too quickly, and the inverse square law greatly limits direct damage. Most civilian population centers won't get hit, unless we start another arms race, so we're looking at a few decades at most of economic disruption in the worst possible case.
Finally, the Roman Empire was in no way comparable to the current global regime. The political systems seen by Rome were downright primitive compared to our representative democracies, multi-state unions, and trade federations. The Anglosphere is in no way vulnerable to dictatorship, and while Europe was once capable of fascism in the past, the days where a would-be Hitler or Mussolini could whip populations into a murderous frenzy are long gone. The worst that can happen is sovereign devolution AKA Brexit, Grexit, Scottish independence et al.
The might of Western hegemony is going to slowly fade away and new regional orders will slowly gain strength. The EU will slowly evolve along those orders and the world will stumble towards a new, multi-polar equilibrium, out of which a new global governing body will emerge, fail, then emerge again.
Rome "collapsed" by spreading across Europe, Western civilization will "collapse" by spreading across the globe.
> even the worst nuclear war imaginable won't be as bad as WW2 was
It wouldn't take that many major cities to get past the death toll of WW2. The "worst nuclear war" would easily have more civilian casualties than WW2. How on Earth can you even say this?
In order to destroy NYC one would require on the order of 40 warheads. Nuclear weapons are far less devastating than we think. Using weapons on civilian populations leaves intact enemy military forces which would be free to counter-attack. For this reason most war plans target enemy military installations. You want to keep a certain number of weapons in reserve, it makes approximately zero sense to completely obliterate a city.
The only reason major population centers were targeted in WW2 was because those centers were also major military targets, destroying them would have been crucial to the planned amphibious assault. Had we not had nuclear weaponry on hand, they would have been conventionally bombed like all the others.
Warfare has changed, materiel is now located outside of population centers, on military bases. Putting countries on war footing would take 18 months and it's unlikely any major conflict would last that long.
Strategic materials are the ultimate limiter to high-tech warfare like we see today. We just don't have enough to keep pumping out weapons.
In the end, the very stakes of warfare keep local conflicts from escalating. It's in everybody's best interest to keep the cash flowing. Trade was far more regional 80 years ago.
> The only reason major population centers were targeted in WW2 was because those centers were also major military targets
Like Dresden? Beer factories and civil industry, all reduced to rubble by carpet bombing. Do read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Not your average anti war book.
Here's [1] a declassified JCS report from 1961 estimating over 200 million deaths from a US attack alone, not including the counterattack. This was with lower target populations and a China which had yet to urbanize. And I don't think it includes the longer-term death toll, e.g. from starvation as transportation webs collapse.
Here's [2] another report from 1956:
> the authors developed a plan for the “systematic destruction” of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted “population” in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw
That one aimed 179 nukes at Moscow alone. You don't think 40 aimed at NYC was plausible?
Yes, many nukes would hit military targets outside urban areas, but many wouldn't. If you're right and the war was a relatively short affair that mostly targetted (and presumably decimated) opposing militaries, the long-term postwar strategic advantage would go to whichever side could rebuild fastest. That means aiming for economic advantage, which means that long-term nuclear strategy includes attacking economic targets, which in large part means population centres.
Would WW3 result in entire continents glassed over and the extinction of all life on Earth? No. But I'm pretty sure it would be a lot worse than WW2, and this assumption that "it wouldn't really be all that bad" strikes me as absolutely terrifying. Yes, "It's in everybody's best interest to keep the cash flowing." There was exactly the same consensus before WW1. Actors don't always act in their own best interest, even if they're rational.
The nuclear arsenal increased from 2,422 in 1955 to 18,638 in 1960. It stands now at 4,500. There were simply a lot more weapons available, and population centers were where warfighting capability was concentrated. Both of those things now are moot.
The argument is over whether nuclear war could end Western civilization. While for a short time this might have been true circa 1960, it no longer remains so now. Sure, it'll royally suck. It's on the same scale as WW2. But not the end of the world. I'll point you again to Rotty, whose job it is to know these things.
Fair point about arms reduction. I'd been thinking "nuclear war in general" rather than "a nuclear war right now", which is probably the more useful discussion.
The world isn't one ecosystem. Some ecosystems, like the Great Barrier Reef, will collapse, but this sort of thing won't put much of a dent in global commerce.
Lots of people's livelihoods are threatened, but humanity isn't.
You complain about moving goalposts in another comment in this thread, but you're doing that exact thing here. In your original comment you asked about societal collapse, here you're talking about threats to humanity. There are plenty of societies that have collapsed, yet humanity is still here...
In the worst-case scenario, it's all the other societies that don't make up Western civilization that are threatened. Western Civilization, defined by the Anglosphere plus Europe, will survive and perhaps even thrive. We can adjust. Large scale civil engineering feats that could save the likes of Miami, London, and New York from sea level rise, the worst threat to Western civilization posed by climate change, are well within the ability of those cities to pursue.
It will be very expensive, but not an existential threat.
Migrations are generally a political problem. When you look at the economics of migration, migrants actually help the nation they migrate to a great deal. The political problems caused by mass migration are generally met with policy imposing social hierarchy in service of political continuity. Society changes, but the political order survives.
That's semantics, and highly irrelevant. Everything you could define as an ecosystem on this planet is threatened by global warming. That includes the places where your food is grown. Same goes for everyone else's food. When food stability is threatened, societies collapse.
> No, nuclear war doesn't count, even the worst nuclear war imaginable won't be as bad as WW2 was.
Let's do some math.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed ~100,000 people, making it 50,000 per bomb.
The US has currently 31,175 nuclear weapons at its disposal.
If it were to even use 5% of its arsenal, assuming they have the same power as the bombs from '45 (which they don't), it would amount to 150,000,000 deaths. This is 2.5 times more than the total casualties of ww2, without even accounting for the nuclear weapon use of the opposing side.
You're assuming all the bombs will be dropped on population centers. They won't. Most weapons will be used on military targets. Removing your enemy's ability to wage war will always take priority over non-military targets.
MAD isn't current US policy and hasn't been for some time. US doctrine allows for flexible responses and the possibility of a nuclear exchange staying within the bounds of a regional conflict, rather than automatically escalating immediately to all-out nuclear spasm.
And I don't think it was ever the official policy of the USSR; their planners believed that even all-out nuclear war was both survivable and winnable. (Which made the whole concept distinctly iffy as the foundation of deterrence.)
MAD is a convenient fiction that politicians and the military use for political purposes. It has zero bearing on any actual military strategy because it is not a real scenario. There aren't enough strategic weapons in the world to bring about such an outcome.
To learn more about how the military community thinks of nuclear warfare, follow this guy on Quora:
> Finally, the Roman Empire was in no way comparable to the current global regime. The political systems seen by Rome were downright primitive compared to our representative democracies, multi-state unions, and trade federations. The Anglosphere is in no way vulnerable to dictatorship, and while Europe was once capable of fascism in the past, the days where a would-be Hitler or Mussolini could whip populations into a murderous frenzy are long gone. The worst that can happen is sovereign devolution AKA Brexit, Grexit, Scottish independence et al.
War is the ultimate test of political systems. In France alone, the First Republic, First Empire, Second Empire, Vichy France, Third Republic, and Fourth Republics all collapsed due to strains of war. Similarly, loss in WWI proved the end of several strains of government. In the United States, the American Civil War prompted Lincoln to more or less tear up the Constitution (although it should also be noted that many provisions only apply in times of peace).
Merely asserting that Western governments are immune to the foibles of fascism and dictatorship is folly. While I agree that many countries have fairly strong checks against reversion from democracy, a prolonged period of weakening could still very well happen.
From a moral standpoint, little that I can imagine. From a human-cost standpoint, howabout unchecked and cascading climate change? If the world's powers retrench into regional hegemonies, and trust erodes along with trans-regional communication, then we're less and less likely to do anything on a global scale -- and we need to. If we let the ball get away from us here, we're talking about potentially billions of lives lost to war and famine, not to mention the billions whose way of life will be lost.
And the worst part is, we don't even need fascism to get us there. We get there easily enough through the direction the status quo is bending towards.
It's all superimposed economic cycles. It was the same with the rise and fall of all empires: Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, the British Empire, the USSR, the EU etc. Most of them ended in wars/revolutions because those that amassed power and territories would not give it up peacefully when a disruptive event occured (drought, famine, plague usually followed by economic crisis) and public unrest spiked. Other empires and/or outside invaders usually finished things up.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I think a more interesting historical event to study for insight into what may lead to an advanced society to collapse is the late Bronze Age collapse, which seems to have been caused by a perfect storm of events (from what I've read about it, at least. I'm no expert) leading multiple interconnected civilisations to collapse in a short (100 year or so) time frame.
> Pre-existing ethnic tensions increased, creating fertile grounds for violence and conflict.
Indeed. We have no shortage of reasons to bash one another over the head, but this one is surely one of the most prevalent. Diversity (of fundamental values and identity) breeds distrust, and distrust erodes social capital and institutions.*
What these doomsday articles don't discuss is what exactly the West collapses into? I mean, we're still going to be here among the ruins even if the pillars of society collapse. What then?
Perhaps we'll collapse up, into a more equitable, fairer society.
Wealth redistribution: a solution in search of a problem. The article does nothing to link this supposed solution to the world's problems; it merely asserts this dubious connection.
Of course the article shows its bias more clearly here:
> Whether in the US, UK or elsewhere, the more dissatisfied and afraid people become, Homer-Dixon says, the more of a tendency they have to cling to their in-group identity – whether religious, racial or national. Denial, including of the emerging prospect of societal collapse itself, will be widespread, as will rejection of evidence-based fact. If people admit that problems exist at all, they will assign blame for those problems to everyone outside of their in-group, building up resentment.
This is using a lot of loaded language to suggest that it's primarily the right guilty of these things, but identity politics is a mainstay of the left, at least in the US. Could it be that eliminating identity politics is more important than redistributing wealth?
It's easy to say wealth redistribution is a solution in search of a problem if you never lived in a city or town that's been slowly rotting away due to the negligence of the economic elites. I come from Wichita, Kansas and I can tell you that the last decade back home has been hell on everyone. I had to leave my home town for another state just to find work that wasn't just $12/hr (that's about as high as you can get without any college education back home) even for software development. You might think "oh but the standard of living in Kansas is cheap" for which I can prove that's not the case, especially for Wichita. In the long run, either the economic elites actually start investing in the consumers that made them wealthy or the consumers who can't pay for their services or goods will (not might) take their wealth from them by force.
I think the gist of the article is that western styled democracy is always going to be more vastly more expensive & economically fragile than any authoritarian superpower that can simply threaten to kill it's own people or harvest their organs to boost GDP and serve it's elite.
It uses Syria to make case that climate change was responsible butterly effect:
> . Syria, for example, enjoyed exceptionally high fertility rates for a time, which fueled rapid population growth. A severe drought in the late 2000s, likely made worse by human-induced climate change, combined with groundwater shortages to cripple agricultural production. That crisis left large numbers of people – especially young men – unemployed, discontent and desperate. Many flooded into urban centres, overwhelming limited resources and services there. Pre-existing ethnic tensions increased, creating fertile grounds for violence and conflict. On top of that, poor governance – including neoliberal policies that eliminated water subsidies in the middle of the drought – tipped the country into civil war in 2011 and sent it careening toward collapse.
Which is shockingly accurate.
It makes parallel case for the rise of populism in US and EU becoming an increasingly less welcoming region as it faces the full pressure from collapsed countries in the middle east.
tl;dr: learn Mandarin or Russian because they are far more likely to survive a global economic collapse.
Nothing new for those of us who've been well convinced progress isn't limitless, and some of whom might even have heard of Tainter. What is new is that a fairly mainstream news outlet is actually addressing the issue. A longtime litany of complaint in the "doomer" "community" (grains of salt needed) is that there's no mainstream consensus about or attention to these predicaments at either a root level or a big-picture level.
> The Syrian case aside, another sign that we’re entering into a danger zone, Homer-Dixon says, is the increasing occurrence of what experts call nonlinearities, or sudden, unexpected changes in the world’s order, such as the 2008 economic crisis, the rise of ISIS, Brexit, or Donald Trump’s election.
Unexpected or rather unexpected to those on the far-left of the political spectrum, who very much like their far-right counterparts often live in echo chambers.
Growing dissatisfaction against globalism and feeble governance didn't happen overnight.
Those who failed to notice it simply were not looking in the right places.
> Unexpected or rather unexpected to those on the far-left of the political spectrum...
Which planet are you living on? Noam Chomsky predicted the election of someone like Trump six years ago [1]. You have it backwards: it's the milquetoast neoliberal part of the spectrum that didn't see the rise of fascism coming. Socialists, communists, anarchists, etc. have been concerned about the rise of fascism ever since World War II.
I'm pretty tired of "far-left" and "far-right" characterizations of most people. Most people are moderates on one side or the other (or put another way, they don't easily fit into either of the "left" or "right" buckets). Lots of people across that whole spectrum were surprised by the election, not just "the far left".
Nobody failed to notice economic dissatisfaction, but many were surprised that the President's particular brand of speaking to it was as successful as it was, especially coming from a Republican.
Well, the Democrats seemed to not even try to speak to it, even though the working class was (once upon a time) their core constituency. So maybe it's fair to say that, if the Democrats "noticed" it, it didn't register in their thinking to the degree it should have.
I have to wonder if in some part what happened during the Bronze Age is destined to happen again? I can see the US here going belly up if someone was inclined to test the US resolve to defend the likes of Saudi Arabia (considering its contribution to the world oil markets is non-trivial and probably not easily replaced). What I'm getting at with that hypothetical situation is that we're probably too interconnected now just like we were in the Bronze Age and with sustained disruptions to vital resources I can imagine things getting bad in a hurry. I just wish more folks would take this possibility more seriously and build redundancy and independence where it can minimize the inevitable disruptions of the future.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadUnfortunately, some experts believe such tough decisions exceed our political and psychological capabilities. “The world will not rise to the occasion of solving the climate problem during this century, simply because it is more expensive in the short term to solve the problem than it is to just keep acting as usual,” says Jorgen Randers
> one of the most important lessons from Rome’s fall is that complexity has a cost. As stated in the laws of thermodynamics, it takes energy to maintain any system in a complex, ordered state – and human society is no exception.
It's not just a matter of supplying the raw power to keep everything running. It's also the sheer amount of continually supplying human effort and willpower. Much more nebulous concepts, but arguably more important.
Too much will stop anything.
For humans, this can be both a good thing and a bad thing. E.g. the "anti-fragile" nature of some decentralized endeavors vs. an unstoppable crazed mob during a fever pitch social or political crisis.
I wonder how automation changes the balance here.
However, inequality increasing itself is not a bad thing (in fact you need inequality for capitalism to work) if the overall quality of life for the bottom improves. If we can reach a point of diminishing marginal returns of just owning wealth (if it's true that people stop caring about collecting wealth once they have enough), than yes I think automation can help stop a collapse because working population won't care because they have enough wealth to be happy.
However, it is human tendency to base satisfaction and happiness RELATIVE to others (look at equity theory from management) so we may still end up in a situation where the quality of life for everyone has improved, but the working population still views that they're still inequal relative to the top (even though they're both better off) and we lead to instability. You can argue that has happened in our modern world today.
Yea I thought that historically inequality has lead to violent uprisings due to general resentment and anger, but the article seemed to imply that the elites collapse because they still implicitly need people to be willing to work for them, and that's less true with automation.
I wasn't thinking abundance at all. Frankly the term "collapse of the elites due to absence of labor" is pretty vague.
In the first place, economic growth slows down and reverses from time to time. Society doesn't collapse. People paint the Great Depression as having been "saved" by WW2, not as a sequence of events that all fed into each other. In other words, if the Great Depression and subsequent world war wasn't a perfect example of the worst that could possibly happen, I dare you to point out a plausible worse scenario.
No, nuclear war doesn't count, even the worst nuclear war imaginable won't be as bad as WW2 was. Nuclear winter is a myth, the particles fall out of the air too quickly, and the inverse square law greatly limits direct damage. Most civilian population centers won't get hit, unless we start another arms race, so we're looking at a few decades at most of economic disruption in the worst possible case.
Finally, the Roman Empire was in no way comparable to the current global regime. The political systems seen by Rome were downright primitive compared to our representative democracies, multi-state unions, and trade federations. The Anglosphere is in no way vulnerable to dictatorship, and while Europe was once capable of fascism in the past, the days where a would-be Hitler or Mussolini could whip populations into a murderous frenzy are long gone. The worst that can happen is sovereign devolution AKA Brexit, Grexit, Scottish independence et al.
The might of Western hegemony is going to slowly fade away and new regional orders will slowly gain strength. The EU will slowly evolve along those orders and the world will stumble towards a new, multi-polar equilibrium, out of which a new global governing body will emerge, fail, then emerge again.
Rome "collapsed" by spreading across Europe, Western civilization will "collapse" by spreading across the globe.
It wouldn't take that many major cities to get past the death toll of WW2. The "worst nuclear war" would easily have more civilian casualties than WW2. How on Earth can you even say this?
The only reason major population centers were targeted in WW2 was because those centers were also major military targets, destroying them would have been crucial to the planned amphibious assault. Had we not had nuclear weaponry on hand, they would have been conventionally bombed like all the others.
Warfare has changed, materiel is now located outside of population centers, on military bases. Putting countries on war footing would take 18 months and it's unlikely any major conflict would last that long.
Strategic materials are the ultimate limiter to high-tech warfare like we see today. We just don't have enough to keep pumping out weapons.
In the end, the very stakes of warfare keep local conflicts from escalating. It's in everybody's best interest to keep the cash flowing. Trade was far more regional 80 years ago.
Like Dresden? Beer factories and civil industry, all reduced to rubble by carpet bombing. Do read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Not your average anti war book.
Here's [1] a declassified JCS report from 1961 estimating over 200 million deaths from a US attack alone, not including the counterattack. This was with lower target populations and a China which had yet to urbanize. And I don't think it includes the longer-term death toll, e.g. from starvation as transportation webs collapse.
Here's [2] another report from 1956:
> the authors developed a plan for the “systematic destruction” of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted “population” in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw
That one aimed 179 nukes at Moscow alone. You don't think 40 aimed at NYC was plausible?
Yes, many nukes would hit military targets outside urban areas, but many wouldn't. If you're right and the war was a relatively short affair that mostly targetted (and presumably decimated) opposing militaries, the long-term postwar strategic advantage would go to whichever side could rebuild fastest. That means aiming for economic advantage, which means that long-term nuclear strategy includes attacking economic targets, which in large part means population centres.
Would WW3 result in entire continents glassed over and the extinction of all life on Earth? No. But I'm pretty sure it would be a lot worse than WW2, and this assumption that "it wouldn't really be all that bad" strikes me as absolutely terrifying. Yes, "It's in everybody's best interest to keep the cash flowing." There was exactly the same consensus before WW1. Actors don't always act in their own best interest, even if they're rational.
[1] https://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/u-s-war-plans-wou...
[2] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear-...
The argument is over whether nuclear war could end Western civilization. While for a short time this might have been true circa 1960, it no longer remains so now. Sure, it'll royally suck. It's on the same scale as WW2. But not the end of the world. I'll point you again to Rotty, whose job it is to know these things.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-fatalities-would-there-be-in-...
What about collapse of the ecosystem due to global warming?
Lots of people's livelihoods are threatened, but humanity isn't.
It will be very expensive, but not an existential threat.
That's semantics, and highly irrelevant. Everything you could define as an ecosystem on this planet is threatened by global warming. That includes the places where your food is grown. Same goes for everyone else's food. When food stability is threatened, societies collapse.
Let's do some math. Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed ~100,000 people, making it 50,000 per bomb. The US has currently 31,175 nuclear weapons at its disposal. If it were to even use 5% of its arsenal, assuming they have the same power as the bombs from '45 (which they don't), it would amount to 150,000,000 deaths. This is 2.5 times more than the total casualties of ww2, without even accounting for the nuclear weapon use of the opposing side.
He isn't. He is assuming 5% of bombs will be dropped on population centers.
> Removing your enemy's ability to wage war will always take priority over non-military targets.
You are applying conventional military tactics in a nuclear war. They don't apply. See MAD[1], the cornerstone of nuclear deterrence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
And I don't think it was ever the official policy of the USSR; their planners believed that even all-out nuclear war was both survivable and winnable. (Which made the whole concept distinctly iffy as the foundation of deterrence.)
MAD is a convenient fiction that politicians and the military use for political purposes. It has zero bearing on any actual military strategy because it is not a real scenario. There aren't enough strategic weapons in the world to bring about such an outcome.
To learn more about how the military community thinks of nuclear warfare, follow this guy on Quora:
https://www.quora.com/profile/Thierry-Etienne-Joseph-Rotty
(For example, every single ocean port is a military target, war time industrial capacity is a military target, etc)
War is the ultimate test of political systems. In France alone, the First Republic, First Empire, Second Empire, Vichy France, Third Republic, and Fourth Republics all collapsed due to strains of war. Similarly, loss in WWI proved the end of several strains of government. In the United States, the American Civil War prompted Lincoln to more or less tear up the Constitution (although it should also be noted that many provisions only apply in times of peace).
Merely asserting that Western governments are immune to the foibles of fascism and dictatorship is folly. While I agree that many countries have fairly strong checks against reversion from democracy, a prolonged period of weakening could still very well happen.
> Merely asserting that Western governments are immune to the foibles of fascism and dictatorship is folly.
The goalposts keep getting moved back. The world survived the Nazis and Holocaust and eventually became more stable. What could be worse than that?
From a moral standpoint, little that I can imagine. From a human-cost standpoint, howabout unchecked and cascading climate change? If the world's powers retrench into regional hegemonies, and trust erodes along with trans-regional communication, then we're less and less likely to do anything on a global scale -- and we need to. If we let the ball get away from us here, we're talking about potentially billions of lives lost to war and famine, not to mention the billions whose way of life will be lost.
And the worst part is, we don't even need fascism to get us there. We get there easily enough through the direction the status quo is bending towards.
Just yesterday Donald Trump called Turkey's Erdogan to congratulate him on seizing nigh-dictatorial powers in his country.
Somehow I feel we're _very_ vulnerable to dictatorship right now....
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Indeed. We have no shortage of reasons to bash one another over the head, but this one is surely one of the most prevalent. Diversity (of fundamental values and identity) breeds distrust, and distrust erodes social capital and institutions.*
What these doomsday articles don't discuss is what exactly the West collapses into? I mean, we're still going to be here among the ruins even if the pillars of society collapse. What then?
Perhaps we'll collapse up, into a more equitable, fairer society.
* http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/...
Of course the article shows its bias more clearly here:
> Whether in the US, UK or elsewhere, the more dissatisfied and afraid people become, Homer-Dixon says, the more of a tendency they have to cling to their in-group identity – whether religious, racial or national. Denial, including of the emerging prospect of societal collapse itself, will be widespread, as will rejection of evidence-based fact. If people admit that problems exist at all, they will assign blame for those problems to everyone outside of their in-group, building up resentment.
This is using a lot of loaded language to suggest that it's primarily the right guilty of these things, but identity politics is a mainstay of the left, at least in the US. Could it be that eliminating identity politics is more important than redistributing wealth?
It uses Syria to make case that climate change was responsible butterly effect:
> . Syria, for example, enjoyed exceptionally high fertility rates for a time, which fueled rapid population growth. A severe drought in the late 2000s, likely made worse by human-induced climate change, combined with groundwater shortages to cripple agricultural production. That crisis left large numbers of people – especially young men – unemployed, discontent and desperate. Many flooded into urban centres, overwhelming limited resources and services there. Pre-existing ethnic tensions increased, creating fertile grounds for violence and conflict. On top of that, poor governance – including neoliberal policies that eliminated water subsidies in the middle of the drought – tipped the country into civil war in 2011 and sent it careening toward collapse.
Which is shockingly accurate.
It makes parallel case for the rise of populism in US and EU becoming an increasingly less welcoming region as it faces the full pressure from collapsed countries in the middle east.
tl;dr: learn Mandarin or Russian because they are far more likely to survive a global economic collapse.
I want to take this seriously, but I'm dubious of any argument that uses doubt of its veracity as evidence of its correctness.
Unexpected or rather unexpected to those on the far-left of the political spectrum, who very much like their far-right counterparts often live in echo chambers.
Growing dissatisfaction against globalism and feeble governance didn't happen overnight.
Those who failed to notice it simply were not looking in the right places.
Which planet are you living on? Noam Chomsky predicted the election of someone like Trump six years ago [1]. You have it backwards: it's the milquetoast neoliberal part of the spectrum that didn't see the rise of fascism coming. Socialists, communists, anarchists, etc. have been concerned about the rise of fascism ever since World War II.
[1] http://www.snopes.com/noam-chomsky-predicted-trumps-presiden...
Yes, they have. They have predicted nine of the last zero fascist dictatorships (with one awaiting further evidence).
Nobody failed to notice economic dissatisfaction, but many were surprised that the President's particular brand of speaking to it was as successful as it was, especially coming from a Republican.
http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-full-transcript-econ...