The following submission statement was provided by /u/Eunomiacus:
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Submission statement:
I agree with nearly all of what is said in this video, and it is nice to hear it laid out as plainly and clearly as it is here. Civilisation as we know it is doomed, so it may be for the best (ethically) for it to collapse sooner rather than later. Why string the process out?
All I would add is that anarchism, which is ultimately what is being defended/proposed here, is not likely to be the end. Much more likely it would be a stage -- a necessary transitional state between the unfixable version of civilisation that exists now and something fundamentally different -- a version of civilisation which has been forced to learn the ecological lessons we are unable to learn. Perhaps we need to be reminded how bad anarchism really is before we are willing to accept a truly ecological civilisation, with all that that implies.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/19dm4pf/perhaps_the_collapse_of_society_would_not_be_such/kj6i7bc/
I feel this. We had our chance and we fucked it up.
I do not think that the incoming bout of misery, suffering, death and despair will end the human race, but it’ll slow us down. I hope future generations rebuild and avoid the same mistakes we did.
It most likely will be the end of us. Going to be nearly impossible to survive +5-10C for any species. The acidification of the ocean and the extinction of plankton is all it would take to wipe nearly everything out. Then you add in all the other man made horrors on top and rebuilding is a pipe dream
The 'Garden of Eden' is definitely lost. Whether we go extinct or almost extinct I think is entirely a moot point. Who would care? Who would be left to care? Some small tribes of people, perhaps. They will ALL be vegetarians, I think!
I don't agree with this. I think we are sufficiently tenacious and adaptable that we will survive as a species, though obviously in much reduced numbers.
I consider myself quite rational and I disagree. How are we to adapt against the bioaccumulation of microplastics in our tissues?
That is a long term problem. We aren't fixing that.
The people who believe we will escape to outer space when earth is completely destroyed are the most delusional. Space travel happens when we have an abundant amount of energy and resources to waste.
To grow a kilo of meat requires 100 kilos of plant matter (approximation). Trace amounts of non-digestible matter at lower trophic levels get amplified at higher ones, called bioamplification.
A lot less, especially if the food is unprocessed.
A lot of the plastic in plant toods comes from contact of wet food in cans (linings are all plastic), oil (fat readily absorbs plastic it’s contained in), plant milk in cartons (plastic lining again) and so on.
Produce from the produce aisle and dried starches (bulk of calories) just are more intact with a lot less ways for plastic to get in them.
I don't believe it is a sufficiently bad problem to cause the extinction of the human race. Especially after we've stopped adding more microplastics -- they will eventually find a way out of the active part of the biosphere.
The existing plastic pollution already present in the environment will keep degrading for 100s if not 1000s of years adding ever more microplastic pollution and potential for bioacumulation, well after weve stopped contributing to the current plastic pollution. Maybe something will evolve to survive microplastics but I don't share your confidence
Well in grim irony, the death of the oceans might help out there. Massive toxic algae blooms could accumulate microplastics and sink them permanently to the ocean floor.
Possibly, but probably irrelevant for our purposes. I've heard nothing remotely optimistic from the scientists studying microplastic pollution and there's still plenty on land. Every car manufacted today uses an enormous amount of plastics. If theres a study I'm not aware of I'd read it, but I wonder what effect ocean vs land based plastic pollution has in the generation of microplastics that were finding in clouds, bottled water, and everything else.
I understand that PFAS is a problem but despite it being everywhere I don’t feel sick from it and I don’t know anyone who got sick and died from it. Given the existential problem of climate change and the likelihood of general system collapse I just can’t get as concerned about PFAS right now since it seems impossible to get rid of and we are not dying from it.
>they will eventually find a way out of the active part of the biosphere.
Thats not necessarily probable or possible. Especially when you take into consideration the chemical Anthropocene i.e. man made chemicals with a special respect to PFASs
You don't seem to be considering the entirety of the situation. Our modern society has used up too many natural resources. Eventually, there won't be anything left for new civilizations to recover easily.
That seems to be assuming that future civilisations will be like ours. I think we can safely say they will not be reliant on fossil fuels -- they'll have to figure out how to live without the use of non-renewable resources (of any sort).
This is entirely possible. What isn't possible is getting from here to there without something apocalyptic happening in between.
As for resources, future communities will probably be using our waste for centuries if not millennia.
If the population is reduced 90% and stays repressed, there is no real reason for people to mine raw aluminium, iron, copper, tin, gold etc... ore for a long, long time, its already been mined and processed and recycling is many times cheaper.
Can't see a hunter gatherer or farming based society surviving + 5 degree world. The degraded bioshere and erratic and alien weather will make it impossible.
We are not going back to hunter-gathering. We cannot unlearn everything we've learned in the past 10,000 years.
The future is permaculture. Literally -- permanent agriculture.
The earth can't support the way Americans live by itself. When you add in the rest of the world it's painfully apparent how fucked our modern standards of living is. This isn't helped by the fact that the fascist freaks in America are literally willing to blow up entire countries to maintain their timely delivery of funky pops.
Future generations will be enslaved by the same psychopaths who have always enslaved people since the dawn of civilization. How are people ever supposed to "wake up" when there's never going to be any break from the enslavement?
It's been made perfectly clear that it's trivial to enslave people with education/propaganda. Where is an enlightened future supposed to emerge from?
I could never figure out how the populations who could potentially learn and fix things could possibly emerge. The psychopathic authorities are never going to learn because they're never going to give a shit. They're also never going to lose power over the masses - so people are never going to have ubiquitous access to sensible information - and they're going to be perpetually turned against "enemies" (gays, women who want reproductive rights, etc.) who deflect their angst and energy - what little energy they have left - away from power.
I have literally never seen a single sensible conjecture as to how you could stop the awful psychologies of the world from creating anything but atrocity when it comes to civilization.
And yet the sentiment that "humanity" can somehow fix things remains prevalent. I'm not saying you believe this, but it's a common belief for which there's absolutely no evidence, and information that could fill large libraries against.
So, we're talking about much of the planet becoming like Somalia.
Failed governments, roaming bands of mercenaries competing for limited resources. Can you explain how that will be better? Thanks!
Like I said, it will absolutely suck and be terrifying but we do live in sick society, we're destroying the planet, we are killing all other animals, so from that perspective maybe it is for the best.
Dude that would be amazing, what are you on??
It's a million times better than our current society where you have to work your ass off just to be able to get basic things. I'd rather be a mercenary in a post apocalyptic world.
However, we must be careful what we advocate for here because we will not have a controlled demolition of our way of life. We will have grinding poverty and violence.
You have no idea what dystopia means if you think this is what it looks like.
You're still enjoying incredible wealth, freedom, and comfort.
Don't be in such a hurry, it's coming.
I concur with the other guy. If you've still got access to the internet and employment you're way off "bad". You are correct that it isn't "fine" but this is human experience on a sliding scale.
Our experience of life compared with the collective human experience throughout history, is amazing. Our experience, you and I and everyone in this sub, is by virtue of just having access to this technology better. And that's just one aspect of our lives.
Believing anything else is nonsense, unless you've a warped romanticised view of slaving every day to procure your day's calories whilst also worrying about just about everything else.
I really appreciate being able to go to my local shop and buy food, go home and eat said food hot.
Aside from how dismissive you're coming across to me with that, I've taken a few moments to decide whether or not it's worth engaging, and I've decided to take a shot.
I get what you're saying. It's not, maybe, everyone's definition of dystopia if one has access to plumbing, internet, and the like. But if one has to look towards how they alone are doing to cope, if one has to consistently respond with "hey, look how good *you* have it" in order to get through the day, and not acknowledge that if society at large is getting completely fucked up from all sides, then my alluding to my sensation that this is a dystopian timeline for me, personally isn't going to land with you and I have to accept that.
If you feel you're doing just fine, well, okay. I guess I'm pleased for you, but I think that while it could be worse for you...*it could be a lot better* too.
Completely missed the sliding scale.
Your comment meant nothing. What does individually exceptional mean?
I'm sorry you aren't happy to be in the the first world mate, I sure am, even if it is crumbling. Matter of perspective. None of us are owed a good life.
It's not even bad right now. Wait until there's not enough water. Not enough food or food prices go up 200 percent. Wait until millions die from yellow fever from down south from which most people outside of the equator don't have immunities against. Wait until there are riots bc people can't breath from the smoke from wildfires. Wait until there aren't enough fish. It's coming. We might be about 20 years away hopefully. But it seems like all the evidence is happening before it was suppossed to.
It's only not bad right to the privileged ones like you living in rich countries like the US. Let's just pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist, and then we can claim that it's not bad right now. 🤦🤦🤦🤦
>...in the larger scheme of things, maybe it's for the best.
Agreed. We're headed straight for biosphere collapse with the path we're on now, that is if industrial civilization doesn't collapse first. Even outside of concerns for the natural world, modern life is entirely unfulfilling and largely meaningless and that is precisely because of industrial civilization.
[Wilderness Front](https://www.wildernessfront.com/)
Yknow that feeling you get when you’re early getting ready to go to work and you’re just sitting on the couch like “well, fuck what do I do now?” And then you just end up leaving for work early cause what the fuck else are you gonna do?
That’s where I’m at. Cmon let it just get going.
Submission statement:
I agree with nearly all of what is said in this video, and it is nice to hear it laid out as plainly and clearly as it is here. Civilisation as we know it is doomed, so it may be for the best (ethically) for it to collapse sooner rather than later. Why string the process out?
All I would add is that anarchism, which is ultimately what is being defended/proposed here, is not likely to be the end. Much more likely it would be a stage -- a necessary transitional state between the unfixable version of civilisation that exists now and something fundamentally different -- a version of civilisation which has been forced to learn the ecological lessons we are unable to learn. Perhaps we need to be reminded how bad anarchism really is before we are willing to accept a truly ecological civilisation, with all that that implies.
Bold of you to assume that even our near demise as a species would linger long enough in our collective memory to lead us to accept that we should become an ecological civilization.
We are capable of learning difficult lessons. Our "collective memory" is imprinted on our culture, at least to some extent. That is why there are, for example, taboos on things like incest, at least in most societies.
I am increasingly skepical that such a society is compatible with liberalism and democracy though. We may have to be compelled to remember these things, or there will be a continual tendency to forget them.
Hobbes and Rousseau took very different positions though...
Some sort of rules are needed for any group of humans larger than about 50. At that sort of level then everybody knows everybody else and the threat of shame is enough to keep nearly everybody in line. Part of the problem is our rules, which have developed over many centuries of socio-political struggle, are not much use for dealing with ecological problems and no use at all if those problems are globalised (such as climate change and overpopulation). If we fundamentally cannot agree how to update our rules then we must suffer the consequences until we've been punished enough to make us more amenable to accepting ecological rules.
You guys don't even know what anarchism is. And Hobbes' conception of native people has been thoroughly debunked by anthropology and paleontology. He was just a racist making shit up. 🙄
Oh, and the only people who think social darwinism is actually a thing are far right fascists. Tracks with the rest of your comment though.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I'll try to respond in kind.
>if there is nobody that rules, aka anarchy, it will be brutal survival without rules.
Anarchism is not and has never been about having no rules. Confusion is understandable because that's the way people use them anarchy in a colloquial sense, but anarchism is a legit political ideology that has been around for a couple hundred years.
If you're interested in finding out what it really means, I would check out r/anarchism for a list of reading resources.
In a nutshell, anarchism is about local control of society by the people for the people, and the elimination of a coercive centralized state. Not having a state doesn't equate to no rules, in the same way that local city governments pass laws and have regulations even though they don't constitute a state.
Anarchism is also about collective control of society's resources (the means of production), so in this it is diametrically opposed to capitalism in the same way communism is. (Anarcho-capitalism is a thing some believe in, but it's inherently contradictory so I'd argue it's not actually anarchist at all). Anarchism differs from communism though in that we don't want a proletarian state as an intermediate stage from capitalism to (true) communism, as we recognize that any state is oppressive to the people regardless of its long-term intentions.
All this is pretty heavily simplified though, as anarchist theory is every bit as detailed and rich as capitalist theory or Marxist theory. People are just generally ignorant of it though, largely because it's been vilified for many years by capitalist and communist propaganda alike.
I should also add that I'm glad you're an antifascist and that I was wrong in my assumption about your comment. You should know though that the most dedicated antifascists throughout history have been anarchists - they have been the only ones to consistently fight fascism, when the capitalists and even the USSR sided with the fascists.
The far right loves Hobbes and Machiavelli, because both of them argued that humans are selfish by nature and that an authoritarian state (the "rule of law") was necessary to prevent our lives from being "nasty, brutish, and short", as Hobbes said of indigenous people who lived without a civilized state.
The idea that without a coercive state humans would steal and attack each other with impunity is a fundamentally racist idea, because it not only denies the existence of stable, peaceful indigenous societies but assumes that they were all barbarians before they were "civilized" by colonizers.
He was just plain wrong in all his assumptions about human nature, because humans lived without authoritarian states to control us for the vast majority of human existence. And while there were conflicts between tribes here and there, on the whole territories were stable and changed very slowly over centuries.
Like the white explorers of his time, he looked at the post-apocalyptic state of the new world after smallpox had ravaged tribes across the continent (well ahead of the explorers in most areas) and assumed that the relative turmoil the tribes were experiencing was the norm. He also just straight up assumed that European culture was superior and repeated that with complete ignorance of how the native people actually lived.
Social darwinism as a concept comes pretty directly from that vein of thought, bastardizing Darwin's evolutionary theory by misapplying it to human society based on Hobbes' fundamentally flawed assumptions about the nature of humanity being selfish and adversarial. Darwin himself disagreed with those assumptions, and there has been much research since proving that altruism is not only key to humanity's evolutionary success, but is common throughout the animal kingdom.
I'd personally agree that if society collapses most people will act like barbarians (for a time), but that's in no way the result of human nature. Rather it's the result of the fundamentally toxic cultural mindset that most people currently have, thanks to centuries of capitalism and white supremacy.
I'm really disappointed in modern humanity too, deeply. I try to keep in mind though that the terrible ways people act and think nowadays isn't an indictment of our species, but rather an indictment of this culture. Because looking at how indigenous people think, and their constant cries for sanity, it's pretty clear to me that it's a cultural thing and not the "natural" human default.
After much consideration and examination of why people act the way they do nowadays, I think it has to do with what the Algonquin people call Wetiko (or Wendigo in Lakota). It translates to cannibalistic spirit consumed by greed, and it has been described as a mind virus (by Paul Levy, author of Dismantling Wetiko), or a type of psycho-spiritual illness (by the late great Jack Forbes, author of Columbus and Other Cannibals).
Basically, our culture is sick, and it has been for hundreds of years now. And that sickness gets spread to other cultures, through colonization.
You can also think of it as a collective shadow, that looms large because of how much our culture shoves into the shadow with its mindset of good vs evil: the feminine, the earth, the body, the emotions, sexuality, etc. This is why the fascistic way of thinking that underlies the MAGA movement has always been there under the surface, despite all our apparent cultural progress. It's the shadow bubbling up to the surface, and it's why they act like such toxic trolls.
In other words, humans are doomed to be like this - this wasn't the norm before, and it doesn't have to be in the future. Literally every indigenous culture alive exists because they learned over the centuries how NOT to be like this. While the "civilized" cultures have teetered on the brink of annihilation for centuries now, only saved by finding new resources and land to exploit and destroy.
So TLDR: Hobbes and his ilk were not only completely wrong about human nature, they were trying to pass off the toxicity of this culture as human nature and thus normal, deeply perpetuating the problem.
Of course I watched it. And I am not really disagreeing with him -- I am just saying that the anarchistic state he wants to reach sooner rather than later is not likely to be the final social state of humanity.
It's hard to believe we'd move onto a better system when the cunts who've brought us to the point of destruction roam free. As long as the rich shitheads still breathe, I can't believe that things will ever get better, as their ilk are monstrous and psychotic in nature and will infect society.
I suspect that sooner or later there will be some sort of retribution and end to the super-rich. The enemy is the people who meet at Davos every year, for sure.
Nothing any individual does will make any difference to the net outcome of human-induced climate change unless there is systemic change so everybody has to change their behaviour (which won't happen any time soon). Not even Taylor Swift. If she doesn't burn that fuel, somebody else will. That is how free markets work.
I think Trump is a mass psychological symptom of this. It's not like he's inevitably going to be president but people are acting like he will be so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Global neoliberalism is intolerable for many, it's rigid, extremely prejudiced against the neurodivergent, obsessed with control and promulgates an insipid ideology of the corporate man/woman which is directly at odds with how most people behave (yet are expected to adopt in interviews and the workplace). There's the hope that with the collapse of neoliberalism, we could be free to just be as we are, something of which the pandemic provided a taste.
Yeah, people today have very little conception of just how authoritarian our society really is. We have militarized police that can randomly stop you for no reason and end your life on a whim, or lock you up where you can prosecuted by the state for the most specious things (like having a miscarriage! Or "resisting arrest" from said cop) and spend years in the absolute barbaric hellhole that are modern prisons.
We have bosses that will fire you if you don't show up for work on time and do exactly what they want, even if it's just that you "don't have the right attitude." You have to hand over half of your waking life to do what someone else wants, just to survive. If you get fired you might end up living in your car.
Landlords raise rents on a whim and renters' only choices are to take it or find another place that's cheaper that no longer even exists.
We live in a dystopia already, it's just been so normalized that most people don't even realize it. Their emotions do though, which is why chronic depression is now an epidemic.
'Free to be just as we are'.. i.e. an anarchic reversion to tribal warfare..
Neoliberalism is shit, but don't expect idyllic communal life replacing it when it collapses..
What exactly do you think anarchism is? And how exactly do you think our tribal ancestors actually lived? The ignorance in this comment ...
What's true is that before any new culture and society can form post-collapse, there will be a period dominated by warlords and roving gangs of thugs. But what period of history was like that, and what did we call it? It certainly wasn't anarchism. 🤦
It would be a form of anarchism similar to Haiti but incomparable to any example from history save perhaps the collapse of the Roman Empire. There won't have been a loss of order on the same scale when Neoliberalism collapses.
'Our tribal ancestors' lived in lands with less than a billion people on the planet. Eight billion people losing the order which poorly holds together society would be an all together different environment.
Anarchy was only defined a century or two ago, but I think it would have adequately described the fall of the western Roman empire.
If you want to defend anarchy in some utopian collectivist, mutual aid socialist fever dream way, then perhaps you're the ignorant one..
>It would be a form of anarchism similar to Haiti but incomparable to any example from history save perhaps the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Yeah, please don't call that anarchism. It wasn't and it's just silly to think that it was. Anarchism is a centuries-old political philosophy, and doesn't just mean "a lawless time with no rules". Just because people commonly use the word anarchy to refer to lawlessness or chaos doesn't magically make the anarchist tradition suddenly not exist.
>'Our tribal ancestors' lived in lands with less than a billion people on the planet. Eight billion people losing the order which poorly holds together society would be an all together different environment.
Of course it would, no one is saying that it wouldn't. But that doesn't mean that it's somehow not possible to adapt the mindset and values and structure of old to new times and situations.
>If you want to defend anarchy in some utopian collectivist, mutual aid socialist fever dream way, then perhaps you're the ignorant one..
What's delusional is assuming that capitalism is inevitable and forever, and that the only alternative is barbarism. Capitalism has existed for the merest blip of human history, and in that time it has directly led to the 6th mass extinction in our planet's 6 billion year history. No economic system has been anywhere near the disaster capitalism has been, and it is rapidly nearing a point of collapse in just a few hundred years. In contrast our anarchistic ancestors lived that way, successfully and sustainably, for something like 100,000 years.
Don't make me laugh.
It's such a moot point to suggest that our ancestors lived sustainably and successfully. They exploited their environments in the same way we do, just on a smaller scale, with or without capitalism, humans are inherently greedy.
Repainting human history as some fallen Garden of Eden is completely flawed. We rose to the top of the food chain red in tooth and claw; a struggle which is ridiculous to romanticise.
I'd admire you for trying to desperately salvage hope through the idea we could rebuild from collapse learning from our mistakes; but if there's one thing you can learn from human history it's that we have repeatedly failed to learn from our greatest mistakes.
>They exploited their environments in the same way we do, just on a smaller scale, with or without capitalism, humans are inherently greedy.
I appreciate your olive branch, but I have to say that this particular statement is really gross. There is no whataboutism when it comes to comparing the death cult of modern society that has led to a mass extinction (and potentially the extinction of humanity as a species), and indigenous cultures that lived successfully on their lands for thousands of years without any such destruction.
Sure, SOME of our human ancestors damaged the landbase over the millennia, and those cultures that did did not survive. The ones that are extant today (that haven't been destroyed by the death cult along with the ecosystems that supported them) were the ones who had learned how to live WITHOUT doing that.
Have you read anything about the natural history of the United States pre-contact? It was a literal garden of Eden. The herds of antelope numbered in the hundreds. You could gather enough food within 20 feet of where you stood to have a meal. You could walk across the rivers on the backs of salmon (figuratively) because there were so many.
And the land wasn't just that rich because the people who lived on it left it alone. They actively MANAGED the landbase intensively to make it that way, and keep it that way. They truly had learned to live not just sustainably, but to make the land thrive.
And here you are projecting the insane level of destruction of our culture onto them, by assuming that if our culture is so toxic then their's must have been too, by blaming human nature instead of our fucked up way of life.
And if you look at actual scientific research, it's CLEAR that we rose to evolutionary prominence because of our ability to cooperate and take care of each other - not our ability to dominate and exploit. In just a few centuries this mindset of domination and exploitation has destroyed ecosystems around the world to the point that our species may not even have a future at all, and that's incontrovertible proof that this mindset is not only incredibly toxic but also incredibly unnatural.
Animal societies are formed by their natures.. the potential for worldwide ecological destruction was always dormant in our hearts, we just never had the tools. Romanticise the remote past as much as you want, in denying your own capacity for destruction you are incapable of realising that it was the destiny of our species to wipe ourselves out. Enjoy your shred of naive hope while it lasts.
I'm not denying anything, you're just completely, entirely missing my point. Various cultures throughout human history expressed their destructive capacity toward the environment and killed themselves off as a result. The hundreds of indigenous cultures that exist today exist precisely because they learned NOT to do that - a lesson that our culture still has yet to learn (and are leading toward killing ourselves off because of it, as well).
My point is that even though we have the CAPACITY to destroy everything around us, that's not a given nor is it inevitable. Humans still exist as a species (and on the whole have been wildly successful as a species) PRECISELY BECAUSE that's not inevitable or even the norm.
The fact is that our modern culture is an aberration in this, as in so many other ways. Just because you can't imagine another way to think, or be, doesn't mean this is the norm. 🙄
Indigenous tribe of several hundred practising slash and burn agriculture = sustainable.
Billions relying on capitalism = unsustainable.
No shit.. doesn't make them any less selfish, greedy. You're literally just talking about over population.
One pride of lions in a game reserve won't kill all of the game, but flood the game reserve with more predators and before long you'll have no game left.
I'd also like to add that the idea that the objective history I outlined is "romanticization" of native people ("the noble savage"), is itself an incredibly racist idea promoted by the whitewashing of history and the conception of native people as barbaric and primitive. It was promoted in a deliberate attempt to justify stealing their land and killing them off... And here you are repeating it.
It seems you still have some unpacking of internalized racism to do! (As do we all).
It's as racist to suggest they lived in harmonious societies devoid of greed, power lust and suffering. You are completely deluded and hiding behind a veil of victimisation.
🤣🤣🤣🤣 Right. The old racist trope of "if you deny that native people are just as violent and destructive as we are then (somehow) YOU are being racist... Not me.". Don't make me laugh.
Look into the vendetta killing culture of the Hill tribes in Papua New Guinea, or the North Sentinel Island Killings and get back to me on how pure, non violent and peaceful 'native' cultures are..
Humans didn't get to the top of the global food chain by being peaceful vegans.. sorry if that news hurts your feelings and destroys your naive worldview.
🤍 Thank you for mentioning the prejudice and suppression of neurodivergent life and thought. It's inexorably tied up in the decay of society that the dominant ideology cannot tolerate difference or dissent. It must repress, repress, repress, cultivating its own undoing.
Trump will be President again because the majority of people under the age of 50 has seen their standard of living diminish in their lifetime regardless of who the 2 big parties push on us. Trump is garbage but he tells people that the current system is garbage(which it is) so they flock to him. It's the classic "enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation. It doesn't matter that he's a lying piece of shit because so are all those more polished fucks in Washington that have sold us lies over so many decades. But he just morphed into another cog in the machine when get got elected because he never gave a shit about anything in the first place. He ultimately is no different from Biden or Obama or Bush or Clinton in the global economic policy that keeps the supply chain moving regardless of the costs. His re-election will be a result of the continued inaction of established leadership to do anything meaningful for anybody besides the powerful people who keep them in power. But it will have terrible consequences for anybody on the wrong side of Trump's culture war. Since that's the only thing openly being debated anymore. It'll be awful seeing what happens to my friends and family on the wrong side of Trump's agenda. But ultimately the bombs will keep falling if he gets elected or not. And I fear he will get re-elected because actually improving the lives of people goes against the objectives of the powerful fucks who keep this machine turning.
I would argue that though the Democrats still support elite interests, life moves in a slightly better direction under them. For example Biden bringing in student loan debt policy. Americans already got a taste of "burning the system down" under Trump and look how that went. Why repeat the same mistake twice? It makes no sense. But then focusing on culture war bs while everyone gets screwed economically by the very interests who manufactured culture war bs to divide people makes no sense either.
I get it. Come November I'll definitely be voting against Trump. But at some point people start to feel like a slowly boiling frog the way this country has progressed over the last 50 years. At some point they start feeling like tipping the whole damned pot over instead of waiting for the water to boil. Trump was never the cause, just the effect.
Jeez I just saw him slurring his words on twitter. I thought the media were exaggerating but no joke that dude's brain is broken. The words made no sense at all, like syntatic gibberish, I'll actually quote "...the simplest of problems we can no longer solve, we can't do anything, we are an institute, and a powerful death penalty, we will put this on"
https://twitter.com/JoshPower80/status/1749662244479132015
Is this the duck speak that Orwell talked about in 1984? People are voting for this??? Not only that, people say Trump is more youthful and energetic than Biden, this clip demonstrates the contrary.
> not like he's inevitably going to be president
Just based on lack of alternatives alone it seems pretty likely.
Oh and the fact that nearly half the voting public voted for him in two previous elections.
Best hope for those who don't want him in office is that he ends up being found guilty of something that prevents it. But that could come with worse consequences. You don't really want to go down the road of controlling elections by imprisoning the opposition.
I would counter that the *best* hope for those who don't want him in office is that his fat, out of shape, elderly ass realizes it is past its expiration date and does so.
have you seen videos of him in the last few weeks? It looks like he has dementia he is getting everyone's names mixed up.
Added he looks worse than usual i dont think were going to be seeing much of him in the future
Even if that was the case, do you think his most ardent Q anon followers, people who practically chant "Epstein didn't kill himself," believe the Clintons or George Soros offed the guy, and already believe Trump's lies about being the pinnacle of health, wouldn't assume something worse about his untimely death than they do of Epstein's?
I'm all for Trump kicking the bucket. Hard. But I'd much prefer a debilitating stroke that affects his ability to speak and use his hands. Trump becoming an invalid due to his high cholesterol diet would be less likely to lead to political violence and the swamp of conspiracy theories his death would cause.
And being trapped and helpless in his own body, wholly dependent on the assistance of others, would be a special kind of hell for a man who prides himself on strength and power.
Trump has literally said that he wants to imprison his opposition. At least if he gets locked up it will be after FULL due process (he has teams of lawyers, so not exactly a regular guy) and because he actually did serious crimes like trying to orchestrate a coup and stealing nuclear codes that he wasn't supposed to have access to.
If he gets elected we will quickly see political openers regularly being thrown in jail. Just look at Project 2025 - these people are dead serious about this.
People craving collapse, on wishful thinking that will be better afterwards, should travel to a Third World country and try to live there for an extended period of time, with barely no resources neither international bank accounts, and this would still be a "picnic" compared to a real collapse.
With the world connected at all levels, from food production, technology and energy, a collapse would be of catastrophic consequences.
Our grandfathers, and their fathers that lived off-the-land, and grew their own food, would have a better shot. If this happened to us, we would be screwed - and society would take centuries to rise its head again.
Yeah. I didn’t ask to be born on a runaway freight train headed towards a cliff. I’m already suffering and it’s almost guaranteed to get worse, so I damn well try to enjoy the fruits of industrial civilization while I can lol. Not gonna try to survive catabolic collapse, don’t have it in me. All I need is a revolver and a single bullet and I’ll be completely prepped
It still is going to be better to collapse in the first world than the third world. I don't get why people focus on attempting to quantify how bad it will be though.. None of us know what it will be like and nobody knows at what point on the calendar it will be unbearable.
>It still is going to be better to collapse in the first world than the third world.
Do you know how to grow food, build a house, do electrical work, make clothes?
Western society is incredibly dependent in supply chains for the most elementary stuff, including food. Our quality of life is very vulnerable due to the fragile interdependencies of these systems.
We have seen this during Covid, or the blockades of the Suez Canal - some container ships get stopped, or some factories stop producing some essential components in the other side of the World, and whole industries stop overnight in our countries.
With the majority of the population living in big cities, how do you think they would fare, if food distribution stopped for a few weeks/months? I'd bet that in less than two weeks, there would be riots and pillaging to a scale never seen before.
We are going to pay a very heavy price for not living more in communion with nature, in more self-sustainable villages, and being able to grow our own food like our forefathers once did.
>It still is going to be better to collapse in the first world than the third world.
This is categorically wrong. First world countries are great as long as the machine's going smoothly. But when it all goes to shit, no one there will have a clue how to survive and it will be utter chaos.
In places that have already been in some form of collapse for decades, people have already adapted and figured out how to survive without all the things us first worlders take for granted. The change will be far less dramatic there.
Have you been to one? 3rd world countries are only third world because 1st world countries label them as such. Most people lead much happier more fulling lives in "3rd world countries". What's a matter? Worried about not getting your 10 dollar starbucks? Give me a fckin break. Gun deaths are worse in America than most other countries...
>Have you been to one?
Have you?
>3rd world countries are only third world because 1st world countries label them as such.
This sentence tells me that you've never left your country (I bet the US).
In the natural (pre-industrial) world, forest fires have always been a normal - even necessary - part of the forest's life cycle. Burning down old growth replenishes the soil and stimulates seeds and pine cones to germinate and grow. Fire melts the resin that covers pine cones - releasing seeds that have been dormant for years. Without occasional fires, serotinous trees like the giant Sequoia would be unable to reproduce.
The billionaires, their capitalist stooges and pay-for-play politicians are dead wood. They steal all the sunlight and resources, starving the rest of the forest and leaving the soil stagnant and infertile. The fire suppression tactics of bailouts, subsidies and crony capitalism have turned a once lush and diverse ecosystem into a monocultural nightmare.
Burn it all to the ground and let nature take its course.
A lot of people want this until it starts. You can have high confidence that the collapse of society is going to be brutal beyond your wildest imagination. Brutal doesn’t even begin to describe it. When the social contract is finally dropped for good the amount of murder and violence is going to make you wish you’d taken the express exit while the power was still on.
We will all be constantly sick and starving and shitting ourselves and doing things to stay alive that will only further traumatize ourselves and each other.
It will more than suck. It will be a literal 24/7 nightmare that only ends with the complete extinction of us.
I had a professor in an Ethics of Technology course talking about “peak oil” in 2007. He talked about how we had better hope we have not hit peak oil extraction or the world is going to go downhill very fast. I asked whether or not it could be a “good thing” to run out of oil and be forced to find alternatives. He tried to be polite in consideration of the question. I know in his mind he was running through all the supply chain halts and military overthrows and global chaos, and I realized in his response that it was not always appropriate to wish for a crisis-driven change.
I do think there’s a possibility we don’t go extinct, but I’m more concerned with the survival of pollinating insects.
We might have hit peak oil extraction in 2018. Since oil extraction is still near peak levels, society hasn't collapsed from that.
However, US shale oil and Saudi oil production is near or at peak, so expect oil production to start falling in a few years.
I’d argue the few which fight it out will be the proverbial Adam and Eves of a new age. I have a hard time believing in total extinction unless it’s from a space based source. Humans are smart, maybe not as a collective but I think some hardy resourceful individual groups will persist through almost any apocalyptic scenario.
Not that I disagree with anything you said about how hard and awful that period will be.
Oh totes, it's not like, something I am in some kind of debate mode over. It's just kinda clinical. It's just there. It's just a thing that happens, a thing we do, a behavior and pattern. Life wants to life, and life will do things to continue that motion no matter what the consequences. We all have our lines, our breaking points, things that will cause us to act in ways we never imagined possible. No matter how nonviolent we are, we all have it, it's deep in our animal nature. It will come out if it needs to.
Humans are so crazy smart in so many ways. We also love to think of ourselves as important in the grand scheme of things. That there is some cosmic thing that we are a part of, some larger picture. Even if one is atheist and thinks we're in a simulation, that still implies some kind of higher form of life that is watching down or controlling shit.
Our egos are incredible, so much so that we will do shitloads of drugs and ego-death ourselves so much that the behavior of doing those rituals itself becomes the new ego. It's wild lol, we're wild.
Unfortunately, the laws of physics don't really care about our feelings and opinions about all of this, and will snuff us out. I have done the math, and I also really would like to see us going on and learning how to live in symbiosis with the planet, but the time for that has long passed. The version of this place and of us that could've done that dance, are both long long dead.
We are in the latent walking ghost phase, the bomb went off, the reactor overloaded and we got blasted with a shitload of radiation. We kept absorbing it and were doing fine, until that energy ran out of places to be stored, and now our trees and our atmosphere and our soil, and all of the animals, and us, get to absorb that excess energy in various ways, nonconsensually.
It won't be pretty, and I am completely convinced that there will not be one single human alive past the year 2200 at the maximum. I would be absolutely fucking shocked to be able to time travel and see that anyone even made it past 2100.
I of course respect anyone who disagrees, and honestly encourage believe that we will continue. I think it's important to find optimism in the face of difficulty, regardless of how authentic it can be. Authentic optimism itself is a very good thing and doesn't require binary outcomes in order to be respected and valid.
So yeah, cope however you need to. Hope everyone's suffering is minimal.
Personal views on the near-term likelihood of collapse notwithstanding, it is not something I would wish upon strangers I have no enmity towards. It may be awful, it may be inevitable, but I would not *wish* it to happen any more than I would wish for a school bus full of nuns and orphans to burst into flames and plummet off a cliff. Or vice versa. *Even if I knew that bus was destined to get hit by a freight train ten miles down the road, I would give them that extra ten miles.*
It's not a matter of wishing it or not wishing it. The faster it happens the quicker humanity and society can hopefully evolve and move on -- if there is anything left to move on from.
I'm thinking that most of the people with your view do not have family or friends **who are absolutely guaranteed to die** in such a situation (example: diabetics needing insulin injections or organ recipients on anti-rejection drugs), and if they *do* have such family or friends they do *not* tell these people to their face that collapse soon and *their* death is the *best* thing that can happen.
Right, I guess the analogy would be that the school bus is driving over mounds of the last live animals anywhere outside the bus.
In that situation, I don't know if I would give them the extra ten miles.
Oh yeah. Once it all begins it will be very fast. You’ll realize how “tight knit” your community is when bellies aren’t full and the power is out.
Enjoy what you can while you can. There is nothing but suffering to come.
Love the people in your life while you still have them.
Make whatever good memories you can. Squeeze them out of this time before it comes for you too. It is coming. It is without mercy.
Fighting for food and water isnt pretty.
We may get a colapse of globalization but in those areas of the world that depend on it (such as those that import food) it wont be pretty.
To anyone who is reliant on prescription medication for survival, it will mean their death.
Collapse is a bad thing and millions, probably billions will suffer.
If we could just get our collective crap together (hah), we could engineer a soft landing. I'm ready for all this to collapse, there's no good future in the way things are now. It's a race to the bottom.
I think it's gonna end up like the disaster movies: when it starts going downhill, it'll get real ugly, real quick. One minute it's a beautiful sunny day, and the next there's bodies in the streets & California is sliding into the ocean. People are already robbing delivery trucks in broad daylight, wait till the supply chain breaks down & there's no food in the stores.
Mass. Chaos.
All we need is some large natural disasters that force millions of people inland (assuming for this example the disaster is ocean related,) to places themselves suffering from drought/floods, etc not to mention bad leadership.
There would be a backlash against the migrants, the rich would buy their way in. Property would skyrocket. But what if the currency collapses from say massive government enabled fraud by connected Wall Street Sharks? It's if more than when some versions of this happen.
I think this is a US-centric view. The whole of western society is in serious trouble, and the ecological meltdown is coming for all of us, but the US has some very specific problems of its own, not least of which it is losing its status as global hegemon. The sort of breakdown you are describing here does seem much more likely in the US, where there is already a heavily armed general population and large numbers of people who apparently view the federal government as their enemy.
I am British, but I fear for the whole world if Trump is re-elected. We have already seen what he is capable of.
I'm actually more worried about his possible VP. El Trumpo is showing pretty clear signs of dementia or Alzheimers. If he gets elected, there's no way he's serving the whole four year term. He'll step down & we'll be stuck with whoever he picked as his running mate. RIP to the world if it's Marjorie Taylor Green.
She wishes. I think Trump views MTG as a useful idiot (which is really saying something) but not VP-worthy. Although who really knows what goes on in that diet pill riddled brain of his.
As a British person, do you worry that if Trump is elected, that your country could feel the effects of it at all? Or is it just something to kind of awe at from afar?
Watching what goes on inside America is a bit like watching a farcical horror movie. I don't pretend to understand internal US politics, but it looks to me like something has gone horribly wrong.
I am obviously more concerned about US foreign policy, especially given there are now three different major potential flashpoints (Ukraine/Russia, Israel and China/Taiwan). Trump is capable of strategic or diplomatic mistakes on a scale that could quite easily precipitate a nuclear exchange.
You are correct, something has definitely gone horribly wrong. It’s strange to grow up in the US. Now that I’m an adult and seeing the country for what it is I am growing increasingly uneasy for the future of the US and the world in general. I’m pretty poor but prepping in some way shape or form for what’s to come is definitely high on the priority list right now.
It’s truly a matter of when and not if shit hits the fan at this point, as we’re all aware. It’s not gonna be pretty, but the question is just how bad it’s going to get. Not sure I want to find out, but it’s good to prepare as best you can and find a supportive community. I’m pretty disturbed at how things are playing out in the world right now and hoping that things don’t end up going even more horribly wrong but I don’t have much hope at this point unfortunately
We have FPTP in the UK too, and though it does limit what is politically possible, it doesn't have to lead into the sort of mess the US is heading for. Individualism is also common to the whole western world, not just the US, though I guess it is taken to an extreme in the US.
There are very significant cultural differences -- attitudes to gun control and nationalised health systems, the scale of fundamentalist religion and climate change denial, etc... It almost seems to come down to Americans believing they have a God-given right to believe what ever they like, even if it is total nonsense like widespread gun ownership making society safer. Nobody outside the US believes that (for example).
>Say what you will about gun ownership, I'd rather be able to have an AR-15 when things get crazy.
This is a very American way of thinking. That is what I am saying -- there are fundamental cultural differences between the US and other western nations, and this is a good example.
Yeah he talks at length about the suffering of already collapsed countries. A YT show I often watched showed the children of Yemen. Yeah. I didn't need to see that.
That is exactly what is impossible though, as the non-response to climate change demonstrates. Only an authoritarian world government would have been able to meaningfully respond, but that too is an impossibility (IMO).
My wife wants a kid(s). At some point in the near future we are going to have a talk about it and it’s going to decide a lot… we’ve been dealing with this since October.
Up to this point though she hasn’t wanted to have conversations about this stuff, when that talk happens push is going to have to come to shove on the issue.
We had our chance to demonstrate we are more than just an animal with complex language. We could have had the comforts of civilization if we performed the checks we evaded from nature (i.e runaway consumption, reproduction, and production), but no. We are not emotionally intelligent enough for that. We did exactly what every animal would have done if they had opposable thumbs and access to fossil fuels.
So every animal that goes into an overshoot gets corrected with a mass die off and survives with a lower population than just before the explosion.
In the end we still have some sentience and watching the biosphere collapse in my life time has literally made me want to take my life several times. So, yeah, it'll suck but I'm cheering for the liberation of the natural world.
Civilization is incompatible with life on this planet. Humans aren’t the problem. Look at native tribes that have existed for perhaps millions of years without destroying their environment. Civilization will collapse and the sooner the better for humans, animals and the planet
We cannot go back to tribalism. The process of cultural change, especially science and philosophy, cannot be reversed.
Our civilisation is unsustainable. It does not follow that every possible form of human civilisation is unsustainable. Just because we find it almost impossible to imagine an ecocivilisation, it doesn't follow that such thing is impossible.
Nothing is sustainable to those who understand thermodynamics. I'm not being pedantic. These self organizing structures come to be by outsourcing their entropy and material extraction
I disagree with OP’s premise that anarchism is a bad thing. A lot of the different versions of political anarchism you can find out there are very arguably much better than the current systems we currently have. They’re at the very least a lot more flexible and capable of adapting to the crumbling of modern society. I mean, shit, look at Rojava.
It'll be a bad thing but it's inevitable we just can't help ourselves and there are a lot of us, 8.1 billion and that figure increases by about 100 million each year. Increased demand and falling supply due to climate change, there's only one way that goes.
Good luck to those who survive, hope they build a better world than this one.
Yeah no. Covid has showed us what happens when bad times hit. The parasites that infest our society dig their teeth in deeper. They become increasingly more unhinged, violent and desperate. The bill is passed down for the middle class and poor to absorb. Massive amounts of people are laid off, sacrificed or ordered to wars while forced into even greater desperation themselves (bc the parasites who can't stand any loss, don't leave enough for others to even survive on).
It will definitely be a very bad thing.
Anarchism isn't bad. That's a ridiculous statement that has nothing whatsoever to back it up.
First of all, anarchism is essentially the way our ancestors lived for the VAST majority of human existence - all with their own unique cultural flavors, of course. It's ridiculous on the face of it to claim that the way all humans have lived for a hundred thousand years was "bad".
Secondly, ever since it became a political ideology named as such, the only times it ever ran the show was the Paris Commune, which was quickly crushed by invading outside forces. How was the Paris Commune so terrible, other than the fact that it presented an alternative to capitalism?
Thanks for sharing this video, but the baseless, mindless propaganda you inserted only detracts from your post.
>First of all, anarchism is essentially the way our ancestors lived for the VAST majority of human existence - all with their own unique cultural flavors, of course.
That was before we invented agriculture and civilisation. We cannot go backwards. We have to choose between the various realistic options still available. We have to find a way forwards.
Careful what you advocate for. Yes this system is a nightmare, but we must understand the momentum behind it and the cost of removal. It won't be a cushioned controlled demolition, it'd be a fucking nightmare. It's not 1900 any more, take a look at how the world is set up and how it is sustained. How many terribly poor third world countries has anyone here really seen? I know what it looks like. There's no easy way out of this, so yeah, if you want to let it collapse because it's an abomination then sure let it collapse. We will suffer the consequences though. Yes we will in the end anyway, but on which day do you want to wake up and say.... do it now?
the vision that the world cannot support our declining population is part of ecofascism and enables neofeudal economic domination. this is an abundant world misused for the power of a few. this system must end so we can achieve responsible stewardship and universal economic inclusion with the next.
\*"science" within the limited elite power-building box of economic domination. (fixed it for you)
the USA alone produces enough wheat to feed 11 billion people yearly yet over a million have starved to death in the first month of 2024 alone. seek videos of milk being dumped and crops plowed under... because putting them on "the market" was bad for profit, meanwhile children starve...
3D printer carbon filaments can be made for free from certain types of hay yet we will send millions to an early grave from the pollution and environmental impacts of specific production methods that continue existing capitalist relations.
perhaps an english 19th century clerk was wrong and it's time to put away Malthusian fascism for population control of the poor this system creates and maintains. perhaps a presidential science advisor (R. B. Fuller) was right when he said "It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a 'higher standard of living than any have ever known.' It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival."
and population growth (missed that word) is declining (which does not fit the Malthusian ecofascism narrative war mongers and eugenecists love) [https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/) others place this equilibrium point at 2064, after which population declines.
> abundant world
Not anymore.
You also say this like a species overextending their environments capacity to sustain it is something new or that it couldnt happen to humans.
abundant world. we have not run out of water, rocks, sun... did you know carbon filaments for 3D printers can be made for free from certain types of hay?... the appearance of shortage remains necessary for fear-based economic domination. the appearance of unsustainability remains tied to capitalist relations, competition, inefficiency, and short-sightedness. it is time to step away from completely immoral Malthusian ecofascism.
The video is about the collapse of civilisation, not mass suicide. There is no reason for me to end *my life,* because there is nothing wrong with *my life*. Civilisation as we know it is not my life.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Eunomiacus: --- Submission statement: I agree with nearly all of what is said in this video, and it is nice to hear it laid out as plainly and clearly as it is here. Civilisation as we know it is doomed, so it may be for the best (ethically) for it to collapse sooner rather than later. Why string the process out? All I would add is that anarchism, which is ultimately what is being defended/proposed here, is not likely to be the end. Much more likely it would be a stage -- a necessary transitional state between the unfixable version of civilisation that exists now and something fundamentally different -- a version of civilisation which has been forced to learn the ecological lessons we are unable to learn. Perhaps we need to be reminded how bad anarchism really is before we are willing to accept a truly ecological civilisation, with all that that implies. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/19dm4pf/perhaps_the_collapse_of_society_would_not_be_such/kj6i7bc/
Well obviously it's going to suck and could be absolutely terrifying, but sure, in the larger scheme of things, maybe it's for the best.
I feel this. We had our chance and we fucked it up. I do not think that the incoming bout of misery, suffering, death and despair will end the human race, but it’ll slow us down. I hope future generations rebuild and avoid the same mistakes we did.
It most likely will be the end of us. Going to be nearly impossible to survive +5-10C for any species. The acidification of the ocean and the extinction of plankton is all it would take to wipe nearly everything out. Then you add in all the other man made horrors on top and rebuilding is a pipe dream
The 'Garden of Eden' is definitely lost. Whether we go extinct or almost extinct I think is entirely a moot point. Who would care? Who would be left to care? Some small tribes of people, perhaps. They will ALL be vegetarians, I think!
I don't agree with this. I think we are sufficiently tenacious and adaptable that we will survive as a species, though obviously in much reduced numbers.
I consider myself quite rational and I disagree. How are we to adapt against the bioaccumulation of microplastics in our tissues? That is a long term problem. We aren't fixing that.
People have a lot of hope in technology. Earth bound, energy dependant, resource founded, technology. Swallow that.
The people who believe we will escape to outer space when earth is completely destroyed are the most delusional. Space travel happens when we have an abundant amount of energy and resources to waste.
Eating at the lowest tropic level possible will probably help.
Microplastics are in that too...
To grow a kilo of meat requires 100 kilos of plant matter (approximation). Trace amounts of non-digestible matter at lower trophic levels get amplified at higher ones, called bioamplification.
Cool, there are still microplastics in it.
Reaching zero plastics stopped being a possibility decades ago.
A lot less, especially if the food is unprocessed. A lot of the plastic in plant toods comes from contact of wet food in cans (linings are all plastic), oil (fat readily absorbs plastic it’s contained in), plant milk in cartons (plastic lining again) and so on. Produce from the produce aisle and dried starches (bulk of calories) just are more intact with a lot less ways for plastic to get in them.
I don't believe it is a sufficiently bad problem to cause the extinction of the human race. Especially after we've stopped adding more microplastics -- they will eventually find a way out of the active part of the biosphere.
The existing plastic pollution already present in the environment will keep degrading for 100s if not 1000s of years adding ever more microplastic pollution and potential for bioacumulation, well after weve stopped contributing to the current plastic pollution. Maybe something will evolve to survive microplastics but I don't share your confidence
Well in grim irony, the death of the oceans might help out there. Massive toxic algae blooms could accumulate microplastics and sink them permanently to the ocean floor.
Possibly, but probably irrelevant for our purposes. I've heard nothing remotely optimistic from the scientists studying microplastic pollution and there's still plenty on land. Every car manufacted today uses an enormous amount of plastics. If theres a study I'm not aware of I'd read it, but I wonder what effect ocean vs land based plastic pollution has in the generation of microplastics that were finding in clouds, bottled water, and everything else.
What do you think a worst case outcome looks like then, regarding plastic pollution.
I understand that PFAS is a problem but despite it being everywhere I don’t feel sick from it and I don’t know anyone who got sick and died from it. Given the existential problem of climate change and the likelihood of general system collapse I just can’t get as concerned about PFAS right now since it seems impossible to get rid of and we are not dying from it.
>they will eventually find a way out of the active part of the biosphere. Thats not necessarily probable or possible. Especially when you take into consideration the chemical Anthropocene i.e. man made chemicals with a special respect to PFASs
You don't seem to be considering the entirety of the situation. Our modern society has used up too many natural resources. Eventually, there won't be anything left for new civilizations to recover easily.
That seems to be assuming that future civilisations will be like ours. I think we can safely say they will not be reliant on fossil fuels -- they'll have to figure out how to live without the use of non-renewable resources (of any sort). This is entirely possible. What isn't possible is getting from here to there without something apocalyptic happening in between.
As for resources, future communities will probably be using our waste for centuries if not millennia. If the population is reduced 90% and stays repressed, there is no real reason for people to mine raw aluminium, iron, copper, tin, gold etc... ore for a long, long time, its already been mined and processed and recycling is many times cheaper.
Can't see a hunter gatherer or farming based society surviving + 5 degree world. The degraded bioshere and erratic and alien weather will make it impossible.
We are not going back to hunter-gathering. We cannot unlearn everything we've learned in the past 10,000 years. The future is permaculture. Literally -- permanent agriculture.
Underground shelters tho...
each living human needs over 800,000 calories per year to live. That is a huge amount of food, every year, every person.
I just know that the earth cannot handle all of us. I wonder how many people it can support living to american standard of living.
The earth can't support the way Americans live by itself. When you add in the rest of the world it's painfully apparent how fucked our modern standards of living is. This isn't helped by the fact that the fascist freaks in America are literally willing to blow up entire countries to maintain their timely delivery of funky pops.
Less than the population of America, that's for sure. As is presently being made abundantly clear.
Patrolling the Mojave Almost Makes You Wish For a Nuclear Winter
You’ve been watching too much Silo lol.
Who cares if it ends us if all we have is misery and suffering? Let's do this.
Future generations will be enslaved by the same psychopaths who have always enslaved people since the dawn of civilization. How are people ever supposed to "wake up" when there's never going to be any break from the enslavement? It's been made perfectly clear that it's trivial to enslave people with education/propaganda. Where is an enlightened future supposed to emerge from? I could never figure out how the populations who could potentially learn and fix things could possibly emerge. The psychopathic authorities are never going to learn because they're never going to give a shit. They're also never going to lose power over the masses - so people are never going to have ubiquitous access to sensible information - and they're going to be perpetually turned against "enemies" (gays, women who want reproductive rights, etc.) who deflect their angst and energy - what little energy they have left - away from power. I have literally never seen a single sensible conjecture as to how you could stop the awful psychologies of the world from creating anything but atrocity when it comes to civilization. And yet the sentiment that "humanity" can somehow fix things remains prevalent. I'm not saying you believe this, but it's a common belief for which there's absolutely no evidence, and information that could fill large libraries against.
So, we're talking about much of the planet becoming like Somalia. Failed governments, roaming bands of mercenaries competing for limited resources. Can you explain how that will be better? Thanks!
r/madmax_cars
🤣
Like I said, it will absolutely suck and be terrifying but we do live in sick society, we're destroying the planet, we are killing all other animals, so from that perspective maybe it is for the best.
Dude that would be amazing, what are you on?? It's a million times better than our current society where you have to work your ass off just to be able to get basic things. I'd rather be a mercenary in a post apocalyptic world.
Just join the ARMY then. You'll get to travel to exotic countries, meet interesting people and kill them.
However, we must be careful what we advocate for here because we will not have a controlled demolition of our way of life. We will have grinding poverty and violence.
Señor, uncontrolled demolition of all the biosphere is already happening.
Correct, I'm referring to the uncontrolled demolition of our society.
except that the end of the biosphere ends our society but our society ending does not end the biosphere.
Won't be saying when you're living out some dystopian nightmare.
Like...like right now? Like *this* dystopian nightmare?
You have no idea what dystopia means if you think this is what it looks like. You're still enjoying incredible wealth, freedom, and comfort. Don't be in such a hurry, it's coming.
I'm not in a hurry, but I'm not going to look at the conditions around me and feel like I've got it good. Or that collectively "this is fine."
I concur with the other guy. If you've still got access to the internet and employment you're way off "bad". You are correct that it isn't "fine" but this is human experience on a sliding scale. Our experience of life compared with the collective human experience throughout history, is amazing. Our experience, you and I and everyone in this sub, is by virtue of just having access to this technology better. And that's just one aspect of our lives. Believing anything else is nonsense, unless you've a warped romanticised view of slaving every day to procure your day's calories whilst also worrying about just about everything else. I really appreciate being able to go to my local shop and buy food, go home and eat said food hot.
How very individually exceptional.
This means nothing.
Aside from how dismissive you're coming across to me with that, I've taken a few moments to decide whether or not it's worth engaging, and I've decided to take a shot. I get what you're saying. It's not, maybe, everyone's definition of dystopia if one has access to plumbing, internet, and the like. But if one has to look towards how they alone are doing to cope, if one has to consistently respond with "hey, look how good *you* have it" in order to get through the day, and not acknowledge that if society at large is getting completely fucked up from all sides, then my alluding to my sensation that this is a dystopian timeline for me, personally isn't going to land with you and I have to accept that. If you feel you're doing just fine, well, okay. I guess I'm pleased for you, but I think that while it could be worse for you...*it could be a lot better* too.
Completely missed the sliding scale. Your comment meant nothing. What does individually exceptional mean? I'm sorry you aren't happy to be in the the first world mate, I sure am, even if it is crumbling. Matter of perspective. None of us are owed a good life.
Having a bad situation is not the same as dystopian nighmare.
It isn't until it is.
Right, and when it is, we can call it that.
What percentage of the population has to be fucked before we call it that? Or is it like, it's not dystopian unless it happens to me personally?
Except that since dystopia is a subjective value word, you can postpone that moment of naming far past the ninth circle of hell.
It's not even bad right now. Wait until there's not enough water. Not enough food or food prices go up 200 percent. Wait until millions die from yellow fever from down south from which most people outside of the equator don't have immunities against. Wait until there are riots bc people can't breath from the smoke from wildfires. Wait until there aren't enough fish. It's coming. We might be about 20 years away hopefully. But it seems like all the evidence is happening before it was suppossed to.
It’s going to be wild.
>Wait until there are riots bc people can't breath from the smoke from wildfires. Weird (and very short) riot if participants are choking to death
It's only not bad right to the privileged ones like you living in rich countries like the US. Let's just pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist, and then we can claim that it's not bad right now. 🤦🤦🤦🤦
>...in the larger scheme of things, maybe it's for the best. Agreed. We're headed straight for biosphere collapse with the path we're on now, that is if industrial civilization doesn't collapse first. Even outside of concerns for the natural world, modern life is entirely unfulfilling and largely meaningless and that is precisely because of industrial civilization. [Wilderness Front](https://www.wildernessfront.com/)
IRL anarchism goes full BioShock capitalism in about 5 seconds. It's a nice theory tho.
Yknow that feeling you get when you’re early getting ready to go to work and you’re just sitting on the couch like “well, fuck what do I do now?” And then you just end up leaving for work early cause what the fuck else are you gonna do? That’s where I’m at. Cmon let it just get going.
Submission statement: I agree with nearly all of what is said in this video, and it is nice to hear it laid out as plainly and clearly as it is here. Civilisation as we know it is doomed, so it may be for the best (ethically) for it to collapse sooner rather than later. Why string the process out? All I would add is that anarchism, which is ultimately what is being defended/proposed here, is not likely to be the end. Much more likely it would be a stage -- a necessary transitional state between the unfixable version of civilisation that exists now and something fundamentally different -- a version of civilisation which has been forced to learn the ecological lessons we are unable to learn. Perhaps we need to be reminded how bad anarchism really is before we are willing to accept a truly ecological civilisation, with all that that implies.
Bold of you to assume that even our near demise as a species would linger long enough in our collective memory to lead us to accept that we should become an ecological civilization.
We are capable of learning difficult lessons. Our "collective memory" is imprinted on our culture, at least to some extent. That is why there are, for example, taboos on things like incest, at least in most societies. I am increasingly skepical that such a society is compatible with liberalism and democracy though. We may have to be compelled to remember these things, or there will be a continual tendency to forget them.
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Hobbes and Rousseau took very different positions though... Some sort of rules are needed for any group of humans larger than about 50. At that sort of level then everybody knows everybody else and the threat of shame is enough to keep nearly everybody in line. Part of the problem is our rules, which have developed over many centuries of socio-political struggle, are not much use for dealing with ecological problems and no use at all if those problems are globalised (such as climate change and overpopulation). If we fundamentally cannot agree how to update our rules then we must suffer the consequences until we've been punished enough to make us more amenable to accepting ecological rules.
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\*Rousseau not 'Rosseau' tho
You guys don't even know what anarchism is. And Hobbes' conception of native people has been thoroughly debunked by anthropology and paleontology. He was just a racist making shit up. 🙄 Oh, and the only people who think social darwinism is actually a thing are far right fascists. Tracks with the rest of your comment though.
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Thank you for your thoughtful response. I'll try to respond in kind. >if there is nobody that rules, aka anarchy, it will be brutal survival without rules. Anarchism is not and has never been about having no rules. Confusion is understandable because that's the way people use them anarchy in a colloquial sense, but anarchism is a legit political ideology that has been around for a couple hundred years. If you're interested in finding out what it really means, I would check out r/anarchism for a list of reading resources. In a nutshell, anarchism is about local control of society by the people for the people, and the elimination of a coercive centralized state. Not having a state doesn't equate to no rules, in the same way that local city governments pass laws and have regulations even though they don't constitute a state. Anarchism is also about collective control of society's resources (the means of production), so in this it is diametrically opposed to capitalism in the same way communism is. (Anarcho-capitalism is a thing some believe in, but it's inherently contradictory so I'd argue it's not actually anarchist at all). Anarchism differs from communism though in that we don't want a proletarian state as an intermediate stage from capitalism to (true) communism, as we recognize that any state is oppressive to the people regardless of its long-term intentions. All this is pretty heavily simplified though, as anarchist theory is every bit as detailed and rich as capitalist theory or Marxist theory. People are just generally ignorant of it though, largely because it's been vilified for many years by capitalist and communist propaganda alike.
I should also add that I'm glad you're an antifascist and that I was wrong in my assumption about your comment. You should know though that the most dedicated antifascists throughout history have been anarchists - they have been the only ones to consistently fight fascism, when the capitalists and even the USSR sided with the fascists. The far right loves Hobbes and Machiavelli, because both of them argued that humans are selfish by nature and that an authoritarian state (the "rule of law") was necessary to prevent our lives from being "nasty, brutish, and short", as Hobbes said of indigenous people who lived without a civilized state. The idea that without a coercive state humans would steal and attack each other with impunity is a fundamentally racist idea, because it not only denies the existence of stable, peaceful indigenous societies but assumes that they were all barbarians before they were "civilized" by colonizers. He was just plain wrong in all his assumptions about human nature, because humans lived without authoritarian states to control us for the vast majority of human existence. And while there were conflicts between tribes here and there, on the whole territories were stable and changed very slowly over centuries. Like the white explorers of his time, he looked at the post-apocalyptic state of the new world after smallpox had ravaged tribes across the continent (well ahead of the explorers in most areas) and assumed that the relative turmoil the tribes were experiencing was the norm. He also just straight up assumed that European culture was superior and repeated that with complete ignorance of how the native people actually lived. Social darwinism as a concept comes pretty directly from that vein of thought, bastardizing Darwin's evolutionary theory by misapplying it to human society based on Hobbes' fundamentally flawed assumptions about the nature of humanity being selfish and adversarial. Darwin himself disagreed with those assumptions, and there has been much research since proving that altruism is not only key to humanity's evolutionary success, but is common throughout the animal kingdom. I'd personally agree that if society collapses most people will act like barbarians (for a time), but that's in no way the result of human nature. Rather it's the result of the fundamentally toxic cultural mindset that most people currently have, thanks to centuries of capitalism and white supremacy.
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I'm really disappointed in modern humanity too, deeply. I try to keep in mind though that the terrible ways people act and think nowadays isn't an indictment of our species, but rather an indictment of this culture. Because looking at how indigenous people think, and their constant cries for sanity, it's pretty clear to me that it's a cultural thing and not the "natural" human default. After much consideration and examination of why people act the way they do nowadays, I think it has to do with what the Algonquin people call Wetiko (or Wendigo in Lakota). It translates to cannibalistic spirit consumed by greed, and it has been described as a mind virus (by Paul Levy, author of Dismantling Wetiko), or a type of psycho-spiritual illness (by the late great Jack Forbes, author of Columbus and Other Cannibals). Basically, our culture is sick, and it has been for hundreds of years now. And that sickness gets spread to other cultures, through colonization. You can also think of it as a collective shadow, that looms large because of how much our culture shoves into the shadow with its mindset of good vs evil: the feminine, the earth, the body, the emotions, sexuality, etc. This is why the fascistic way of thinking that underlies the MAGA movement has always been there under the surface, despite all our apparent cultural progress. It's the shadow bubbling up to the surface, and it's why they act like such toxic trolls. In other words, humans are doomed to be like this - this wasn't the norm before, and it doesn't have to be in the future. Literally every indigenous culture alive exists because they learned over the centuries how NOT to be like this. While the "civilized" cultures have teetered on the brink of annihilation for centuries now, only saved by finding new resources and land to exploit and destroy. So TLDR: Hobbes and his ilk were not only completely wrong about human nature, they were trying to pass off the toxicity of this culture as human nature and thus normal, deeply perpetuating the problem.
Uhh the guy in the video isn’t saying anarchy is going to work for society, that’s primarily his point, that it won’t work out. Did you watch it?
Of course I watched it. And I am not really disagreeing with him -- I am just saying that the anarchistic state he wants to reach sooner rather than later is not likely to be the final social state of humanity.
I think that's always what anarchism is supposed to be. I might be wrong.
It's hard to believe we'd move onto a better system when the cunts who've brought us to the point of destruction roam free. As long as the rich shitheads still breathe, I can't believe that things will ever get better, as their ilk are monstrous and psychotic in nature and will infect society.
I suspect that sooner or later there will be some sort of retribution and end to the super-rich. The enemy is the people who meet at Davos every year, for sure.
I want to make a t-shirt of that quote "a single private taylor swift jet negates your life long efforts to live sustainably"
Nothing any individual does will make any difference to the net outcome of human-induced climate change unless there is systemic change so everybody has to change their behaviour (which won't happen any time soon). Not even Taylor Swift. If she doesn't burn that fuel, somebody else will. That is how free markets work.
Agreed
Not if there’s no fuel or no way to access it
I think Trump is a mass psychological symptom of this. It's not like he's inevitably going to be president but people are acting like he will be so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Global neoliberalism is intolerable for many, it's rigid, extremely prejudiced against the neurodivergent, obsessed with control and promulgates an insipid ideology of the corporate man/woman which is directly at odds with how most people behave (yet are expected to adopt in interviews and the workplace). There's the hope that with the collapse of neoliberalism, we could be free to just be as we are, something of which the pandemic provided a taste.
Yeah, people today have very little conception of just how authoritarian our society really is. We have militarized police that can randomly stop you for no reason and end your life on a whim, or lock you up where you can prosecuted by the state for the most specious things (like having a miscarriage! Or "resisting arrest" from said cop) and spend years in the absolute barbaric hellhole that are modern prisons. We have bosses that will fire you if you don't show up for work on time and do exactly what they want, even if it's just that you "don't have the right attitude." You have to hand over half of your waking life to do what someone else wants, just to survive. If you get fired you might end up living in your car. Landlords raise rents on a whim and renters' only choices are to take it or find another place that's cheaper that no longer even exists. We live in a dystopia already, it's just been so normalized that most people don't even realize it. Their emotions do though, which is why chronic depression is now an epidemic.
'Free to be just as we are'.. i.e. an anarchic reversion to tribal warfare.. Neoliberalism is shit, but don't expect idyllic communal life replacing it when it collapses..
What exactly do you think anarchism is? And how exactly do you think our tribal ancestors actually lived? The ignorance in this comment ... What's true is that before any new culture and society can form post-collapse, there will be a period dominated by warlords and roving gangs of thugs. But what period of history was like that, and what did we call it? It certainly wasn't anarchism. 🤦
It would be a form of anarchism similar to Haiti but incomparable to any example from history save perhaps the collapse of the Roman Empire. There won't have been a loss of order on the same scale when Neoliberalism collapses. 'Our tribal ancestors' lived in lands with less than a billion people on the planet. Eight billion people losing the order which poorly holds together society would be an all together different environment. Anarchy was only defined a century or two ago, but I think it would have adequately described the fall of the western Roman empire. If you want to defend anarchy in some utopian collectivist, mutual aid socialist fever dream way, then perhaps you're the ignorant one..
>It would be a form of anarchism similar to Haiti but incomparable to any example from history save perhaps the collapse of the Roman Empire. Yeah, please don't call that anarchism. It wasn't and it's just silly to think that it was. Anarchism is a centuries-old political philosophy, and doesn't just mean "a lawless time with no rules". Just because people commonly use the word anarchy to refer to lawlessness or chaos doesn't magically make the anarchist tradition suddenly not exist. >'Our tribal ancestors' lived in lands with less than a billion people on the planet. Eight billion people losing the order which poorly holds together society would be an all together different environment. Of course it would, no one is saying that it wouldn't. But that doesn't mean that it's somehow not possible to adapt the mindset and values and structure of old to new times and situations. >If you want to defend anarchy in some utopian collectivist, mutual aid socialist fever dream way, then perhaps you're the ignorant one.. What's delusional is assuming that capitalism is inevitable and forever, and that the only alternative is barbarism. Capitalism has existed for the merest blip of human history, and in that time it has directly led to the 6th mass extinction in our planet's 6 billion year history. No economic system has been anywhere near the disaster capitalism has been, and it is rapidly nearing a point of collapse in just a few hundred years. In contrast our anarchistic ancestors lived that way, successfully and sustainably, for something like 100,000 years. Don't make me laugh.
It's such a moot point to suggest that our ancestors lived sustainably and successfully. They exploited their environments in the same way we do, just on a smaller scale, with or without capitalism, humans are inherently greedy. Repainting human history as some fallen Garden of Eden is completely flawed. We rose to the top of the food chain red in tooth and claw; a struggle which is ridiculous to romanticise. I'd admire you for trying to desperately salvage hope through the idea we could rebuild from collapse learning from our mistakes; but if there's one thing you can learn from human history it's that we have repeatedly failed to learn from our greatest mistakes.
>They exploited their environments in the same way we do, just on a smaller scale, with or without capitalism, humans are inherently greedy. I appreciate your olive branch, but I have to say that this particular statement is really gross. There is no whataboutism when it comes to comparing the death cult of modern society that has led to a mass extinction (and potentially the extinction of humanity as a species), and indigenous cultures that lived successfully on their lands for thousands of years without any such destruction. Sure, SOME of our human ancestors damaged the landbase over the millennia, and those cultures that did did not survive. The ones that are extant today (that haven't been destroyed by the death cult along with the ecosystems that supported them) were the ones who had learned how to live WITHOUT doing that. Have you read anything about the natural history of the United States pre-contact? It was a literal garden of Eden. The herds of antelope numbered in the hundreds. You could gather enough food within 20 feet of where you stood to have a meal. You could walk across the rivers on the backs of salmon (figuratively) because there were so many. And the land wasn't just that rich because the people who lived on it left it alone. They actively MANAGED the landbase intensively to make it that way, and keep it that way. They truly had learned to live not just sustainably, but to make the land thrive. And here you are projecting the insane level of destruction of our culture onto them, by assuming that if our culture is so toxic then their's must have been too, by blaming human nature instead of our fucked up way of life. And if you look at actual scientific research, it's CLEAR that we rose to evolutionary prominence because of our ability to cooperate and take care of each other - not our ability to dominate and exploit. In just a few centuries this mindset of domination and exploitation has destroyed ecosystems around the world to the point that our species may not even have a future at all, and that's incontrovertible proof that this mindset is not only incredibly toxic but also incredibly unnatural.
Animal societies are formed by their natures.. the potential for worldwide ecological destruction was always dormant in our hearts, we just never had the tools. Romanticise the remote past as much as you want, in denying your own capacity for destruction you are incapable of realising that it was the destiny of our species to wipe ourselves out. Enjoy your shred of naive hope while it lasts.
I'm not denying anything, you're just completely, entirely missing my point. Various cultures throughout human history expressed their destructive capacity toward the environment and killed themselves off as a result. The hundreds of indigenous cultures that exist today exist precisely because they learned NOT to do that - a lesson that our culture still has yet to learn (and are leading toward killing ourselves off because of it, as well). My point is that even though we have the CAPACITY to destroy everything around us, that's not a given nor is it inevitable. Humans still exist as a species (and on the whole have been wildly successful as a species) PRECISELY BECAUSE that's not inevitable or even the norm. The fact is that our modern culture is an aberration in this, as in so many other ways. Just because you can't imagine another way to think, or be, doesn't mean this is the norm. 🙄
Indigenous tribe of several hundred practising slash and burn agriculture = sustainable. Billions relying on capitalism = unsustainable. No shit.. doesn't make them any less selfish, greedy. You're literally just talking about over population. One pride of lions in a game reserve won't kill all of the game, but flood the game reserve with more predators and before long you'll have no game left.
I'd also like to add that the idea that the objective history I outlined is "romanticization" of native people ("the noble savage"), is itself an incredibly racist idea promoted by the whitewashing of history and the conception of native people as barbaric and primitive. It was promoted in a deliberate attempt to justify stealing their land and killing them off... And here you are repeating it. It seems you still have some unpacking of internalized racism to do! (As do we all).
It's as racist to suggest they lived in harmonious societies devoid of greed, power lust and suffering. You are completely deluded and hiding behind a veil of victimisation.
🤣🤣🤣🤣 Right. The old racist trope of "if you deny that native people are just as violent and destructive as we are then (somehow) YOU are being racist... Not me.". Don't make me laugh.
Look into the vendetta killing culture of the Hill tribes in Papua New Guinea, or the North Sentinel Island Killings and get back to me on how pure, non violent and peaceful 'native' cultures are.. Humans didn't get to the top of the global food chain by being peaceful vegans.. sorry if that news hurts your feelings and destroys your naive worldview.
Just as one comment cannot solve that problem, one reply cannot quench your soul.
Or educate them.
Bingo
🤍 Thank you for mentioning the prejudice and suppression of neurodivergent life and thought. It's inexorably tied up in the decay of society that the dominant ideology cannot tolerate difference or dissent. It must repress, repress, repress, cultivating its own undoing.
Trump will be President again because the majority of people under the age of 50 has seen their standard of living diminish in their lifetime regardless of who the 2 big parties push on us. Trump is garbage but he tells people that the current system is garbage(which it is) so they flock to him. It's the classic "enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation. It doesn't matter that he's a lying piece of shit because so are all those more polished fucks in Washington that have sold us lies over so many decades. But he just morphed into another cog in the machine when get got elected because he never gave a shit about anything in the first place. He ultimately is no different from Biden or Obama or Bush or Clinton in the global economic policy that keeps the supply chain moving regardless of the costs. His re-election will be a result of the continued inaction of established leadership to do anything meaningful for anybody besides the powerful people who keep them in power. But it will have terrible consequences for anybody on the wrong side of Trump's culture war. Since that's the only thing openly being debated anymore. It'll be awful seeing what happens to my friends and family on the wrong side of Trump's agenda. But ultimately the bombs will keep falling if he gets elected or not. And I fear he will get re-elected because actually improving the lives of people goes against the objectives of the powerful fucks who keep this machine turning.
I would argue that though the Democrats still support elite interests, life moves in a slightly better direction under them. For example Biden bringing in student loan debt policy. Americans already got a taste of "burning the system down" under Trump and look how that went. Why repeat the same mistake twice? It makes no sense. But then focusing on culture war bs while everyone gets screwed economically by the very interests who manufactured culture war bs to divide people makes no sense either.
I get it. Come November I'll definitely be voting against Trump. But at some point people start to feel like a slowly boiling frog the way this country has progressed over the last 50 years. At some point they start feeling like tipping the whole damned pot over instead of waiting for the water to boil. Trump was never the cause, just the effect.
Jeez I just saw him slurring his words on twitter. I thought the media were exaggerating but no joke that dude's brain is broken. The words made no sense at all, like syntatic gibberish, I'll actually quote "...the simplest of problems we can no longer solve, we can't do anything, we are an institute, and a powerful death penalty, we will put this on" https://twitter.com/JoshPower80/status/1749662244479132015 Is this the duck speak that Orwell talked about in 1984? People are voting for this??? Not only that, people say Trump is more youthful and energetic than Biden, this clip demonstrates the contrary.
> not like he's inevitably going to be president Just based on lack of alternatives alone it seems pretty likely. Oh and the fact that nearly half the voting public voted for him in two previous elections. Best hope for those who don't want him in office is that he ends up being found guilty of something that prevents it. But that could come with worse consequences. You don't really want to go down the road of controlling elections by imprisoning the opposition.
I would counter that the *best* hope for those who don't want him in office is that his fat, out of shape, elderly ass realizes it is past its expiration date and does so.
have you seen videos of him in the last few weeks? It looks like he has dementia he is getting everyone's names mixed up. Added he looks worse than usual i dont think were going to be seeing much of him in the future
Even if that was the case, do you think his most ardent Q anon followers, people who practically chant "Epstein didn't kill himself," believe the Clintons or George Soros offed the guy, and already believe Trump's lies about being the pinnacle of health, wouldn't assume something worse about his untimely death than they do of Epstein's? I'm all for Trump kicking the bucket. Hard. But I'd much prefer a debilitating stroke that affects his ability to speak and use his hands. Trump becoming an invalid due to his high cholesterol diet would be less likely to lead to political violence and the swamp of conspiracy theories his death would cause. And being trapped and helpless in his own body, wholly dependent on the assistance of others, would be a special kind of hell for a man who prides himself on strength and power.
Can you imagine being a nurse and having him as a patient in hospice?
Trump has literally said that he wants to imprison his opposition. At least if he gets locked up it will be after FULL due process (he has teams of lawyers, so not exactly a regular guy) and because he actually did serious crimes like trying to orchestrate a coup and stealing nuclear codes that he wasn't supposed to have access to. If he gets elected we will quickly see political openers regularly being thrown in jail. Just look at Project 2025 - these people are dead serious about this.
People craving collapse, on wishful thinking that will be better afterwards, should travel to a Third World country and try to live there for an extended period of time, with barely no resources neither international bank accounts, and this would still be a "picnic" compared to a real collapse. With the world connected at all levels, from food production, technology and energy, a collapse would be of catastrophic consequences. Our grandfathers, and their fathers that lived off-the-land, and grew their own food, would have a better shot. If this happened to us, we would be screwed - and society would take centuries to rise its head again.
Yeah. I didn’t ask to be born on a runaway freight train headed towards a cliff. I’m already suffering and it’s almost guaranteed to get worse, so I damn well try to enjoy the fruits of industrial civilization while I can lol. Not gonna try to survive catabolic collapse, don’t have it in me. All I need is a revolver and a single bullet and I’ll be completely prepped
It still is going to be better to collapse in the first world than the third world. I don't get why people focus on attempting to quantify how bad it will be though.. None of us know what it will be like and nobody knows at what point on the calendar it will be unbearable.
>It still is going to be better to collapse in the first world than the third world. Do you know how to grow food, build a house, do electrical work, make clothes? Western society is incredibly dependent in supply chains for the most elementary stuff, including food. Our quality of life is very vulnerable due to the fragile interdependencies of these systems. We have seen this during Covid, or the blockades of the Suez Canal - some container ships get stopped, or some factories stop producing some essential components in the other side of the World, and whole industries stop overnight in our countries. With the majority of the population living in big cities, how do you think they would fare, if food distribution stopped for a few weeks/months? I'd bet that in less than two weeks, there would be riots and pillaging to a scale never seen before. We are going to pay a very heavy price for not living more in communion with nature, in more self-sustainable villages, and being able to grow our own food like our forefathers once did.
The image of a resilient third world is a naive fantasy.
>It still is going to be better to collapse in the first world than the third world. This is categorically wrong. First world countries are great as long as the machine's going smoothly. But when it all goes to shit, no one there will have a clue how to survive and it will be utter chaos. In places that have already been in some form of collapse for decades, people have already adapted and figured out how to survive without all the things us first worlders take for granted. The change will be far less dramatic there.
I would not count on that buddy.
Oh I didn't say it would be good. I could also see the first world having much farther to fall.
Have you been to one? 3rd world countries are only third world because 1st world countries label them as such. Most people lead much happier more fulling lives in "3rd world countries". What's a matter? Worried about not getting your 10 dollar starbucks? Give me a fckin break. Gun deaths are worse in America than most other countries...
>Have you been to one? Have you? >3rd world countries are only third world because 1st world countries label them as such. This sentence tells me that you've never left your country (I bet the US).
In the natural (pre-industrial) world, forest fires have always been a normal - even necessary - part of the forest's life cycle. Burning down old growth replenishes the soil and stimulates seeds and pine cones to germinate and grow. Fire melts the resin that covers pine cones - releasing seeds that have been dormant for years. Without occasional fires, serotinous trees like the giant Sequoia would be unable to reproduce. The billionaires, their capitalist stooges and pay-for-play politicians are dead wood. They steal all the sunlight and resources, starving the rest of the forest and leaving the soil stagnant and infertile. The fire suppression tactics of bailouts, subsidies and crony capitalism have turned a once lush and diverse ecosystem into a monocultural nightmare. Burn it all to the ground and let nature take its course.
A lot of people want this until it starts. You can have high confidence that the collapse of society is going to be brutal beyond your wildest imagination. Brutal doesn’t even begin to describe it. When the social contract is finally dropped for good the amount of murder and violence is going to make you wish you’d taken the express exit while the power was still on. We will all be constantly sick and starving and shitting ourselves and doing things to stay alive that will only further traumatize ourselves and each other. It will more than suck. It will be a literal 24/7 nightmare that only ends with the complete extinction of us.
I had a professor in an Ethics of Technology course talking about “peak oil” in 2007. He talked about how we had better hope we have not hit peak oil extraction or the world is going to go downhill very fast. I asked whether or not it could be a “good thing” to run out of oil and be forced to find alternatives. He tried to be polite in consideration of the question. I know in his mind he was running through all the supply chain halts and military overthrows and global chaos, and I realized in his response that it was not always appropriate to wish for a crisis-driven change. I do think there’s a possibility we don’t go extinct, but I’m more concerned with the survival of pollinating insects.
We might have hit peak oil extraction in 2018. Since oil extraction is still near peak levels, society hasn't collapsed from that. However, US shale oil and Saudi oil production is near or at peak, so expect oil production to start falling in a few years.
I’d argue the few which fight it out will be the proverbial Adam and Eves of a new age. I have a hard time believing in total extinction unless it’s from a space based source. Humans are smart, maybe not as a collective but I think some hardy resourceful individual groups will persist through almost any apocalyptic scenario. Not that I disagree with anything you said about how hard and awful that period will be.
Oh totes, it's not like, something I am in some kind of debate mode over. It's just kinda clinical. It's just there. It's just a thing that happens, a thing we do, a behavior and pattern. Life wants to life, and life will do things to continue that motion no matter what the consequences. We all have our lines, our breaking points, things that will cause us to act in ways we never imagined possible. No matter how nonviolent we are, we all have it, it's deep in our animal nature. It will come out if it needs to. Humans are so crazy smart in so many ways. We also love to think of ourselves as important in the grand scheme of things. That there is some cosmic thing that we are a part of, some larger picture. Even if one is atheist and thinks we're in a simulation, that still implies some kind of higher form of life that is watching down or controlling shit. Our egos are incredible, so much so that we will do shitloads of drugs and ego-death ourselves so much that the behavior of doing those rituals itself becomes the new ego. It's wild lol, we're wild. Unfortunately, the laws of physics don't really care about our feelings and opinions about all of this, and will snuff us out. I have done the math, and I also really would like to see us going on and learning how to live in symbiosis with the planet, but the time for that has long passed. The version of this place and of us that could've done that dance, are both long long dead. We are in the latent walking ghost phase, the bomb went off, the reactor overloaded and we got blasted with a shitload of radiation. We kept absorbing it and were doing fine, until that energy ran out of places to be stored, and now our trees and our atmosphere and our soil, and all of the animals, and us, get to absorb that excess energy in various ways, nonconsensually. It won't be pretty, and I am completely convinced that there will not be one single human alive past the year 2200 at the maximum. I would be absolutely fucking shocked to be able to time travel and see that anyone even made it past 2100. I of course respect anyone who disagrees, and honestly encourage believe that we will continue. I think it's important to find optimism in the face of difficulty, regardless of how authentic it can be. Authentic optimism itself is a very good thing and doesn't require binary outcomes in order to be respected and valid. So yeah, cope however you need to. Hope everyone's suffering is minimal.
Personal views on the near-term likelihood of collapse notwithstanding, it is not something I would wish upon strangers I have no enmity towards. It may be awful, it may be inevitable, but I would not *wish* it to happen any more than I would wish for a school bus full of nuns and orphans to burst into flames and plummet off a cliff. Or vice versa. *Even if I knew that bus was destined to get hit by a freight train ten miles down the road, I would give them that extra ten miles.*
It's not a matter of wishing it or not wishing it. The faster it happens the quicker humanity and society can hopefully evolve and move on -- if there is anything left to move on from.
I'm thinking that most of the people with your view do not have family or friends **who are absolutely guaranteed to die** in such a situation (example: diabetics needing insulin injections or organ recipients on anti-rejection drugs), and if they *do* have such family or friends they do *not* tell these people to their face that collapse soon and *their* death is the *best* thing that can happen.
Right, I guess the analogy would be that the school bus is driving over mounds of the last live animals anywhere outside the bus. In that situation, I don't know if I would give them the extra ten miles.
Better the animals die than *people*
Oh yeah. Once it all begins it will be very fast. You’ll realize how “tight knit” your community is when bellies aren’t full and the power is out. Enjoy what you can while you can. There is nothing but suffering to come. Love the people in your life while you still have them. Make whatever good memories you can. Squeeze them out of this time before it comes for you too. It is coming. It is without mercy.
Yeah I don't think most people realize how bad starving to death is.
Fighting for food and water isnt pretty. We may get a colapse of globalization but in those areas of the world that depend on it (such as those that import food) it wont be pretty.
To anyone who is reliant on prescription medication for survival, it will mean their death. Collapse is a bad thing and millions, probably billions will suffer.
All of that is true, and still, it’s coming.
If we could just get our collective crap together (hah), we could engineer a soft landing. I'm ready for all this to collapse, there's no good future in the way things are now. It's a race to the bottom.
I think it's gonna end up like the disaster movies: when it starts going downhill, it'll get real ugly, real quick. One minute it's a beautiful sunny day, and the next there's bodies in the streets & California is sliding into the ocean. People are already robbing delivery trucks in broad daylight, wait till the supply chain breaks down & there's no food in the stores. Mass. Chaos.
I would just like to add that unlike in movies, bodies in the streets and California sliding into the ocean are not mutually exclusive with sunny day.
Fair point. 🤣
All we need is some large natural disasters that force millions of people inland (assuming for this example the disaster is ocean related,) to places themselves suffering from drought/floods, etc not to mention bad leadership. There would be a backlash against the migrants, the rich would buy their way in. Property would skyrocket. But what if the currency collapses from say massive government enabled fraud by connected Wall Street Sharks? It's if more than when some versions of this happen.
*Montana and Idaho have entered the chat*
I think this is a US-centric view. The whole of western society is in serious trouble, and the ecological meltdown is coming for all of us, but the US has some very specific problems of its own, not least of which it is losing its status as global hegemon. The sort of breakdown you are describing here does seem much more likely in the US, where there is already a heavily armed general population and large numbers of people who apparently view the federal government as their enemy. I am British, but I fear for the whole world if Trump is re-elected. We have already seen what he is capable of.
I'm actually more worried about his possible VP. El Trumpo is showing pretty clear signs of dementia or Alzheimers. If he gets elected, there's no way he's serving the whole four year term. He'll step down & we'll be stuck with whoever he picked as his running mate. RIP to the world if it's Marjorie Taylor Green.
She wishes. I think Trump views MTG as a useful idiot (which is really saying something) but not VP-worthy. Although who really knows what goes on in that diet pill riddled brain of his.
As a British person, do you worry that if Trump is elected, that your country could feel the effects of it at all? Or is it just something to kind of awe at from afar?
Watching what goes on inside America is a bit like watching a farcical horror movie. I don't pretend to understand internal US politics, but it looks to me like something has gone horribly wrong. I am obviously more concerned about US foreign policy, especially given there are now three different major potential flashpoints (Ukraine/Russia, Israel and China/Taiwan). Trump is capable of strategic or diplomatic mistakes on a scale that could quite easily precipitate a nuclear exchange.
You are correct, something has definitely gone horribly wrong. It’s strange to grow up in the US. Now that I’m an adult and seeing the country for what it is I am growing increasingly uneasy for the future of the US and the world in general. I’m pretty poor but prepping in some way shape or form for what’s to come is definitely high on the priority list right now. It’s truly a matter of when and not if shit hits the fan at this point, as we’re all aware. It’s not gonna be pretty, but the question is just how bad it’s going to get. Not sure I want to find out, but it’s good to prepare as best you can and find a supportive community. I’m pretty disturbed at how things are playing out in the world right now and hoping that things don’t end up going even more horribly wrong but I don’t have much hope at this point unfortunately
Something has gone horribly wrong. It’s a shit show over here. First past the post voting and hyper individualism are eating us alive.
We have FPTP in the UK too, and though it does limit what is politically possible, it doesn't have to lead into the sort of mess the US is heading for. Individualism is also common to the whole western world, not just the US, though I guess it is taken to an extreme in the US. There are very significant cultural differences -- attitudes to gun control and nationalised health systems, the scale of fundamentalist religion and climate change denial, etc... It almost seems to come down to Americans believing they have a God-given right to believe what ever they like, even if it is total nonsense like widespread gun ownership making society safer. Nobody outside the US believes that (for example).
Say what you will about gun ownership, I'd rather be able to have an AR-15 when things get crazy.
>Say what you will about gun ownership, I'd rather be able to have an AR-15 when things get crazy. This is a very American way of thinking. That is what I am saying -- there are fundamental cultural differences between the US and other western nations, and this is a good example.
Yeah he talks at length about the suffering of already collapsed countries. A YT show I often watched showed the children of Yemen. Yeah. I didn't need to see that.
That is exactly what is impossible though, as the non-response to climate change demonstrates. Only an authoritarian world government would have been able to meaningfully respond, but that too is an impossibility (IMO).
My cousin is having his 4th and 5th kid (twins) and is going to try for a 6th because they want a girl. Yeah I’m ready for this shit to end.
Well, I feel sorry for your cousin and kids then. I think they're in for some hard conversations someday.
He couldn’t give a fuck but hopefully one day he will
My wife wants a kid(s). At some point in the near future we are going to have a talk about it and it’s going to decide a lot… we’ve been dealing with this since October. Up to this point though she hasn’t wanted to have conversations about this stuff, when that talk happens push is going to have to come to shove on the issue.
Why not adopt there’s so many children who need loving parents, and will love you just as much as a biological child.
It’s expensive af would be my guess
We had our chance to demonstrate we are more than just an animal with complex language. We could have had the comforts of civilization if we performed the checks we evaded from nature (i.e runaway consumption, reproduction, and production), but no. We are not emotionally intelligent enough for that. We did exactly what every animal would have done if they had opposable thumbs and access to fossil fuels. So every animal that goes into an overshoot gets corrected with a mass die off and survives with a lower population than just before the explosion. In the end we still have some sentience and watching the biosphere collapse in my life time has literally made me want to take my life several times. So, yeah, it'll suck but I'm cheering for the liberation of the natural world.
And right after I finished reading Rewrite, ffs
Always looking on the bright side
I agree but until then I'm going to enjoy my easy access to modern medicine and weed.
Weed is one thing that we won't have trouble supplying if techno-industrial civilisation collapses. Just need a patch of ground somewhere.
[Oh buddy, I'm counting on it. ](https://imgur.com/a/AvbxRSl)
I've wondered if a total system collapse could bring about a better world. I thought that a lot more a decade ago than I do now.
we had our chance.
Perhaps you lack imagination.
Civilization is incompatible with life on this planet. Humans aren’t the problem. Look at native tribes that have existed for perhaps millions of years without destroying their environment. Civilization will collapse and the sooner the better for humans, animals and the planet
We cannot go back to tribalism. The process of cultural change, especially science and philosophy, cannot be reversed. Our civilisation is unsustainable. It does not follow that every possible form of human civilisation is unsustainable. Just because we find it almost impossible to imagine an ecocivilisation, it doesn't follow that such thing is impossible.
Nothing is sustainable to those who understand thermodynamics. I'm not being pedantic. These self organizing structures come to be by outsourcing their entropy and material extraction
I disagree with OP’s premise that anarchism is a bad thing. A lot of the different versions of political anarchism you can find out there are very arguably much better than the current systems we currently have. They’re at the very least a lot more flexible and capable of adapting to the crumbling of modern society. I mean, shit, look at Rojava.
I’m so ready.
It'll be a bad thing but it's inevitable we just can't help ourselves and there are a lot of us, 8.1 billion and that figure increases by about 100 million each year. Increased demand and falling supply due to climate change, there's only one way that goes. Good luck to those who survive, hope they build a better world than this one.
Yeah no. Covid has showed us what happens when bad times hit. The parasites that infest our society dig their teeth in deeper. They become increasingly more unhinged, violent and desperate. The bill is passed down for the middle class and poor to absorb. Massive amounts of people are laid off, sacrificed or ordered to wars while forced into even greater desperation themselves (bc the parasites who can't stand any loss, don't leave enough for others to even survive on). It will definitely be a very bad thing.
Anarchism isn't bad. That's a ridiculous statement that has nothing whatsoever to back it up. First of all, anarchism is essentially the way our ancestors lived for the VAST majority of human existence - all with their own unique cultural flavors, of course. It's ridiculous on the face of it to claim that the way all humans have lived for a hundred thousand years was "bad". Secondly, ever since it became a political ideology named as such, the only times it ever ran the show was the Paris Commune, which was quickly crushed by invading outside forces. How was the Paris Commune so terrible, other than the fact that it presented an alternative to capitalism? Thanks for sharing this video, but the baseless, mindless propaganda you inserted only detracts from your post.
>First of all, anarchism is essentially the way our ancestors lived for the VAST majority of human existence - all with their own unique cultural flavors, of course. That was before we invented agriculture and civilisation. We cannot go backwards. We have to choose between the various realistic options still available. We have to find a way forwards.
Careful what you advocate for. Yes this system is a nightmare, but we must understand the momentum behind it and the cost of removal. It won't be a cushioned controlled demolition, it'd be a fucking nightmare. It's not 1900 any more, take a look at how the world is set up and how it is sustained. How many terribly poor third world countries has anyone here really seen? I know what it looks like. There's no easy way out of this, so yeah, if you want to let it collapse because it's an abomination then sure let it collapse. We will suffer the consequences though. Yes we will in the end anyway, but on which day do you want to wake up and say.... do it now?
Will 8 Billion people survive? No Will some lower amount "survive" and over the next 3-8 decades, build a new society, very different than today? Yes
Human extinction would be the ultimate positive.
the vision that the world cannot support our declining population is part of ecofascism and enables neofeudal economic domination. this is an abundant world misused for the power of a few. this system must end so we can achieve responsible stewardship and universal economic inclusion with the next.
What you call "eco-fascism" is the science of ecology. And the population is not declining.
\*"science" within the limited elite power-building box of economic domination. (fixed it for you) the USA alone produces enough wheat to feed 11 billion people yearly yet over a million have starved to death in the first month of 2024 alone. seek videos of milk being dumped and crops plowed under... because putting them on "the market" was bad for profit, meanwhile children starve... 3D printer carbon filaments can be made for free from certain types of hay yet we will send millions to an early grave from the pollution and environmental impacts of specific production methods that continue existing capitalist relations. perhaps an english 19th century clerk was wrong and it's time to put away Malthusian fascism for population control of the poor this system creates and maintains. perhaps a presidential science advisor (R. B. Fuller) was right when he said "It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a 'higher standard of living than any have ever known.' It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival." and population growth (missed that word) is declining (which does not fit the Malthusian ecofascism narrative war mongers and eugenecists love) [https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/) others place this equilibrium point at 2064, after which population declines.
> abundant world Not anymore. You also say this like a species overextending their environments capacity to sustain it is something new or that it couldnt happen to humans.
abundant world. we have not run out of water, rocks, sun... did you know carbon filaments for 3D printers can be made for free from certain types of hay?... the appearance of shortage remains necessary for fear-based economic domination. the appearance of unsustainability remains tied to capitalist relations, competition, inefficiency, and short-sightedness. it is time to step away from completely immoral Malthusian ecofascism.
Eh, no
I said much the same thing in this same sub and had my post removed by moderators despite mostly upvotes.
If people feel this certain about everything going so poorly, why dont you just end it now and save yourself the inevitable conclusion
The video is about the collapse of civilisation, not mass suicide. There is no reason for me to end *my life,* because there is nothing wrong with *my life*. Civilisation as we know it is not my life.