Civilization will Collapse

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Gloominary
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by Gloominary »

Transhumanism in my view is a pipe dream, science and tech haven't improved our health they've made us all more sickly, largely modern diseases from autism-cancer-diabetes-heart disease have dramatically increased for all socioeconomic classes.
At best we've gotten better at extending the lives of the sick a little longer, and making things safer.
The rise in life expectancy is mostly attributable to the lowering of the infant mortality rate.
If we review the work of maverick scientists like Weston A Price, the rise in life expectancy mayn't only be exaggerated, but fabricated.
In my view at some point science and tech don't actually improve our lives, at best they only seem to, eventually things are going to get worse and worse until we'll be forced to abandon all-some of our high tech or die.
We've gone too far, too fast with this technology thing.
Last edited by Gloominary on Sun Sep 03, 2017 2:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Gloominary wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 11:50 pm Transhumanism is a pipe dream, science and tech haven't improved our health they've made us all more sickly, largely modern diseases from autism-cancer-diabetes-heart disease have dramatically increased for all socioeconomic classes.
At best we've gotten better at extending the lives of the sick a little longer, and making things safer.
The rise in life expectancy is mostly attributable to the lowering of the infant mortality rate, if we review the work of maverick scientists like Weston A Price, the rise in life expectancy mayn't only be exaggerated, but fabricated.
In my view at some point science and tech don't actually improve our lives, at best they only seem to, eventually things are going to get worse and worse until we'll be forced to abandon all-some of our high tech or die.
We've gone too far, too fast with this technology thing.
Hmm, in amongst all of that there might be an element of truth. Cancer rates do seem to be at epidemic proportions. It used to be unusual to hear about someone with cancer. People would talk about it as something they didn't hear about all that often. The only explanation I can find on the internet is that 'people are living longer'. That doesn't make sense. There are certain 'peaks' in a person's lifetime when they are most likely to get cancer, if they are going to get it at all, and it's not in advanced years, more like older middle-age for the most common types. There are many flaws in statistics. A lot of people can have cancer, seem to 'beat it' only to have it return later in life, possibly because of their depressed immune system caused by either other old-age problems, or the chemotherapy they had previously.
Gloominary
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by Gloominary »

@Flash
It wasn't quick though was it? Certainly not quick enough to fit into the pattern you are asserting. They may have lost Alexandria in 671, and perhaps you can claim that as important, but they lost the battle of Manzikert in 1071. That is where they went into their fatal decline and is way way way outside of your cycle. And in both cases they lost chunks of empire to equivalent empires without any dark age ever descending anywhere so this loss of civilisation you are whittering about doesn't occur irrespective.
The Byzantine Empire reached its peak in 555, about a century after Rome's fall and about half a century after my supposed global dark age begins.
However, even at its peak, it was a little over half the size of Rome, and a century after that, about a fifth of Rome.
It paled in comparison to Rome even at its height, really it was Rome, it was Rome on its way out.

I have modified my cycle.
It's now a 2000 year cycle instead of a 1500 year cycle.
The winter solstice, which signaled both the death of the 2nd global civilization (which saw the rise/fall of Rome, Greece, Persia, India and China) and the birth of the 3rd universal civilization (which'll see the rise/fall of Europe and its offshoots), which's is ours, was in 1000 AD, its spring equinox was in 1500, its summer solstice was in 2000, its fall equinox will be in 2500, and its winter solstice, its death/the birth of whatever's to come, will be in 3000 AD.
That's a lot of speculative stuff you are presenting there. Capitalism is really a very sustainable system and none of those resources are actually running out. WW3 to be fought over something like that is really a massive excercise in wishful thinking.
Capitalism is the antithesis of sustainbility, its faulty premise is endless growth.
There's only so much oil, uranium and so on in the world.
It's not that these resources will run out overnight, it's that demand is outpacing supply at an accelerating rate, which'll send prices skyrocketing.
It's getting increasingly difficult to find and extract these resources, increasingly inefficient.
Additionally there's climate change to worry about.

No combination of green technologies, each one with problems of its own, will makeup for coal, gas, oil, uranium and so on, all of them incredibly powerful and hitherto relatively easy to find and extract, furthermore it will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars to replace them with green techs and decades.
We're going to have to dramatically power down our civilization, or perish, there's no alternative.
A third instance wouldn't give you statistical significance. Your cycle has to run for tens of thousands of years before it becomes a basis for statistical prediction. Sorry, maths won't help you here, maybe the 97th generation of your man seed will inherit mathematically sound knowledge from this discussion, but you won't live to see it.
There is no exact point at which something becomes statistically significant, two instances of a thing is significant, two more instances is more significant, it's a continuum, a spectrum.
If A then D then...?
Of course it could be anything, it's not a lot to go on, but having nothing more to go on, I"m going to go with G.
Your spring summer autumn and winter theme for civilisation is the sort of thing I expect to read in a Victorian era text book, the empty nonsense that used to be popular because it provided a handy pseudo-explanation for the rise of the various empires that posed as indirect successors to Rome. It's unsophisticated junk food for the soul. If you factor in effeminacy as part of the final decline of a decadent civilisation you are basically Macaulay risen again.
Civilizations are organic processes, super organisms.
They have a life span.
Virtually every civilization born at some point died.
They have a beginning (winter), they can't materialize fully developed out of the aether, then a rise (spring), then they peak, stagnate (summer), then they fall, and then they die (winter).
Granted there are exceptions to this rule, some civilizations might rise, then stagnate, then rise some more, or some might be swiftly destroyed while they're still in the process of rising, but typically civilizations do most of their rising in one period, their stagnating in the following period, their setting in the subsequent period before perishing.
Rome is the quintessential example but many followed this path.

And now I'm just applying this same principle, a principle noted by many historians throughout the ages, to civilization itself.
The west is still growing, but it's growth has slowed down, economically, even technologically, not much other than communications has developed in the last few decades, nothing like how fast it was growing, or how fast China and India, which're attempting to ape our 'success', are growing now.
We're in late summer now, and in another century or two we'll enter the autumn phase.

There can also be like a marriage of civilizations, like how European civilization had both Greco/Roman and Judeo/Christian origins.

Civilizations will always rise/fall, everything that's born dies, this seems to be the way of things.
The problem with civilization is I don't think we've figured out how to do this gracefully.
We get too enamored with ourselves and the things we build.
We rise too quickly, bite off more than we can chew sort of speak, and fall just as quickly.
excessive materialism, hedonism and even science, technology leads to a tumultuous death from which it'll be difficult if not impossible for subsequent peoples to spring back from.

I wouldn't say civilizations fall because of effeminacy.
However, men and women are neurologically different, we have different strengths and weaknesses, which've been shaped by our physiology, and which'n turn, have shaped our physiology.
Sexually we're getting further and further away from nature, we can see this in both the feminization and asexualization of men, as well as the masculinization and asexualization of women.
As civilization advances beyond reason, sexual specialization becomes less and less relevant, and as sexual specialization becomes less and less relevant, civilization advances beyond reason, and so the two are codependent phenomena.
But even if we permit the analogy for a laugh, you've really got no likely grounds to make your claim that we are the fatal winter of our civilisation unless you resort to the doomsday daydream you already tried. If you wanna go that way, then fine, we can cover why water and food are obviously not "(non)renewable resource" and why those others you mentioned are available in qunatities sufficent to last us well past the boundaries of your fictional cycle.
There's a reason why the non in nonrenewable resources was in brackets, I'll let you figure out why.

Sure, let's go down that road.
Last edited by Gloominary on Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Gloominary wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 3:48 am I have modified my cycle.
It's now a 2000 year cycle instead of a 1500 year cycle.
Instantly demonstrating that you made it up using cherry picked data points as I mentioned already.
Gloominary
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by Gloominary »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 3:55 am
Gloominary wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 3:48 am I have modified my cycle.
It's now a 2000 year cycle instead of a 1500 year cycle.
Instantly demonstrating that you made it up using cherry picked data points as I mentioned already.
No, demonstrating how I'm willing to modify my model after reassessing data.
Gloominary
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by Gloominary »

Greta wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 11:08 pm
Gloominary wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 7:33 pm
Greta wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 5:54 am
We shall see. It may turn out that they are the future of civilisation. While that may seem a shame because they are so selfish, humanity itself would never have thrived if not for its selfishness. You could say that nature itself, like its spinoffs, politics and economics, is a system that is powered, at least in part, by bastardry.
I think the elite overestimate themselves.
Not only is their subjugation of the lower classes and other species bad for us, but it's bad for themselves, it's bad for life itself.
The elite are a black hole, a cancer, they'll terminate themselves upon termination of their hosts.
The elite are more driven by their monstrous instincts than by both reason, and what you refer to as 'mindfulness'.
Their materialism, hedonism, and meddling with society and nature, detriments us all.
Not at all. I say good luck to the rich and I hope they create a brilliant civilisation after the worst of the current environmental upheaval is over.

The rich ARE us, only with money. There is no difference. Not a cancer, not a parasite, rather a predator. Like humans. The rich show us what humans do when they are empowered. Almost everyone would do the same in their situation.

After all, what the rich are doing to the poor is only what humans did to other animals (but the rich are a little less cruel). We regular folk didn't give a damn when other animals were being decimated, so why should anyone worry overly about us? Some would say it's justice or karma, but it's just evolution.

Nothing can ever stay the same and anyone who's been pushed out of their home or lost their job through corporate restructuring knows that change hurts. The next phase of humanity is blended with technology, and thus capable to spreading Earth's stuff out to other worlds. The poor aren't going to continue the Earth's journey after the Sun heats up, only large wealthy institutions can do it.
While we're all the same species, I identify with some people more than others.
I identify with my friends and family first, and people I have a common psychology and values with.
I don't think I'd do what the elite does if I was in their place, if I was a multi-millionaire, but then I've never been in anything like that position, so I can't say for sure.

When a species dies, it saddens me, I hate to imagine a world in which all that exists is the elite, their machines and life extension technologies.
There's beauty in real diversity, which modernity is the antithesis of.
Modernity wants to get us all looking and thinking exactly the same.
Instead of the same religion, the aim now is to get us to shop the same, and vote the same.
Multiculturalism gives way to culturelessness or consumer culture, more species are casualties in pursuit of more goods.
Last edited by Gloominary on Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
Gloominary
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by Gloominary »

HexHammer wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 10:23 pm
Gloominary wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 7:25 pmEinstein was joking when he said WW4 would be fought with sticks and stones.
His point was we wouldn't have the means to fight WW4, cause WW3 would blow us back into the stone age.
I believe we are more or less fighting a WW3 right now, much of the world has been involved in the the middle east the past decades.
The cold war was kind of a 3rd world war and this war in the mid east is kind of a 4th one or an extension of the cold war.
The Arabs are pawns in a conflict between the USA and its allies and Russia and its allies.
This cold war is increasingly less about ideologies and more about resources and control.
Gloominary
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by Gloominary »

PauloL wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 8:13 pm
Gloominary wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 7:33 pm
You're right indeed.

I have recently read about French's Revolution role in implementation of Capitalism.

In fact, industrialization, first by manufactures and later by machines, created a new class, bourgeoisie, that became powerful enough by the money they accumulated to take power as we see it today.

This could be different, but I think no one can tell what other way we could have left feudal society.

The idea is always destroying bourgeoisie, but then we enter a new order no one prefers to the current one.

The alternative has been creating limits each time bourgeoisie gives a coup from the chest, but then bourgeoisie makes up another coup no one could predict.

After all the measures taken after 1929, they could again give another coup, this times through Financial Engineering by banks (subprime crisis). They won't do that again. No problem. They'll invent a new scheme. Wait and see.

I don't think society will collapse anyway, unless they create such a crisis that world enter war again. You may call it WWIII if you like. No need to count as it will be final, like Einstein said.

After 1929 we faced WWII. After 2008 we escaped WWIII, but it took almost 10 years to recover, at least in Europe (Working class paid recovery, but they would be conscripted anyway in case of war). Next time I don't know.
Perhaps there were other ways we could've left feudal society, and perhaps feudal society wasn't all that bad.
Gloominary
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by Gloominary »

vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 12:46 am
Gloominary wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 11:50 pm Transhumanism is a pipe dream, science and tech haven't improved our health they've made us all more sickly, largely modern diseases from autism-cancer-diabetes-heart disease have dramatically increased for all socioeconomic classes.
At best we've gotten better at extending the lives of the sick a little longer, and making things safer.
The rise in life expectancy is mostly attributable to the lowering of the infant mortality rate, if we review the work of maverick scientists like Weston A Price, the rise in life expectancy mayn't only be exaggerated, but fabricated.
In my view at some point science and tech don't actually improve our lives, at best they only seem to, eventually things are going to get worse and worse until we'll be forced to abandon all-some of our high tech or die.
We've gone too far, too fast with this technology thing.
Hmm, in amongst all of that there might be an element of truth. Cancer rates do seem to be at epidemic proportions. It used to be unusual to hear about someone with cancer. People would talk about it as something they didn't hear about all that often. The only explanation I can find on the internet is that 'people are living longer'. That doesn't make sense. There are certain 'peaks' in a person's lifetime when they are most likely to get cancer, if they are going to get it at all, and it's not in advanced years, more like older middle-age for the most common types. There are many flaws in statistics. A lot of people can have cancer, seem to 'beat it' only to have it return later in life, possibly because of their depressed immune system caused by either other old-age problems, or the chemotherapy they had previously.
Good observation, loads of people are now getting cancer young.
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Greta
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by Greta »

Gloominary wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:45 amWhen a species dies, it saddens me, I hate to imagine a world in which all that exists is the elite, their machines and life extension technologies.
I am saddened by extinction too but almost all species that have ever existed are now gone.

For thousands of years we have been the "elite, their machines and life extension technologies". That is who we humans are. However, we soon arrange ourselves into the haves and have nots, the leaders and followers, etc. The survivors of whatever happens on Earth will no doubt organise themselves similarly, with one group taking the "human role" and the rest taking the relative role of animals.
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HexHammer
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by HexHammer »

Gloominary wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:49 amThe cold war was kind of a 3rd world war and this war in the mid east is kind of a 4th one or an extension of the cold war.
The Arabs are pawns in a conflict between the USA and its allies and Russia and its allies.
This cold war is increasingly less about ideologies and more about resources and control.
So Einstein is wrong in assuming atomic war and the following bombed back to the stone ages.

I do respect Einstein for his immense intellect for physics, but as I said before ..he was a complete retard when it comes mundane things.
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Gloominary wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:10 am
FlashDangerpants wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 3:55 am
Gloominary wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 3:48 am I have modified my cycle.
It's now a 2000 year cycle instead of a 1500 year cycle.
Instantly demonstrating that you made it up using cherry picked data points as I mentioned already.
No, demonstrating how I'm willing to modify my model after reassessing data.
You've not really done anything with data though. Some X number of centuries ago, give or take Y number of other centuries, some empires fell, while others didn't. You choose which empires are to be data by which ones happened to fall in years that you find convenient. They fell for reasons, but the reasons aren't convenient for you because they are not going to apply again, so those are not data for your model at all. Otherwise you would have to explain why it is that every whatever number you are working to today, northern barbarians suddenly become a potent force, which would be stupid, so you ignore that problem.

Extrapolating from this insignificant dataset, that is mostly defined by all the data you have wilfully excluded such as the inconvenient number of empires that have fallen outside of the pattern you insist on, you are resorting to mere numerology for predictive purposes. Of course you change the numbers as often as you want, what difference does the number make? They mean nothing because you are presenting an incoherent model and hoping that nobody has noticed that you are unable to provide any link between causes, effects, and your random number sequence.
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

HexHammer wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 5:36 am
Gloominary wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:49 amThe cold war was kind of a 3rd world war and this war in the mid east is kind of a 4th one or an extension of the cold war.
The Arabs are pawns in a conflict between the USA and its allies and Russia and its allies.
This cold war is increasingly less about ideologies and more about resources and control.
So Einstein is wrong in assuming atomic war and the following bombed back to the stone ages.

I do respect Einstein for his immense intellect for physics, but as I said before ..he was a complete retard when it comes mundane things.
He was very wise in so many things. Perhaps not on a personal level, but when you have an intellect that big something has to go....
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HexHammer
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by HexHammer »

vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 6:20 amHe was very wise in so many things. Perhaps not on a personal level, but when you have an intellect that big something has to go....
No, he wasn't particular wise.
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Civilization will Collapse

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

HexHammer wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 12:03 pm
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2017 6:20 amHe was very wise in so many things. Perhaps not on a personal level, but when you have an intellect that big something has to go....
No, he wasn't particular wise.
There are some very good quotes of his. No one is saying he knew everything there was to know about everything or that he was perfect (how boring would that be?) but he was certainly a lot more intelligent than the average person.
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