Decline of the West???

[FlashDangerpants]

I wouldn't want to cause further offence by interpreting you in any way for the purposes of presenting a wider hypothesis. But I am interested in the underlying rationale of your tale of woe and gloom here.

Thank you. I don't see this as something that I can demonstrate. And as I said I also see countertrends so I am not sure it is a tale of woe and gloom yet.

Who might this elite "they" be and how did they come to be such a powerful "they", with the power to destroy ' supportinve institutions'.

It depends a bit where we are in the world. And I'd have to do more research then I'm will to do right now to remind myself of things I'd find out before. I think one thing that shifted a lot of power was the financialization of corporations in general. I am probably not using the f word correctly, but here's what I mean. Corporations 40 years ago, say, tended to see themselves as product makers. Certainly they invested and made money off investments, but there has been a large shift in the amount of money they make from investment. This aligns them with Wall St. There was also much more freedom given to banks and other financial type institutions. And while this led to the 2008 recession, and was supposedly taken care of, it hasn't been. The same kinds of financial shenanigans are continuing. And the same 'we have to bail them out' situation has not been prevented or undercut. How did these things happen? They happen because, again focusing on the US, corporations and the finance industry are able to unduely affect elections, oversight, legislation and enforcement. I don't think we have a democracy (or a republic) anymore. The only people who can challenge a Wall st. approved choice between candidates (not choice of candidates, that's not on the table) is if some incredibly wealthy supposed outside like Trump comes in. Otherwise we are dealing with what the financial sector, which now includes corporations in a way it didn't decades ago. (I do not view the 80s as a golden age. Apart from it being a decade that started the neo helping these shifts in power take place, I just don't see golden ages). (A related pattern is the shift from corporations focusing on profits to focusing one stockholders/bonuses)

The limited liability joint stock corp has existed to make profits since its inception, and has at all times therein been the product of the people of the time and their understanding at that time of the best way to go about making big fuck off bundles of cash. The two biggest coporations (the Dutch and then the British East India companies) that ever existed had canons and they invaded countries. They stopped doing that stuff when it became difficult to manage.

Very few companies play the stock exchange (Apple's absurd war chest being the exception that proves the rule). There's been a change in high end manufacturing to a more services based model where companies sell ongoing support contracts for their products that represent a major share of the whole cost of the item, that's largely due to the complexity of things such as airoplanes which need software support and can't really be repaired with a wrench any more anyhow. Product design, manufacturing techniques and the supply chains involved in both have all grown vastly more complex than the stuff that was made in the 70s. Firms have stopped doing the end to end manufacturing that once was normal because of this, not the financial engineering aspect. And it was already under way long ago, it was in the late 60s/ early 70s I think that Toyota and Honda introduced just in time manufacturing for car plants.

Much of this requires no 10 guys in a room conspiracy. We've got vulnerabilities in the system being attacked by people with pretty common motives.

Perhaps, but for that we would be required to believe that the Wall St guys all sort of think the same and want the same policies. That's not a realistic take on human nature imo. The things they can plausibly all agree on are very limited and I can't see any way to an accidental conspiracy to ruin the world and tread heavily on the necks of the poor.

Part and parcel with this in my being influenced by Chomsky's and the other guy's The Manufacturing of Consent. They made that argument whenever it was, back in 70s, I think, that corporate influence over media affected media's independence from corporations/finance, etc. The talked about the concentration of media control in a not very large number of corporations. Well, the situation since they wrote that book is much much worse. I also see much of this as creating storms in tea cups. Distracting. Though also suppressing information broadly. It can and will appear but at the fringes. Part of the point of their work was that you don't have to censor, just push things to the margins. You don't have to do what, then, the USSR and CCCP were doing.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of such narratives which treat humans as a flock being led around by corporations, but I've never read the Chomsky so I can't usefully say much about it.

Does all of that follow some potential narrative path or do you see no historical sequence of repeating patterns involved. Some sort of rise and fall pattern perhaps?

I don't have a cyclic theory of history. I mean, it may work like that. And I kind assume that lots of cycles are happening. That we must follow the Rise and Fall or Rome or something like that, no, I don't work from that kind of hypothesis. I don't rule it out, but I don't feel like I have the tools to apply, criticize or recognize such a thing. I'm not saying others must lack these abilities. I mean, perhaps a smart person, even me, if one invested a lot of time - and Jesus, I think I'd really have to look at economics in a way that both scares me and bores me in advance) - might be able to say this was likely. But I'm not there in any case.

The traditional way that these Decline of X things work when peopole like GrandWizard are doing them is a mercantilist zero sum sort of thing where advantage can neither be created nor destroyed. So the decline of Rome is the rise of the Franks as power transfers from one race to another. I can't tell if your theory follows that pattern or not. It seems to me that you are sort of assuming that greater wealth for the already super wealthy entails poverty for those who are not wealthy, but I can't tell if you are commited to it or not.

If we have talk of "they" moving to "open dystopia" while further down the page the rest of us must dine at soup kitchens or bulk purchase gruel ingredients in 50lb bags, does that not relegate the bulk of the populace to the political status of a modern day serf?

As bad as serfs had it, they had a role. Of course Stalin, for example, thought he didn't need so many, and he eliminated vast swathes of them. But in general, they had their place and function. I see trends where people may not have the role of serfs. That they will move outside. Will they be the bottom rung, as serfs were, yes. And I say yes, meaning if those trends and not the countertrends win out. I don't see them becoming argicultural laborers. I'm sure you meant it more broadly and metphorically. So, at a metaphorical level, to some degree yes. But actually more expendable.

I think that part is predicated on some assumptions that don't bear up under scrutiny. The zero sum thing being primary. Does some of this relate to mass technological unemployment caused by bots of some sort?

[FlashDangerpants]

I believe it was Churchill who said that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In your scenario, it seems that we can't learn anything at all from history. I disagree, and I think that the more one studies it, the more one realises that human nature never changes.

I'm sure Churchill quoted Santayana more than once. One of the mistakes of history would be trying to force it into convenient little narrative McNuggets that suit our purposes, which is a mistake you are making today. Directional histories are useful mainly for propaganda.

On the contrary, I think the mistake, as apparently Burke pointed out even before Santayana, is precisely the modern trend to trash any message that the past might have for us. An obvious symptom of the very collapse I was referring to.

I think Malthus is the more applicable lesson here tbh.

How do you pick the correct message to recieve from history? Why did you select the rise of Christianity as the cause of the fall of Rome rather than the decline of the Senatorial classes in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries or the Antonine Plague and the subsequent influx of barbarian populations? GrandWizard is a nazi and he wants you to provide cover for him to tell the story of Rome's fall using racial identity politics. History has some lessons about helping people like him do stuff like that, or so I have heard?

[Maia]

I'm sure Churchill quoted Santayana more than once. One of the mistakes of history would be trying to force it into convenient little narrative McNuggets that suit our purposes, which is a mistake you are making today. Directional histories are useful mainly for propaganda.

On the contrary, I think the mistake, as apparently Burke pointed out even before Santayana, is precisely the modern trend to trash any message that the past might have for us. An obvious symptom of the very collapse I was referring to.

I think Malthus is the more applicable lesson here tbh.

How do you pick the correct message to recieve from history? Why did you select the rise of Christianity as the cause of the fall of Rome rather than the decline of the Senatorial classes in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries or the Antonine Plague and the subsequent influx of barbarian populations? GrandWizard is a nazi and he wants you to provide cover for him to tell the story of Rome's fall using racial identity politics. History has some lessons about helping people like him do stuff like that, or so I have heard?

How about Plato, in the Timaeus? All of those factors contributed to the decline of Rome, but they were all symptoms, I would say, rather than primary causes. The primary cause was simply that it got old, and tired, as all societies do.

[FlashDangerpants]

How about Plato, in the Timaeus? All of those factors contributed to the decline of Rome, but they were all symptoms, I would say, rather than primary causes. The primary cause was simply that it got old, and tired, as all societies do.

What?

[iambiguous]

What is clear is that as humans we find it useful and comforting to construct a narrative surrounding anything that we happen to want to interpret. But also there are an unlimited variety of such stories available and we have a long observable tendency to pick and choose which story to tell and when for manipulative purposes. It's usually harmless, just a matter of overlooking some data we don't like and promoting some that we do. But it's there and in conversations like the one here about the Decline of the West, it is important to see that meta aspect of what is driving these tales.

Yep, that's how it works all right. In both the West and the East. Given the historical and cultural evolution/devolution of villages, hamlets, cities, states, nations and empires some stories rise and others fall.

Also, however, what some lament as in decline others embrace and celebrate as in decline instead.

Then particular historians and philosophers will make note of all this and try to "deduce" what to make of it...given what they construe to be the most rational and virtuous stories themselves.

The part I root existentially in dasein and others root essentially in Gods and spiritual paths and political ideologies and philosophical constructs and assessments regarding Nature itself.

Then it just comes down to particular sets of circumstances and squabbling over what is in decline and what is on the rise. And, of course, what should be in decline or on the rise.

For example, in 526 days here in America, there will be a Presidential election. And, depending on the results, there will be many, many fierce discussions regarding the extent to which the West on our side of the pond is or is not in decline.

Then those who believe that their story here should be your story too. And if it's not your story? Well, go ahead, ask them.

[promethean75]

Hey Maia the decline of any civilization is due primarily to property and privilege disproportion. Unhappy people in that society... usually the vast bulk of em, get restless and unruly becuz the masters ain't making life better for any of em.

Sorry to demystify the collapse of empires but that's all it is. Believe me, I wish I could say every empire begins as a people of nobility, virtue and spectacularness and then the lowly plebs ruin it's glory so on and so on becuz of culture miscegenation and all that shit. It's really much more painfully simpler than that and super unexciting.

[Maia]

Hey Maia the decline of any civilization is due primarily to property and privilege disproportion. Unhappy people in that society... usually the vast bulk of em, get restless and unruly becuz the masters ain't making life better for any of em.

Sorry to demystify the collapse of empires but that's all it is. Believe me, I wish I could say every empire begins as a people of nobility, virtue and spectacularness and then the lowly plebs ruin it's glory so on and so on becuz of culture miscegenation and all that shit. It's really much more painfully simpler than that and super unexciting.

Not so much the disproportion itself, but the willingness of the population to put up with it. The Pax Romana of the first century brought a staggering increase in prosperity to the whole Mediterranean world, and even the lowest in society benefitted from it. But it didn't last.

[Iwannaplato]

The limited liability joint stock corp has existed to make profits since its inception, and has at all times therein been the product of the people of the time and their understanding at that time of the best way to go about making big fuck off bundles of cash. The two biggest coporations (the Dutch and then the British East India companies) that ever existed had canons and they invaded countries. They stopped doing that stuff when it became difficult to manage.

Sure.

Very few companies play the stock exchange (Apple's absurd war chest being the exception that proves the rule). There's been a change in high end manufacturing to a more services based model where companies sell ongoing support contracts for their products that represent a major share of the whole cost of the item, that's largely due to the complexity of things such as airoplanes which need software support and can't really be repaired with a wrench any more anyhow. Product design, manufacturing techniques and the supply chains involved in both have all grown vastly more complex than the stuff that was made in the 70s. Firms have stopped doing the end to end manufacturing that once was normal because of this, not the financial engineering aspect. And it was already under way long ago, it was in the late 60s/ early 70s I think that Toyota and Honda introduced just in time manufacturing for car plants.

Sure.

Perhaps, but for that we would be required to believe that the Wall St guys all sort of think the same and want the same policies. That's not a realistic take on human nature imo.

It's a realistic take on people with shared interests in legislation regarding finance and economics which they do not share with other classes/groups.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of such narratives which treat humans as a flock being led around by corporations, but I've never read the Chomsky so I can't usefully say much about it.

Ok

It seems to me that you are sort of assuming that greater wealth for the already super wealthy entails poverty for those who are not wealthy, but I can't tell if you are commited to it or not.

It may or may not entail it, but it's happening. We have more poor, the superwealthy are getting wealthier and the middle class is getting smaller.

I think that part is predicated on some assumptions that don't bear up under scrutiny. The zero sum thing being primary.

I'm looking at trends in my home country (US) and the European country I live in. In both the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is getting smaller. Here privatization of national industries and the slow gutting of welfare and other services to children, the poor, immigrants, the sick and elderly, and increases in homelesses and so on. I see media companies being swallowed up in fewer and few corporations'. And while I can't track exactly what this will lead to I think it is a bad trend. Investigative reporting has gone down, partly due to competition from the internet's affect on traditional media, but in general, regardless of source, a dumbing down and entertainmentififcation of news. I also see worse and worse indenpendence of government oversight from the industries they are supposed to oversee. Generally these trends have being going on for decades. And they are putting a lot of power in the hands of the superwealthy. A couple of years back I read an interesting book on the changes in the way the judicial system, in the US, views the wealthy. I think we all know that rich people have the ability to get vastly better representation and this affects how they are treated in court rooms. But this book was going into changes in the way the judicial system view wealthy powerful people, per se, regardless of representation. They are viewed as 1) more vulnerable if sent to prison. You're a hedge fund manager, the judges have been more leniant for the same crimes because it would be worse for you than a plumber to find yourself in prison. They don't openly compare to the working class say, but they have started to openly call attention to the contrast argument. 2) people get off because their roles are important on a class basid 3) courts treat rich people's mitigating circumstances radically different from other classes (and also politicians with pardons do this). Equal under the law has been shifting in a bad direction.

I see how here Thatcher/Reagan attitudes are changing a much more egalitarian and supportive society to something with much larger class differences and the start of homeless for mentally healthy people and inability to get timely and effective health care.

These trends concern me very much. And, again, I see countertrends. I think it is getting harder for information to stay secret. On the other hand it is easier to marginalize information, at least in tradition media. Hard to say how that struggle will go.

The East India company is not relevant. I am not saying the world is worse than in 1750 or something. But in my lifetime I have seen shifts that make it harder for people economically in general, whereas up until my early years there was a general upward trend in general.

I am very concerned about four tech areas: surveillance, AI, nanotech and gene mod and already being used without much supervision by goverment and also the possibilities these offer centralized power, whether private or governmental. I think we are seeing a re-concentration of power in the few. We had a long countertrend in the West where power was distrbuted to more people. I see this trend going the other way now.

There's a kind of 'it'll all work out we've had technological shifts before, so any future or current technological shift will hurt some people here and help others there, so the trend will generally be upward.' I think that's a form of faith. I think current technologies offer undreamed up power to powerful private and governmental groups. The Stasi would have been peeing themselves with joy over current self- and government surveillance options now. Yes, tech can also empower regular people, but with things like combining AI and smart cities, I don't think the average person's power somehow counter power player increases in power.

I also see not the slightest bit of harm in being concerned about these things.

But I don't know what will happen. I just see a lot of things to be concerned about.

Does some of this relate to mass technological unemployment caused by bots of some sort?
[/quote]

[FlashDangerpants]

by 'directional narratives' i would surmise that F.D. Pants means something like this.

if you critique economy and point out all the foibles and shortcomings of the free market, you're a lazy communist satanic jew feminist pleb that wants everything for free... and if you champion liberal ideas and freedom of enterprise etc., you're a selfish egotistic misanthropistic wage slave driver that doesn't want anyone to get an abortion or stop carrying guns or learning creationism in school or driving electric cars.

you see that whatever side you're on, you're pushing a historical narrative that condemns the forces-that-be or some period over history that was disasterous in ways x and y and therefore very bad.... not something we'd want to be condemned to repeat, etc.

so anytime somebody says 'learn from history', nine times out of ten they're fixin to point out all the shit they think is bad about period x and y and what they think is responsible for it. enter the narrative.

It seems that directional history is a less common term than I thought, we used it a lot in uni but I believe it was lifted from Fukuyama's whole (perhaps unfairly notorious) thing about the end of history. The stricter term of art would be 'teleological', the view of history that Popper disparages as running on rails. I'm referring to any analysis of history that is driven or directed by some specific force, the sort of history that comes with a destination. Examples obviously include Hegel, Marx and Hitler, but importantly the list does not end with those guys. The most important factor is the matter of predictive power; a teleological hostoriography is the one that tells you that you have understood the past and can use that understanding to predict the future as the same forces will necessarily apply.

The pernicious Victorian version was built around a discussion of how the power of Rome had been lost through decadence and effeminacy, and then in this version of history the Islamic empires provide the vigour to replace Rome for a few hundred years before settling into effeminate degeneracy themselves and ultimately being replaced by the enterprising new powers of the west is a more prevalent framework still today than those dialectic forces of the history-as-science brigade mentioned above. This same framework is applicable with the whole decadence and effeminacy thing swapped out for any number of other things, there's a reason why Rome is always invoked in threads on this subject matter, it's the comfortable narrative framework that everyone is already conditioned for.

So Maia's current thing doesn't count, it just has some stuff about civilisations getting tired, which is equivalent to an air accident investigator saying that 237 people died in fire because what goes up usually comes down. But Maia also is the one who invoked the Rome thing (obv GW22 would have anyway) and claims the signs of such decay are evident everywhere so she appears to know more than she is letting on.

Your theory about imbalances in wealth distribution obviously does fit that template, although you referenced so many proximate causes for the holocaust that I suspect you offer little by way of precise predictions. The Late Stage Capitalism guys have been riffing on the same stuff for so many decades they've had to rebrand about 7 times now to feel relevant.

Now Popeye, he's got this shit nailed down for sure. He's got a prediction about a new multipolar aggregated superpower overthrowing American tyrranny by replacing the Imperium of the Petrodollar. That's the good Tankie shit, done with feeling. I'm not clear whether he thinks this new empire of the BRICS that will replace NATO and the UN and whatever other machines of American domination will be benevolent, is it the End of History or just another round of imperialism? But this is a minor quibble, if you're gonna be mad, be mad like Popeye, it's just that much more efficient.

[Skepdick]

We have more poor

How are you measuring that and against what base rate?

Literally all the data available shows a global decline in poverty. And a decline in poverty in the west.

How are you cherry-picking your definition of "The West"?

, the superwealthy are getting wealthier and the middle class is getting smaller.

Yes, that's what happens when more people transition from middle class -> rich; than they do from poor -> middle class.

[FlashDangerpants]

Perhaps, but for that we would be required to believe that the Wall St guys all sort of think the same and want the same policies. That's not a realistic take on human nature imo.

It's a realistic take on people with shared interests in legislation regarding finance and economics which they do not share with other classes/groups.

This seems like an enormous leap. At the input end you have some informal not-even-conspiracy of all the different types of welathy peope all going along with those things which suit them all... yet at the output end you have statements like "I don't think we have a democracy (or a republic) anymore" and this seems like a very complex output for a simple machine.

It seems to me that you are sort of assuming that greater wealth for the already super wealthy entails poverty for those who are not wealthy, but I can't tell if you are commited to it or not.

It may or may not entail it, but it's happening. We have more poor, the superwealthy are getting wealthier and the middle class is getting smaller.

Is that actually true though? I can't define, let alone count the middle classes in a developed economy, but I find it surprising that with unemployment so low everywhere we have this middle class emergency.

I think that part is predicated on some assumptions that don't bear up under scrutiny. The zero sum thing being primary.

I'm looking at trends in my home country (US) and the European country I live in. In both the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is getting smaller. Here privatization of national industries and the slow gutting of welfare and other services to children, the poor, immigrants, the sick and elderly, and increases in homelesses and so on. I see media companies being swallowed up in fewer and few corporations'. And while I can't track exactly what this will lead to I think it is a bad trend. Investigative reporting has gone down, partly due to competition from the internet's affect on traditional media, but in general, regardless of source, a dumbing down and entertainmentififcation of news. I also see worse and worse indenpendence of government oversight from the industries they are supposed to oversee. Generally these trends have being going on for decades. And they are putting a lot of power in the hands of the superwealthy.

If you live somewhere that the social services are underfunded you probably live somewhere that people don't vote for higher taxes to pay for that stuff. It's a wheeze to say that some shadowy cabal of super rich plutocrats are the reason we don't raise enough cash to house the homeless, we just choose to vote for low taxes and then tell that story to placate our guilt.

The East India company is not relevant. I am not saying the world is worse than in 1750 or something. But in my lifetime I have seen shifts that make it harder for people economically in general, whereas up until my early years there was a general upward trend in general.

You said that 40 years ago companies "tended to see themselves as product makers" and I raised the long rapacious history of the company itself to show that this was all just the PR that was preferred at the time. When PR was formalised as a branch of professional services (1920s?) generalised wholesomeness was the quality that all the customers wanted to portray, the 80s is around the time when that PR movement started to wither away.

I hate to be mean, but it's normal to think the world was better and more hopeful at the time in your life when you felt most vigorous and hopeful (or when you were still unspoiled and naive, before the cynicism took hold). It's the same with GrandWizard22 literally telling us that food tasted better in the 90s than it does today, you already know which decade he had his 18th birthday in just from that sentence. He's dumb enough that you could reasonably guess he took up smoking in the late 90s and that's why he thinks food got worse.

I am very concerned about four tech areas: surveillance, AI, nanotech and gene mod and already being used without much supervision by goverment and also the possibilities these offer centralized power, whether private or governmental. I think we are seeing a re-concentration of power in the few. We had a long countertrend in the West where power was distrbuted to more people. I see this trend going the other way now.

It's a bit of an amoprphous set of concerns tbh. A bunch of technologies with a set of insecurities projected upon them. I don't see how the problem with nanobots is centralisation of power in the hands of plutocrats and oligarchs.

There's a kind of 'it'll all work out we've had technological shifts before, so any future or current technological shift will hurt some people here and help others there, so the trend will generally be upward.' I think that's a form of faith. I think current technologies offer undreamed up power to powerful private and governmental groups. The Stasi would have been peeing themselves with joy over current self- and government surveillance options now. Yes, tech can also empower regular people, but with things like combining AI and smart cities, I don't think the average person's power somehow counter power player increases in power.

All of the wealth of our current society is based on technologies that displaced human workers and thus made the work product much cheaper bringing down prices. That's a simple true fact going back at least as far as the invention of the plough. The tractor and then the combine harvester put millions of farm hands out of work, and in doing so made food so cheap that our modern disease of poverty is an epidemic of obesity. That faith is better supported by the evidence than most.

If there is a dramatic enough improvment in AI technology, there will be a huge productivity boost in the medical field, and doctors will get through so much work thanks to the extra tools that they will all be able to work 3 day weeks. That would allow for all the healthcare needs of an aging population to be handled with vastly lower cost (as proportion of GDP) than today and would most likely improve cancer survival rates by a significant margin (if cancer is still much of a problem by the time it comes about).

[Wizard22]

And not being American, either.

Civilisations go in cycles. They seem to just get tired, and die out.

While what you say maybe true... it's not accurate enough.

What exactly were the injuries and organ failures that led to the death?

There's a difference between dying at age 80, 110, and/or with clarity of mind. This requires specificity.

[Wizard22]

I don't know how high up the scale you've met. I've had mixed experiences with wealthy. Some are fine, some not. I saw less generosity in them as a trend but not a rule, and also a trend to dealing hysterically with stuff that middle class and poor people grit their teeth and deal with more practically. Trends.

But I have never encountered the superwealthy. The people who show up at the various international meeting for world players or who don't even bother to do that. People affecting government policy behind the scenes. They may be charming or cold fish interpersonally, I have no idea. But their use of power is atrocious.

I don't have much hope for the Old World either. Everybody emigrated away from them, for often good and practical reasons. Eastern Civilizations have been 'stagnant' for thousands of years. I don't think that type of momentum can be 'turned around' so suddenly. But who knows?

The pockets of prosperity may coalesce throughout the West, in areas resistant to these declines of quality of life.

Well, we can hope that pockets can remain unpoisoned by the trends out there. Both politically unpoisoned (iow disallowed and intervened with) and than poisoned more literally by nanotech, genetic modification and AI. The days of only local contamination are disappearing. Even Cherobyl may seem a rather local affair compared to coming boo boos.

It's not only the Rich who are 'at fault' with the general decline of Western Civilization. It is the middle class. It is the poor. It is the noble.

Everybody can be blamed, even if some more than others. Every small person plays their part in the erosion.

[Wizard22]

even though it knows full well what's happening.

I think this is the hard part though. Most people, let alone an entire country, are not self-conscious. They might have a vague idea of the decline, the lowering quality of culture, food, entertainment, etc. the lowering standard-of-living, but they aren't fully aware of what's happening, and especially not why.

[Wizard22]

Accept it. Adapt. Move on

The people with purpose evacuate and relocate but they don't vanish. Just follow them.

Since there are no more Earthly frontiers...it seems more and more unlikely that one can escape Globalist and International tyranny.

Eventually the free-thinkers, rebels, revolutionaries are going to need to organize and resist. Without this, there is no freedom for mankind in the future.