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Why would Western systems always fail in Africa? Why are they arguably failing in the West itself today? And why are the Boomers the only ones standing between us and the flood?
1/20 Despite living in an age at the pinnacle of technological development, the odds are good that most people you talk to in the West, on any part of the political spectrum, will express a feeling that things are not only headed the wrong way, but have been for some time.
2/20 iPhones and AI notwithstanding, we're a far cry from the Victorian era and 1950s optimism of progress. There's a sense that ChatGPT is all well and good (or not), but basic everyday things no longer work as they once did.
3/20 There's the old saw about some regime getting the trains running on time. And while Norway has never been a paragon of public transport, let's just say you shouldn't rely on it to commute these days, never mind the US, where they seem to derail every second day.
4/20 Conversations are suddenly rife with examples of things that used to be taken for granted suddenly breaking down, or teetering on the edge. An acquaintance who works at a hydro-electric plant expressed worry about the possibility of a flood.
5/20 "Last time we had lots of snow in the mountains melting off quickly and causing a flood, we had lots of competent guys to handle it at the dam," he said, "Now there's just a few of us." And everywhere it seems ever fewer people are keeping the wheels turning.
6/20 "Things fall apart". W. B. Yeats' apocalyptic poem "The Second Coming" has often been seen as a prophecy of war. But its central theme is rather the breakdown of natural order, "The falcon cannot hear the falconer;" and "mere anarchy is losed upon the world"
7/20 Granted, as seen today, this societal decline often LEADS to war. As Paul Kennedy pointed out in his 1987 work "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers", it's most often great powers in decline that precipitate wars, thrashing about in panic, rather than ones on the rise.
8/20 In a previous thread on how decline of a society usually manifests historically, someone commented:
9/20 Now, much as I would love to take credit for the phrase, it was in fact coined by Joseph Tainter in his 1985 book by the same name. His core thesis is that societies, over time, trade solutions to problems for complexity. You solve problems, but always at a price.
10/20 A stable society starts out picking the low hanging fruit, obvious problems with obvious collective solutions. In these cases the price in added complexity, say a tax or regulation, is dwarfed by what is gained by solving the problem.
11/20 But after a while the added complexity in solving ever more marginal problems amounts to a net loss for society. People begin to groan under the weight of taxes, red tape and regulations makes it cumbersome to start new businesses.
12/20 For your public administration in the Viking age, you needed a handful of chiefs and lawsayers. By the 1200s you need lensmenn, sheriffs, and clerks. In 1600, public school teachers, as well as early industrial workers like miners, lumber millers, etc.
13/20 By the Industrial Revolution things are getting so complex to run that you need real experts in every field. Society is becoming incredibly productive. But you also now need many 120+IQ people to keep the systems running. And that very productivity now presents temptations.
14/20 The surplus food and capital allows you to "solve" all sorts of things that were previously just facts of life, from poverty and hunger to the lack of trans representation in kindergarten entertainment. But the whole thing rests on an extremely complicated clockwork system.
15/20 This is why the attempts to export Western systems to Africa could never work. There simply aren't enough high IQ individuals to run all the moving parts; and the few that are emigrate for greener pastures TO the west through open borders.
16/20 Problem is our own societies are now running short of competent people, exacerbated by funneling bright people into less than constructive enterprises, like financial shell games, and employment quotas for mediocre women and other "minority groups".
17/20 Dysgenic effects of industrialized welfare states was compounded by IQ and ability to plan ahead resulting in fewer children in the upper classes. That in turn made it posh to have few children, and low class to have many, for the dysgenic anti-natalist double whammy.
18/20 Western society is now an extremely complex, fuel hungry, over engineered machine, lumbering on almost by inertia, run by people with often only limited understanding of its inner workings, and everyone of them praying it doesn't break down on their watch.
19/20 The Boomers, or 1968 generation, as they're called in Europe, have been collectively blamed for many of the ills of society. And they did embody a certain "Aprรจs moi, le dรฉluge" (After me comes the flood) attitude in most things large and small.
20/20 But the crisis of modern Western society has roots that run far deeper than flower power and McMansions, and reasons that were all but inevitable. And we'll probably miss them when they're gone.
#decline #civilization #history #boomers #collapse
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