Luke Kemp, wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Zentrum für das Studium des existenziellen Risikos an der Universität von Cambridge, hat ein Buch über seine Forschung mit dem Titel „Goliaths Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse“ geschrieben.
Er macht den Fall, dass die meisten Menschen, wenn man sich die archäologischen Aufzeichnungen ansieht, wenn viele Gesellschaften zusammenbrachen, danach besser dran sind. Zum Beispiel waren Menschen in der Post-Römischen Welt größer und gesünder. Zusammenbruch kann eine Umverteilung von Ressourcen und Macht sein, nicht nur von Chaos.
Für den größten Teil der Menschheitsgeschichte lebten Menschen als nomadische egalitäre Bands mit geringer Gewalt und hoher Mobilität. Bedrohungen (Krankheit, Krieg, wirtschaftliche Prekarität) verdrängen die Bevölkerung zu autoritären Führern. Der daraus resultierende Anstieg der Ungleichheit von einem Zyklus, der im Zusammenbruch endet. Darüber hinaus argumentiert er, dass wir jetzt in den späten Phasen eines solchen Zyklus leben. Er sagt "Die Bedrohung besteht von Führern, die „Wanderversionen der dunklen Triade“ – Narzissmus, Psychopathie und Machiavellianismus – in einer Welt, die durch die Klimakrise, Atomwaffen, künstliche Intelligenz und Killerroboter bedroht ist, bedeuten."
Einige Leute hoffen/denken, wir sind für eine Zukunft des universellen Grundeinkommens bestimmt und Vollautomatischer Luxuskommunismus. Vielleicht ist das der Egalitarismus, der nach unserem eigenen Zusammenbruch auftaucht? Wenn ja, hoffe ich, dass der Zusammenbruch kurz ist und wir so schnell wie möglich zum egalitären Bit gelangen.
Zusammenbruch für die 99% | Luke Kemp; Was passiert wirklich, wenn Goliaths fallen
New research argues Societal Collapse benefits 99% of people. Historically, the societies that have emerged after a collapse are more egalitarian, and most people end up richer and healthier than they were before.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
48 Kommentare
If a society is stagnant and then it gets destroyed the society that comes after it may do better since it is starting over.
But that doesn’t benefit 99% of the people who are alive today. Most people who are alive today would die of starvation or violence.
yeah, but if you were not already rich, there is a good chance you might not survive the transition. Also people may be relatively better, but not absolutely better.
can they fuck right off, please? I don’t have the lifetime to wait 300 years until modern dark ages end. yes there’s always a shining light at the end of the tunnel, but we pay with our dwindling existence … finish school and you’ll have a great career, toil your health away in a shitty job and you’ll have a comfortable retirement, get fired at 60 and be told you’re out of touch
Uh, is that the 99% of the people that were alive before the collapse, or the 99% that SURVIVED the collapse?
It’s a bit of a cheat to ignore decades and generation between the collapse and the declaration that now it’s better. It is much worse for a lot of people for a fairly long time. They say roughly the same thing about the Black Death but you can’t say the millions that died are better off.
This is the most hilarious Survivorship bias study I’ve seen in awhile. 99% of peasant farmers in Europe had better prices for the food they produced and were in high demand too when 2/3rds of them died during the plague.
I also doubt the entire premise of the study. Better off in what metric? No electricity, no modern convenience (they dont magically maintain themselves), less access to Healthcare, less access to modern sewage systems (pairs great with lack of Healthcare). There is a million holes in this because i feel that even a person living just above the poverty line would be worse off becoming a medieval level surf
I cant even fathom recovering from a total societal collapse on a global scale.
Like are we talking new world order meteorite type of shit or are we talking about overthrown of govenrment.
We’ve had and experience multiple societal collapses within bubbles of country regime changes. More often than not, it doesn’t turn out for the better.
If you were going to start a civilization from scratch, you wouldn’t give a handful of families 95% of the assets, so I can imagine this is true
“Let’s not go with the whole ’Insurance will
cover everything!’ approach.” – Incredibles 2
Sorry, but I’d have to disagree. There’s no way societal collapse will benefit the whole as I believe we’re already past the point of no return thanks to technology (speaking in terms of medical and infrastructure).
The collapses we’ve seen were on a local scale. This will be on a planetary scale. 👍
This is stupid because it ignores all the death caused by collapse.
Yeah, even if maybe the middle age people were better fed (doubtful, and I feel like height is just due to Germanic genes naturally being taller.), their population was tiny compared with the huge Roman cities.
What happened? 75% of the people died.
usually the super rich get richer and the upper/middle class get poorer
What utter nonsense.
The western Roman empire had a population of about 75 million people.
After the collapse of the empire, the population of Western Europe shrank to less than 25 million over just a century of brutality and barbarism.
This study, while interesting in the context of studying ancient history, is completely unsuited to being applied to modern day life.
If modern society with its advanced industrial and agricultural technology collapsed more than half the population of the world, some 4+ billion people, would die within a year as food supplies stopped coming and anarchy took over.
So yeah, Mad Max and the wastelanders would be very egalitarian, but they would be walking on the bones of billions of children.
Ancient Rome was an extraction based empire, where the economy was basically agrarian, and labour and agricultural products were just funneled toward the center of the empire.
We live in a global industrial society, where most output arises from long fragile supply chains and extreme specialization of labour.
These are not the same. If Rome collapses, and you’re out in the provinces, you stop having Roman armies kidnap people and tax crops. If the global economy collapses, we stop getting fertilizer, tractor parts, and antibiotics.
Edit: his claim about post-Roman populations is also at best contested. For example, the roman province of Britain dropped from around 4 million to just 1 million people, with apparently completely depopulated cities. It had multiple causes, including climate, disorganization, pandemics, and more random warfare. But isn’t that what we would expect to face?
I think this was the entire manifesto of zorg the bad guy from fifth element.
Jesus Christ, I haven’t read anything so stupid in a long time. Some examples of the really deep thought process involved:
>The work is scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. “Don’t be a dick” is one of the solutions proposed
>His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. “When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don’t see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,”
(apparently, civilization is countries that never conduct wars, which I don’t think have existed on this planet yet)
>“First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths,” he says. That means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales. History shows that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient, he says.
And that is the jewel on the crown that showcases the extreme ignorance of the author. History shows the exact opposite – monarchies are the most resilient societies, while democracies have barely ever existed for prolonged periods of time. Especially direct democracies at large scales are usually the fastest way to collapse any society.
>We’re a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species
I don’t think this even requires a comment
If we collapse, who will be working on fixing the plastic/chemical pollution and climate change? Those problems don’t need us to grow anymore. The amount of plastic we’ve already produced plus fragmentation cascade means lots more microplastics. The loss of ice sheets is mechanical in many instances now. If we collapse we’re just going to lose response time on those events no? I guess microplastics in the brain are already pretty egalitarian though.
OP is actually stupid and outed themselves as a neo-feudalism supporter, the fall of the Roman Empire led to nearly a thousand years of technological stagnation and feudalism, also widely known as the medieval ages. Also an accelerationist too advocating for the fall of western civilization. Millions of people will die and it won’t be a nice thing for us or our children to experience or survive. Don’t let yourself be gaslit. Cheers.
And how many people did not live past the collapse? How many years, decades or generations did the collapse take? How much knowledge was lost in the collapse?
I mean yeah, phoenix rising out of the ashes and all that, but aren’t we forgetting a pretty important bit where a bunch of people are killed between the point of collapse and the point of things getting better? Personally I am not much a fan of the way things are but I’d like to find a way to change them without endangering literally everyone who doesn’t have the money to build a private doomsday megabunker complex
Wait we’re now entering the era where „Society has fallen — Billions must die“ is entering mainstream public consciousness?
That’s one hell of a shift.
As I keep saying. My retirement plan? Societal collapse. On more a serious note though, I believe it is inevitable at this point. Unsustainable socio-economic establishments naturally lead to a collapse, sooner or later. And what we have was never designed with sustainability in mind.
The trains will run on time for the survivors… This is why pure logic reasoning is dangerous.
But it also can take centuries for the egalitarian community to rise up out of the ashes of the societal collapse. In the meantime lots of death and destruction. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
I don’t find this a particularly good argument. It would be akin to arguing that the improvement in social mobility post the 2 world wars means that we should advocate for conflagrations to ‘thin the herd’. This ignores of course the fact that A) The wars themselves take place over a long period of time and lock everybody into the war effort. B) It ignores that the wars are immensely destructive and traumatising for those going through them. C) Most importantly the benefits are only available to those not killed or maimed in the process.
To respond more specifically to the claims made here, most collapses I am aware of (ie the Bronze Age Collapse and the Collapse of the Western Roman Empire), took a great deal longer than one lifetime to occur. The people may have been more equal after the collapse but they were still experiencing a considerable amount of turmoil and suffering. Furthermore, things as simple as writing may have totally disappeared. Imagine losing access to modern medicine or a functioning justice system? I’m not certain how much fun it would be to have to return to settling our own grudges with reprisals or if very lucky being able to plead for the local ‘Hetman’ or ‘Basileus’ to intervene and stop the local psychopath from torching your crops. Equality is important but it’s not the only metric that you’d use to decide what the quality of life in a society is.
Yeah that’s the whole point of conservatism. There’s a concept called bias and I am using it in the abstract definition of bias, not „political bias.“
If society goes too far off into one direction, then conservatism will become „appealing“ and then the country „self corrects.“ You know, by overcoming the desire to create a society where there they can in theory be king, but that’s obviously not how anything works. You don’t get to be king… It’s going to be some jerk face, because that’s how it always works with them… People don’t get what they want and that’s the whole point of it… You’re suppose to think that you’re getting what you want, but you don’t, and somebody else does. Because conservatism is not „for the voters.“ They don’t care what the voters think at all and that’s their purpose.
So, people get biased towards popularity, and then the faux popularity people come by to trick people. It’s like their entire purpose is to expose the flaws in democracy. I assure you, if you knew what I knew about politics, you would clearly see that conservatism is basically a troll form of governance. You’re just going to get trolled…
It’s exactly like the scammers that sell get rich quick books/courses. They’re just lying about how this works so they get what they want… Which is your money, so it’s just a scam obviously.
>For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility.
yes, because the total number of humans on the planet was measured in the very low millions, possibly even low 100’s of thousands.
we aren’t going to be living a peaceful, nomadic post collapse existence with 8 billion people on the planet.
want to know how is likely to do well under those circumstances? the people who can afford the most guns and best stocked bunkers. spoiler alert: this probably doesn’t include you …
I mean…long-term yes….short term…..probably not
Bigger, healthier people outlived, or killed, their weaker neighbors. Natural selection.
You could argue the collapse of the Roman Empire led to modern western civilization – ignoring the dark ages and world wars in between. With a large enough timescale – anything is positive.
I’m putting together a group of Raiders to take advantage in the chaos. Who wants to join? accepting applications now. Lol
Can we just choose policies that benefit all of us and skip the whole collapsed society part???
Yes, those who survived the fall of Rome were taller and heavier. But before that, half of them starved to death.
All other things being equal, a collapse of nitrogen fertilizer production will starve about 3 to 4 billion people. This is without counting other farming inputs missing, and the collapse of agricultural machinery and trade networks.
And this time living standards have grown far above substitence for far more than 1% of the population, so even those who survive stand to lose immensely.
Well in that case the MIT prediction that societal collapse will happen by 2042 can’t come soon enough
“the threat is from leaders who are ‚walking versions of the dark triad‘ – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianis”
Who on earth could he be taking about lol
This is along the lines of war can be an economic good via depopulation. That’s been shown to be true but it’s obviously borderline taboo. Equity and prices are freed up. I think a soft measure of that will happen over a few decades in lieu of conventional war and alternative to nuclear.
Seems like a reach to me. The transaction costs of societal collapse have to be pretty high. The only metrics mentioned here are that people were taller and healthier. They were also arguably less free and less educated; isn’t that why we call post Roman Europe the dark ages? Also, Is their selection/survivor bias in that? If lots of people die in a societal collapse, then you get a resource windfall for the survivors, kind of like how the Black Death raised living standards in the long term – but you’d be hard pressed to argue that the Black Death itself was good.
Sure … it is great. We can have societal collapse in which 99% of the population is tortured and killed. And then, the 1% left alive will be better off than before. Great idea.
But how do we know they will not live in a radioactive wasteland in society collapses? Easy, the archeological record shows that Ancient Romans did not have to deal with radioactive wasteland, so we won’t either.
Ridiculous bullshit.
Societal collapse in the 21st century means the end of human life on this planet.
Accelerationism is particularly hazardous copium consumed by blithering idiots.
What do you know.. another study that’s not repeatable and confirms already set beliefs.
Many revolutions have worked. In fact, I believe it’s most. The societies that had those revolutions come out better on the other side. They are even deemed post revolution societies and are deemed different than countries and societies that haven’t had a revolution. It speaks to the power of propaganda and fear that we don’t see more of them. Including in countries that have already had them.
What percentage of people perish, and how many poor people survive past the collapse vs middle class?
How many people died during those collapses? Does the gain really outweigh that? I’m not sure accelerationist theory like this is really healthy.
We used to play a drinking card game called Asshole. The winner of the game was king, 2nd queen etc. down to the last place asshole. Subsequent rounds started with the King giving the asshole his 2 worst cards and the asshole giving the king his 2 best. The king also got to make up rules, that usually kept the king at the top. I see many parallels between life today and Asshole. The game never ended well.
Really poor timing to fall into authoritarianism given how much we could be doing to prepare for the coming changes in global food and water supply.
Just imagine if Gore had won….
We’d be eating sustainably sourced manbearpig burgers
Hold on are we getting to the point where Posadism is actually within the Overton Window?
There was a NoSleep story years ago where the protagonist was a scientist working on time travel, and basically the world gets attacked by giant mutant bugs. He has the ability to prevent it, but he sees the war against the bugs unite the entire planet and basically fix (through destruction and rebuilding) all of the societal issues that are killing us today. He eventually decides not to prevent it and let it happen because it ends up creating such an amazing future.
I honestly think the USA is what it is, a massive outlier among western, “developed” countries, because we’re the only one that hasn’t suffered country-wide, nation-altering tragedy.
Yes, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both horrible things, but they honestly don’t compare to places like London and Belfast (Northern Ireland) being bombed to bits during WWII, a decade plus of food rationing nationwide, etc.
We as a country just haven’t experienced the level of tragedy needed to actually unite us and give us respect and appreciation for our neighbors, our fellow countrymen. We’re still of the stone-age mindset that you can be an asshole to everyone not in your cave (house/family/in-group) and stay on top forever. That there’s zero need for societies at all, really.
Until we can get past the selfish bullshit, we won’t change. I don’t see it happening in any way other than nation-crippling disaster.
The lizard part of my brain thought for a minute, during Trump’s first term, that maybe this was his intention: destroy the country and go down being remembered as a fucking monster so that we can finally unite and rebuild as an actual developed country that cares for its citizens.
Obviously, that was extremely wishful thinking, BUT if someone actually did that, it would work.