It's the End of the World as We Know It: Part 1 - Status Report ~ by Ransom

The Black Pill, for all its bitterness, has a large share of devotees.

People are worried about the path the world is taking. As a man with an internet connection I have seen despair in more than one corner of the internet. Recent comments on this blog brought it up again.

Here I intend to address the Black Pill in relationship to the future of America. This article describes the problems we face. Subsequent articles address false and true solutions. I hope my efforts are both encouraging and instructive.

For anyone who doesn't know, 'the Black Pill' is a succinct term to describe an outlook on a subject. As The Matrix's Blue Pill and Red Pill respectively represent blissful ignorance and challenging awareness, the Black Pill refers to the knowledge that victory is impossible, that evil is overwhelming, that defeat is inevitable. It is the philosophy of despair.

It is my purpose to demonstrate that despair is not warranted, to guide readers away from traps that waste time and energy, and to describe some methods of addressing the real problems we face.

Despair is Not Warranted

We live in challenging times.

We have the most wealth & the most debt in all of history, the most power & the largest threats of all empires, and the best communication & the weakest communities of the modern world.

For all that we possess, for all that our ancestors accomplished, we have a deep unease – and for good reason. The family is a much-assaulted thing. Where our communities still exist they are fractured. Our inherited identities are being dissolved. Our masters within and without the governments are not amused with their human cattle.

If ever there was a best of times, it is not this.

Despite all this and more, despair is not warranted.

I say again; despair is not warranted.

Here is why.

Points of Hope

Action is possible. It is difficult and comes at a cost, but meaningful action is possible and is being carried out every day. Our resident body builders can testify that change results from daily commitment to an effective plan and that gains don't care about your feelings. So it is with life. No-one gains strength by talking about the gym, by learning better lifts, or by hiring superior trainers. We gain strength by working out, by making and executing commitments. So it is with life.

We are subject to optical illusions. Our brains are very good at certain tasks that can work against us under some conditions. The anticipation of loss can be more painful than the loss itself, and people tend to regain their temperamental equilibrium after a period of discouragement.

We incorrectly believe we care about certain things. The world is complicated and just about every object & institution serves multiple purposes. Those institutions are easily conflated with their functions and the prospect of losing the institutions appears to mean losing those functions. Those roles can be filled in other ways.

History shows the way. While our situation is in many ways unique, so were all the situations before us. Our ancestors have a proven track record. We are of the same stock.

So much for the generalities. Now I will survey the problems so that we can devise appropriate solutions.

Challenges We Face

Describing the problems we face is the work of a lifetime, but not necessary. Here is a cursory description of the big topics.

Imperial Contraction

America is the homeland of a vast empire. All empires fall. The United States and its corporate lovers have played a mighty game that must draw to a close. I am not alone in saying that the empire is fraying.

The imperial contraction is inevitable. When it comes it will likely be both chunky and quick as allies and subjects pivot to new power structures. The process will not be clean and may drag on for quite a while before it truly ends. The British Empire still exists, though few really care.

Historically empires last for an average of a little over two centuries before their fortunes reverse. The process is not pleasant for the little people involved, though the big players will make out like the bandits they usually are. Dying dragons thrash wildly in their pain.

Example: if we'd gotten involved in Syria sixty years ago, half the Syrians would be dead and the other half would be playing baseball like God and George Washington intended. Today most Americans probably think Syria is a girl on the iPhone.

Governmental

It is a fantasy that the US government was virtuous some time in the past. This is not the case. Graft and corruption have been with us since the beginning.

The government's ability to do wrong has increased even as the forces that pushed back against it have weakened.

Example: We live in a surveillance state that has access to nearly everything; their only difficulty is getting away with using it.

Cultural

Our cultural decline is many-faceted. The enthusiasm that buoyed us for two centuries is flagging. The western frontier that influenced American temperament and self-concept was consumed to extinction nearly a century and a half ago. Our origin story is distant, unknown, and despised.

Example: Boy Scouts of America was a cultural institution that provided a sort of rite of passage with connections both to history and the environment that shaped that history. Now the Boy Scouts is for gays & girls and 'camp' describes the The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Moral

The moral framework that our society was built on is under attack from a range of competitors. Our relationships, concepts, and institutions lose solidity and definition because they rely on beliefs no longer held and behaviors no longer reinforced.

Example: Basically everything.

Social

As a result of the moral and cultural changes, social structure is in decline as well. Society is being ground down by developments that have destructive potential but no indication of creative potential – it is not being replaced, only worn away.

Example: Marriage was replaced by shacking up which is being replaced by hooking up. Each step down resulted in a reduction of commitment and people's responses to the consequences result in even more reluctance to commit.

Technological

Changing technology obsoletes old institutions and creates new ones. Social and cultural adaptations lag those changes, and the gaps provide opportunities for problems to grow.

Example: the rapid growth of the internet gave unprecedented access to pornography with consequences that were not known, and in many cases parents didn't even know what was going on.

False Solutions

In response to all this people often waste their time pursuing solutions that won't work, create new problems, and make existing problems worse.

More on that later.

Cycles

What we are experiencing is not new. This has happened many times before and is inevitable. Humans have been the same since the beginning of time and our behavior falls into rather boring cycles.

The Imperial Cycle

An empire may be roughly described as a group of nations under a single government. The empire may be ruled by a single people (as in the earlier Roman Empire) or by a power structure of many peoples (as in the later Roman Empire).

Sir John Glubb's The Fate of Empires is a modestly well-known piece of historical investigation that covers the rise and fall of empires through history. The lessons in this document are interesting to those of us wondering where we are at and where we are going.

Glubb discerned that empires demonstrated a similar set of behaviors that may be broken down into discrete stages: Outburst, Conquest, Commerce, Affluence, Intellect, Decadence, and Decline. The details are available elsewhere but in summary successful empires enjoy approximately two hundred to two-hundred-and-fifty-years of success before they begin to decline, a process that can take quite a length of time.

Where to begin counting is tricky. The beginning of the Revolutionary War? The Westward spread from the original 13 states? The military conquest of the South? Ultimately it doesn't matter. The numbers vary from one empire to the other. The main takeaways are: 1) Empires have lifespans, and 2) We are near the point of decline, or in it.

Men of the West has a short analysis of our place on the progression.

The Civilizational Cycle

Distinct from but intertwined with nations and empires, civilizations rise and fall. Western civilization has enjoyed centuries of success and has touched most landmasses in the world. Through some strange synchrony, every culture that participates in Western civilization is seeing headwinds at the same time.

Our expectations of what this means are informed by our knowledge of the past. This knowledge is not always applicable or correctly oriented.

Civilizations grow & shrink, mutate & die. Our perception of civilization is skewed by our historical perspective for two reasons:

1. Language creates hard distinctions for soft and fluid situations. Where does one civilization end and the next begin? In reality things experience ongoing change, both between and within what we call “Eras.” Modern France descends from pre-Middle-Ages barbarians who filled the void of the Roman Empire, but French is a Romance language. Legal concepts & infrastructure layout carries over from Rome as well. We look back on history and say “this is this and that is that,” but it could be cut up any number of ways.
2. We attribute much to what we see and little to what we do not see. Archaeology thrives on the found. Periods of history that created durable art, artifacts, and writing are seen as successful while periods of history that did not are dismissed. While durability has its benefits it does not always correlate to increased value for the actual inhabitants of that period.

We humans love categorizing and cataloging but it can give us a skewed or incorrect perception of the past that make comparisons with the present unprofitable.

Here's an interesting article on civilizational collapses from Aeon: What the Idea of Civilizational Collapse Says About History.

Here are some valuable highlights:

“Very often, it’s suggested that civilisations collapse, but this isn’t quite right. It is more accurate to say that states collapse. States are tangible, identifiable ‘units’ whereas civilisation is a more slippery term referring broadly to sets of traditions. “

“The idea of a collapse of Maya civilisation seems just wrong – and it carries with it the wrong kind of implications – that the Maya all disappeared or that their post-collapse culture is less important or less worthy of our attention. Via many individual collapses, Classic Maya society transformed through the Terminal Classic and into the Postclassic – a development that is hardly surprising when compared with the changing map of Europe across any five-century period. “

“States collapsed, civilisations or cultures transformed; people lived through these times and employed their coping strategies – they selectively preserved aspects of their culture and rejected others.“

The Cycle of Governments ('Kyklos')

Some Greek philosophers had theories of how governments change over time. As described in the Infogalactic article on Kyklos, governments start at a high form, degrade to a degenerate counterpart, and are then overthrown & replaced by the next form down. The process repeats until anarchy is reached.

I am skeptical of how useful this is because the Greeks seem to have valued pleasing categorization over actual observation, but Plato & Aristotle shouldn't be dismissed offhand.

If they are correct, then our Democracy will devolve into mob rule followed by anarchy, which should lead to wonderful absolute monarchy again (thank Zeus).

The Good Times Cycle

At this point we have all heard the statement that “Good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men, and strong men create good times.”

I have no opinion on how universally true it is, but surely there is some truth in it that is beneficial to us today.

I think it would be more accurate to say that that “Good times create wasteful, expansive systems that undercut their success, leading to hard times that require the development of lean, productive systems that lead to good times.” That's far less catchy though.

The idea that there are weak men and strong men assumes that men's natures are fixed. I disagree. Individuals adapt to their environments. The weak may become strong – when necessary quite quickly.

None-the-less it is uncontroversial to say that we live in an era of material abundance & have used that prosperity to invest in a whole lot of poisonous nonsense. It will come back to bite us. When it does we will deal with it.

Hope

So yes; things are looking bad. Our host empire is showing its age, our culture is mutilating itself, and our civilization no longer believes in its own existence. So what's the good news?

Optical Illusions

The period of time that seems to us normal is historically abnormal. Most of us have enjoyed unusual peace in the post-WWII period. Health too has been unusual; the invention of antibiotics has been a blessing, and before that anesthetics & medical hand-washing as well.

The Pax Americana & Pax Britannica provided clear benefits at least to those on the inside track of those respective empires.

We have done mighty well, some of it by accident of natural resources & some of it by effort of our ancestors.

But that doesn't last forever. Sooner or later things have to go back to normal. We've been so saturated by the blessings of abnormal prosperity that normal looks pretty bad. Sure, normal is a bit more work, but it's normal. People survive.

We have a lot of stuff, but how much of it does our happiness actually rely upon? Sure it's nice to have a wireless can opener that can play YouTube videos & remind us to buy more detergent, but do we really need it?

The fear of losing a thing is often more painful than the thing's absence.

When we possess something we can imagine a thousand ways to lose it & visualize the worst possible consequences of its loss. Once gone we also lose the uncertainty & discover that we can compensate better than we imagined. The coward dies a thousand deaths, while the brave man dies once.

These are optical illusions.

Not Everything is Bad to Lose

If history is any guide and we are correct in our perception of trouble, much will be lost in the next phase of human history. A lot of this will indeed be tragic, but not all of it. Many of the things we lose don't really matter, and some we are better off without.

The prosperity of the last century has provided a sort of “line of credit” that funds the growth of pointless and downright nasty things. When the prosperity crashes, so does the line of credit. When the margins of life are thin, things that don't provide value come at a higher price.

The really bad stuff is supported by the state and is thus able to fund its losses at others' expense, but that cannot last forever. As growth and good end up funding their own destruction, so also evil eventually makes war on its own foundation.

The losses we will suffer will be harsh, but they will provide social, moral, and spiritual clarity.

Solutions Exist

While problems exist with more on the way, we are not locked into one single terrible future. We have power to shape events for the benefit of our descendants, more power than our parents or grandparents had.

The trick is knowing a) what to do, and b) what NOT to do.

These will be the subjects of the next posts in this series.

It is common when discussing these topics to reference the song “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Those of you who abhor country music are welcome to pass over this video, but as for me I will respectfully submit to tradition.