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Willie Tomg posted:D&D's primary problem is roundly recognized to be unfunny cliques lashing out from and retreating into the comfort of their mod-pet megathreads making the forum painful to read unless you really like cliques of vaguely-center-left dweebs, and it gets really obvious when people attempt to post topics more granular than "middle east war thread" or "eastern europe thread" or "climate change thread" While i'd love if we posted more threads there's also not much to discuss here, as the subject of civilizational "collapse" is necessarily purely speculative and most perspectives on the subject are based more on genre fiction rather than anything real that can be debated. Films like Mad Max put this picture in our head of anarchic devastation in the aftermath of some cataclysm, but rarely is the process of getting from our highly organized and structured civilization ever explained. The requisite series of events is so implausible as to render any attempt to elaborate absurd. Institutions like the state and government exist first and foremost in the mind and as tradition, and therefore it is only when we choose to break with them that they can collapse. Real collapses look less like the Road Warrior than they do the French Revolution or end of the Soviet Union. The basic framework of most governments existed long before fossil fuels or capitalism and barring the literal extermination of their residents their future governments will probably remain relatively similar. I mean let's look at the most complete example of state failure from the recent past, the fall of the Somali Federal government in 1991. Although state institutions like the civil courts, schools and police ceased to function, the conflict can also be seen as the reassertion of authority by traditional Somali tribal society. Civil courts were replaced with Xeer and Islamic courts, order is kept with blood feuds instead of police, and the warlords relied on the ancient tribal networks to raise militias and control territory. The anarchy of Somali is highly structured and reflective of the old traditions and natural conceptions of power and governance held by Somali people. Any collapse in a place like the United States will also be so constrained, and not even famine and war should be expected to break society from established patterns.
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Apr 4, 2017 04:30
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Willie Tomg posted:I think also "collapse" is a really lovely term which connotates a suddenness that will simply not happen on a societal scale, though it may occur on an interpersonal level. Just because The Age Of Trump has ushered in an era of $4 avocados to the detriment of my Texas restaurant doesn't mean that suddenly people won't be able to go out to eat in the state anymore, or the economics of the industry suddenly don't make sense. Just that it'll suck and will necessitate a period of navel-gazing whereupon if we're successful we realize we've been putting good avocados on mediocre food because avocados were cheap and doing a good job is hard, and if we're smart we make better food and if we're not the restaurant folds and we're a sad story in a world full of 'em and in either case life goes on. Until the next Trump Tariff. Collapse has a very clear definition and its definitely not "slump." Maybe a nuclear war could cause a real collapse, but even in that event I suspect a few years or decades beyond the initial disaster the lives of survivors would more closely resemble those of us today than that of our favorite characters from apocalypse literature. Nobody ever bothers to elaborate such scenarios in fiction though because its boring and doesn't accommodate violent fantasies.
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Apr 4, 2017 05:26
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Wakko posted:Hmmm... climate data is so damning that depression amongst the scientists who study it is a regular source of media fodder.. that IS exactly like the homeless man outside my metro stop who told me the beast of revelation walks amongst us. That thread is full of suicidally depressed people whose understanding of the impacts of climate change is little more sophisticated than the film The Day After Tomorrow. Cease to Hope posted:no they absolutely did not. their replacements claimed to be their successors, but each of those things destroyed the order that proceeded them That's like saying The English crown was destroyed in the 19th century by Parliament's continued accumulation of powers. Cultural systems are always changing, both in crisis and in prosperity. Calibanibal posted:but to answer your q op, yes capitalism is unstable and will collapse. thats not a prophecy, thats science Unstable systems need not necessarily collapse, but can in some circumstances exist in an unstable equilibrium. See for example the old Thai Kingdom of Ayutthaya, in which the King was compelled to continually devolve control of the serfs to subordinate princes and nobles at the expense of his own power, until reaching a point at which power was so devolved either the princes overthrew the king or he crushed them and seized back control of the serfs. The system is necessarily unstable, but crises tend to reinvigorate the system rather than disrupt it. According to Edmund Leach the the politics of the Kachin people in highland Burma also often followed a predictable oscillation between the Gumsa Gumlao systems of government, switching between hierarchical chiefdoms to egalitarian self-governing villages. Basically if you think that just because a system doesn't work it has to change, well history doesn't exactly bear that out.
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Apr 5, 2017 02:53
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