I’m tired of the cognitive dissonance. I’m tired of the radical politicalization that everyone criticizes yet participates in. I’m tired of the complacent attitude 90% of people in the west have, watching everything around them crumble and burn while sitting in denial. It’s literally that meme of the cartoon dog with the coffee mug being burnt alive in his apartment.

How long will people blame the current state of things on covid? How long will people continue to vote in the same motherfuckers who get the same funding from the same billionaires who want to continue the same rapid decline of our entire society for their material benefit?

We need to start getting insanely real. Become that ‘crazy’ family member at thanksgiving, start having unhinged conversations about the future with your coworkers. In front of your bosses, because who cares? Everyone’s going down together. Nobody is going to come in and save the day. Every one of these issues is connected; we have all the information at our fingertips to incite an international, historic revolution. What’s stopping us?

I saw this video regarding Soil where Sadhguru (a mystic/ religious figure) talks about lack of attention to soil in UNCCD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBp4RkqfCmc&ab_channel=Sadhguru Is the issue with soil really that severe, that we should immediately switch to Organic farming? Also he mentions that the Oxygen content in the atmosphere has decreased from 32% to 22%, which it seems can cause cognitive deficiencies. Is this true?

Pretty Serious isn't it?

This essay is part of a series comparing the twilights of (1) Rome's slave-based economic system and (2) the Middle Ages' feudal system to (3) today's capitalist economic system. In addition to the broad life cycles of these economic systems, we'll note similarities between infectious diseases and changes in communication technologies common to all three eras. Finally, we'll see how belief systems rise and fall in tandem with these broad economic systems. When these systems seize up and stop functioning, people begin questioning authority. And that, in turn, leads to collapses of bedrock conceptions of reality itself.

https://preview.redd.it/i00g8gigiv0e1.png?width=1456&format=png&auto=webp&s=9071a91fc6b82371ae2cf8d2f6e75968c70f7082

Introduction

On the 2020 campaign trail, dark-horse presidential candidate Andrew Yang was fond of saying, “We never knew that capitalism was going to get eaten by its son, technology.” But that’s the very idea that Karl Marx painstakingly laid out over 150 years ago. His prophecy of doom was simply that once tech replaces enough employees, the capitalist system—comprised of employers and employees—will come crashing down. At that point, Marx supposed, we’d invent new production roles to replace the familiar employers and employees of capitalism. Just as those roles, once upon a time, replaced the lords and peasants of the Middle Ages.

The Advent of Capitalism

Capitalism was born in the aftermath of the Black Death, which killed a third of all Europeans. The resulting labor shortage gave the survivors an idea. Rather than swearing fealty to any particular feudal lord, the peasantry started selling their labor to the highest bidder instead. After that, a dynamic economy populated by employers and employees slowly began displacing the old feudal system of lords and peasants.

The horror of the plague also prompted Europeans to begin questioning the political authority of their day, the Roman Catholic Church. Wealthy banking families, notably the Medici of Florence, were the first to challenge its intellectual monopoly.

This challenge eventually culminated in the Protestant Reformation, a continent-wide conflagration that Europe resolved by drawing international borders the Pope was not allowed to cross. After that, each country chose between Catholicism and Protestantism, free from the influence of the Vatican. The modern nation-state was born.

The Treaty of Westphalia formalized international borders in 1648. With the political power of the Pope severely curtailed, banking houses rushed to fill that power vacuum. Just 46 years later, the world’s first surviving central bank popped up in London. And we’ve lived in a political order dominated by banks ever since.

Just as the Pope once crowned the noble heads of Europe, international bankers still hold political influence over our nominal heads of state. Banks rule our capitalist system of employers and employees the way the Pope used to rule over the feudal system of lords and peasants.

The Prophecy of Doom

The basic plumbing of the capitalist system is that employers (1) borrow money from banks and then (2) pay off their loans by hiring employees to bring goods and services to market.

This arrangement heavily incentivizes employers to minimize the number of paid employee hours they must deduct from their profits. That’s where technology comes in. Labor-saving tech is prized by business owners for its ability to fatten profit margins and undercut competition. That dynamic makes capitalism into a technological arms race.

However, this race to innovate and apply new technology also creates a countdown clock to disaster. With the recent arrival of ChatGPT, it’s easier than ever to imagine a future in which production is carried out by robot armies and managed by AI software. Under such a scenario, a handful of employers would control this vast, automated production apparatus.

However, without workers earning wages, no one would have the money to buy the resulting products. Collectively, customers and employees are the same people. That’s why capitalism’s relentless incentivization of technological improvement gives it a logical expiration date.

All the way back in 1867, this was the simple observation of Karl Marx. No system that divides people into employers and employees can survive past the point where technology renders the employees obsolete. At that point—Marx prophecied—new production roles would arise to replace employers and employees. Just as those roles once replaced the lords and serfs of the Middle Ages.

The Tipping Point

All the way back in the 1970s, we reached a crucial tipping point in America. It came unheralded and unrecognized.

During that decade, the supply of labor doubled as women arrived at the workplace for the first time in US history. Meanwhile, technology cut deeply into the demand for that labor. Long-distance communications and international jet travel facilitated the mass offshoring of American jobs. Computers radically enhanced the productivity of the remaining domestic workforce, such that many fewer workers were suddenly needed to perform the same tasks. This collapse in the demand for labor—in concert with a burgeoning supply—had a predictable impact on the price of labor: wages stagnated relative to worker productivity.

50 years of stagnant wages for employees has resulted in escalating political strife. But it has not yet resulted in the dramatic collapse of capitalism foreseen by Herr Marx. That’s because we slapped a temporary blowout patch over the problem.

The Patch

This temporary patch was the mass extension of credit to the working and middle classes. The 1980s are known for the rise of shopping malls and credit cards. In previous eras, credit cards were primarily used by business travelers. But in the 80s, they became ubiquitous. Debt was the only way the working and middle class families could afford to continue consumption apace.

And that brings us back to the banks that dominate politics in our modern era. We’ve papered over the fundamental problem of technology depressing wages by augmenting employees’ income with interest-bearing debt. But over the long haul, of course, the interest owed on that debt exacerbates the problem.

Debt was also a key factor in the Fall of Rome. For the Romans, slavery caused dangerous debt levels by undercutting the incomes of free laborers. Wealth inequality exploded to the point that there was almost no one left with an incentive to defend Rome from barbarians at her gates. The Fall of Rome gave interest-bearing debt such a bad name that the Roman Catholic Church considered moneylending to be a sin all the way up until the time of the Protestant Reformation.

Today, household debt sits at record levels. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is poised to make large swatches of employees redundant, from teachers to writers to paralegals. Our current situation is not unlike the one faced by the passengers on the Titanic. No one is unaware that we have a problem at this point. But, for most of us, the true scale of the looming disaster has yet to sink in…

Conclusion

The interplay between capitalism and technology means that there is a countdown clock built right into the capitalist system. It’s a ticking time bomb, scheduled to blow up in our faces when enough employees are made obsolete by technology. In the last half of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx articulated the nature of that problem definitively. But a final reckoning with his prophecy has been delayed by the kick-the-can-down-the-road tactics of international finance, the political power-brokers of the capitalist era.

Share System Failure

I'm mid-30s and have been contributing to my 401k since I first entered the workforce. However, the pace of collapse is incredibly worrisome to the extent that I'm considering changing my savings strategy in favor of spending more/traveling now. I have a gnawing suspicion life 30 years from now will be radically different.

So r/collapse, are you saving for retirement or have you adjusted your lifestyle?

Observation based on all of the latest elections toppling or significantly weakening ruling parties.

As collapse picks up more and more steam, the average voter in the western democracy is starting to feel the effects. Insurance coverage being denied while record storms are happening and fires ravage the whole states. Prices going up on every day goods with stagnant wages. People are looking for someone to blame and will always point to those "in control" .

This will lead to a constant rotation of ruling parties as the realities of collapse will only make the situation worse going forward. Even doing the right thing (lowering emissions and so on) requires degrowth, which many will look at as significant decrease in their standard of living.

Constant changing will lead to - continuity of government and cripple most of long term planning and strategy. It is highly likely we will see a parade of opportunists that will try to enrich themselves as fast as possible, knowing that they will be out the next election cycle.

I'm not sure if this counts as 'coping.' I spend a lot of time alone, not working right now (trying to finish my degree but I'm not sure it will be of any use), so I do a lot of thinking about humans and modern, industrial society.

Earth's history is long, although it's nothing compared to the rest of the universe. Humans have been here for such a short time, and our modern society barely registers on earth's timeline. Speaking specifically about the west, we've only lived the way we do for a mere handful of decades - public health infrastructure, transportation and education systems we built are so fragile and the whole mess is not sustainable.

So what happens to humans? What happens to those of us in the west, who don't have the knowledge or skills to hunt and preserve our own food, the chronically ill who depend on medicine to stay alive (my own daughter is one - she's a type 1 diabetic so is very dependent on the pharmaceutical industry)? The people marooned in cities or suburban wastelands. How is our society going to evolve and adapt?

I guess I don't care if we go extinct. We don't deserve this beautiful planet. I hope we die out and leave the flora and fauna to repopulate the earth, but (selfishly, probably) I don't want to be witness to it. I don't want to lose my children or die and leave them alone.

I felt many aspects of the world becoming shittier as days passed,

in 2020s alone we get global warming on record setting pace, big country that blatantly occupied other without big repercussion, a country commiting genocide with the support of superpower and the whole world could do nothing but just see, overpollution, widened wealth gap, fascism and nazism on the rise everywhere, misinformation that benefit ruling powers and the riches.

With those condition in the mind, what drive you forward to live and look for the future? is it your children and family? or that AI will help us fix those mess? is it your aspiration and goals? is it your hobbies? lets talk

Humans are super reliant on tech and having to get back to physical survival skills like knowing the land will be quite the shift for those few who survive, especially considering how little of it will be liveable. Do you anticipate that the amish will have a slight advantage, even if only just for a short time, while the rest of us are left high and dry?

Im 24 now, almost 25 - march. Always felt like i was gonna die young. When i was young i heard nonstop about the looming threat of climate change. it was quite fucking obnoxious, theyd preach and preach at us like a bunch of 8 year olds are gonna be able to do anything to stop what was happening. But i still cared about it cuz it was important. Then, over and over again, we heard about different ways the planet would end. Zombies, the mayan calendar. I was born the day the dot-com bubble burst. Some people thought that would be the end of the world. Movie after movie about the apocalypse.

When i was about 15 id been suicidal for some time and started trying to understand what death meant for me, and what it would mean if all of us died somehow. If an anomalous event killed us, the sun miraculously dies and we freeze in 7 minutes, a comet, whatever. I wanted to be able to face death with acceptance and peace. So i thought about it a lot.

Im cool with the earth killing me. She was always going to find some way to get me, that old battle ax. I stopped being suicidal because i realized theres no point in expediting my death if its gonna happen anyway somehow. None of us get out of it alive. And for the amazing, fucking astounding, incredible gift of life and awe for life that i was given by earth, i am happy to repay her with my death and body for whatever lifeforms need this next. I feel like ive been held fast to a shooting star since i was born and its finally burning in our atmosphere. And once i accepted the tragedy of that and move past it, i discovered its kind of a beautiful thing. I can go out on my terms truly and with the rest of humanity. I can choose something for myself. And i choose to be born and killed in earths hands. Its funny, once i accepted my death i suddenly didnt want to die anymore. And i still dont WANT to die. Id like to face death the way every other human who has lived long enough for it to just naturally find them has. I just know its coming and that i was right all along, which is unsurprising to me. I usually am about these things.

My solace in this is that life will go on. Not mine, not yours, not ours. But something small, something that has no knowledge about humans. Something that will just persist because it can and doesnt know anything else. Some hidden life deep in the ocean, or a spore waiting somewhere safe. Something. Just not us. Which is for the best honestly. We really fucking suck and should not have waited so long to do something.

Humans pride ourselves on being nonviolent in "enlightened societies" (rolling my fucking eyes so hard) but its all a farse. The truth is we just arent supposed to be violent with people who we deem within our own societies. But i think its coded in us to be physical, territorial, and to hunt things. I mean, look around. Lets try because it cant hurt to try, and when that doesnt work, let it be someone elses turn. at this point, the people who could change things gave up long before people like me ever got here. I was damned from birth. And i cant do shit about it. But the jellyfish could be happy. The squid could be happy. Something else will take our place, even if its a billion years from now. And i will die happy knowing that.

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e: thanks for all the love everyone. Also i have received a lot of comments saying they dont feel peace, rather acceptance or deep sorrow and grief. Thats where im at too, i just couldnt think of a better word.

In the 1810s a volcano erupted suffocating much of the earth with ash and that year was dubbed the year without summer. People starved so badly they began to eat grass to survive. I know its dumb. I know were doomed. But what if we set off a shitload of volcanos in the hope that it would stop the planet heating more? Would other life have a chance of surviving earth, because we most likely wont and dont really deserve to imo anyway?

. . . .

eta hi guys. read again. I know it would be bad for us. we are already fucked. would it do anything good for the earth (specifically nothing on land, just the ocean) in our wake?