Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Cool Breeze wrote: Sat Mar 06, 2021 10:47 am

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Mar 06, 2021 12:12 am Demarest off the cuff.

https://www.arthurdemarest.com/collapse ... s-today-2/

"You know what's going to bring our civilization down?...the byproducts of our incredible technology, our wonderfully successful capitalist economic system, our tremendous linking through communications and information systems, and the spread of democracy. That's what's gonna bring us down. The combination of all those things has caused a real boom which will lead to a giant, giant bust."

"So, you know, we're collapsing. But I'm not just a grumpy old man, we're collapsing. Although it sounds like it. I'm an expert on the collapse of 18 civilizations and we're collapsing. We've got everything. We've got every single fucking cause of collapse you could want except radical climate change and that's beginning. So, but as I've told you, don't worry about global warming. We won't make it far enough for that to be a problem. I think the wars are going to be the end of everything but only because the infrastructure's so vulnerable because of hypercoherence and technology it's also fragile."

What do you actually think he means by paragraph 1? When he gets to "climate change" in paragraph two it is nauseating and almost ruins his case. Why can't we just be in decline, as opposed to all the doomsday language, all the time? I believe we are in major decline. Do any of these guys believe in God? One of the proofs of GD, if it is real, is that if you don't have God (look, we forgot Him again, we don't need Him) you decline and get eaten from the inside. Happens every time. Thus, it's the only thing that can save you, and actually is the only thing that can save you from death anyway - if we are meant to never learn from the past only God can save us. Indeed, this is the whole point of Christianity and why when you abandon it, you suffer the consequences by denying who made us and why things aren't harmonious, but rather chaotic, without Him.

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Mar 06, 2021 12:12 am Demarest off the cuff.

https://www.arthurdemarest.com/collapse ... s-today-2/

"You know what's going to bring our civilization down?...the byproducts of our incredible technology, our wonderfully successful capitalist economic system, our tremendous linking through communications and information systems, and the spread of democracy. That's what's gonna bring us down. The combination of all those things has caused a real boom which will lead to a giant, giant bust."

"So, you know, we're collapsing. But I'm not just a grumpy old man, we're collapsing. Although it sounds like it. I'm an expert on the collapse of 18 civilizations and we're collapsing. We've got everything. We've got every single fucking cause of collapse you could want except radical climate change and that's beginning. So, but as I've told you, don't worry about global warming. We won't make it far enough for that to be a problem. I think the wars are going to be the end of everything but only because the infrastructure's so vulnerable because of hypercoherence and technology it's also fragile."

Higgenbotham wrote: Sun Dec 04, 2016 5:27 pm

Ted Fischer: We talk a lot about sustainability these days, but your work raises the question: Is collapse inevitable?

Arthur Demarest: On the future of the U.S., or of Western civilization in general, I tend to be quite pessimistic. Perhaps that is simply because “collapse” is what I do. As an archaeologist, I have excavated single trenches, just a few meters deep, in which you can see stratigraphic levels of several civilizations. We find layers of artifacts and evidence indicating periods of great prosperity, but always separated by levels of burned earth, ash and artifacts that reflect the epochs of social disintegration, chaos and tragedy that seem to conclude the achievements and aspirations of every society.

With that caveat about my gloomy perspective, I would say that today I see most of the symptoms of societies on the brink of collapse, not just in the U.S., but in the tightly interconnected societies of Western civilization – now essentially world civilization.

Ted Fischer: You have observed that in a crisis, leaders “do what they always do, just more of it.” Could you explain?

Arthur Demarest: When there is pressure for leaders to respond to problems or crises, they often simply intensify their efforts in their particular defined sphere of activity – even if that’s not relevant to the real problem. To do otherwise requires taking on entrenched practices and asserting power in areas where it often will not be well received. And leaders tend to see major crises more as threats to their own position rather than as systemic challenges for the societies that they govern or the institutions that they manage.

Frenzied grand constructions, wars and great rituals are among the common responses of ancient leaders to crises. These demonstrate powerful responses by the leaders (enhancing their threatened hold on power), but almost never really address the problems themselves. A cynic might characterize the giant U.S. stimulus bill of 2009 as such an effort.

Leaders may recognize that they are not addressing the real problems, but they rationalize their actions with the argument that they must first politically survive in order to later address the hard problems and sacrifices. Of course, they usually don’t ever actually get around to addressing the fundamental problems later, either because they don’t make it through the initial crisis or because, even later, they are not willing to risk sacrificing their own position (or “career”) with needed measures that usually require tough sacrifices by the population.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sens ... on-bubble/

Higgenbotham wrote: Mon Dec 05, 2016 9:14 pm

Higgenbotham wrote:https://soundcloud.com/bloomberg-busine ... s/odd-lots

25:06 Moderator: How quickly can it all collapse?

Arthur Demarest: Very quickly. It can happen very, very quickly. The Maya Civilization was most spectacular at around 780 to 790, 785, and by 810 it was just in pieces. 800 in a lot of places, so it can happen really, really quickly. It's often happened slowly in one part and then that reaches a critical point and then it just runs through the whole system which is what happened also with the Maya.

Higgenbotham wrote: Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:37 pm From Vanderbilt University professor Arthur Demarest, who has studied the collapse of 18 civilizations:

These events illustrate just one of the patterns characteristic of the collapse of civilizations that are now evident in our modern society. This particular one is called “hypercoherence.” This risk is well known by the IT community, but the public aren’t catching on. Hypercoherence is when a society’s systems and its regions become so well integrated and interconnected that when there is a problem or failure in one part of the system, it brings the whole system down. In the case of civilizations or complex societies, such hypercoherence has been involved as one of multiple factors in the decline, upheaval, or collapse of economies, states or empires or even of whole civilizations. By itself hypercoherence would normally lead to a crisis that often could be overcome. However, if such a hypercoherence crisis is combined with some of the other common dangerous weaknesses, it can lead to total disintegration. Our modern global interlinked world already has many such additional weaknesses like shorter and shorter cycles of thinking to judge political leaders, to demand profits of CEO’s, and to plan business or government decisions...

https://www.arthurdemarest.com/hypercoh ... h-airways/

aeden wrote: Thu Jun 25, 2020 5:58 pm The hypercoherence phase has been here

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Feb 13, 2018 3:16 pm Demarest's analysis is incomplete, as would be anybody's including my own because we all lack knowledge and experience as well as overweight experience we have (which is why I urge every person to adopt their own view of the future).

What I think could add to his comments would be an analysis of the degree of hypercoherence that exists today versus previous civilizations or previous crisis periods. The comments I can recall making regarding that on this thread are:

• Control by large corporations of finance, retail, manufacturing and food production and distribution (lack of Main Street businesses) which reduces redundancy and margins (Amazon is the best example I can think of)
  
  Coordinated worldwide Central Bank interventions which have created an unprecedented "all one market" bubble with no important outlier economy to provide redundancy
  
  Complex worldwide supply chains based on electronically enabled financial transactions (where, to repeat an example another analyst provided, aluminum is mined in one country, refined in another, the can produced in another, the soda made in yet another)
  
  Diminishing marginal returns due to factors such as increasing cost of energy production which make redundancy in inventory less affordable