Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

"We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism...

Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination...

All Goliaths, however, contain the seeds of their own demise, he says: “They are cursed and this is because of inequality.” Inequality does not arise because all people are greedy. They are not, he says. The Khoisan peoples in southern Africa, for example, shared and preserved common lands for thousands of years despite the temptation to grab more.

Instead, it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming.

Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”

“Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.”

Kemp points to these “agents of doom” as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. “These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,” he says. “Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry.

“The key thing is this is not about all of humanity creating these threats. It is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering all [the risks] up.”

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Jul 12, 2025 10:59 amEarly next week I can post that, then circle back to the general discussion about location and resilience to heat and extremes in rainfall.

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri May 24, 2024 1:44 pm
My preference is to be in an area that is still amenable to growing vegetables, but also where the population density has thinned out considerably. That's approximately near the red line below as precipitation also thins out moving west. So these areas aren't "best" for growing but still generally "OK". Overall I don't think someone is going to get too much past that red line (approximately) moving west and have an easy time of it growing vegetables until it gets wetter near the west coast. And on the line it's not going to be real easy.

The Telegraph

Republicans tell Trump to ‘grow up’ after he sacks data chief
Benedict Smith
Sat, August 2, 2025 at 11:11 AM CDT

President Trump’s sacking of Erika McEntarfer was described as ‘kind of impetuous’ by Cynthia Lummis, a Republican senator.

Republicans have told Donald Trump to “grow up” after he sacked the US government’s top statistician over underwhelming jobs numbers.

The president said on Friday he would remove Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) shortly after government figures indicated the economy was performing worse than expected.

The move has prompted a rare backlash against Mr Trump from members of his own party.

Higgenbotham wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2020 5:08 am Say, like Trump, you've been in the real estate business, and you recognize it's a bubble and has been for a long time. It's logical to say, well, it's been a bubble for a long time and the way to address it has been to buy the dip and then wait for some excesses, trim holdings, wait for the next dip, etc. The practical way to be successful in navigating the bubble has been to take on debt and assume the general trajectory is onward and upward to bigger and bigger bubbles with speed bumps along the road.

“I have been asked a lot about how I feel about passing along Bridgewater after having started and built it over the last 50 years,” Dalio said in the LinkedIn post. “I am thrilled about it because I love seeing Bridgewater alive and well without me — even better than alive and well with me.”

I think the masses don't really give overpopulation much thought, and for most people alive today this is just how things have always been. None of them have had to seriously consider food scarcity.

There are also those who are more aware and just assume that we'll engineer our way out of our problems again when we start hitting the next production ceiling. Feels like wishful thinking to me, to just assume everything will work out without anything to base it on.

I'm in a field that is heavily involved with crop production, I've been to conferences and seen the latest advances and what's in the pipeline. All of the improvements that are being worked on are incredibly incremental, scraping very small efficiencies at great cost. Most of the industry is focused on leveraging AI and automation to get something on the order of 5-10% yield improvements, and the costs to implement these technologies in the real world are really prohibitive at this point for most crops.

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue May 27, 2025 12:45 am One is that I believe AI, instead of dousing a field with a uniform coverage of pesticides, can "look" for insects and only use pesticides where it determines they are needed, avoiding waste. Same type of thing for other inputs.

FullMoon wrote: Thu Jul 17, 2025 1:42 pm What's your thoughts on the religious and spiritual aspect of this transition time forthcoming? Will we see a renewal of faith in God and how will that affect the social structure and politics?

“New York City is finished,” he said. “They can’t keep order there, and you can’t have business without order. It’ll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again.”

“What do you hear of the U.S. government?” I said. “We don’t have electricity an hour a month anymore and there’s nothing on the air but the preachers anyway.”

“Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn’t met since twelve twenty-one,” Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. “We’re still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn’t what it used to be, is it?”

“We believe in the future, sir. Only it’s not like the world we’ve left behind,” Joseph said.

“How’s that?”

“We’re building our own New Jerusalem up the river. It’s a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. Tell me something: do you know Jesus Christ.”

aeden wrote: Thu Jul 03, 2025 12:24 pm 1 day ago
I’m a younger millennial born in the 90’s and my best friend in my industry, tech, is 10 years my senior born in the 80’s. We’ve both been on the struggle bus for the last couple years. Work is getting much much harder to find, prices aren’t keeping up, and we’ve both make huge changes to our lifestyles to keep our heads above water. He’s selling his gaming PC now, I got stacks of stuff to sell myself. Both our AC units are running absolutely minimally. We’re not going out to eat. My friend admittedly has a far larger lifestyle, I just got married and that came with 130k of student loans. My wife only takes home 19k, so she got absolutely shafted and sold a lie. I’ve told her it’s going to be a very long time till we move or get her a new car. We’re canning food, hang drying clothes, using fans instead of AC, stopped buying stuff to drink, it’s tap water now, buying mark down food, and I’m doing my own haircuts. I’m in the top income bracket in my area, living on nothing, and I feel the pain.


The wasting files