American Democracy Will Fail In The Next 30 Years

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Fair point, but the Marxist in my is screaming that the capitalist class is already being a class of vampires living of the blood (and labour) of the proletariat.
Technology will just replace the proletariat, making them not just oppressed but unnecessary for the people who own the technology.

To quote the dead kennedys:
Jobless millions whisked away,
At last we have more room to play
So let's get dressed and dance away the night...

He're a crazy thought...

What do you think the fox in the hen house might be if we're looking at everything that's been said about human reasoning - that we're at least able to digest or be aware of - from the ancient Egyptians, Chaleans, and Greeks forward, something that seems like it's equivalent of 'beware the dark triad traits?'.

Capital's like anything else, it depends whose hands its in and for what purpose. I think the thing we generally have to be alarmed about is when people are cutting too many deals with 'reality' so to speak. One of my friends tried to get me to read The Expanse a year or two ago and I remember, I think it's somewhere early on in season one, where they're on the main floor of a casino on one of the moons of Jupiter and all the security apparatus are trying to usher people into these small pill box bunkers that are filled with both radioactive material and bio agent that James Corey dreamed up, where they were all going to be used a bit like Aliens-style incubation chambers. I think there are plenty of people out there who'd gladly be the guards ushering people into such places or be behind such things. I don't think there's really a system to give them - democracy, social democracy, socialism, Marxism, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism, if anything I'd love to give them anarco-primitivism so they could go throw spears at each other but you get my point. There's a fundamental bug in humanity and we're still quite bad at quantifying when it surfaces or separating it out.

Impeaching Trump would be the end of democracy. That's his only point. And he fails to elaborate on why he even believes that. And in fact he was too timid to even say it out loud. He had to lay that between the lines.

So I guess we have nothing to worry about because the guy failed to make any point. So if he cant state why "democracy will fail in thirty years" I suppose it wont fail.

Democracy will survive the onslaught of "trigger warnings". That's my bold prediction.

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But the level of political discourse has deteriorated IMHO because there is no middle ground even on specific issues anymore. You would think that something like gun control, or immigration, would exist on sliding scales, where the opposing groups could compromise somewhere in the middle of the scale. But no. Everything is couched these days as all or nothing. And compromise is the essence of democracy. So if I were that guy, and trying to fear monger I would use that tack.

Hmm. The thing about capital is that it undermines human notions of "moral" and "good", as in capitalism, the only measure is profit -
I don't think it even makes sense to speak of capitalism in a future scenario of a class of people owning everything and a useless class - at that point, the profit motive is kind of pointless, because who are they going to profit off, and for what purpose? They will already own everything and be, socially speaking, all powerful.
It is just for now, that the majority of mankind is being disenfranchised as to who gets to profit off them - if you're hungry/homeless, you don't really have a choice. And if you have enough money to consume, you still don't have a free choice, if allyou can afford is the products of someone else being exploited.

Noticing the (lack of) morality of those in power is fine, but you have to acknowledge that the system is built so that it selects for these people. - it's like saying that fictatorship was fine as long as the dictator was a benevolent person - but can you imagine a way in which a benevolent person could become a dictator?

I actually can: in a monarchy, where the heir to the throne becomes ruler by inheritance/accident, despite his benevolent streak.
Any more competitive mode of selection os likely bound to select someone who takes advantage of a given situation....

Where Marxism doesn't do it for me is that it's not pessimistic enough. Life on this planet is a state of nature. That state of nature is the domain of the Queen of Hearts where you have to run twice as fast to stay in the same place and more than enough people and things are out to - if not kill you - take everything you have. That's the way of evolution in the raw. It actually takes an artificial impediment of some type to impede evolution from functioning, and even there you have a temporary stop-gap with pressure building up below the surface.

Part of why I can't help but find Brett Weinstein's inputs on game theory interesting is that grappling with Tiamat on this is the only way we have a fighting chance and that specifically means bringing a game-theoretical toolbox to the battle. The problem with Marx is that he was offering one of those plugs, he came too early (no fault of his own) to see how important evolution is in the accrual of inequality and oppression (nature actually hates all life and wants weakness to be stomped out wherever it can be found - to that extent the 6th mass extinction isn't a tragedy - it's the pyrrhic triumph of human supremacy from the other side of the coin), and the other problem - Marx didn't get to live to see what Lenninism, Stalinism, Maoism, the Khmer Rouge, etc. looked like and it's difficult to believe he would have held his ground on those ideas if he had lived to see communism effectively create model kleptocracies for sadists.

Speaking of Tiamat, I can't help but feel like she's a far and away better model of what we're grappling with than the Christian devil or Lucifer.

When I think of her I think back to reading DragonLance Chronicles, Legends (Caramon and Raistlin saga), they have three primary deities - a white light deity whose thought of as the great white dragon (Paladine), the god of neutrality (Gideon), and the goddess of Evil named Takhisis. Her influence on destroying the world in Chronicles and Legends is sort of in line with what Frank Herbert talked about with Harkonen pragmatism in Dune, ie. whatever's expedient and practical wins the day. One of the primary characters (Tanis if I remember correctly) when he was disguised as one of the Dragon Highlords' minions, when he was in the presence of Takhisis, went on an internal monologue about her being the goddess of evil and yet being in some way holy - something that you wouldn't want to straight-away 'kill' even if you could due to some sacred aspect of her existence, a bit like the consequences for removing her would be beyond human comprehension.

I tend to think they nailed something with that. This is part of why I don't think game theory would end human brutality against each other or our environment but at a minimum it might put enough wedges in the right places (surgically aimed) to create redirect valves that could buy us maybe hundreds of years rather than just a generation or two.

As of right now we're clearly not smart enough to solve our own problems. Even the best and brightest as far as I can tell have some useful solution but they're still a bit cobbled together and intuitively pointed in the right direction but far from being answers as of yet - and very few people are listening to them because they're paying way more attention to a political class with 20th century solutions who spends all of their time courting senior citizens for votes. I think we'd need to do whatever we can to buy the human race enough time to be able to have the intelligence at our fingertips needed to solve these problems.

To that end though I think in a lot of ways we'd have to throw out pre-21st century solutions. At the same time it might seem a bit cheesy to borrow from Ken Wilbur in this way but I think the phrase 'transcend and include' is critical in that outreach for solutions, otherwise we'll make some version of mistakes we've already made, should have known better than to make, and it'll leave us back at square one for our efforts even more disillusioned and hopeless.

It’s already failed. Our rights have been trampled, the gover has illegally expanded its powers and does whatever it wants.

I'm going to add something, ie. what convinces me that we're in deep trouble. Working for a mom and pop custom programming outfit I'm seeing where businesses aren't just out to wring a good deal out of each other, they seem to be out to take each other to the cleaner. I've gotten a sense of what it is for a client to wring more out of us than covers my wages. The ethos seems to be drifting from narcissistic to sociopathic. That flavor seems to be extending across a lot of domains in finance as well and the SJW thing seems to be a distraction.

That's where Haidt's claim that the trust is getting wrung out of the system really sticks with me. If our economic transactions are drifting from competitively collaborative to predator/prey that can't last.

The problem with this is that; human beings in particular are at their strongest when they chose to cooperate. Because of our weak physiology, cooperation has and still is our primary mechanism for survival.

If we were genetically hardwired to act in pure competition, we would be extinct. No doubt about that.

Natural selection in our case favors cooperation over competition.

Last edited by RushKing on 10 Sep 2019, 10:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think it's all one way or the other necessarily and I do think David Sloan Wilson is making some interesting inroads on studying cooperation and the size of societal units. OTOH I don't think our societal percentages of psychopaths and sociopaths are necessarily decided by capitalism, narcissism and antisocial PD by themselves seem like they can be moving targets (ie. can be acquired) but if there's anything we've noticed through history, especially in the 20th where we took some serious shots at Marxism, it's that our psychopaths and sociopaths would never let a good opportunity go to waste and it takes having a huge bureaucratic system of one type or another where hardly anyone can do anything in order to safeguard ourselves either against that effect or at least keep the psychopaths and sociopaths competing with each other and in relative stalemate.

That's a very complicated subject. I like power to be as spread out as much as possible. That way psychopaths and sociopaths (if the same number exist post-capitalism) are capable of the least amount of damage.

I personally view Marxism as a useful diagnostics tool. As you probably know, I don't have favorable opinions around the idea of the "proletarian" state and nation states in general.

This is part of why I can be sympathetic to some types of technocrats so long as they're coming at it from the perspective of intense interest in the worlds problems and figuring out ways of getting under them.


Where I find myself in a lot of agreement with Bret Weinsten that the solutions need to be deeply game-theorhetical and if David Sloan Wilson is able to really underscore patterns of societal organization that are pro-cooperative (like team-sized groups competing more rather than individuals in one of his examples) then I'd hope there's at least some chance of people who have the right mindset being able to think of public policy decisions that would somewhat loosely favor these outcomes. I say loosely in that last part because we want enough freedom or ambiguity to navigate in case such experiments have unforeseen consequences and if China's one-child policy and failed attempts at reversing it are anything to learn by it's that once a rule gets too dogmatically ingrained in cultural norms it can be difficult to remove.

"American Democracy Will Fail In The Next 30 Years"

That implies that it wasn't already a failure to begin with.

Well, technically if free will is an illusion there's never been a free society in the entire history of human civilization and the very word 'freedom' is a bit like religion or the easter bunny. Similarly it's perfectly valid to say that if 1 billion people died in a massive pogrom it would be as nothing in infinite time and space.

Point being - conversations scale to a relevant range. The relevant range here is evaluating to what degree there's likely going to be a significant change in social contract and the likelihood that such a change in social contract will impede the unfolding of individual agency anymore than the demands of neoliberal capitalism already do.

Frankly I think Americans deserve whatever they have coming to them. If they choose to allow a hardcore capitalistic megalomaniac into the white house who wants to destroy every bit of our human progress as a nation and they don't put up much of a fight for a country that they claim to be deeply patriotic about because they are too busy arguing amongst themselves over bs then in my honest opinion their nation DESERVES to collapse.

It's just like in George Romero's American horror classic "Night of the Living Dead" when all the strangers hiding in the farm house got killed by the zombies because they were too busy fighting and bickering amongst themselves to cooperate for their own survival.

Maybe a society that values individualism ain't all it's cracked out to be?

Every American wants to be a smartass, but no American wants to be smart.

The United States is NOT going to collapse.

There was grave danger of it around 1814 (when the British set fire to Washington, DC and the White House)----and during the Civil War. Those were much more drastic times than what we're going through now.