So I have been playing a bit of Disco Elysium lately. It’s a strange game made by a communist, set in an alternative universe essentially, where history progressed similarly to our world, but different. You play as a drug-addicted alcoholic cop, investigating a lynching. The game is strangely creepy, a kind of psychological horror, because your character’s mind is beginning to disintegrate.
But it got me thinking. History in our own world is pretty boring. Humans became evil, which led to very rapid economic growth. This is essentially the theme from Tolkien’s Middle Earth realm. In Middle Earth, the races are just not evil enough to enable technology to progress beyond a kind of medieval-fantasy landscape. It’s Mordor, where industry took hold. In Disco Elysium, the world seems to have stagnated in a kind of early 20th century level of complexity.
But in our world, everything has so far kept accelerating:
There is some stagnation that emerges on this graph around 1930, when the United States makes a noble sacrifice for our planet that Trump now seems eager to repeat. The Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 imposed tariffs by the United States on the rest of the world. Other countries responded to these tariffs of course, with their own tariffs. As a result, we get the 1930’s, that period of history known to us for economic depression, when carbon emissions stagnated at a low level.
There are other brief periods of stagnation. The Arab oil boycott in response to the Western support for Israel forced people to start car-pooling. But the main principle you observe when you see this graph, is that people don’t really believe strongly enough in anything, to stand in the way of progress. Had the Arabs of the peninsula truly believed in Islam, they would have gone out of their way to stop exporting oil to the filthy infidels.
Even communism helps. Communist countries tend to stagnate. People refuse to have children, the smart and ambitious people flee, the system eventually tends to collapse, sometimes the dictator is a moron who kills tens of millions of peasants by telling them to kill the sparrows. No, the worst possible ideology has to be this neoliberal view of constant material progress through free-market competition.
You might say it brought us prosperity. But look around you. There is a kind of deep pervasive sense of misery, that comes from people leading lives that became effectively pointless. Humans want to explore the world and discover things, but there is nothing left to discover. I don’t think there has ever been an era like ours, that leaves the general population leaving so powerless to meaningfully affect anything.
You might think at least the population growth was inevitable. But even that is not the case. Very few people seem to be aware of the mystery of France’s low fertility rate. There are various attempts at explaining it, but none are very satisfactory. You can see here that as France and England industrialized, in England fertility rates climbed in response, whereas in France, they began to sink. The difference is so massive, that if France had followed England’s pattern, it would have had 250 million people today, instead of the 70 million it currently has.
There has unfortunately been very little resistance in our world so far, to the march towards annihilation. The e/acc nerds think they adhere to some sort of profound view of the world, but they just pursue most people’s natural tendency to jump on board of the train that takes the easy route, the route towards oblivion.
Animal rights philosophies like veganism when taken to their natural conclusion, would also have obstructed the march towards destruction. Vegetarianism is not new, it’s a tendency that has existed among Western cultural elites for centuries. The abolition of the trans-atlantic slave trade by the British empire was not some kind of materialist inevitability. Rather, it was simply an idea that became popular among the British cultural elite. The same could have happened to vegetarianism.
God pulled the emergency brake back in 1346, through the black death, thereby extending my favorite period of history, the medieval era. Around half of Europe’s population perished, thereby relaxing feudalism, as there were simply not enough peasants left to work for the lords. In the big cities, the population loss was even greater. It took England about 300 years, to recover to a pre-plague population level:
Every lifeform and every ecosystem on our planet, has a limit to the speed of environmental change it can adjust to. Had our cumulative emissions by now been half of what they actually were, you would expect the degree of warming to be roughly half of what it has been too. This could have been enough to save certain species and ecosystems.
In reality it would be slightly better than this, because many of the greenhouse gasses humans release are slowly processed by the Earth. Half the methane humans release is broken down after around 9 years. The Earth also sequesters carbon dioxide in various ways, the carbon humans release builds up slowly in decaying vegetation in peat bogs. But warm the whole planet rapidly enough and the opposite happens: It starts adding carbon of its own to the carbon you released.
When it comes to building imaginary worlds, climate change is to me one of the most interesting mechanisms to change the world. Our species is so evil and pursued material prosperity so heavily, that we put ourselves on the course for annihilation. That’s why the COVID-19 pandemic was necessary. In a few years, when most of the human population starts dying from the consequences of immunodeficiency, carbon emissions will dramatically plunge.
It’s a pretty harsh predicament we face, but since the 1950’s, people have been building genocidal death camps for animals, apparently never thinking to themselves: “Well, this is pretty harsh too.” There was never any serious opposition to “progress”. People happily sold their farmland, leaving their sons with no other option in life than to find a desk job.
But I often find myself wondering: Imagine if you just slowed the whole thing down. Imagine if through a stroke of luck, the 1918 pandemic turned out to be a really big one. A viral particle somewhere wins the lottery, a weird insertion takes place in its genome and when people think the horror is over, it returns in 1920 with a vengeance, leaving millions of people worldwide with brain damage.
You wouldn’t have your 2% annual compounding economic growth. We’re inclined to underestimate, how catastrophic disasters can really be. Meteors and submarine landslides are the obvious ones. At any moment, the entire East coast of the United States could be flooded by an enormous tsunami meters high, when a landslide happens near the canary islands. All the spent fuel pools keeping old nuclear fuel rots would be hit simultaneously, it would leave uninhabitable zones similar to Fukushima.
In our world, we’re effectively stuck with this accelerating treadmill. The 1930’s are a minor hiccup, the 70’s and 80’s have some minor issues with oil shortages, but even what we call the “great recession”, hardly has any serious impact on how our world unfolds in the greater scheme of things. Our world faced a steady growth towards the information age, followed by a very big plunge towards oblivion.
But how exciting it would be, to have a world of growth, stagnation, collapse and rebuilding. How exciting it would have been, if the “industrial revolution”, had been an “industrial evolution” instead. Just imagine a world, where after the 1920 neurovirulent strain of influenza left millions of survivors with agonizing headaches, wealthy American youth went to the Mazatec in Oaxaca and found out they treat their symptoms with psilocybe mushrooms.
Imagine how things could have unfolded if all these psychological and spiritual transformations of the 1960’s had unfolded in the 1920’s. People were smoking hashish in New York city in the 1880’s, there were 500 hashish smoking parlors at the time according to police estimates. The ingredients were there, but there was never really much resistance towards the authoritarian materialist growth paradigm.
When people smoke cannabis flowers or hashish, they’re not motivated to work hard. And that’s what, looking back, we will wish people in the early 20th century had done: Not work hard. Of course the world rewards you for working hard, but it’s a negative sum game. Every coal miner is paid for his job and yet everyone today wishes that coal miners in the past had worked less hard. There’s nobody who looks at the removed mountaintops of Appalachia and thinks: “I’m glad those are gone.”
People always have a choice. When the first cars were invented, a guy had to walk in front of the car with a flag. The streets at the time, belonged to pedestrians. It was a choice to hand the streets over to cars and force people onto the sidewalks. The car industry invented the term “jaywalker” for this, they suggested in their propaganda you’re an uneducated country bumpkin if you walk across the road.
Similarly, the climate change problem was first discovered in 1896. The oil industry was aware of the problem in the 1950’s. The fact that it took so long until something was done about it, is because industry bribed scientists. Those scientists could have spoken out in the 60’s and 70’s, but didn’t. The world we live in today is not a historical inevitability. Rather, it is a choice that billions of people made, to pursue technological progress and the associated destruction of other aspects of life.
In a sense, I’m quite happy about the election of Donald Trump as president, because it means the end of the United States as the world’s most dominant economic power. It’s hard for me to think of someone who could do a better job of bringing the United States to its knees. He has the combination of charisma and arrogance that brought down empires in the past. What upsets me is that millions of the world’s poorest people have to suffer the consequences from the shutdown of USAID. But other than that, Trump and Musk are examples of evil being humiliated, by being forced into serving good.
Overall, we’re getting what I would hope for: A global crash, with the United States first to sink into oblivion. And it would have been exciting I think, to be born into a world where a crash had already happened much earlier, where we were already in the middle of a cycle of recovery. Just imagine, a world where temperatures rise gradually, where coral reefs gradually migrated to deeper parts of the ocean, where Greenland was gradually inhabited, a world where we burned through our fossil fuels in a thousand year period of numerous series of growth followed by collapse. But that’s not how we live. We downed the whole bottle in one sitting.
POV: you got all your most cracked friends to move sf to build an ai startup
Revenue: $50k+ / month
Rent: <$1k / person
Sleep: 4-6 hrs / night
Mattresses on the floor: 7If you’re not doing this, your startup will never hit PMF pic.twitter.com/04s77hO8ft
— Finn Mallery (@fin465) February 23, 2025
But I’m happy with what we have. This world is now a graveyard for techbro arrogance. It could have been a lot worse. They all have brain damage, cardiovascular damage and immune system damage today. They gather together in their San Francisco apartments, to work on the next AI startup that will surely revolutionize the world. But they are living on borrowed time.
My fear was always they would just get away with destroying everything. But in our world, evil is put in the service of good. They are more like maggots that only get to eat dead flesh.
>So I have been playing a bit of Disco Elysium lately.
When I played that game my Harry was full schizo, he liked to bang on the doors of women while screaming at them when they didn’t give him attention; and thought of himself as a rockstar even though he was a insane drunk low status white male.
>The e/acc nerds think they adhere to some sort of profound view of the world,
Was arguing with one of these things on twitter and he argued that the economy was in complete lockstep with the environment and that capitalism and the AI takeover is just the natural conclusion of nature. These people just believe what they want to believe it seems, and the idea about capitalism being the construction of a Roko’s Basilisk from the future sounds cool to them so that’s what they believe.
>When I played that game my Harry was full schizo, he liked to bang on the doors of women while screaming at them when they didn’t give him attention; and thought of himself as a rockstar even though he was a insane drunk low status white male.
Woah based.
” The streets at the time, belonged to pedestrians. ”
No, they belonged to carriages, waggons, horses, cows, mules and donkeys. So the first car with a petrol motor, a Maybach-Daimler construction, was really much slower and cleaner than a carriage powered by four or six horses. Why should anybody protest against that great machine. Think of how many animals were treatet really badly in the transportation business or in agriculture. Motorpowered vehicles don’t feel any pain when you use your whip on it.
Because of the shit the animals left on the streets, the streets were never used by pedestrians. And humans shoveled their shit and urine on the streets too.
Evolution will always happen, there is no escape, if you don’t use the technology your fellow man uses, you will die. But all in nature is about to survive NOW. What will happen in 100 years is not of intrest.
A herd of monkeys with more sticks, more stones, heavier stones, heavier sticks, stones with strings bend on them, sharpened sticks etc. will always supersede those monkeys without those kind of weapons. So evolution of technology is inevitable if you like so survive. And all behaviour is survival, whatever you have done or will do.
If you don’t like to survive, if you don’t like survival itself, you don’t like nature at all. The earth is a wrong place for you, if you don’t like that.
Rintrah Radagast, I’d like to hear more from you on the Black Death of the 14th century.
IN MY OPINION, it was not, could not possibly have been bubonic plague spread by fleas riding on rats and yet that’s the story we’re still told.
You know how many rats were living in Iceland at the time?
None
No rats, so they couldn’t be blamed for spreading fleas that killed 50% of the Icelandic population.
It was physically impossible for fleas and rats to do what they say because they couldn’t move that fast. The Black Death was burning through miles a day through the air transmitted by an aerosolized virus. Rats and fleas not to blame. Look at the fascinating historical record.
It was some kind of hemorrhagic virus and not bubonic plague which crops up every year in the American southwest, isn’t particularly dangerous, and only sickens a couple of people.
Come on, back me up here…
I don’t know, so many people have looked at the black death, if it was something else, there would be more controversy around it. Iceland could just be a case of people on the boat being infected I think.
Back in the 1990s it was expected that Africa would have a huge human die-off because of AIDS. However, fortunately for preventing human suffering, in 2003 George Bush came up with PEPFAR, using America’s money to keep African people from dying. So the die-off did not happen and the population of Africa has gone from 882 million in 2003 to 1.5 billion now. India went from 1.1 billion in 2003 to 1.4 billion now. Pakistan went from 167 million in 2003 to 251 million now.
I don’t know whether the West is really a factor here, other than giving money so that when older men rape young girls the young girls don’t die of AIDS; that is obviously a good thing. People who like to reproduce will reproduce and the world will get worse for animals. The spike in humans is not due to the West; it is due to the West keeping people outside the West from dying, and due to people in Muslim countries heeding their religious directives. The Europeans reproduced like crazy in their own historical moment; that is why there’s so little of the natural world left in Europe.
The French don’t reproduce due to toxoplasmosis: (“The incidence of fertility problems was significantly higher in the 163 Toxoplasma-infected men (48.47%) than in the 506 Toxoplasma-free men (42.29%), τ = 0.049, P = 0.029. After correction for multiple tests, we found significantly lower sperm concentration, concentration of progressively motile sperm, and concentration of non-progressively motile sperm in Toxoplasma-positive men”) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33420759/ (“infected women reported that it took them significantly longer to conceive, to become pregnant at an older age, and experienced more fertility problems overall than uninfected women did. Toxoplasma-positive women are thus more likely to require artificial insemination than Toxoplasma-negative women”)(https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8399658/#:~:text=%5B28%5D%2C%20infected%20women%20reported,insemination%20than%20Toxoplasma%2Dnegative%20women.)
Having a tradition of eating raw ground beef will do that.
You don’t have to go full luddite on civilization, really all the problems boil down to one, the meat industry.
It boils down to capitalism, ie greed. Regenerative grazing of cattle can actually improve soils and sequester carbon, but the profits are less than from clear-felling tropical forests, for a few years of grazing.
I wish you would understand that both the activity of modernity, and the backlash that results from it, are evil. Destroying the environment through burning fossil fuels is evil, as is animal agriculture. So is a disease which agonizingly kills millions of people and maims even more. Even if these two evils act as opposing forces in some context and the final result is a kind of homeostasis or reversion to a mean, this does not mean that the disease which killed millions of people, or the economic contraction which causes suffering for huge swathes of the population, or the obliteration of billions of individual hopes and dreams, is now somehow a good thing. Instead, you now have an overall process which produced enormous suffering at every step along the way, during the rise of modernity as well as its fall. And even if industrial civilization ended, there would still be peasants dying of malaria and suffering under the thumb of a feudal lord; if humanity died out completely animals would still consume each other. There would still be half-dead gazelles getting eaten alive by swarms of insects and such things. This world is evil giving rise to evil: suffering giving rise to suffering. It is something to be escaped – not embraced. I’m not telling you this for no reason. I say this, because this information might genuinely help you one day.
When people are children, a certain type of naïve empathy for others often comes naturally to them. On some level we don’t like seeing others suffer; it is only by layering on intellectual abstractions such as that this mass-suffering is “necessary” for the “long-term health of the ecosystem,” or “to stop the forward march of techno-industrial progress,” or whatever else, that we are able to develop a framework which allows us to morally justify the suffering of others. It is only after living in this world for long enough, and inculcating yourself into the logic of this reality, that you can come to a deranged conclusion like, that “a disease which causes the suffering of millions of people, is a good thing”. I am saying that you should remove the ideological frameworks and metanarratives that you have learned from living in this place, and reapproach the topic from that naïve perspective wherein all suffering of others is evil. We are all being ontologically psyoped – this isn’t the ‘true’ reality, for lack of a better way to put it. Its (incredibly cruel) laws and structures are arbitrarily imposed on us by a malevolent interdimensional force, and one of the many reasons why this is done is to ingratiate people like you into exactly this type of cruel logic. This is the spirit behind what someone like Jesus means, when he says something like: “Woe to you who hope in the flesh and in the prison that will perish! How long will you be oblivious? And how long will you suppose that the imperishables will perish too? Your hope is set upon the world, and your god is this life! You are corrupting your souls!” The laws of reality are written to create and enforce the existence of evil. People assume that things will somehow get better in this reality if the blood-soaked wheel of samsara just turns a few more revolutions, that once the current crop of problems are extinguished by the suffering and deaths of enough people, that the worst will be over for good, while actually this reality is working exactly as intended, from the perspective of the ones running it. Reality doesn’t have to adhere to our scientific understanding of things, either – and in fact, the very idea that it truly does at all is illusory. So to say that this suffering is logically necessary in order to bring about something better, is to fall into a trap laid for you by an unseen enemy.
Adhering to the logic of this world, also eventually causes people to confuse what is good and what is evil. They begin to mistaken the one for the other in an increasing variety of contexts. In many cases, they also associate good with suffering and evil with fun or excitement. You’ve expressed such sentiments yourself in the past – if I were you I would re-examine these assumptions in a more critical light, combined with a scepticism towards the nature of the reality we are living in more generally.
I think it will be important for you to break free of the materialist brainwashing. I get the sense that you don’t really believe that reality could ever be truly, fundamentally different than what you’ve been presented with in this life. Perhaps you might believe as some quasi-materialists do, that ‘god’ created this world the way they did, because it was the only way for the world to make logical or moral sense or some such bullshit. I would encourage you to divest yourself of this notion. I think if you did believe that something radically different was possible, it would allow you to start asking deeper questions about where you are right now, and why.
You might also want to look at why this reality works the way that it does. Why does it appear as though we are inevitably headed for this type of ‘progress’ you’ve described? On the surface, this reality operates somewhat like a clockwork machine with fixed rules, which appear to be fined-tuned towards exactly this type of outcome. The ways of life which are most competitively successful in our present context, are exactly those which prioritize the growth of capital and the leveraging of technology without any heed to moral, ecological, humanitarian or other considerations. It is not that people never resist this process – it is as though an unseen force has its thumb on the scales of history, forcing reality to bend in this direction. I encourage you to think about the implications of this.
interesting comment. tks
So after just finishing “My big toe” and the the journeys trilogy from Monroe the second time, this comment got me hooked. Could you please recommend some further reading if one wants to dive deeper into that topic?
Thank you very much.
I think Trump’s tariff policy is a measure to alleviate the worsening oil shortage. It will cool the economy and reduce global oil consumption. It’s probably the same as when Lehman collapsed during the global financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic shut down society and suppressed the economy. This time, there is no turning point to replace shale oil, so economic activity will remain depressed. Will international trade decrease and the demand for the international settlement currency, the dollar, decrease? Will the supply chain also stop functioning?
The destruction of society caused by the spread of the Black Death led to the promotion of young people to important social positions, breathing fresh air into all areas of stagnant Europe. I’ve heard that it contributed greatly to the subsequent development of Europe. It may also have helped to free the country from Mongolian pressure. I don’t know the details, though.
I know the details,
how the Black Death freed the serfs and ushered in the Enlightenment, how it spread, and I’m telling you I don’t understand how it possibly could have been Yersinia Pestis.