The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies

well, this strategy was all laid out by the designer of the american constitution over 200 years ago in the federalist papers (the ones written by madison) and his notes on the constitutional convention. Madison wrote that the primary purpose of the structure of the american govt under his constitution was to preserve wealth inequality. Madison wrote that the way to do this was to prevent the majority from uniting and discovering their common interest. The way he proposed to keep the majority from uniting was to create factions in voting districts by creating enlarged voting district (federal districts). Thus enlarged, the districts would have more factions and that would "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority" (to quote madison).

Also useful in preventing the majority from using the government against the minority of the opulent was the pseudo-democratic structure of the federal govt (strong checks and balances and separation of powers). This would hinder the ability of the majority to control the government. That would keep the wealth of madsison, jefferson, washington, morris et al., safe from that dirty, brutish mob (i.e., you and me).

The benefit to the elite of factions created by nation enlargement? The elite get to keep more of their wealth.

As the USA grows larger and more heterogeneous with mass immigration, we are less and less in control of our own govt.

Our cultural cousins in the rest of the western nations (canada, australia, UK, scandanavia, france, austria, germany etc) are all smaller and more homogeneous, and so the majority there therefore have more control of their own nations. However, as they elite cram more immigrants into those nations, factions grow and there is less majority control. And of course the elite created the EU along the lines of the USA so as to remove as much power as possible from the majority in those member nations.

Meh. Conflating moby dick into the collapse of the roman empire, et al. It's an interecting vehicle to organize some conjecture under, but at it's core it's just pointing at large corporations as parasites, and doesn't offer any new insights.

He rambles on and on about political alignments, but he seriously neglects the honest roots of power that today's human civilizitions are couched in. Corporatized business activities are just the games that powerful civilians play in their spare time, lately. Power projection has nothing to do with the kangaroo courts of public opinion anymore. It just smoke and mirrors. A dog and pony show.

Monsanto's bad, m'kay? NSA's bad, m'kay? Fascism's bad, m'kay? Complex civilizations go through phases, m'kay? Read English literature m'kay?

Nice platitudes, but so what? Just another Sunday sermon, blah blah blah...

The ecological situation can be improved (damage slowed) by putting resources into it, or encouraging a shift in resource use through laws. Encouraging the onward march mindlessly is not helpful. There has to be some self-reflection and reevaluation of current strategies on how to get to the next technological age, if we are to get there without: nuclear holocaust; human-made plague; trashing our planet so badly we can no longer eat or drink; using up the resources needed for computers and therefore causing computer infrastructure to stagnate and decay just when we need it to run an AI; using up all our hydrocarbon energy reserves and running out of energy that we need to keep up the onward march...

There are many pitfalls that might cause this march into the future to end abruptly and miserably, even if the goal of a new technological era is physically and strategically possible given our current resource constraints. We would do well to avoid falling into a pit along the way, and a social dialogue about possible pitfalls is a necessary part of that.

> The ecological situation can be improved (damage slowed) by putting resources into it, or encouraging a shift in resource use through laws.

But this itself has a long-term cost in terms of both consumption and complexity. Put another way, you can't solve the environmental problems, really, if you demand that consumption continues to rise exponentially over time.

What I think we are actually being sold with the green energy agenda is a way to continue to grow consumption because this is important to macroeconomists. The problem though is that this leads to permamently debt-ridden, destitute workers robbed of social context in order to make the wealthy even more rich.

The environmental damage could be contained by taxes to reduce consumption but that has very significant implications for our way of life. Reducing consumption though is the only way out.

I am going to take a stab at this. I would look at two things: the first is the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the second is comparing Indonesia (as an American living in Indonesia) to the US.

When Rome fell, the result of the lack of central administration meant that the institution of Roman slavery began to evolve from proprietary rights over other people's actions to proprietary rights over land entrusted to other people. Over generations, the descendants of slaves became peasants with rights over the land they worked, with strong access to common resources. Nutrition improved in the lower classes. Laws were simplified.

Now this took some time. You don't see slavery turn into serfdom during the rein of Theodoric the Great, for example, but it's a general trend in history that during most of the Middle Ages, when power was not well concentrated in the hands of the King (which was the norm until relatively late) that the poor did relatively well.

Another good comparison might be between Indonesia today and the US today. Indonesia has a weak central government, with a very decentralized society. The result is that society runs, at least in the cities, in almost an inverted order to what we think of in the US: everyone but the obscenely wealthy live in gated communities, food production is widely distributed (and a substantial part of fruit and vegetable production happens in the cities). As a result, the diet of those in poverty in Jakarta tends to be rice, tempe, and fresh produce (though access to unpolluted drinking water is a problem, I suppose right now, the US has issues there too at least in some states).

Families are stronger and they become the primary form of support, instead of the government. This means that vertical transmission of wealth happens earlier in life (i.e. invest in your children's businesses because that's your retirement plan), and so forth.

On the whole, the elites in the US today use the power of the state to shape a culture where families are de-emphasized and undermined as a support structure, where we replace people with things as the necessary way out of poverty, and therefore where people are isolated from eachother in order to be made ready for the corporate workforce.

Corporations are creatures of the state. It is unthinkable that corporations could totally dominate the economy if there is no large, powerful state backing them. (BTW, one of the big issues with some strains of Libertarian thought is that if the government's role is reduced to that of enforcing contracts, then it becomes reduced to backing powerful corporations. What are the just limits of contracts cannot be purely found in the limit of a contract but has to be found from wider political controls.)