Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Higgenbotham wrote: Mon Aug 04, 2025 2:14 am

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, 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.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... l-collapse

aedens wrote: Tue Aug 05, 2025 9:57 am

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies… and turned them into caricatures of themselves…. This occurred as a result of the … participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.

…Identifying these phenomena through history and properly qualifying them according to their true nature and contents - not according to the ideology in question, which succumbed to the process of caricaturization - is a job for historians. […]

The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a “new class” within that nation. This privileged class [of pathocrats] feels permanently threatened by the “others”, i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man. [Andrew M. Lobaczewski Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes]

A NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB'S MUST-READ BOOK • A radical retelling of human history through the cycle of societal collapse—"a Cassandra-like warning about the path today’s oligarchs have set [and] a sweeping and dire vision of a world on the brink.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

“Deeply sobering and strangely inspiring. . . . Read it now, or your descendants will find it in the ruins.” —Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus

“Anyone who doubts the importance of this conversation hasn’t been paying attention.” —Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun

12,000 years ago, human history changed forever when the egalitarian groups of hunter-gathering humans began to settle down and organize themselves into hierarchies. The few dominated the many, seizing control through violence. What emerged were “Goliaths”: large societies built on a collection of hierarchies that are also terrifyingly fragile, collapsing time after time across the world. Today, we live in a single, global Goliath—one that is precariously interdependent—under threat from nuclear war, climate change, and the existential risks of AI. The next collapse may be our last.

In Goliath’s Curse, Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp conducts a historical autopsy on our species, from the earliest cities to the collapse of modern states like Somalia. Drawing on historical databases and the latest discoveries in archaeology and anthropology, he uncovers groundbreaking revelations:

More democratic societies tend to be more resilient.
A modern collapse is likely to be global, long-lasting, and more dire than ever before
Collapse may be invisible until after it has occurred. It’s possible we’re living through one now.
Collapse has often had a more positive outcome for the general population than for the 1%.
All Goliaths contain the seeds of their own demise.

As useful for finding a way forward as it is for diagnosing our precarious present, Goliath’s Curse is a stark reminder that there are both bright and dark sides to societal collapse—that it is not necessarily a reversion to chaos or a dark age—and that making a more resilient world may well mean making a more just one.

"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.