“Kurzegesagt tier bugman feed” is so good I want to curse. My son watches those videos and it’s given me a nice opportunity to explain that when the fossil fuels run out, technological civilization is over and no one is going to space.
This kid is teaching himself to be an evolutionary biologist, he doesn’t want anything to do with me and his mom’s oldy oldson stuff. But I will just go ahead and block kurtzgesagt, it’s past time. By the way I have been reading about Vico for years but I don’t know where to get a good volume of his writings, if you have a suggestion I’d appreciate it. And are you familiar with the Muqaddimah/incorporated it into of your thinking on civilization?
I am barely familiar with Khaldun, I must admit. Hope you can find some good alternative material for the little chap!
As far as Vico goes, it depends on a few things really. Admittedly I'm a lot more familiar with Benedetto Croce's secondary literature on him than his own works, I've never actually completed La Nuova Scienza cover to cover. Croce's Italian is also a lot more comprehensible to me than Vico, naturally for how old it is. These are works that I've accessed through library membership, however, not sure where to recommend looking to purchase them.
I am but a humble pool guy so I will have to content myself with reading people who have read the things I don’t have access to. Keep up the good work!
Oh, is that how you spell Kweer-sge-tard? My son watches those YouTube videos too but until I read your comment I had no idea whose bugman-feed the author was talking about. Heh.
Can you explain this to me? Fossil fuels aren't going to run out overnight and the increase in cost corresponding to their scarcity would propel adoption of alternative energy sources (albeit probably nuclear rather than renewables in most corners of the world.)
Setting aside Malcolm's goal of our species' eventual ascension to Godhood (which I agree is perhaps over-optimistic),I feel like the present author is missing a practical contradiction in their own thesis here: that an authentic return to spirituality can only emerge from "the primitive age when myth emerges, a phase of turmoil and visceral contact with nature", but also that this age of shattered shields and vital barbarism won't confer enormous advantages on the communities that can still run factories and make gatling guns. Sure, birthrates matter, but technocracy took over the planet in no small part because it can equip armies that defeat 10 or 100 times as many pre-industrial primitives. I don't foresee those advantages being passed up for long in an era of no-holds-barred ethnoreligious competition.
I don’t have spare time to do a thorough rundown, but the short version is that there are no alternative sources of energy that are more energy dense than fossil fuels. You already know that wind and solar power are nothing like the highly concentrated energy in oil, coal, and gas. But most people don’t consider the fact that nuclear material does not exist in any concentrated form in nature. Uranium ore contains about 0.1% uranium. This trace amount of nuclear material goes through a long and intensive refining process to turn it into a fuel rod. Without the abundant cheap energy on demand provided by fossil fuels, we’re not going to be refining .1% ore into anything useful.
You’re right that fossil fuels won’t just suddenly run out, there will be a gradual series of partial collapses, with each collapse followed by a period of partial recovery followed by another collapse, each stair step down gradually simplifying and reducing the energy and resource demands of the society experiencing the collapse. You’re right that this won’t happen at the same time everywhere all at once, but this is the general shape of the future over the next 300 years or so (in my opinion).
It's certainly true that ore processing is a laborious process, but nuclear is potentially cost-competitive with coal or gas plants if you get economies of scale going and is just as 'on-demand', so I don't see why nuclear energy can't itself power more ore-processing? Fuel prices are actually fairly small as an overall percentage of the lifetime cost of a nuclear plant.
The finite supply of uranium itself is an objection I hear more often, and would run out on a timescale of centuries, but if you switch to thorium, use seawater extraction and/or invest heavily in fuel reprocessing you could potentially stretch out supplies for tens of thousands of years, which (I'd hope) should be enough time to crack fusion or space-based solar.
I suppose the question is: how do you switch over an entirely fossil fuel based grid to uranium-electric in time to evade collapse, which would have to be done with fossil fuels itself, and would be the most monumentally costly infrastructural project of all time, essentially equivalent to the total energy cost of all of the fossil fuel era, repeated in transitioning to something that is enormously costly in itself to maintain and relies on colossal state infrastructure and spending.
Power-plants have to be decommisioned and replaced every few decades regardless, and exhausting fossil fuels would probably take centuries, so I don't see switching over to nuclear on a piecemeal basis being especially challenging.
You're right that switching over transport infrastructure from fossil fuels more generally would be difficult and/or costly, but industrial civilisation in the broader sense won't collapse if we switched over to purely electric mass transit or even synthesised petro products from other sources, such as waste biomass or CO2 capture.
My claim here isn't "running out of fossil fuels will be entirely painless and involve no recessions or localised economic breakdowns", but that industrial civilisation in one form or another will keep trucking on. Given the choice between "no cars or electricity" or "cars and electricity that are twice as expensive", people will pick the second option, every time.
One piece that is often overlooked in fossil fuel depletion is the Hubbard curve. At a certain point you hit peak production and then tip over into irreversible production decline as new discoveries fail to keep up with depletion. Hubbard famously predicted the peak and decline of American conventional petroleum (he did not calculate a decline curve for shale deposits, but they are subject to the same mathematical realities). There will be fossil fuels extracted for a long time to come, but most of that time will be spent with a continually shrinking total volume of production, which will mean there will be less and less energy available to do all other science, industry, agriculture, etc
I think you’ve got to contend with plummeting levels of intelligence too, the ability to keep this ticking over is vanishing with every generation. We’re already seeing a retraction I think. I don’t have a crystal ball to see the future and can’t tell you for certain that collapse is on the horizon, but images of interstellar empires are based on absolutely no realism at all; they’re literally only science fiction.
The second law of thermodynamics says that you can concentrate energy from a lower to a higher state through the expenditure of a greater total amount of energy than you get out of the end of the process. How does condensing dispersed nuclear material get around the net loss associated with the 2nd law?
It doesn't. It's just that the energy release from mass-energy conversion during nuclear reactions is vastly larger than the energy required to process the ore to fuel the reaction. You'll still run out of fissile material eventually, but not because ore-processing is too energy-intensive.
I still don't understand why Christianity is inadequate. We don't need to invent a new religion, we already have the right one, and abandoning it in the first place is what led to our current woes.
Agreed, if there is a truth out there, then it makes sense that it has already been encountered and the sensible thing to do is to restore faith in the religions which are the basis of our good society.
This is just following the reason to its ends. Why on earth would we need a new one?
Christians are not backward. We are the west. Soul and body. And we have this athiest sickness with us now.
Mind you athiesm taken to its ends is identical in every way to judeochristian theism save for the supposition that the universe as creator is a cold unfeeling thing.
It's not like athiests want to abandon Christian morality. Even if they are just cowards doing this.
It's just a tried and true gnostic heresy at work. It happened before in christendom with disastrous consequences and was rooted out by a crusade.
Now it's the other way around, they won and we are paying the price with their crusades.
The preeminent solution is a return to christ and christendom in full. Man will become more rational for it. Not less.
The church at its peak pushed out enlightenment level thinkers like nothing else. And was the bastion of progress in a depraved world.
Now we are more depraved due to gnostic progress. Technology will continue onward in catholic hands in a beautiful harmonious manner the whole premise of backward old religions is false. And it was never true.
It's a mistake to equate 'religion' with the supernatural orientation that has historically been associated with the phenomenon. 'Religion' is the collection of embodied actions and expectations that separates one community from another by binding that community to itself and enforcing the boundaries between 'them' and 'us'.
The reason the Collins' religion seems ridiculous is because they think their religion need be something more than 'smart people having babies guarantees a future for smart people having babies'. The answer to 'Why?' then becomes 'Because I am a smart person who wants to have babies and I want my smart children to live in a smart people future'.
One person's 'self-referential error' is another person's 'positive feedback loop'.
Identity is the only functional morality.
'Religion' is what binds human aggregate into a meaning-filled and meaning-driven human *community*.
You make very good points. Both the latin religiō and the Old English ǣfæstnes that it replaced have a meaning that emphasises observance more than belief. Religiō has the meaning of “piety” as well as religious “obligation” and strict observance of rites, where ǣfæstnes had the added meaning of “lawfulness” and scrupulous observance of moral norms. Another originary meaning to the Latin word would be the “binding” of a person to their community. It's about public observance within an "us", in a founded territory or "world", which is the bar for order, against which everything else is measured and seen as chaotic. It's intrinsically collective.
The reasons I resist ‘supernaturalism’ as inherent in ‘religion’ is that it (a) it sets the bar for having a religion ridiculously high which (b) favors only those existing sets of supernatural beliefs that - at this point in time - are almost-entirely under the control of elites and (c) it prevents us from see ‘new’ religions as they spontaneously emerge and take root.
‘Meaning’ has to have a ‘material support’ of some kind, a carrier (or carrier-wave) that us to experience (or believe we experience) what is in someone else’s head because what matters to us is not what another person thinks, but what those thoughts make them do.
Which is why ‘observing the outward forms’ will always be more important than ‘inward belief’ and why the Abrahamic insistence on ‘inward belief’ has created such chaos in the world. As Abrahamism unravels, what is left is no operant beliefs at all. It all just thoughts in people’s heads. There’s no collective flow or rhythm left in America (especially).
‘One size fits all’ has resulted in ‘everything must go’.
I think that the Hypsistarian faith I outlined on Tree of Woe -- which is solidly built on authentic ancient writings of ancient pagan priests and philosophers but which transcends the vulgar notions of paganism we sometimes encounter elsewhere - is much closer to what we need than the Collins' space-natal god. Hypsistarian, as I reconstruct it, is a call for spiritual and physical excellence, a militant faith that acknowledges the need to fight evil, and a tight fit with Evolan Tradition.
An interesting proposal. It is my belief that “what we need” can never come from within ourselves, however, and must always present itself from beyond us.
That's a longer story, but I will say, I agree, and I don't find that disqualifying on what I've written, because it did. Tolkien used to talk about how he *discovered* Middle Earth rather than created it and then knew it was true. Same vibe.
As in Heidegger: the “the essential poetic word is not invented by but overcomes the poet.” In German, “Überdichtet der Dichter.” It over-poetises the poet.
First thing's first. If anyone claims to be a transhumanist or human-maximist with tech or gene editing I always look up their picture. If I would not hesitate to get into a fistfight with them I disregard everything they have to say. If they can't even take care of their personal health, and we see with people like Mike Mentzer and Arnold that it's incredibly systematic and logic based nowadays, then they are either hypocrites, incompetents or liars. It's outright on the tin.
"I think humans can self improve and become ubermen!"
"Ok does this include you?"
"n-no...."
"Then why should I listen to you?"
"You should give me and my kin governance over all humanity because....just because alright?!"
Incidentally he's wrong about almost everything. The first thing to note is that even with "population crash" all these nations are still going to have populations that outstrip WWI and WWII levels. Way back when they thought world populations exceeding 3 billion was absurd. Secondly the idea that you can extrapolate trendlines off into infinity is incredibly stupid, or rather incredibly midwitted.
"hey man line went down last week. Temperature went from 40C to 39C. In 100 weeks it's going to be -60C! In 500 weeks it's going to be -460C!!!!"
That's not even beginning to talk about his religion which worships tech geeks like him and Bill Gates as sex gods over harems of nubile women having VR orgies under statues of Climate Changeous or whatever.
Immediately one of my favorite writers, incredible article. When I first encountered "rationalists" I fucking hated them because it is instantly clear through rational analysis that rationality is insufficient for you know, living, so why the fuck would you be a "rationalist." Your prose and references are so good, a real joy to read. Excited to read more of your work and looking forward to new stuff from you.
To be fair, "expansion into infinity" is the Faustian spirit, detailed in Spengler, with space colonization as its latest and greatest expression. It all ties into the Progressive worldview, which the Collinses are wedded to. This article explains very well how they're trying to have it both ways, progressing into infinity without paying the human costs of this experiment. They remain an interesting anomaly, but they won't put a dent in the historical cycle we're caught up in.
Hard time getting the gist of this article. You are proposing what exactly?
When I talk to my attractive secular family & friends, I encourage them to see the beauty in their blood, their gift of nobility, their potential. I encourage them to see themselves as nobles with a great inheritance. Their eyes light up when they see the possibility of a great destiny, through creating family as their highest purpose (in contrast to identifying with “a career” especially for their daughters).
Ultimately we need smart beautiful people to outbreed ugly dumb people while maintaining dignity for everyone. Voluntary eugenics sounds sterile on its surface but when applied to a vision of nobility it rings true on the deepest spiritual level.
We honor our ancestors by building a better world for our descendants. If that’s not enough reason to live & thrive nothing is. Requires no superstition, no heaven & hell.
The only hindrance is the massive momentum of cultural nihilism that hates beauty, including religion that negates life. That can be overcome with simple affirmations promoting family nobility as beautiful. Try it yourself with those you recognize as beautiful & watch their eyes light up.
‘We aren’t having children and nothing the government has tried has helped.’ Ummmm…they actively work against that. They don’t encourage having babies. They definitely aren’t trying to get us to be more fertile.
Utter nonsense, smaller populations will help humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and help save the other species we share the planet with by protecting their shrinking habitat.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food. Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recently looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.
"Religion" is simply the ego of man creating a system to make himself god and gather power. All "religions" require works; certain steps, rituals and rules to be followed which at the end, provide two things: 1)Pride in one's ability to rise up the ranks and ensure one's own salvation and 2)the need for Higher Ups, in a position of some kind of power/privilege/enlightenment who can teach those below them how to do it "right" through proper adherance to said steps/ rituals/rules. ONLY in Christianity does God do ALL the work of saving US. True Christianity is not a religion. The Bible is clear on the matter; neither Christ nor God required buildings, (no matter how simple or impressive)stage productions, pot lucks or high holidays for salvation. I could quote book, chapter, verse, but this post would be too long and it is already too long. Few understand the actual Gospel because they have never heard it. Die to self, (ego, pride) confess your sin (putting yourself ahead of God), believe Jesus died to take your sin, and confess it with your mouth. Nothing else. Faith is a requirement. The Holy Spirit, (helper) does the heavy lifting of sanctification, gently over time. Reading the Bible, praying, thanking God and learning about Him; those are the worthy pursuits. The desires of the flesh slowly die with no "work" required. Men created religion. God wants a relationship. It is why He created us. It is clearly stated in Genesis. But not many will believe, they have not been chosen. Bottom line; "And Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness". Just believing God saves us. He sent Jesus to die, as His design for salvation. It is so simple. Yet brutally hard; killing the ego, (your idol) is a battle that lasts a lifetime. Few care to do it.
Thanks for your comment. I think the attitude of the technical fix and faith in it come as a result of the instant gratification that technical modernity gives us through our gadgets.
“Kurzegesagt tier bugman feed” is so good I want to curse. My son watches those videos and it’s given me a nice opportunity to explain that when the fossil fuels run out, technological civilization is over and no one is going to space.
Glad you enjoyed the piece. In total agreement - get him watching Beatrix Potter cartoons or something lol
This kid is teaching himself to be an evolutionary biologist, he doesn’t want anything to do with me and his mom’s oldy oldson stuff. But I will just go ahead and block kurtzgesagt, it’s past time. By the way I have been reading about Vico for years but I don’t know where to get a good volume of his writings, if you have a suggestion I’d appreciate it. And are you familiar with the Muqaddimah/incorporated it into of your thinking on civilization?
I am barely familiar with Khaldun, I must admit. Hope you can find some good alternative material for the little chap!
As far as Vico goes, it depends on a few things really. Admittedly I'm a lot more familiar with Benedetto Croce's secondary literature on him than his own works, I've never actually completed La Nuova Scienza cover to cover. Croce's Italian is also a lot more comprehensible to me than Vico, naturally for how old it is. These are works that I've accessed through library membership, however, not sure where to recommend looking to purchase them.
I am but a humble pool guy so I will have to content myself with reading people who have read the things I don’t have access to. Keep up the good work!
Oh, is that how you spell Kweer-sge-tard? My son watches those YouTube videos too but until I read your comment I had no idea whose bugman-feed the author was talking about. Heh.
queersgetard lmao
Can you explain this to me? Fossil fuels aren't going to run out overnight and the increase in cost corresponding to their scarcity would propel adoption of alternative energy sources (albeit probably nuclear rather than renewables in most corners of the world.)
Setting aside Malcolm's goal of our species' eventual ascension to Godhood (which I agree is perhaps over-optimistic),I feel like the present author is missing a practical contradiction in their own thesis here: that an authentic return to spirituality can only emerge from "the primitive age when myth emerges, a phase of turmoil and visceral contact with nature", but also that this age of shattered shields and vital barbarism won't confer enormous advantages on the communities that can still run factories and make gatling guns. Sure, birthrates matter, but technocracy took over the planet in no small part because it can equip armies that defeat 10 or 100 times as many pre-industrial primitives. I don't foresee those advantages being passed up for long in an era of no-holds-barred ethnoreligious competition.
I don’t have spare time to do a thorough rundown, but the short version is that there are no alternative sources of energy that are more energy dense than fossil fuels. You already know that wind and solar power are nothing like the highly concentrated energy in oil, coal, and gas. But most people don’t consider the fact that nuclear material does not exist in any concentrated form in nature. Uranium ore contains about 0.1% uranium. This trace amount of nuclear material goes through a long and intensive refining process to turn it into a fuel rod. Without the abundant cheap energy on demand provided by fossil fuels, we’re not going to be refining .1% ore into anything useful.
You’re right that fossil fuels won’t just suddenly run out, there will be a gradual series of partial collapses, with each collapse followed by a period of partial recovery followed by another collapse, each stair step down gradually simplifying and reducing the energy and resource demands of the society experiencing the collapse. You’re right that this won’t happen at the same time everywhere all at once, but this is the general shape of the future over the next 300 years or so (in my opinion).
It's certainly true that ore processing is a laborious process, but nuclear is potentially cost-competitive with coal or gas plants if you get economies of scale going and is just as 'on-demand', so I don't see why nuclear energy can't itself power more ore-processing? Fuel prices are actually fairly small as an overall percentage of the lifetime cost of a nuclear plant.
The finite supply of uranium itself is an objection I hear more often, and would run out on a timescale of centuries, but if you switch to thorium, use seawater extraction and/or invest heavily in fuel reprocessing you could potentially stretch out supplies for tens of thousands of years, which (I'd hope) should be enough time to crack fusion or space-based solar.
I suppose the question is: how do you switch over an entirely fossil fuel based grid to uranium-electric in time to evade collapse, which would have to be done with fossil fuels itself, and would be the most monumentally costly infrastructural project of all time, essentially equivalent to the total energy cost of all of the fossil fuel era, repeated in transitioning to something that is enormously costly in itself to maintain and relies on colossal state infrastructure and spending.
Power-plants have to be decommisioned and replaced every few decades regardless, and exhausting fossil fuels would probably take centuries, so I don't see switching over to nuclear on a piecemeal basis being especially challenging.
You're right that switching over transport infrastructure from fossil fuels more generally would be difficult and/or costly, but industrial civilisation in the broader sense won't collapse if we switched over to purely electric mass transit or even synthesised petro products from other sources, such as waste biomass or CO2 capture.
My claim here isn't "running out of fossil fuels will be entirely painless and involve no recessions or localised economic breakdowns", but that industrial civilisation in one form or another will keep trucking on. Given the choice between "no cars or electricity" or "cars and electricity that are twice as expensive", people will pick the second option, every time.
One piece that is often overlooked in fossil fuel depletion is the Hubbard curve. At a certain point you hit peak production and then tip over into irreversible production decline as new discoveries fail to keep up with depletion. Hubbard famously predicted the peak and decline of American conventional petroleum (he did not calculate a decline curve for shale deposits, but they are subject to the same mathematical realities). There will be fossil fuels extracted for a long time to come, but most of that time will be spent with a continually shrinking total volume of production, which will mean there will be less and less energy available to do all other science, industry, agriculture, etc
I think you’ve got to contend with plummeting levels of intelligence too, the ability to keep this ticking over is vanishing with every generation. We’re already seeing a retraction I think. I don’t have a crystal ball to see the future and can’t tell you for certain that collapse is on the horizon, but images of interstellar empires are based on absolutely no realism at all; they’re literally only science fiction.
The second law of thermodynamics says that you can concentrate energy from a lower to a higher state through the expenditure of a greater total amount of energy than you get out of the end of the process. How does condensing dispersed nuclear material get around the net loss associated with the 2nd law?
It doesn't. It's just that the energy release from mass-energy conversion during nuclear reactions is vastly larger than the energy required to process the ore to fuel the reaction. You'll still run out of fissile material eventually, but not because ore-processing is too energy-intensive.
I still don't understand why Christianity is inadequate. We don't need to invent a new religion, we already have the right one, and abandoning it in the first place is what led to our current woes.
Because I just can’t believe in it
Catholicism? Presbyterian? United Church of Canada? Seventh Day Adventist? All of them?
American Evangelical Protestantism.
Agreed, if there is a truth out there, then it makes sense that it has already been encountered and the sensible thing to do is to restore faith in the religions which are the basis of our good society.
This is just following the reason to its ends. Why on earth would we need a new one?
Christians are not backward. We are the west. Soul and body. And we have this athiest sickness with us now.
Mind you athiesm taken to its ends is identical in every way to judeochristian theism save for the supposition that the universe as creator is a cold unfeeling thing.
It's not like athiests want to abandon Christian morality. Even if they are just cowards doing this.
It's just a tried and true gnostic heresy at work. It happened before in christendom with disastrous consequences and was rooted out by a crusade.
Now it's the other way around, they won and we are paying the price with their crusades.
The preeminent solution is a return to christ and christendom in full. Man will become more rational for it. Not less.
The church at its peak pushed out enlightenment level thinkers like nothing else. And was the bastion of progress in a depraved world.
Now we are more depraved due to gnostic progress. Technology will continue onward in catholic hands in a beautiful harmonious manner the whole premise of backward old religions is false. And it was never true.
Your inevitable response was literally my first thought when reading their article initially. Glad you answered the Bat-Signal
Glad to hear, Tooks. I could hardly resist could I?
It's a mistake to equate 'religion' with the supernatural orientation that has historically been associated with the phenomenon. 'Religion' is the collection of embodied actions and expectations that separates one community from another by binding that community to itself and enforcing the boundaries between 'them' and 'us'.
The reason the Collins' religion seems ridiculous is because they think their religion need be something more than 'smart people having babies guarantees a future for smart people having babies'. The answer to 'Why?' then becomes 'Because I am a smart person who wants to have babies and I want my smart children to live in a smart people future'.
One person's 'self-referential error' is another person's 'positive feedback loop'.
Identity is the only functional morality.
'Religion' is what binds human aggregate into a meaning-filled and meaning-driven human *community*.
You make very good points. Both the latin religiō and the Old English ǣfæstnes that it replaced have a meaning that emphasises observance more than belief. Religiō has the meaning of “piety” as well as religious “obligation” and strict observance of rites, where ǣfæstnes had the added meaning of “lawfulness” and scrupulous observance of moral norms. Another originary meaning to the Latin word would be the “binding” of a person to their community. It's about public observance within an "us", in a founded territory or "world", which is the bar for order, against which everything else is measured and seen as chaotic. It's intrinsically collective.
The reasons I resist ‘supernaturalism’ as inherent in ‘religion’ is that it (a) it sets the bar for having a religion ridiculously high which (b) favors only those existing sets of supernatural beliefs that - at this point in time - are almost-entirely under the control of elites and (c) it prevents us from see ‘new’ religions as they spontaneously emerge and take root.
‘Meaning’ has to have a ‘material support’ of some kind, a carrier (or carrier-wave) that us to experience (or believe we experience) what is in someone else’s head because what matters to us is not what another person thinks, but what those thoughts make them do.
Which is why ‘observing the outward forms’ will always be more important than ‘inward belief’ and why the Abrahamic insistence on ‘inward belief’ has created such chaos in the world. As Abrahamism unravels, what is left is no operant beliefs at all. It all just thoughts in people’s heads. There’s no collective flow or rhythm left in America (especially).
‘One size fits all’ has resulted in ‘everything must go’.
I think that the Hypsistarian faith I outlined on Tree of Woe -- which is solidly built on authentic ancient writings of ancient pagan priests and philosophers but which transcends the vulgar notions of paganism we sometimes encounter elsewhere - is much closer to what we need than the Collins' space-natal god. Hypsistarian, as I reconstruct it, is a call for spiritual and physical excellence, a militant faith that acknowledges the need to fight evil, and a tight fit with Evolan Tradition.
An interesting proposal. It is my belief that “what we need” can never come from within ourselves, however, and must always present itself from beyond us.
That's a longer story, but I will say, I agree, and I don't find that disqualifying on what I've written, because it did. Tolkien used to talk about how he *discovered* Middle Earth rather than created it and then knew it was true. Same vibe.
As in Heidegger: the “the essential poetic word is not invented by but overcomes the poet.” In German, “Überdichtet der Dichter.” It over-poetises the poet.
First thing's first. If anyone claims to be a transhumanist or human-maximist with tech or gene editing I always look up their picture. If I would not hesitate to get into a fistfight with them I disregard everything they have to say. If they can't even take care of their personal health, and we see with people like Mike Mentzer and Arnold that it's incredibly systematic and logic based nowadays, then they are either hypocrites, incompetents or liars. It's outright on the tin.
"I think humans can self improve and become ubermen!"
"Ok does this include you?"
"n-no...."
"Then why should I listen to you?"
"You should give me and my kin governance over all humanity because....just because alright?!"
Incidentally he's wrong about almost everything. The first thing to note is that even with "population crash" all these nations are still going to have populations that outstrip WWI and WWII levels. Way back when they thought world populations exceeding 3 billion was absurd. Secondly the idea that you can extrapolate trendlines off into infinity is incredibly stupid, or rather incredibly midwitted.
"hey man line went down last week. Temperature went from 40C to 39C. In 100 weeks it's going to be -60C! In 500 weeks it's going to be -460C!!!!"
That's not even beginning to talk about his religion which worships tech geeks like him and Bill Gates as sex gods over harems of nubile women having VR orgies under statues of Climate Changeous or whatever.
Brilliant haha
Immediately one of my favorite writers, incredible article. When I first encountered "rationalists" I fucking hated them because it is instantly clear through rational analysis that rationality is insufficient for you know, living, so why the fuck would you be a "rationalist." Your prose and references are so good, a real joy to read. Excited to read more of your work and looking forward to new stuff from you.
Thanks ever so much. Glad to have you on board!
To be fair, "expansion into infinity" is the Faustian spirit, detailed in Spengler, with space colonization as its latest and greatest expression. It all ties into the Progressive worldview, which the Collinses are wedded to. This article explains very well how they're trying to have it both ways, progressing into infinity without paying the human costs of this experiment. They remain an interesting anomaly, but they won't put a dent in the historical cycle we're caught up in.
💯
Hard time getting the gist of this article. You are proposing what exactly?
When I talk to my attractive secular family & friends, I encourage them to see the beauty in their blood, their gift of nobility, their potential. I encourage them to see themselves as nobles with a great inheritance. Their eyes light up when they see the possibility of a great destiny, through creating family as their highest purpose (in contrast to identifying with “a career” especially for their daughters).
Ultimately we need smart beautiful people to outbreed ugly dumb people while maintaining dignity for everyone. Voluntary eugenics sounds sterile on its surface but when applied to a vision of nobility it rings true on the deepest spiritual level.
We honor our ancestors by building a better world for our descendants. If that’s not enough reason to live & thrive nothing is. Requires no superstition, no heaven & hell.
The only hindrance is the massive momentum of cultural nihilism that hates beauty, including religion that negates life. That can be overcome with simple affirmations promoting family nobility as beautiful. Try it yourself with those you recognize as beautiful & watch their eyes light up.
No government I can think of has been encouraging people to have babies or devising programs to foster this. If anything they do the opposite.
The example of Hungary is directly referenced in the article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary
‘We aren’t having children and nothing the government has tried has helped.’ Ummmm…they actively work against that. They don’t encourage having babies. They definitely aren’t trying to get us to be more fertile.
https://vridar.org/series-index/russell-gmirkin-plato-and-the-hebrew-bible/
Utter nonsense, smaller populations will help humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and help save the other species we share the planet with by protecting their shrinking habitat.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food. Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recently looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.
"Religion" is simply the ego of man creating a system to make himself god and gather power. All "religions" require works; certain steps, rituals and rules to be followed which at the end, provide two things: 1)Pride in one's ability to rise up the ranks and ensure one's own salvation and 2)the need for Higher Ups, in a position of some kind of power/privilege/enlightenment who can teach those below them how to do it "right" through proper adherance to said steps/ rituals/rules. ONLY in Christianity does God do ALL the work of saving US. True Christianity is not a religion. The Bible is clear on the matter; neither Christ nor God required buildings, (no matter how simple or impressive)stage productions, pot lucks or high holidays for salvation. I could quote book, chapter, verse, but this post would be too long and it is already too long. Few understand the actual Gospel because they have never heard it. Die to self, (ego, pride) confess your sin (putting yourself ahead of God), believe Jesus died to take your sin, and confess it with your mouth. Nothing else. Faith is a requirement. The Holy Spirit, (helper) does the heavy lifting of sanctification, gently over time. Reading the Bible, praying, thanking God and learning about Him; those are the worthy pursuits. The desires of the flesh slowly die with no "work" required. Men created religion. God wants a relationship. It is why He created us. It is clearly stated in Genesis. But not many will believe, they have not been chosen. Bottom line; "And Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness". Just believing God saves us. He sent Jesus to die, as His design for salvation. It is so simple. Yet brutally hard; killing the ego, (your idol) is a battle that lasts a lifetime. Few care to do it.
Wonderful and beautifully worded comment. So glad to have you on board
Thanks for your comment. I think the attitude of the technical fix and faith in it come as a result of the instant gratification that technical modernity gives us through our gadgets.