alt Hacker NewsHonestly there are writings from the greeks, romans, enlightment, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s... That read just like this.
At some point, this view point, and this predicament is just "The Human Condition".[0]
[0] That's not a excuse to not try to fix the broken things around us. But perspective is important.
Replies
To be fair, depending on when these things were written, there was a lot of shit going on in Greece and Rome that merited such a take, including invasions, plagues, civil war. And the '20s[1], '30s[1], and '40s[2], and '50s[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_(1953%E2%80%931962)
Speaking of the Romans, decline can indeed take hundreds of years to play out.
> 20s 30s
They were heading up towards large catastrophy. In fact.
Obligatory xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1979:_History
That out of the way, I'm close to 50, and things over the last year definitely seem different in a more precarious way than anything before them. It feels closer to my memories of August 1991, or the days immediately after 9/11 or January 6th, only all the time, where I've gotten a little numb to the dissonance, but not nearly enough for it to feel close to normal. It feels like what I imagine the run-up to WWII might have felt like to those living then.
That's my perspective.
Well yeah but at the same time social specifics exist; Trump doesn't go about things like Caesar because the world is fundamentally different
So negotiations and solutions must be too
The point about our current situation can best be understood with complexity theory.
Complex systems can be interpreted as trajectories in high dimensional spaces. When a complex system is pushed out of equilibrium too far, it "runs up against its constraints", the borders of the space it can operate in.
It follows those towards edges and along those finally into corners (so to speak), reducing the degrees of freedom along the way. "Being cornered" is an accurate visualization of a complex system out of options: you have nowhere to go.
Our society is such a cornered complex system. "Crises" are themselves symptoms of reduced resilience: the system cannot evade them. They compound, eventually overwhelming the coping abilities, leading to catastrophic break down of entire subsystems and further domino effects.
The same observation is correct for our natural environment, whether you look at biodiversity, climate or other pollution-induced stressors.
So no, it's not "the human condition". It's the end-state of a prolonged lack of course-correction.