Author: Eric Helland

MBTI Personality Type Test

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”
— Morpheus

How Western civilization could collapse

By Rachel Nuwer for BBC Future 18 April 2017

The political economist Benjamin Friedman once compared modern Western society to a stable bicycle whose wheels are kept spinning by economic growth. Should that forward-propelling motion slow or cease, the pillars that define our society – democracy, individual liberties, social tolerance and more – would begin to teeter. Our world would become an increasingly ugly place, one defined by a scramble over limited resources and a rejection of anyone outside of our immediate group. Should we find no way to get the wheels back in motion, we’d eventually face total societal collapse.

Such collapses have occurred many times in human history, and no civilization, no matter how seemingly great, is immune to the vulnerabilities that may lead a society to its end. Regardless of how well things are going in the present moment, the situation can always change. Putting aside species-ending events like an asteroid strike, nuclear winter or deadly pandemic, history tells us that it’s usually a plethora of factors that contribute to collapse. What are they, and which, if any, have already begun to surface? It should come as no surprise that humanity is currently on an unsustainable and uncertain path – but just how close are we to reaching the point of no return? Continue reading precipitating factors

De-emphasize conformity and emphasize curiosity …

What really happens when human societies are stressed by disaster?

Disasters are “characterized by a strong feeling of mutual suffering and in-group solidarity … most disasters produce a great increase in social solidarity among the stricken populace … Nations and communities typically demonstrate amazing toughness and resiliency in absorbing and coping with the disintegrative effects of disaster. And disaster-struck societies not only quickly rebound from disaster but often reconstruct and regenerate their social life with added increments of vitality and productivity … persons and institutions submerge their particular aims in a common effort. Old rivalries and conflicts are forgotten, or at least become subliminal, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming task. Almost complete selflessness and great generosity are the emotional climate of this time … the crisis accompanying a disaster is a strongly integrating force in the community. It demands a redefinition of roles in which the divisions of status and culture give way to humanitarian or universalistic considerations … The breakdown of racial and minority group barriers, and the acceptance of minority group members into new social roles, has been noted in both historical and contemporary accounts of disaster.” — Charles E. Fritz

The decadent ages of Great Nations are characterized by: defensiveness; pessimism; materialism; frivolity; an influx of foreigners; the welfare state; a weakening of religion; and internal political division. These are symptoms of the decline. The cause of the decline is an overwhelming obsession with the accumulation and protection of wealth.

Wealth itself is not ‘bad’; the obsession with wealth is ‘bad’. The expression: “love of money” means an obsession with wealth. The loss of a sense of duty springs from the selfishness that comes from having an obsession with wealth. The terms “love of money”, and “obsession with wealth”, may be summed up in the word greed.

America’s decadent age began circa 1980. The book The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe and the movie Wall Street directed by Oliver Stone, both circa 1987, appear in the starting decade of America’s Decadent Era. The statement “Greed is good”, made by Oliver Stone’s ruthless arbitrageur Gordon Gekko, sums up the era succinctly. To say that “greed is good” is an expression of the distorted thinking that poisons the national psyche of people belonging to once great nations in the final chapter of their global relevance.

Greed is not good. Greed is a spiritual disease. No nation, consumed by greed, can be considered great. The root cause of the decline and collapse of once great nations is greed.

The cure for spiritual disease is love.

… on the topic of America’s path to diminished importance in world affairs, and the decline of Great Powers generally, the problem is the emphasis on wealth. Wealth … ‘should be’ a secondary outcome of productive activity … ‘not’ the solitary purpose of productive activity.

The trajectory of Great Nations begins with a burst of productive energy for the sake of productive expression … it ends with a miserly hoarding of wealth … all energies dedicated to protecting and adding to the hoard.

A declining nation that wants to be great again would have to: De-emphasize wealth and emphasize productive expression; De-emphasize competition and emphasize co-operation; De-emphasize escapism and emphasize engagement; De-emphasize conformity and emphasize curiosity.