State of the Civilization Report

Our civilization is stuck in a rut.

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Analysis . . .

After reading articles like this one:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/uk-conservatives-are-banking-on-a-losing-strategy

. . . we can observe that the democracies vote in the liberals, nothing all so much changes, they vote in the conservatives, nothing all so much changes, then they cycle back through and through and through. And not all so much changes.

Meanwhile, the autocracies can’t depose the autocrats.

The world is stuck and it cannot imagine what to do.

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What the wealth/power elites want more than anything else is stability and complacency. Toward that end they’ve addressed the worst of the carnage. They stopped their major warring after the carnage of 1914–1945. They haven’t used their nuclear weapons since the carnage of 1945. They mitigated mass unemployment after the economic carnage of the Great Depression. They’ve achieved just enough in the way of stability and complacency.

For a hundred years there was a dynamic and hopeful movement (under the rubric of Labor or Socialism or Communism). It swept the world. It failed, and now it’s hardly much remembered. And now there is nothing like it. The retrograde religious fundamentalists have some passion. The retrograde national chauvinists have some passion. Movements that we might consider “progressive” flare up for a while (Ban the Bomb, the New Left, the Rainbow Coalition, Occupy, Syriza, Podemos, Bernie, BLM). Each of those made headlines for a couple of years.

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I do believe the “greening” movement is growing. But it’s a movement of a very different kind. Those cited above were about “progress” to better places. Historical advancement. Higher stages.

The greening movement is actually about degrowth and devolution. Not the stuff of passion. Chastening. Slowly confronting what’s gone wrong.

“Downscale Now!” won’t have a million marching. Rather, it will seep into consciousness, culture, and character subtly over time. As the civilization settles back down.