This is something I've been thinking about. I don't believe you can go backwards. So by that I main we're not going back to monarchy. I don't think we're going to communism. I don't think we're going to fascism. What is next? Is it something that doesn't currently exist? Is it something that's a combination of previous things in a new form? Are we ten years, fifty years, one hundred years, or five hundred years out?
From where I sit, the liberal post World War Two world is basically dying before our eyes. The more I think about it, the better I feel about this. That's not to say I am not concerned about what follows, because it could be worse. But it could be better. Ultimately I'm less convinced that we can build a system that fixes our problems. This is including Bitcoin. I'm not saying Bitcoin doesn't fix problems. It does, but it can't fix everything.
What do you think?
Every trend I see is toward governments exerting more control over the people within their borders.
Tech is aiding this (flock, internet surveillance, bank secrecy act, digital payments, cell phones).
Seems like that increases. So where does it go? I think its a thing where the average person has far less freedom than even a decade ago. Rich people and people in charge probably get to do whatever they want.
You'll be begging for monarchy as you stare down the barrel of techno feudalism just like your ancestors did for the thousands of years before you
What will you be doing?
Enjoying my popcorn
Have you ever read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley?
I remember liking it more than 1984, but now I'm not sure why. It's been a while.
They're both dystopian novels but they warn about very different types of realities. I think Brave New World's concerns are more likely to come about than 1984's.
Control through pleasure and degeneracy
I do hold hope that there's going to be push-back. I'm already seeing it. I think the time of hedonism will pass. In a completely materialist world where everyone is focused on themselves, we have a meaning crisis. I'm only seeing it in small anecdotal things, but I do think the zoomers are more likely to come out of this less materialist than any other generation.
When I've spoken with clergy from traditional sacramental religions, they say the same thing. Their numbers are booming with young people seeking meaning in a world gone mad. Will that scale? Will that stick? I don't know, but I hope so.
I feel the same way. The zoomers basically got three consecutive generations showing them how not to live their lives.
If not them, it might be their kids. If they have kids.
Incredibly insightful book.
But what is the story people beleive that follows after the story of self determination. Of globalism. Of democracy.
Rise in national identity? That seems to be a trend though I am not sure it sticks after the massive diversification of populations.
What moral guiding principles do people organize around? Faith in the ideals of democracy are on life support.
Do we drift into a techno neo-nationalism? Or do we see globalism take over and the idea of nations die?
I think the story becomes: "All those ideals (like liberty, democracy, equality, etc) were never real, they were just a plot by [fill in your villain] to control you. So now you shouldn't bother with any of that, just pay attention to your phone and have faith in bureaucracy."
Trust the experts and follow the science
But make sure they are our experts, our science, in our democracy.
That’s not how this works
Science is and has been the religion. We never have nor ever will have separation of church and state. We either have a new religion (what we have today) or we have two institutions that work together and balance each other.
How do you like them apples.
Religion is just a different word for world view. Many religious people, maybe most are actually more centered on their political world view than their "faith". Its sad but true. The worst part is that most do not realize it. They think they are voting "christian" but really they worship the nation state. And the science obsessed other half are not better. They think they can keep the two separate but one always wins over. It ain't the church either.
I agree, however democracy is society's escape valve, and it's not going anywhere. Corporations handpick the candidates and give them to the people to vote for so they feel like they're an important part of the process, only to then return to the complacency of everyday life.
The story might be "Thank goodness these smart people are keeping me safe from all this scary stuff I don't understand."
This is the deal since the first empire.
The state has to be a variation on this theme or it will face rebellion.
Without being a broken record, this is also the typical cycle of the rise and fall of these same empires. In my view, life today is so artificial, detached from nature, and dependent on synthetic elements (meds, economic controls, consumerism), that every rebellion ends up serving as the foundation for a new corporation rather than a break between individuals and this fraud.
Yes, because the rebels never actually understand the problem or, if they do, the movement gets coopted.
You CANNOT have freedom and a government.
Government literally means NO freedom.
We may see a move away from representatives towards more direct democracy.
What do you mean?
Determining policy through public vote, like many states already have mechanisms for. There have been several reformers who have pushed for it at the national level.
California is the canary in the coal mine with this approach. The answer to our problems is not more democracy.
I didn't say it was an answer to our problems. I said it might be coming next.
lol. My mistake. I'm a broken record on California. Every time I visit family in more conservative states and they start ragging on it, I just say, Well, you're on the same path. They're just ten years ahead of you. You're just in denial about it, and that isn't gonna help. You don't even understand why California is the way it is.
I usually give blank stares which is confirms what I'm saying is true.
It probably won't look any more like California's system than the early republics looked like monarchies.
The corruption inherent with representative government is pretty obvious to everyone and the technological limitations that led to it over direct democracy don't really exist now, so I think it's likely to be attempted somewhere and it may catch on.
That's the best case I've heard for direct democracy right there. Not in the positive sense, but in the practical sense. It's also a very common argument for anarchy. Why do we need government to handle a massive amount of our lives when those things could be specialized by individual groups that are really good at them?
When I've mentioned this to people, I've said would you get your taxes done by the guy that changes the oil in your car? Why on earth would we put so much into one institution? Well, there was a time when that made more sense.
Are you sure? I think people give blank stares when someone says something incredibly smart they’ve never considered, but also when something is incredibly stupid and they don’t know where to start, and are considering whether it’s even worth arguing about.
Blank stares are not a good indicator of how right you are.
Though I’m aware you’re a better judge of the situation you described.
I’m not sure people are good at knowing whether an argument they don’t know how to counter is smart or stupid.
Very true. Not my indicator of my rightness. Observing where California was in the 90s vs today and where other states are now. That is why indicator. As well as the direction I have seen these other states move during this time. Pretty easy to track.
I should have phrased it better. What it confirms for me is that they have no clue where things are moving. They are in denial. I do think some have never considered it and that's the blank stare.
What do you think of that?
California has direct democracy on a lot of issues. I am not sure if it's been a net good or net bad.
I can tell you, in California, it's been a net negative. It's bad enough when you have politicians with poor incentives making terrible decisions. It's even worse when you have uneducated, easily manipulated plebs making decisions that are very hard to undo. State of California is massively in debt, in large part due to the proposition system. Then there's high speed rail. Thank you, propositions.
People that can't lead their own lives in a productive and successful way should have no business selecting leaders. When we have a world that has lost its moral compass, the last thing we need is the masses making moral decisions. And that's the problem in my opinion. We have lost our moral compass. This is why I believe religious people are wasting their time when they're focusing solely on politics. They should instead be focusing on their families, on their parish and their communities.
But... that's just my opinion :)
This reminds me of the John Adams quote: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
More democracy won't save society if the people themselves are foolish.
when Adams said it USA was not a democracy. in fact the constitution is about a republic not a democracy
It's a slippery slope, this business of adding filters to who may or may not select. Then it all becomes a game of who controls the filters.
In any event, that is not democracy. Yet I've had countless arguments with mostly lefties but also others about that as they were seriously thinking some form of "voting license" would help democracy.
I don’t know what your definition of democracy but I already hate it.
the franchise should be limited to male property owners
women should not vote because they are too emotional and irrational
felons should not vote
non citizens should not vote
The homeless should not vote
renters should definitely not vote
You missed a big one. Government employees should not be allowed to vote with the exception of those in military service. They have already surrendered almost all their agency.
But truthfully I say no one should vote. Period. Not in the current alignment. I don't care about the other limitations.
Someone else's desire and vote doesn't make it morally right or wrong to use force against me or you.
And yes, the US is a liberal democracy. It is also a republic mostly in name today. But both can be true. There are many forms of democracy and the US is one of them.
I know Democrats like to say it's a democracy as some sort of pride. I'm not. Democracy is a religion many people practice but deny the religiousness. But it is indeed a religion.
The simplest test would be net tax recipients can’t vote.
A reasonable cost of living off other people is not getting to boss them around too.
You are correct, government employees should not vote except for military service!
Church going Christian male head of households.
I don't have a custom definition of democracy. Doesn't mean I like it.
But I dislike your laundry list of demands even more. Goes to show there's always another, even worse system some people will clamor for.
Should non citizens be able to vote?
yes or no
Funny, it was democracy in ancient Greece. And there are always filters. They exist now. Children can't vote. Nor can felons. And supposedly foreign people can't either.
Most countries do allow felons to vote.
And I'm sure you can see the difference in drawing a line between accepted age and citizenship as opposed to filtering out those who "don't know how to vote correctly."
So yes, there have always been filters. You got me on that semantic error.
Most countries allow felons to vote? That's a recipe for third world hellscapes
You'd need a lot of felons to make that faction strong enough to really matter. And if they were that big, it might be an indication of how deranged lawmakers have become.
Or in other words: maybe that's a chicken/egg problem.
Ancient Athens
if you are going to bash direct democracy and classical Athens
The temptation to exploit the excluded is too strong
Prop 8 passed but was overruled by a federal judge.
Prop 187 passed but was overruled by a federal judge.
A single fucking judge can overrule the voters.
This is fact not my opinion.
edit: it's only a net negative because of voter fraud in CA, have people show their fucking ID and I assure you election results will change.
<thats-racist.gif>
I think I need to be clear on what I mean by uneducated. I don't mean people that didn't go to college. People that don't have diplomas. I mean idiots. Which includes most people with college degrees. People that just feed on the crap they're sold. People that robotically repeat the bromides their team recites.
The people of California are conditioned and they act in the ways that they're conditioned.
Depends on the implementation. I can imagine versions that are better and versions that would destroy our civilization.
The reason I think it’s plausible is that there’s so much effort going towards shaping public beliefs already and the elites might prefer to cut out the political middlemen.
Some sort of techno autocracy disguised as democracy?
what’s the problem in Canada? too much democracy or too much immigration?
The problem with this post is focusing on the wrong problem
another post criticizing democracy
time for new material
The problem in Canada like most democracies is people vote themselves stuff they perceive to be “free”. Immigration just expands the voter base of people who vote themselves stuff they perceive to be “free”.
That's the tip of the iceberg on the problems with immigration.
I could see that.
It's not going backwards, it's a cycle, monarchy is the next logical step in the cycle.
Everything falls to entropy eventually, and there are no new ideas. Everything has been tried already.
It's like expansion and contraction of the universe, the helix in your DNA, the weak men that create hard times ...
It's a playlist of 4-5 songs on loop.
we need more immigration from third world hellscapes
Sure, it's a cycle. It's not a pure circle though. It's more like a spiral. I don't think everything's been tried. Not more than once at least. Liberal democracy is a new concept, based on an old concept, but in a new way. The Enlightenment and Secularism, both have shaped what liberal democracy looks like in ways that didn't exist in the past. So I don't see us in a loop, I see us in a spiral, and I do see something new, a combination that hasn't existed in the past. And it could be more obvious centralized power that looks something like monarchy, for sure. But it's gonna be different this time.
I mean you can see it now, you can see it developing, you can see people wanting it even. It's one of the biggest mistakes people make with Trump thinking that they can just oppose him and all everything will go back to the way it was. It won't. You can't go backwards.
Of course everything has been tried, by several generations. It's just vanity to think this time is different because it's ours. The human firmware is a constant.
Small clans became villages became nations became hemispheres through endless iteration. Technology is a constant too, boats and the wheel were world shaping technology that moved information and material.
The only difference is the world is getting smaller, Putin Xi Trump are just tribal leaders under compression by a smaller world.
They're all strong-men inevitably created out of necessity by the abdication inherent in democracy.
A weak Tsar creates a Kerensky, a Kerensky creates a Lenin, a Lenin creates a Stalin. It's an inescapable cycle hard coded into our firmware.
It depends on the outcome of WWIII. If China is unified under the communist banner, then the Government-is-God model of human organization dominates the planet until the sun blows up. If the US wins then we achieve total separation of economy and state in the process.
Communism is dead, dude. They just don't realize it yet. China is not dead, but communism is. They're all LARPers now. But you're not wrong about government is God. It's just not limited to China. It's the same here in the US. Don't fool yourself.
All politics is LARPing.
The moral question is the same but our communists currently don't have command of a military.
Liberal idiocracy
That's now. What next.
Fascist idiocracy
ok, believable -.-
Idiocracy was a documentary and 1984 the instruction manual -.-
Misspelled MAGA.
Tyranny comes after democracy. Known for thousands of years since Plato.
We will have a technofeudal AI-CBDC control system for the vaxxed brain rotted sheep still dreaming about “healthcare” and “voting”
Free yourself, family, and community with self custody bitcoin or join the masses eating bugs.
Or, don't be a little bitch, and jockey to be one of the lords... idk how to tell you this, but the free escaped people are simply another flavor of the masses
The democracy of today is a far cry from that of the ancients. I think they would balk at the comparison.
And the ancient one wasn't any better. The scale was smaller in the poleis, but slavery sustained them, the economic foundation of the oligarchs since that time. Today they let the slaves vote.
Indeed.
Can go backwards if you learn from mistakes
That's going forward. You can't go back to the previous state. You create a new one that is influenced by the previous.
thus, monarchy. told yah
Yeah, Monarchy's going backwards. So no, not monarchy as we know it. Notice I didn't say there won't be a ruling elite class. I suspect there will be, just as there is now. There aren't gonna be kings though. They're not gonna be that blatant about it.
no, it's not going backwards. It's updating/correcting an error.
Also, what is this Whiggish nonsense of constant progression to some ideal? Says who?
Asking the right question, progress according to who? I'm just repeating the propaganda. Progress as in progressing from where you were to where you are, not in the valuation sense.
Good question. I agree with the framing here, #1497516, where you said globalism, liberal democracy is a story people believe.
We probably have to look to the youth. Not that it will be for them to decide, but whatever comes about has to be plausible for them. They, unlike our predecessors, probably won't go fight abroad for an abstract notion like "nation," "liberty" etc. My prediction is they will withdraw as the current order heaves its last sigh. Communities fragment, coalesce and will and build until they have something worth fighting for. A larger, more powerful force will swoop in to usurp what they have, and then the cycles of war will continue. This is my bull case. Bear case is technofeudalism. We will most likely land somewhere in between.
Tldr; imho, the meta narrative that replaces liberal demlcracy is some kind of agri-localism and this will be contrasted by dystopian techno-feudalist megacity nightmares. Both, to me, are intimations of a dark age that resist broad stroke -ismness
Another Crusade and holy war: the West vs Islam
We have seen this movie before
Spain got it right in 1492: expel all Jews and Muslims
Yeah... this time it won't be Christians vs Muslims. Muslims vs secularists. I don't like the odds.
monarchy
We don't go backwards. Though dynasty never really died.
why would it be backwards? If you make a wrong turn, it's not a mistake to backtrack in search for a better path.
I'm not saying it's a mistake. I'm saying it's not possible. You create something new. You cannot return to the past. The past was created by different people with different pasts from us. We have a different future from them. We cannot recreate the world that they had. We're going to create something different. It might be better, it might be worse. But we can't go backwards. When conservatism is at its best, it's questioning and pushing back on progress that might be negative. When it's at its worst, it is pure nostalgia. Can't go back and it's a trap. We can learn from the past and create a new future. That's it.
Monarchy 2.0*, whatever. Some small-state duke-ship, we all pay homage/service to a dude who cares for the land and its people and inherits the power.
Maybe we call it, Enlightened monarchy. Whatesvs
I might sound pedantic, but when people hear monarchy, they think the king of England, some hereditary thing that is silly to them. This is a very anti American way of thinking. We're well on our way to what you described functionally with corporations and capitalism. Look at Jeff Bezos and Amazon and all the services that they provide and how much power they have. I'm not even saying any of this to s to slam Amazon. much of this power and wealth they have acquired by solving people's problems in ways that other companies couldn't or wouldn't. That said, it's not gonna solve all of our problems and it it isn't going to fill the moral void in our societies. Which I believe is one of the root problems that we keep trying to fix with government and politics. And we can't.
Capitalist oligarchy technocracy, maybe?
I saw this over on nostr first, so here’s my thought on the subject.
Techno-Cracy
How predominant was liberal democracy ever?
#1495818
Only 7% of the world currently live in one!
The book 'The Return of Strong Gods' by R..R. Reno is relevant here.
Great book. I of course am speaking of the West. Not to globe in total. I have written about that book several times.
Yes agree it is a great book but imo most westerners (lets say the 7% of the world population who do live under a Liberal Democratic government) have no idea what is coming to replace it.
China has won the trade war - its state capitalist economy now dominates the planet and it looks a lot like that dominance will gradually lead to dominance over the monetary and institutional con.structs which are what remains of the wests legacy hegemony.
The 'liberal democracies' were afterall only ever viable based on the wealth and privilege that western imperialism delivered over the last 500 years. That privilege looks likely to be ending, along with the liberal democracies and their sense of entitlement
As I explained in my old warning post #171338, we are going fast towards COMMUNISM, controlled WITH so called "AI tools", that in fact are just modified content pushed into gullible minds.
WHO controls the content,, controls the people.
With AI tools is so fucking easy to control people's mind...
Sorry if you don't get it
cyberocracy
That’s where we are now.
hmm