#declining civilization

[arcticdementor]

“Thread about Lord of the Rings and decline. This won’t be super cohesive or all encompassing but just a few things. On won of the podcasts JMG was on a few months back one of the hosts was a little bummed out about the prospect of almost certain decline.”

Thread about Lord of the Rings and decline. This won’t be super cohesive or all encompassing but just a few things. On won of the podcasts JMG was on a few months back one of the hosts was a little bummed out about the prospect of almost certain decline.

JMG made a comment that might seem trivial but I think reflects upon something pretty important. He said something like this (I’m paraphrasing) “some of the best stories take place during times of decline, The Lord of the Rings takes place during a time of decline.”

I don’t think this point is trivial. LOTR clearly takes place deep into a cycle of decline. There are constant mentions of castles, sculpture, and mines that are abandoned or decaying and there is no ability of anyone alive to build something like that anymore.

The elves are explicitly in decline, so much so that they basically have to leave middle earth at the end of the books. The dwarves don’t have the manpower or ability to mine that they once did. Even the antagonist isn’t as powerful as he once was.

At one point he had his ring and his army and his body. By the time LOTR comes around he ‘regaining’ his power and he doesn’t have his ring/body. The elves are no longer able to field armies like they did to face of against Sauron the first time.

So okay LOTR takes place during or at the end of a decline so what? The story is fascinating and contains immense amount of adventure. The characters enjoy each other, their lives have meaning, their actions matter, and they’re able to make the word a better place

Dispute all of this at the end of LOTR they still can’t make the states of old and the elves are still in deep decline, but LOTR is still a story of immense meaning.

Underneath all this lies a reality, I think we have little prospect of stopping the collapse and decline that’s almost certainly headed our way BUT I don’t think that necessarily means the collapse of meaningful lives and meaningful stories. In fact it might be the opposite. I know many people whose identity and meaning are tied up in our colonizing mars or having cheap green energy and I’m sorry but that almost certainly not happening. But there will be plenty of opportunity for heroism, friends, meaning, celebration, and tobacco smoking/mead drinking.

And honestly given the choice between a life oriented around mars and electric vehicles or a life oriented around community, friendship, heroism, and love of God; I think the proper life is obvious.

Things in the future will be very much more rough and less plentiful, but it doesn’t have to mean a collapse at the level of the Good life or of human existence.

Sorry lots of typos but I wrote this one quick and have the cheap tiny iPhone and yuge orangutan hands.

[arcticdementor]

As societies enter a dark age, military technologies are apt to be the last to be lost, and in the recovery from a dark age, the first to advance.

In dark ages, art declines, great buildings decline, ordinary people’s living standards decline, people harrow the ground with stones tied to bits of wood instead of iron plows, but weapons technology usually goes right on improving.

Our art is crap, we no longer build Cathedrals, but until recently, weapons were good and improving.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review has recently appeared, revealing that we have lost all nuclear military technology

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I have regularly remarked on America’s inability to produce tritium.  All existing nuclear weapons require tritium to juice their detonation, and without tritium, would produce a low yield explosion.  Tritium decays over time, and so fresh tritium continually needs to be added.  The US is out of tritium, has repeatedly attempted to produce more, and repeatedly failed.

Fully funding the Obamacare website did not produce an Obamacare website, and I doubt that fully funding proposed new tritium production facilities will produce tritium.

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So, our enrichment facilities have ceased to function across the board.

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Existing nuclear weapons have not received maintenance for a very long time, and it is unclear whether there is anyone with the relevant skills to perform maintenance and adequately test them for readiness.

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If all existing fast neutron reactors have ceased to work, if all our existing isotopic enrichment plants have ceased to work, should we really believe that our existing nuclear weapons will work?

Money, “full funding”, is unlikely to be the issue.  Obama threw stupendous amounts of money at the Obamacare website, and the site did not come up.   It only came up when a conspicuously undiverse team of white and east Asian heterosexual males led by white heterosexual males took over the job.

Nuclear weapons were produced by western civilization, and since 1972 the core project of our universities has been “Western Civilization has got to go.”

[arcticdementor]

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[arcticdementor]

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[arcticdementor]

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[arcticdementor]

r/TheMotte - Comment by u/I_Dream_of_Outremer on ”Culture War Roundup for the week of May 23, 2022” —  Short piece on societal decline, what it looks like, and is it happening now:

51 votes and 2,680 comments so far on Reddit

(Dear diary) My cable wasn't working right the other day, so I tried to call to have a technician come out and check it. Sometimes, the customer service agent just hung up on me. It took about 4 hours on the phone to finally get someone assigned for a window between 8am-12pm two weeks from next tuesday. When the day came and they showed up, around 4:30pm with no notice they'd be late, they helpfully determined everything looked fine in their system and charged $199 for uplugging-and-replugging the modem. When looking into switching services after the visit, the only other option was prohibitively expensive (for me!).

I went to the mall to get some new shoes yesterday. The nordstrom had no sales people. 0. There were just stacks of shoeboxes of different sizes underneath the display cases. It was, quite literally, like shopping for shoes at target. For those unfamiliar with nordstrom it's a quasi-upscale large department store with a reputation for being 'better than macy's but less pricey than Saks.' In fact it is essentially the 'target' of department stores if macy's is walmart and saks is costco.

For those unfamiliar with American department stores, for 100 years or so you'd walk in and wander toward the section in which you were interested 'mens/womens shoes/formal etc' where a salesperson would cheerfully greet you and take you through the whole process. If they showed you something you liked and wanted to buy, they'd go get it from the back in your size, and help you check out. It was all entirely civilized.

In fact when my mom was growing up, all American department stores, even many local dry goods stores, had fashionable cafes and sometimes full restaurants, where while you were dining models would come by wearing the latest fashion and tell you about what they were wearing if you were interested.

Tomorrow I have to take a flight. Which means I have to take off my shoes, jacket, little ziploc bag with mandatorily tiny bottle of body wash, etc to go through security and pose like Vitruvian man before a vertically challenged horizontally elongated guatemalan woman casually paws at my personage and shrugs me off. Only so that I can wait eagerly in a plastic terminal chair for the privilege of further sitting in a cardboard-polyester chair with too little room for regular human leg-length (even in 'comfort-plus' or whatever dystopic shit they're calling 'business class' these days). It didn't used to be like this and it doesn't have to be like this.

In terms of today, with another soul-crushing outbreak of violent evil at an elementary school, I've shared a few times but will again when my dad was growing up there were riflery clubs and kids would just bring their guns to school and leave them in their lockers. There were no school shootings. Ever. It wasn't a thing yet.

Please also inset here a thing you've recently seen from @libsoftiktok, since it has to be seen to be believed.

Inflation and the economy has been bad before, way worse to be sure, but this culture/standard of living/reasonable expectations stuff seems unprecedentedly bad. What do you think?

[arcticdementor]

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[arcticdementor]

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