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this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Two points, I think.
The first is that, honestly, if this is the like, assessment we're making, we're totally fucked. Not in the sense that we're totally fucked, but in that we're totally fucked if we're making that assessment, ja feel? It shouldn't really matter too much one way or the other what the outcome is, there, obviously the strategies for real change are the same in either case. We're also more broadly fucked if we're having this conversation of like, oh well which one is the damage control, there, because it takes a conversation away from what those strategies for change might be, and puts the perspective more towards like, okay, the supermassive meteor is hitting, do we have an orgy or do we get in the bunker? No conception of how to stop it, just sort of like, a doomer sense of resignation, a doomer smokescreen. Maybe this is like the fabled "accelerationist perspective", right, but I don't think so. That's a political movement, it still does things, and the people who are in it still end up doing things even if they think like, collapse of either the political system or just generalized ecological collapse and the holocene extinction are inevitable. In no case, really, can we come to a conclusion about it that kind of, forgoes the idea that we still end up doing general strikes, protests, and [redacted]. This isn't really a criticism of you, but of this conversation more broadly, because I've seen it happen like a million times every time election season rolls around.
I dunno, I guess I'm just saying that I don't think this meta-level, abstract conversation is very useful. It's sort of like when people talk about freedom or efficiency. I've been obsessing a little bit, it's surfaced once again in my mind, how those values are such core values to people's worldviews, right. They're core to people's decision making. And yet, they're totally meaningless, they're proxy values that indicate nothing on their own. One man's freedom to own guns infringes on another's freedom to live in a gun free society. One definition of efficiency says it's better to diversify and decentralize the methods of production, to better insulate against external forces which might collapse a system and make it less brittle, collapses which lead to increasingly larger losses as time goes on. The other definition of efficiency says that it's better to engage in mass production and centralized production, because the margins are better, and you can specialize more. This whole conversation is sort of, it strikes me as similar to when people argue about freedom or efficiency. We're arguing over an abstraction, here, we're implicitly accepting a framing in which we've already kind of lost.
The second point is that I don't know if we really have enough data to go with either perspective. The "slower and less painful" decision isn't always obvious electorally, even though we might make it out to be so in hindsight. It just seems more like either position is a gut feeling, to me. Against the cries of the history nerds, we can't much use historical precedent for these sorts of decisions. Anyone that's not a hack imposing a grand narrative on history knows that basically everything in history is just a hurricane that forms because a butterfly beats its wings, it's all an insane set of chances and probabilities.
So I don't know if we can come to a conclusion in which is better, and I don't really know if we even need to in order to still know where we should go and what we should do.
Well, I happen to think that the US is finished with its Greatest Power stage, just like every other nation in History that was once the Greatest Power for a while eventually fell of that pedestal, hence you could say you're totally fucked in aggregate. However given the massive disparity in wealth distribution over there and how the gains and the costs of Imperial America are distributed - a few people get most of the gains whilst most people get to pay for the costs such as the Military - it's quite possible that as the US becomes Just Another Big Nation and thus less rich in aggregate, the majority of people are still better off than before because they never really got the benefits of Imperial America whilst having to pay the costs.
Ultimatelly it depends on how much the elites destroy on their way down, which in turn depends on how much people in general fight against or cooperate with their desperate clinging to their elite position in an elite nation.
(By the way, your efficiency point is interesting: you see, one of those ideas of efficiency is long term - specifically the diversification for robustness one - and the other one is short-term. Short term efficiency yield more results moment by moment but does so at the risk of collapse from even relativelly mild external shocks, by which point that system stops operating and has to be rebuilt and if you count those downtimes and the cost of rebuilding, it actually adds up to less in the long run. Long term efficiency as you described it add robustness to shocks hence makes something unlikely to collapse when faced with one, but does so at the cost of less efficiency when things are going fine and there are no shocks. Ultimatelly what is the best efficiency depends of your time-frame: for example a Nation State, which aims to exist ideally forever, should be aiming for long-term efficiency, whilst a speculative investor in the Stock Market naturally only cares about short-term efficiency as they're in-today-out-tomorrow - the former has an outlook measured in decades or centuries and can't exactly "leave the market" in times of crisis, whilst the latter has an outlook of days or months and can just cash out and wait during shock periods or, if they can short, bet in the "things will get worse" direction)
As for your second point, I agree that we don't have enough data and probably never will: the world changes and no two situations are the same so we'll never be sure.
So anything you chose to do is a risk.
However doing nothing is just as much a risk.
Usually change happens when people's judgement of those risks (which is generally flawed) is heavilly tilted to seeing "do nothing" as the greatest risk.
I dunno. The collapse of the US is sort of, interesting, right. I think there are a lot more people reaping the gains of imperial america than you might think. I mean, that's basically all of what american industry is at this point, and maybe all it ever has been. If you think about like, first industrial revolutions, those came about not contrary to, but in combination with slavery. You can't much have a loom without cotton being picked somewhere, and you can't much have a grainery or industrialized mill without someone out working in the wheat fields, you know? And then you have the sort of colonial period in which that slavery was outsourced, and then you have a post WW2 period of rapid military expansionism and then now you have an interconnected global system in which larger colonial states rely on what are basically smaller states where everyone inside of them is a slave. Not only larger colonial states in the west, but states abroad which benefit from both US and domestic military imperialism. Nobody's talking about what's happening in the congo right now, but all those lithium batteries, that are used basically everywhere, they all have a set of common origin points.
I find it distressing that, you know, it can be within everyone's mutual interest, internal to a democracy, even a real democracy, it can be in their internal mutual interest to be extremely xenophobic and exploitative of another culture or nation, especially if they can do so at arm's length.
So I dunno, I think with the collapse of that global hegemony, I would like to think that it's only a more minor kind of thing, right, but at the same time, I think maybe it's not, and maybe the common narrative about BRICS being the big grand replacement on the world stage, and hopefully, being the better replacement, I dunno if that's gonna come to pass, and I dunno if they're really gonna be better so much as they might just be different. I might be wrong, you know, but china flirts with a danger, when they open up to a larger market and populate the higher parts of their government with billionaires, when they decide to fuse a presumably socialist project with a neoliberal economic system that inherently concentrates power.
I mean and that's all considering the idea that the elites don't just wanna fucking burn everything down at the point at which they figure out that it's not really tenable any longer, or like, just want to burn it all down for another fifteen minutes of power, which might very well be the case.
The efficiency point is something I find kind of interesting because. Say you have a short-term efficiency, right, you get much larger gains in the short term, much more rapidly. In a competitive field, you will be able to crush your competitors more easily, if you can grow faster in the short term of this time frame. This applies to the free market, but also applies to nations at the broadest level. You can't really reliably create a strategy that has long term efficiency and stability, because the short term strategies still win in the short term, and a "win" is quantified as the extinction of competition. So, I dunno, I don't have a solution to that problem. Might be like, we're just fucked longer than long term, just, fucked in the sense that human psychology is fucked, I dunno. I also don't really like the idea that the only "winning" is basically that, after some short term power becomes the dominant force, exterminates all competition, then they can start leaning into long term efficiency strategies. It's not as though it's like, a static process, right, where you only have to win once to keep going, you have to keep winning against all possible and future competition. There are also obviously problems with a structure that wins it's battles along the short-term and then becomes a sort of monopolized power, right, because it's by nature brittle and resistant to that change into a long-term strategy. And then I also just don't know if the cost of "winning" in that context, maybe that does enough damage by itself that you're just fucked. Holocene extinction style.
Maybe there's something I'm missing there, or like, I'm thinking in too absolutist and grandiose of terms in a place where the context really actually matters much more, I dunno. Probably that's the case, if I had to guess.