"It's just history" seems unhelpfully dismissive. Duh. The black death was history too, and half of Europe's population died.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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Collapse
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This is the place for discussing the potential collapse of modern civilization and the environment.
Collapse, in this context, refers to the significant loss of an established level or complexity towards a much simpler state. It can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular, global event. Although, the longer the duration, the more it resembles a ‘decline’ instead of collapse.
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So many words about what is just exponential growth simultaneuosly hitting multiple limits on a finite planet.
Its just history . IF you dont think history is rife with polycrisis you haven't read much history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis
It seems like the intelligent people are consumed with thought and research, which the stupid people simply ignore and lie about, going on to make short sighted decisions based on nothing more than their own egos, enrichment or empowerment.
The smart people have failed in their duty to keep the stupid people away from positions of power.
There is a whole branch of management theory about "narcissistic leadership".
Narcissistic leaders are not always dysfunctional narcissist personalities...it's also a style of leadership where the people in charge push their own ideas / agenda and dont really care about other people. Its essentially a leader who is in the job for their own selfish personal gains.
The benefit of narcissistic leaders is that they can be very magnetic people who become very popular. In management schools they basically accept that these people are useful for rallying support.
The danger is that if there is a power vacuum, they often step into top positions where there is no longer oversight / supervision. This is the cardinal rule: you NEVER let these people run anything. NEVER.
Once in a top position, they tend to discard rules, disregard others, do a lot of bad things in secret, sabotage all rivals etc etc, eventually leading to major corruption problems for any organization they head.
I don’t agree better communication will help at all. It doesn’t overcome willful ignorance and stupidity.
I believe language is powerful, and lack of appropriate language can be a real impediment.
However I have to agree with you that better communication won't help in this case, but not because of "stupidity." Modern society is constructed to subject us, including training us to become the perfect subjects. And if you don't buy into your life becomes much more difficult.
A superego control system built on Id-like manipulation (starvation, imprisonment, poverty, shunning) presides over us and often dictates that we go against our better interests, in service of capital and successional powers.
There are many smart people around us imo, wearing masks wrought in fear. Popular society is like a cult, and the rat race is real. Fall behind - or stick out - too much and you'll find yourself in a meatgrinder.
In some cases I think maturation of wisdom and intelligence is literally inhibited because of the pressures against it. "Curiosity killed the cat," "the good die young," the warnings are abound. Writ in literal blood no doubt. Which all seems absurdly dystopian to me but I digress.
These are Cipolla’s five fundamental laws of stupidity:
I get the attitude but I don't think "stupidity" is a good way to frame anything. It's being edgy for the sake of attention and that's not going to help anything.
- A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
The definition of stupidity is not productive. There are many reasons why a person would act in a way leading to these outcomes such as a lack of education, and they are remediable. However claiming that...
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
...promotes essentialism of this concept of stupidity, creating a framework wherein the stupid cannot be separated from the person. This won't lead anyone toward fixing the situation by addressing issues like lack of access to good education, food access, and healthcare - it only leads toward these "stupid" people becoming victims of oppression and crime.
As for the article posted...
There has been some backlash to the idea of the polycrisis. The historian Niall Ferguson has described it as “just history happening”. The political scientist Daniel Drezner says its proponents “assume the existence of powerful negative feedback effects that may not actually exist” – in other words, when crises overlap, the outcome might not always be bad (for instance, the pandemic lockdowns might have had some short-lived environmental benefits). Some point to past crises as evidence that what we are experiencing is not new.
These are secular ways to say "We can't know everything so I'm just going to let Jesus take the wheel." Or perhaps, "I can't bring myself to confront the consequences of my lifestyle, so I'm just going to let Jesus take the wheel."