I put significantly lower confidence in these predictions than those of the previous post.
Generally speaking I expect comfortable, well maintained social democracies to first become uncomfortable, run down social democracies. Stagnation and sclerosis. Lower trust will mean lower investment which together with the rigidity and unadaptability will strengthen the oligarchic aspect of the central European technocratic way of doing things. Nepotism will become more prevalent in such an environment.
Overall violent crime will still drop, because of better surveillance and other crime fighting technology, but surprising outbursts of semi organized coordinated violence will be seen for a decade or two more (think London). These may become targeted at prosperous urban minorities. Perhaps some politically motivated terrorist attacks, which however won’t spiral out into civil wars, but will produce very damaging backlash (don’t just think radical Islam here, think Red Army fraction spiced with a nationalist group or two).
Could you please give more links to the stuff that helped you form these opinions? I’m very interested in this, especialy in explaining the peculiar behaviour of this generation’s youth as opposed to that of the Baby Boomers when they were the same age. After all, it’s irrational to apply the same tactics to a socipoloitical lanscape that’s wildly different from the one in which these tactics got their most spectacular successes. Exiting the mind-killing narratives developed in bipartidist systems and finding the way to rethink the problems of this age from scratch is a worthy goal for the rationalist project, especially in a “hold off on proposing solutions”, analyze-the-full-problem-and-introduce-it-from-a-novel-angle sense. Publications such as, say, Le Monde Diplomatique, are pretty good at presenting well-researched, competently presented alternative opinions, but they still suffer a lot from “political leanings”.
I know we avoid talking politics here because of precisely its mind-killing properties, able to turn the most thoughtful of agents into a stubborn blind fool, but I think it’s also a good way of putting our skills to the test, and refine them.
I put significantly lower confidence in these predictions than those of the previous post.
Generally speaking I expect comfortable, well maintained social democracies to first become uncomfortable, run down social democracies. Stagnation and sclerosis. Lower trust will mean lower investment which together with the rigidity and unadaptability will strengthen the oligarchic aspect of the central European technocratic way of doing things. Nepotism will become more prevalent in such an environment.
Overall violent crime will still drop, because of better surveillance and other crime fighting technology, but surprising outbursts of semi organized coordinated violence will be seen for a decade or two more (think London). These may become targeted at prosperous urban minorities. Perhaps some politically motivated terrorist attacks, which however won’t spiral out into civil wars, but will produce very damaging backlash (don’t just think radical Islam here, think Red Army fraction spiced with a nationalist group or two).
What, you mean like in Gangs of New York?
Could you please give more links to the stuff that helped you form these opinions? I’m very interested in this, especialy in explaining the peculiar behaviour of this generation’s youth as opposed to that of the Baby Boomers when they were the same age. After all, it’s irrational to apply the same tactics to a socipoloitical lanscape that’s wildly different from the one in which these tactics got their most spectacular successes. Exiting the mind-killing narratives developed in bipartidist systems and finding the way to rethink the problems of this age from scratch is a worthy goal for the rationalist project, especially in a “hold off on proposing solutions”, analyze-the-full-problem-and-introduce-it-from-a-novel-angle sense. Publications such as, say, Le Monde Diplomatique, are pretty good at presenting well-researched, competently presented alternative opinions, but they still suffer a lot from “political leanings”.
I know we avoid talking politics here because of precisely its mind-killing properties, able to turn the most thoughtful of agents into a stubborn blind fool, but I think it’s also a good way of putting our skills to the test, and refine them.