This is incredibly helpful and oddly reassuring in these uncertain times. Change is scary, but inevitable. Understanding our ability to become active participants in shaping the change makes it more manageable and opens up possibilities that the frightened mind cannot see. Thank you.
I wish for collapse all the time. I can't see any other way to halt the momentum of what we have made and shift lanes. Too much invested interest in what we have now. Too many people with incentives to keep it this way and everyone else is too busy working and surviving to care. Collapse is the dissolution of that momentum and a redesign into another way that better fits the current needs. The old expansionist economy has reached the end stage. Even if it gets to space, that will require a massive redesign because the exploitation machine will not be able to bring a glut of goods to space colonies. Those will be hard places, hard lives, requiring solid designs, not mindless consumption and expansion industries. It will take centuries for that machine to be able to facilitate the level of consumption we see as normal now system-wide. I expect us to naturally shift away from it because we'll have faced more and more consequences the whole time. The evidence of the flaws in our current paradigm has grown too great and that will only continue. Haven't watched any of the video yet, wanted to barf out my opinion first, watch the video, and then share any differences I feel from watching it. I am looking forward to developing a more mature economic understanding, it's a necessary piece in pursuing my goals in this quickly changing world.
Why create parallel institutions first. Lookup Victor Orban and his civic circle movement. Instead of buying terrible processed food, have someone sell premade food(since 2000's every state has Cottage Kitchen Laws that let you sell food from home), form coops insurance, retirement, ect. If collapse happens, your group will be in much better position.
@rekit7351 I don't know what you mean about the civic circles thing. Saw a paper that said he was able to engineer a political movement with a multilimbed approach of making grassroots organizations, create new heroes, do the whole propaganda stir fry.
@@HoboGardenerBen that's just what they called their idea. The paper goes over what groups they created and how they did it. If you want an ideology that goes well with the idea, one that the left and the right will like, lookup Distributism. Its the idea that assets should be owned as widely as possible. For example; instead of having 3 companies making sneakers, the goal would be to have hundreds of smaller sneaker manufacturers.
@rekit7351 I sure wish we had small shoe maker shops in every town instead of the megacorps, but I think collapse is our route back to that, not intentional design. I think the dragon will kill itself through its exploitative approach and we aren't going to have a nice stable climate that's good for global trade. We've been taking the climate for granted, we've lived in a long stable period. Whether we do it or not, the planet was going back to a more extreme state at some point. We take it for granted that it will be up to us to decide what happens. I suspect that will not always be true.
METAMORPHOSIS NOT COLLAPSE - Seems to me there is a better descriptor for the paradigm shift process you describe than collapse, and it is: Metamorphosis. It is misleading to call the overall process "collapse" when just a few foundational ideas/leaders are rejected while much of prior knowledge/ideas are preserved, and while the big change is an addition of new ideas that elaborate/expand/reorganise/transform the prior paradigm. This is synthesis not degradation (collpase). In nature, metamorphosis is a "fast" way to achieve significant change within a single generation without any loss of life, while actual collapse involve deaths and massive population decline, which requires "slow" recovery over generations even if what returns is different.
Asset bubbles demonstrate the power of our group instincts around shared stories. The story wasn't ever true, usually evidence of its flaws exist right from the beginning, but we will cling to that belief through all sorts of hardship caused by that path before letting it go. We're so weird, back to the video :)
First, this is my second video from this channel. I will be watching more and will check out your other channels. Something that I think you might find that looking into Ilya Prigogine's Dissipative Structure Theory adds new dimensions your already insightful understanding of collapse.
Reminds me of Sid Smith @bsidneysmith and his bacteria in a petri dish analogy! Thanks Ashley, another thought-provoking video, good news for heretics.
Ashley, I would really appreciate hearing your perspective on complementary/community currency systems and how they may interact with the GDP Dragon. I suspect that some forms might provide sufficient autonomy to smaller communities to resist the Dragon's influence, but it seems that historically the Dragon has been able to crush any such opposition.
The video has opened my mind on a new and I think fondamental perspective: the very speculative nature of the trust groups have in particular components of the social construct and their intricate dynamics. And it seems to me that the clusters of trust are under great pressure right now. ... Maybe what I am saying doesn't make much sense, but I get my point 😅
Do you have a place where you list all the books you have read/recommend that have informed your worldview? I have recently gotten back into reading and am making a list of books to read.
I absolutely love this video. We, The Left made an enormous error in the very beginnings of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s criticisms of how critical theory was being implemented and how activists were shutting down speakers for increasingly minor disagreements. If we had approached him in dialogue and in good faith instead of treating him like a heretic while right-wing propaganda outlets embraced him with open arms there is a good chance we could have brought him over to our side along with converting his followers to left wing rather than right wing ideologies. Because a lot of what he was saying was correct: the critical theory camp was being EXTREMELY overzealous in the application of their theory and they needed (and still need to) be pushed back against in their misuse of the critical theory “lens” instead as the guiding principle for every thought and action of every minute of their entire lives. Not to mention how they, largely a group of economically privileged people from several generations of economic privilege, completely leave out economic class as a category of oppression and privilege. Interesting 🤨 But instead we participated in polarization, which is still fresh in my mind as I just watched OP’s video on that immediately before this one, and focused on the tiniest details here or there, largely misrepresenting them, and using them as an excuse to damn him. Unfortunately now he’s brain damaged from Benzos and COVID infections and all that remains is a strange walking corpse speaking right-wing talking points and Russian propaganda but the material from his pre-fame days serves as a valuable guide for self-criticism. But wow, watching this video that’s what comes to mind immediately was how we viciously attacked that guy and drove him towards a very organized and competent group of bad actors who are now using him to bad ends. Let’s stop doing that.
Good question. In the academic example there can be a slow decline of energy in the prevailing paradigm. The analogy of the immune system is an excellent one. The prevailing system will fight the newcomer. If there is a pent-up amount of new knowledge to flow from the new paradigm build-up can be fast but that's now how we think of rapid collapse and slow rising from the ashes!
It's a new diet for the dragon then, not the death of the dragon. I was never a big fan of Kuhn personally. It's kind of the type of things rebels and conspiracy theorists would want to believe and those almost never create a paradigm shifts. The Roman empire is an interesting example. The economy, the food of the dragon was slaves. Once the dragon stopped foreign wars, it starved from the lack of slaves. Lots of slave owners, the citizens, suddenly became poorer. Some could not even survive and had to sell their land, so they became indentured servants, working on farms themselves, but not owning them. And that lead naturally to feudalism where at some point slaves were simply abolished as a whole. It fits a bit what you described, except maybe for the heretic, although I suppose those that wanted to abolish slavery maybe were at first. The same happened later on with urbanization. Eventually there was not enough land for the feudal peasant, so they went to the cities and then became wage labor and journeymen, doing odd jobs. Eventually people used that free labor to create industries and now you have the birth of capitalism where wage labor was predominant and feudalism was abolished. In that case, the dragon was feeding from the land and switched to free labor. You can see those things as paradigm shifts in an ad hoc manner, but they rarely thought out by some heretic, they happen naturally out of necessity or opportunity imo. Like right now it's clear there is a lack of free labor in many ways. Some jobs people don't want to do, so people want to return to slave labor and or immigration. Capitalists are starving and the government policies to fix it are rather unpopular. It's why everybody wants to beg on youtube and be an influencer. They can make money as independents. I doubt it's food for the dragon, so something else will need to feed it. Some people think it's robots, others debt servitude or criminal servitude, but it's still up in the air how it's going to work out. All those things are hidden by the financial world where the ability to borrow rules and create fictional wealth, and yes, that might collapse, but it's not the dragon, ir's only the dragon having a bloated belly due to starvation, a condition known as kwashiorkor.
we already had informational collapse, no one knows knows nothing important any more. after that the general public will cause chaos and the economic collapse begins. and please stop asking "when", and start doing something to soften the blow.
I became a societal heretic after the santa claus disclosure as a kid, this weird collective lie for the sake of nostalgia and capitalism. Wounded idealism can sour, went kinda dark in my 20s and 30s after reading Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words about the dark foundations of civil society. Discovered all sorts of real stuff that took a while to process. Now I am just waiting, trying to mature my perspective, prepare myself as a seed of many ideas that might grow in the new space opened up by collapse. My hobo gardener flow will be valuable for people coming from soft unhealthy lives. I'll try to make as much as that happen before it gets bad too, not wait for collapse. It's already happening. People are already shifting perspectives due to consequences in the basic elements undermining modern society. We can all feel the changes. I suspect we are about to make a huge jump in complexity and novelty. I keep remembering Terrence McKenna's omega point idea. I know he was just a guy who tripped on mushrooms and ayahuasca a lot, but damn, he sure could spin an idea with a lecture. I get the feeling that the rate and scale of changes will be so huge and so fast that it will be hard for everyone, even if most of the results are good for everyone. Change is inherently stressful, adaptation of normal daily rituals is incredibly hard for some people. It could be the fulfillment of all their dreams of how life could be and people will fear it and resist it.
I think the concern with change is who decides, especially against a backdrop of the powerful manipulating behind the scenes to ensure they lord over the new. Meet the new boss and all that. The history of revolutions isn't exactly promising, and so it seems things getting dramatically worse is a real possibility. I also fear most people don't have concrete ideas of how society should operate, just vague notions which leaves them vulnerable to manipulation. It does no good to destroy the dragon only to create another.
@quintessenceSL Great comment, a lot to unpack there and I just roasted a bowlie so this is gonna get tangential real fast. I highly doubt most of the changes will be good, was just making a point that even if it was, many people would resist it just because it's change. With the existing structures in the economy, I expect them to collapse due to mismanagement because of the incentives within a society based on seeking profit. So many systems that concentrate power that attract greedy people who drive it into the ground over time from being focused on greed and expansion and domination. Children of empire we are. I think we are facing a total redesign due to bringing the biosphere to the point where it no longer supports the society. Nothing like the need to survive to tighten up some loose bolts in old Bessie :) I suspect that having such a catastrophic collapse due to mindless consumption and expansion will teach us a lesson that lasts at least a bit. We'll have lots of ruins to remind us of our folly.
I don't believe that how someone votes affect moral value of the ideas they present, because all ideas are neutral - no positive or moral value. Of course if you vote similarly or differently from a person you are more likely to agree that a person's ideas are true or false - but a wrong idea isn't a bad idea neither is a correct idea a good idea. In my opinion, a person's understanding of various ideas should influence the the way they vote - not the other way around opposite, but i may be wrong.
Renaming WYSIWYG for another aspect-version, because collapse/reinflation is continuous, eg Penrose CCC @e-Pi-i Singularity-point here-now-forever is this reciprocation-recirculation potential positioning in relative-timing Aether, condensed wave-particle nucleation-matter freeze-framing.. Point taken, it's only scary if you don't know what you are looking at and feel hopeless when you could only be feeling discrete helplessness. Enlightenment is a good/bad agnostic neutrality POV of gret teaching and achievable bootstrapping.
This is incredibly helpful and oddly reassuring in these uncertain times. Change is scary, but inevitable. Understanding our ability to become active participants in shaping the change makes it more manageable and opens up possibilities that the frightened mind cannot see. Thank you.
All of us have to get involved.
I wish for collapse all the time. I can't see any other way to halt the momentum of what we have made and shift lanes. Too much invested interest in what we have now. Too many people with incentives to keep it this way and everyone else is too busy working and surviving to care. Collapse is the dissolution of that momentum and a redesign into another way that better fits the current needs. The old expansionist economy has reached the end stage. Even if it gets to space, that will require a massive redesign because the exploitation machine will not be able to bring a glut of goods to space colonies. Those will be hard places, hard lives, requiring solid designs, not mindless consumption and expansion industries. It will take centuries for that machine to be able to facilitate the level of consumption we see as normal now system-wide. I expect us to naturally shift away from it because we'll have faced more and more consequences the whole time. The evidence of the flaws in our current paradigm has grown too great and that will only continue. Haven't watched any of the video yet, wanted to barf out my opinion first, watch the video, and then share any differences I feel from watching it. I am looking forward to developing a more mature economic understanding, it's a necessary piece in pursuing my goals in this quickly changing world.
Why create parallel institutions first. Lookup Victor Orban and his civic circle movement.
Instead of buying terrible processed food, have someone sell premade food(since 2000's every state has Cottage Kitchen Laws that let you sell food from home), form coops insurance, retirement, ect.
If collapse happens, your group will be in much better position.
@rekit7351 I'll check it out, thanks, seems like some cool ideas
@rekit7351 I don't know what you mean about the civic circles thing. Saw a paper that said he was able to engineer a political movement with a multilimbed approach of making grassroots organizations, create new heroes, do the whole propaganda stir fry.
@@HoboGardenerBen that's just what they called their idea. The paper goes over what groups they created and how they did it.
If you want an ideology that goes well with the idea, one that the left and the right will like, lookup Distributism. Its the idea that assets should be owned as widely as possible. For example; instead of having 3 companies making sneakers, the goal would be to have hundreds of smaller sneaker manufacturers.
@rekit7351 I sure wish we had small shoe maker shops in every town instead of the megacorps, but I think collapse is our route back to that, not intentional design. I think the dragon will kill itself through its exploitative approach and we aren't going to have a nice stable climate that's good for global trade. We've been taking the climate for granted, we've lived in a long stable period. Whether we do it or not, the planet was going back to a more extreme state at some point. We take it for granted that it will be up to us to decide what happens. I suspect that will not always be true.
You’re doing very good work!
Really glad I found your channel at this particular moment. Change is coming...
Thanks!
This channel is the best all around.
METAMORPHOSIS NOT COLLAPSE - Seems to me there is a better descriptor for the paradigm shift process you describe than collapse, and it is: Metamorphosis. It is misleading to call the overall process "collapse" when just a few foundational ideas/leaders are rejected while much of prior knowledge/ideas are preserved, and while the big change is an addition of new ideas that elaborate/expand/reorganise/transform the prior paradigm. This is synthesis not degradation (collpase). In nature, metamorphosis is a "fast" way to achieve significant change within a single generation without any loss of life, while actual collapse involve deaths and massive population decline, which requires "slow" recovery over generations even if what returns is different.
Asset bubbles demonstrate the power of our group instincts around shared stories. The story wasn't ever true, usually evidence of its flaws exist right from the beginning, but we will cling to that belief through all sorts of hardship caused by that path before letting it go. We're so weird, back to the video :)
First, this is my second video from this channel. I will be watching more and will check out your other channels. Something that I think you might find that looking into Ilya Prigogine's Dissipative Structure Theory adds new dimensions your already insightful understanding of collapse.
Reminds me of Sid Smith @bsidneysmith and his bacteria in a petri dish analogy! Thanks Ashley, another thought-provoking video, good news for heretics.
FYI there isn't any money in your bank account.
Ashley, I would really appreciate hearing your perspective on complementary/community currency systems and how they may interact with the GDP Dragon. I suspect that some forms might provide sufficient autonomy to smaller communities to resist the Dragon's influence, but it seems that historically the Dragon has been able to crush any such opposition.
The video has opened my mind on a new and I think fondamental perspective: the very speculative nature of the trust groups have in particular components of the social construct and their intricate dynamics. And it seems to me that the clusters of trust are under great pressure right now.
... Maybe what I am saying doesn't make much sense, but I get my point 😅
Interested in manufactured collapse that fails and reversion to an older system.
"The collapse of the collapse"
I recommend a the book "Hospicing Modernity" which discusses this topic.
Do you have a place where you list all the books you have read/recommend that have informed your worldview?
I have recently gotten back into reading and am making a list of books to read.
Actually destruction is only apparently fast since it might require a lot of preparation, resources, knowledge, know-how, man-power and may be more.
😁🦺 so important, what you are doing with this podcast. thank you.
Dr Ashley be making me feel like a simp sometimes, it's wild. But anyway I do like this dragon series of videos.
I absolutely love this video.
We, The Left made an enormous error in the very beginnings of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s criticisms of how critical theory was being implemented and how activists were shutting down speakers for increasingly minor disagreements. If we had approached him in dialogue and in good faith instead of treating him like a heretic while right-wing propaganda outlets embraced him with open arms there is a good chance we could have brought him over to our side along with converting his followers to left wing rather than right wing ideologies.
Because a lot of what he was saying was correct: the critical theory camp was being EXTREMELY overzealous in the application of their theory and they needed (and still need to) be pushed back against in their misuse of the critical theory “lens” instead as the guiding principle for every thought and action of every minute of their entire lives.
Not to mention how they, largely a group of economically privileged people from several generations of economic privilege, completely leave out economic class as a category of oppression and privilege.
Interesting 🤨
But instead we participated in polarization, which is still fresh in my mind as I just watched OP’s video on that immediately before this one, and focused on the tiniest details here or there, largely misrepresenting them, and using them as an excuse to damn him.
Unfortunately now he’s brain damaged from Benzos and COVID infections and all that remains is a strange walking corpse speaking right-wing talking points and Russian propaganda but the material from his pre-fame days serves as a valuable guide for self-criticism.
But wow, watching this video that’s what comes to mind immediately was how we viciously attacked that guy and drove him towards a very organized and competent group of bad actors who are now using him to bad ends.
Let’s stop doing that.
is energy transferred fast on destruction but slowly on buildup?
Good question. In the academic example there can be a slow decline of energy in the prevailing paradigm. The analogy of the immune system is an excellent one. The prevailing system will fight the newcomer. If there is a pent-up amount of new knowledge to flow from the new paradigm build-up can be fast but that's now how we think of rapid collapse and slow rising from the ashes!
It's a new diet for the dragon then, not the death of the dragon. I was never a big fan of Kuhn personally. It's kind of the type of things rebels and conspiracy theorists would want to believe and those almost never create a paradigm shifts.
The Roman empire is an interesting example. The economy, the food of the dragon was slaves. Once the dragon stopped foreign wars, it starved from the lack of slaves. Lots of slave owners, the citizens, suddenly became poorer. Some could not even survive and had to sell their land, so they became indentured servants, working on farms themselves, but not owning them. And that lead naturally to feudalism where at some point slaves were simply abolished as a whole. It fits a bit what you described, except maybe for the heretic, although I suppose those that wanted to abolish slavery maybe were at first.
The same happened later on with urbanization. Eventually there was not enough land for the feudal peasant, so they went to the cities and then became wage labor and journeymen, doing odd jobs. Eventually people used that free labor to create industries and now you have the birth of capitalism where wage labor was predominant and feudalism was abolished. In that case, the dragon was feeding from the land and switched to free labor.
You can see those things as paradigm shifts in an ad hoc manner, but they rarely thought out by some heretic, they happen naturally out of necessity or opportunity imo. Like right now it's clear there is a lack of free labor in many ways. Some jobs people don't want to do, so people want to return to slave labor and or immigration. Capitalists are starving and the government policies to fix it are rather unpopular. It's why everybody wants to beg on youtube and be an influencer. They can make money as independents. I doubt it's food for the dragon, so something else will need to feed it. Some people think it's robots, others debt servitude or criminal servitude, but it's still up in the air how it's going to work out. All those things are hidden by the financial world where the ability to borrow rules and create fictional wealth, and yes, that might collapse, but it's not the dragon, ir's only the dragon having a bloated belly due to starvation, a condition known as kwashiorkor.
As a professional heretic I hope the long grind of the quite heretics plays out as yo suggest....
In the aviation world we are still arguing what is making a wing fly. Bernoullian forces or Newtonian forces. Two theories : - )
Cosy collapse or 3:16 mass starvation
Collapse wen?
we already had informational collapse, no one knows knows nothing important any more.
after that the general public will cause chaos and the economic collapse begins.
and please stop asking "when", and start doing something to soften the blow.
2025 - 2027
it has already begun between somewhere between 20 years ago or less
and it will last 50-100 years or more in my current opinion.
It's hard to be a heretic (or a Cassandra, which is much the same...)
I became a societal heretic after the santa claus disclosure as a kid, this weird collective lie for the sake of nostalgia and capitalism.
Wounded idealism can sour, went kinda dark in my 20s and 30s after reading Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words about the dark foundations of civil society. Discovered all sorts of real stuff that took a while to process. Now I am just waiting, trying to mature my perspective, prepare myself as a seed of many ideas that might grow in the new space opened up by collapse. My hobo gardener flow will be valuable for people coming from soft unhealthy lives. I'll try to make as much as that happen before it gets bad too, not wait for collapse.
It's already happening. People are already shifting perspectives due to consequences in the basic elements undermining modern society. We can all feel the changes. I suspect we are about to make a huge jump in complexity and novelty. I keep remembering Terrence McKenna's omega point idea. I know he was just a guy who tripped on mushrooms and ayahuasca a lot, but damn, he sure could spin an idea with a lecture.
I get the feeling that the rate and scale of changes will be so huge and so fast that it will be hard for everyone, even if most of the results are good for everyone. Change is inherently stressful, adaptation of normal daily rituals is incredibly hard for some people. It could be the fulfillment of all their dreams of how life could be and people will fear it and resist it.
I think the concern with change is who decides, especially against a backdrop of the powerful manipulating behind the scenes to ensure they lord over the new. Meet the new boss and all that.
The history of revolutions isn't exactly promising, and so it seems things getting dramatically worse is a real possibility.
I also fear most people don't have concrete ideas of how society should operate, just vague notions which leaves them vulnerable to manipulation.
It does no good to destroy the dragon only to create another.
@quintessenceSL Great comment, a lot to unpack there and I just roasted a bowlie so this is gonna get tangential real fast. I highly doubt most of the changes will be good, was just making a point that even if it was, many people would resist it just because it's change. With the existing structures in the economy, I expect them to collapse due to mismanagement because of the incentives within a society based on seeking profit. So many systems that concentrate power that attract greedy people who drive it into the ground over time from being focused on greed and expansion and domination. Children of empire we are.
I think we are facing a total redesign due to bringing the biosphere to the point where it no longer supports the society. Nothing like the need to survive to tighten up some loose bolts in old Bessie :)
I suspect that having such a catastrophic collapse due to mindless consumption and expansion will teach us a lesson that lasts at least a bit. We'll have lots of ruins to remind us of our folly.
Curious if you’ve read Dr. Patrick Deneen & his discussion on the slow collapse of the liberal paradigm. Seems apposite here.
Thanks for the reference. I was thinking the same thing about Kunstler's long emergency
Yes! I learned that long ago, I guess with AI we as humans are in a 'Wende', don't know which philosopher talked about that.
no idea who you are, but the only thing I need to know is if you're PRO TRUMP or ANTI-TRUMP
Choosing between Trump or Harris is like choosing between barf or diarrhea
@@Time2goExtinct just say you're a democrat
@@raymond_sycamore Anarchist is more like it.
I don't believe that how someone votes affect moral value of the ideas they present, because all ideas are neutral - no positive or moral value.
Of course if you vote similarly or differently from a person you are more likely to agree that a person's ideas are true or false - but a wrong idea isn't a bad idea neither is a correct idea a good idea.
In my opinion, a person's understanding of various ideas should influence the the way they vote - not the other way around opposite, but i may be wrong.
Renaming WYSIWYG for another aspect-version, because collapse/reinflation is continuous, eg Penrose CCC @e-Pi-i Singularity-point here-now-forever is this reciprocation-recirculation potential positioning in relative-timing Aether, condensed wave-particle nucleation-matter freeze-framing..
Point taken, it's only scary if you don't know what you are looking at and feel hopeless when you could only be feeling discrete helplessness.
Enlightenment is a good/bad agnostic neutrality POV of gret teaching and achievable bootstrapping.