We are entering a period of overlapping crises

72 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by speckx
(hamishcampbell.com)

87 Comments

allenrb

4 hours ago

It’s interesting and valuable, imho, to consider that people have always tended to think things are falling apart, and that perhaps now is no different.

That said, all societies rise and all appear to eventually fall. It’s equally reasonable to consider that the US/Western Civilization/humanity might actually be nearing a fall.

maxerickson

4 hours ago

I guess if you take a wide enough lens, the west lives in the civilization founded in Rome. There's no political continuity, but there's a reasonably coherent cultural trajectory going back a few thousand years.

Do we think that there is going to be a major break from that?

bjornsing

4 hours ago

Something more dramatic than the fall of the Roman Empire then? I doubt it. But we definitely have a potent cocktail on our hands.

The scariest ingredient as I see it is AI. Overproduction of elites is always a destabilizing factor, and much of the well educated workforce may now turn out to be overproduction.

Loquebantur

2 hours ago

You doubt it based on what?

Civilizational collapse occurs when society runs afoul of its basic contract and cannot provide its foundational services anymore. That can mean starvation, it also is given e.g. in the situation of elites running low on trust. Leading to social unrest spinning out of control, or former allies refusing to play along with political shenanigans.

In order to evade catastrophic civilizational collapse, you need viable and timely avenues for course-correction or adaptation. Those are presently being blocked by the very elites profiting from the system they bleed dry.

daymanstep

3 hours ago

Elite overproduction I think refers to the unemployment rate of people who graduated from elite universities. I think that rate is probably still not high enough to be concerning for now.

bjornsing

3 hours ago

Turchin doesn’t restrict his ”elite” to graduates of elite universities.

tayo42

4 hours ago

How exactly is the US a continuation of Rome?

Avicebron

3 hours ago

Other than the senate, eagle statues, architecture, philosophical/intellectual tradition?

Not as much of a parallel as people tend to think, but the Roman empire fell apart partly because it was based on the theory of constant outward expansion. If your model, say economic, is based on infinite expansion in a finite arena you'll have trouble.

nephihaha

3 hours ago

The European colonies in eastern North America were started by the successor states of the Roman provinces of Gaul, Hispania, Batavia and Britannia. Two of these spoke Latin derived languages, and the other two spoke languages heavily indebted to Romance languages. (Much of English core vocabulary is either French or Latin in origin — 60% according to one estimate.)

Other Roman influences on the USA include Christianity and to a lesser extent Judaism (since the major US versions come out of post-Roman Judaism.)

tekla

3 hours ago

Are you actually saying that a particular aspect of the Roman economy/society is applicable to something entirely different and completely irrelevant in the modern day?

black6

3 hours ago

Western Civilization saw its start in Rome, and continued through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire when it contracted. The core of Western Civilization reemerged in England in the 15th century and expanded again, with the core moving to France in the early 19th century, before moving again to Germany in the middle of the 20th century. Post-WWII the core moved once again, this time to the United States, and after the expansion of the US Empire, we now see Western Civilization faltering and contracting under unpopular wars driven by a long series of self-serving poloticians. Whether Western Civilization can reorganize and expand (with the core migrating once again) or wither and die under the expansion and invasion by other civilizations remains the great question of the present day.

cobbzilla

3 hours ago

Agree but “reemerge” implies it may have disappeared; of course it never truly died.

Taking a semi-opinionated swag, the core went from Rome to Constantinople, then Venice, then London.

black6

31 minutes ago

That's fair, but I would argue that Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire was the genesis of the Eastern Orthodox Civilization, with the core now in St. Petersburg (or maybe Moscow.)

nephihaha

3 hours ago

The USA is the product of the British empire which consciously modelled itself on Rome. It was influenced by various European countries, including England and France, which mostly developed in the Roman Empire's former territories.

The European Renaissance and the Enlightenment both used Roman and Greek ideas as inspiration. You can see this in early US architecture, and the models for some institutions such as the Senate. Some of this was ironically as a revolt against English institutions (even though England and Wales were successors of a Roman province).

The early USA's language(s) and Judaeo-Christian heritage are partly products of the Roman Empire. (Spanish most definitely is, and French is. English is heavily influenced by French and Latin.)

jesuslop

an hour ago

You are hedging all outcomes

Daishiman

4 hours ago

It is absolutely true.

It's also true that as the scope of power humanity has over itself and its environment, it equally manages to create ever larger crises, and it seems like we truly are reaching the ecological and environmental limits of what the planet's life support systems can give us before breaking down.

bamboozled

4 hours ago

I personally disagree , humans have for Millenia ruined eco systems, made things go extinct etc.

Fires majorly destructive for example. Humans did a lot of environmental damage with that over the years

Loquebantur

4 hours ago

Earth is finite. Scale matters.

Present levels of environmental degradation due to human actions far exceed Earth's capacity to self-heal.

People struggle with judging that, after all, at best you get a bunch of numbers and the claim, they would show this (or not). Without actual scientific background, what are you supposed to do?

Human society is based on trust. You depend on "experts" on a given subject to give truthful accounts of things. When you don't have that, society breaks down sooner or later: nobody adapts anymore to reality.

That's where we're at.

bamboozled

3 hours ago

We also have efforts to save the environment too though. So I agree it's grim, but it's not all grim.

marginalia_nu

4 hours ago

I don't think there is an obvious contradiction between what you're saying and what the post you're responding to is saying.

user

3 hours ago

[deleted]

monneyboi

6 hours ago

We are entering? I feel like we've been there for years.

smallerize

4 hours ago

The term "polycrisis" started getting popular in 2023.

user

4 hours ago

[deleted]

onethought

5 hours ago

Honestly there are writings from the greeks, romans, enlightment, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s... That read just like this.

At some point, this view point, and this predicament is just "The Human Condition".[0]

[0] That's not a excuse to not try to fix the broken things around us. But perspective is important.

Loquebantur

5 hours ago

The point about our current situation can best be understood with complexity theory.

Complex systems can be interpreted as trajectories in high dimensional spaces. When a complex system is pushed out of equilibrium too far, it "runs up against its constraints", the borders of the space it can operate in.

It follows those towards edges and along those finally into corners (so to speak), reducing the degrees of freedom along the way. "Being cornered" is an accurate visualization of a complex system out of options: you have nowhere to go.

Our society is such a cornered complex system. "Crises" are themselves symptoms of reduced resilience: the system cannot evade them. They compound, eventually overwhelming the coping abilities, leading to catastrophic break down of entire subsystems and further domino effects.

The same observation is correct for our natural environment, whether you look at biodiversity, climate or other pollution-induced stressors.

So no, it's not "the human condition". It's the end-state of a prolonged lack of course-correction.

polishdude20

4 hours ago

Isn't this how it always was though? It just feels to the individual it's different probably because our news feeds are all so toxic. The stuff that's happening in the world is bad but the way it's presented and with such significance is way worse.

Loquebantur

4 hours ago

No, it's categorically different. Your point about not being able to judge based on "news feeds" is valid though.

Societal collapse has happened before, many times actually (but usually with great spans of time between them). Western culture doesn't particularly like to speak about it, lest people get the idea, such cataclysm might repeat.

A society doesn't exist after it collapses, so "reporting" on it is usually rather scant and framed from the view of those left to talk about it (often not many).

Consequently, historians struggle with pinpointing the reasons for those collapses. People often had no clue themselves and didn't see it coming. Complexity theory is a rather new development.

Daishiman

4 hours ago

Sure, the difference was that in the past local crises gave way to events that would normally span out to neighboring countries. The level of interconnectedness, as the article points out, means there's nowhere to go and nowhere that's exempt.

HPsquared

4 hours ago

Speaking of the Romans, decline can indeed take hundreds of years to play out.

watwut

5 hours ago

> 20s 30s

They were heading up towards large catastrophy. In fact.

card_zero

4 hours ago

But what kind of doom did they anticipate in the roaring 20s? I guess Upton Sinclair wasn't very happy, but that's not the same as crises everywhere you turn.

marginalia_nu

4 hours ago

The Great Depression began in 1929.

card_zero

4 hours ago

October 1929. Tenuous.

marginalia_nu

4 hours ago

A reminder that technically correct is the best kind of correct.

GolfPopper

5 hours ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1979:_History

That out of the way, I'm close to 50, and things over the last year definitely seem different in a more precarious way than anything before them. It feels closer to my memories of August 1991, or the days immediately after 9/11 or January 6th, only all the time, where I've gotten a little numb to the dissonance, but not nearly enough for it to feel close to normal. It feels like what I imagine the run-up to WWII might have felt like to those living then.

That's my perspective.

rickydroll

2 hours ago

I have a few more times around the sun, and you are not the only person with that perspective.

I've lived through crises such as Nixon, Iran-Contra, the Arab gas embargoes, the Savings and Loans (S&L) crisis, and the 2001 tech collapse, in addition to the events you've mentioned. It seems, though, that we lived through all of those, but we were able to survive the events, and we may still have been a bit dented, but we could function. We (I) didn't feel hopeless.

I think you are dead on with the observation that what we are going through now is like previously intense but much shorter-lived events, except it's going all the time. Because it's not stopping, we're not getting a chance to breathe and figure out what the next thing to do is.

I think of the previous events; only COVID-19 and the 2008 banking crisis were similar multi-year persistent events and have increasingly cemented a sense of precariousness.

bubbluppugus

4 hours ago

Well yeah but at the same time social specifics exist; Trump doesn't go about things like Caesar because the world is fundamentally different

So negotiations and solutions must be too

tengbretson

5 hours ago

Seeing what "we" need to do to build a better future as described by an author that doesn't appear to have a wife, children or any attachment to a permanent home reads to me a lot like an offseason blog post by a Chicago Bears fan talking about what "we" need to do to get better next year.

unrented7977

4 hours ago

What an unnecessarily privileged take. We have an entire class of people for whom homeownership is not even a dream. We have a fertility crisis. We have a loneliness crisis. Have you been paying attention to anything outside of yourself for the last ten years? Because that's the only way I can imagine someone would make a statement like this.

bossyTeacher

4 hours ago

> Have you been paying attention to anything outside of yourself for the last ten years?

That's the average HNer. Academic smart but devoid of empathy or awareness of the world outside their socioeconomic circles.

overfeed

4 hours ago

I noticed a pattern of people incapable of altruism - and apparently can't imagine it exists - weirdly call it "virtue signalling" as that's the best-fitting motivation that exists in their worldview.

Your comment says a lot about how you view things that don't affect you personally, in the vein of "Après moi, le déluge."

swader999

4 hours ago

On one hand the notion of the world is ending or gonna end is as old as history itself. On the other, the complexity of everything and the amount of technical capability an individual or small group can wield has never been higher.

nater5000

3 hours ago

>On the other, the complexity of everything and the amount of technical capability an individual or small group can wield has never been higher.

This, too, has basically always been true at every point in time across history.

dleary

2 hours ago

> has basically always been true at every point in time across history.

The Late Bronze Age collapse in 1200 BC.

The Dark Ages, 500-1500 AD. Ended with the Renaissance (literally, “Rebirth”).

Both of these times saw significant ‘backward motion’ in the amount of technical capability people could wield.

esseph

3 hours ago

> This, too, has basically always been true at every point in time across history.

1 person, right now, could launch a large enough portion of the worlds nuclear arsenal to cause a near simultaneous response of the also nuclear kind, immediately wiping out the bulk of the human population, infrastructure, food, educational institutions, factories, housing, transportation and shipping, etc and effectively dooming much of the remaining population.

That's comparatively new over the past 20k years of human history.

bryanrasmussen

6 hours ago

I don't feel like it's AI, but I do get the feeling of reading someone dipping into the bucket of their local version of English slang, and maybe doing some context switching that they cannot handle as adeptly as could be hoped, to the detriment of the article's readability.

I suppose there are probably people out there snorting in disbelief and saying "you're one to talk", but that's how I feel.

user

5 hours ago

[deleted]

esseph

3 hours ago

It's not AI, it's just someone writing that is deep into a particular niche and community and is using much of that language outside that niche without considering their audience probably as much as they should.

dzink

5 hours ago

“The panic pays and monetizes well - people share it to warn their friends, spread your message, lots of people comment in fear and raise algorithm engagement, and they paralyze thinking they are helpless.” Said the cowboy to the other cowboy as they scared the herd into their fenced yard.

haunter

5 hours ago

Once in a lifetime events every single year since the 2000s

user

6 hours ago

[deleted]

rglover

4 hours ago

One of the few things that calms me down in response to the chaos is looking at nature and really observing it.

Watch the birds, squirrels, etc and compare their general behavior to that of humans. What I've observed is that unlike us, they're not worried or panicked. They just live. A threat may appear and startle them, but assuming there isn't one, they just carry on. No 'bird news,' or 'bird notifications,' or 'opinions about <other bird> to have at the feeder.' They just flap around and eat the fucking seed.

Humans seem to be obsessed with turning life into an endless cycle of stress and 'critical' moments.

Need I remind everyone: we're floating in what we call 'space' on a giant ball (one of ~billions) protected by a relatively thin atmosphere, hurtling at a thousand miles per hour, convinced of our own brilliance despite barely having left the neighborhood. I think our next evolutionary step, the one that moves us further up the Kardashev Scale, is realizing just how much of our existence is consumed by human-manufactured nonsense and distraction or, "crises."

card_zero

4 hours ago

Indeed, for many small squeaky animals, a predator may kill their offspring, and they will set about making another batch the next day. Consider the lilies of the field, they have no jobs, and would go around naked, if they could move.

Modified3019

3 hours ago

Personally, I don’t really find “all my kids got murdered, it’s fine I’ll just make more” to be the sort of thing that fills me with peace and inspiration.

While I find nature “beautiful” certainly, I also find myself rather dissatisfied with it being a horrific trap of nonstop callous selfish violence, at a scale beyond human capacity to ever understand or accept.

Loquebantur

4 hours ago

Escapism can be a useful tool for managing individual stress levels.

On the level of society, it's a catastrophic maladaptation.

The problem for normal people is to discern between "fearmongering" and honest warnings by competent people who actually know and understand the situation.

Havoc

4 hours ago

Not sure what the point of that was?

World is on fire so join whatever the hell Open Media Network is?

longitudinal93

6 hours ago

"Then on the left the is a matching fantasy, we romanticism collapse, but it is not automatically progressive."

Should be "romanticise" rather than "romanticism".

WaltPurvis

5 hours ago

That's only one of the misspellings or incorrect words in this fairly short post. There are also numerous grammatical errors. Perhaps it's intentional, to show it wasn't written by AI, but I think more likely it's just sloppy and rushed. (The thinking in the piece seems as sloppy and rushed as the writing.)

nh23423fefe

5 hours ago

Literally full of spelling errors and omitted words and subject verb disagreement and awkward phrasing. To say nothing of the trash logic. Verified human everyone!

MissAnnThrope

4 hours ago

No. Humans have been entering this period gradually from the start. It started with them destroying habitats from non-human living beings during ancient times. Ancient humans wars destroyed this planet's ecosystem. Now, we've got unhinged capitalism and greedy brats that demand too much on a planet with limited resources. A war economy is not sustainable in the long run, either. Without humans, this planet would go back to having life thrive a lot more. Humans are the only ones ruining this planet. Other species would be fine without humans existing.

gaiagraphia

6 hours ago

Is it just me, or are the amount of hashtags quite jarring in the piece?

>But any one with any sense can see there is no #stupidindividualism exit from #climatechaos. There is no technological #dotcons platform that allows us to escape social relationships.

GaryBluto

5 hours ago

The whole thing reads like a bizarre, vaguely schizotypal manifesto, complete with it's own confusing form eccentricities.

I checked the "hashtags" link and was met with the following: "Hashtags are a critique and a rallying cry to gather round. They are the protest banners of the openweb"

Nothing says protest banner of the "openweb"(?) like a convention invented by Twitter.

jerlam

5 hours ago

Sometimes it's hard to tell if a well-formatted blog is popular or it's just a single person screaming into the void. We don't have pageview counters anymore.

I didn't see any comments on this page, nor did the linked Mastodon accounts have much engagement, and that suggests the latter.

Also, both the number of and length of posts started increasing dramatically in 2024, which might just be a strange coincidence.

Terr_

5 hours ago

Or IRC channels.

GaryBluto

5 hours ago

You are right that hash symbols were used for IRC channels but I'm almost certain that hashtags were a Twitter invention.

Terr_

4 hours ago

That seems a little tautological, like "Maybe Unix had directories, but Windows Folders are purely a Microsoft invention."

They're both a symbol-with-label text convention for users, and in each case it designates a topic and mechanism for users of the service to converge-on the topic.

baron3dl

5 hours ago

when i got to the second hashtag, i scanned the following paragraphs, saw it's littered with them, and just hit the back button.

#'s are for signaling root access, and bash comments.

edit: and also IRC channels.

grebc

5 hours ago

I had trouble reading it because they kept drawing my eyes to them, so I stopped.

nephihaha

3 hours ago

Many of our current crises are consciously created. I was about to say artificially created, but that would include mistakes. We have people who pay large amounts of money to cause disruption and instability, not just Putin supporters but billionaires. And they design some of these crises with a prepared solution that hands them more influence.

0xbadcafebee

5 hours ago

So in other words, people who were watching cartoons 30 years ago now think that the world didn't have multiple simultaneous crises, until they now happen to be adult enough to pay attention/care.

- 1970s: multiple oil crises, war in the middle east, iranian revolution

- 1980s: latin american debt crisis, soviet-afghan war, ethiopian famine

- 1990s: collapse of USSR, yugoslavian war, bosnian genocide, ethiopian genocide, asian financial crisis

- 2000s: dot-com bubble burst, darfur genocide, african food crisis, global financial crisis (due to US housing bubble burst)

avrionov

4 hours ago

1980s had the "Intifada" which is another name for a war in the middle east.

throwaway23597

5 hours ago

"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine" - REM, 1987

The world has always been in overlapping crises, the only difference now is that it's constantly blared into your face by your pocket screen. Ignorance is bliss. Delete the news, buy index funds, and relax.

SequoiaHope

4 hours ago

“…climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions, these are no longer separate problems…”

Very weak opening. These were never separate problems. If the author is just beginning to notice, it doesn’t bode well for what insights they have to share.