12 December 2012

Out of All the Possible Futures . . .

The future is not set in stone. There are always a number of possible futures -- strange attractors -- ceaselessly battling each other for the opportunity to evolve into a transient reality and instantiation.

Mega-Egali-Dystopia

As crucial elections pass and the world moves more deeply into a narrowing set of futures, a few things become more clear. Almost none of the possible futures which have been predicted by pundits, bureaucrats, visionaries, and speculative writers, are likely to come about. That is because the future cannot be created deliberately in the manner of conventional construction. Instead, the future must be facilitated and channeled by the erection of specific, well-placed constraints, keeping in mind the natural forces underlying the movement of humans through time.

The set of constraints being erected by the great powers as of today, combined with apparently inexorable demographic forces at work across the globe, increase the likelihood of a global dystopia of poverty, low intelligence, and constant, low-level violence.
The world’s urban population is expected to grow by 2.6 billion people between 2011 and 2050, bringing the total number of urbanites to 6.3 billion. This urban expansion will be especially burdensome for developing countries, where 82 percent of the world’s population currently lives...

Slum populations are expected to grow significantly in the future, and UN HABITAT projects that 6 million more people live in slums every year.

The World Health Organization identifies the rapid increase of urban populations, especially slum populations, as the most important issue affecting health in the 21st century. The agency cites overcrowding, lack of safe water, and improper sanitation systems as the primary factors contributing to poor health among the urban poor. Slums often become breeding grounds for diseases like tuberculosis, dengue, pneumonia, and cholera, and slum dwellers contract water-borne or respiratory illnesses at much higher rates than people in rural areas do.

Cities and their slums will continue to grow as long as rural populations continue to migrate to cities to find economic and other opportunities, such as access to cultural amenities, education, and health care. _Worldwatch_via_GCC
Across the more developed world -- from North America to Europe to Oceania to East Asia -- populations are aging, fertility is falling far below replacement, and these generally more intelligent and accomplished societies of the world are embarking upon a grand experiment of group extinction. These populations which accomplished so much over a fairly short period of time, appear to have chosen to fade away.

Decline of Average Global IQ Over Time

...nearly all of the world's annual demographic growth - close to 95 percent - is occurring in less developed regions. Top seven contributing nations are India, 22 percent; China, 9 percent; Nigeria, 5 percent; Pakistan, 4 percent; Indonesia, 3 percent; Brazil, 2 percent; and Ethiopia, 2 percent

...African birthrates... stand at more than 4 children per woman, with some countries, such as Mali, Niger and Uganda, continuing to have rates above 6 children per woman. Such fertility rates, though expected to decline, translate into rapid population growth for most sub-Saharan African countries for the coming decades. For example, with a current fertility rate of 5.5 children per woman projected to decline to 3.5 children per woman by 2050, Nigeria's population of 162 million more than doubles to 390 million over the next 40 years.

...The consequences of these major demographic changes affect every aspect of human society, including food, natural resources, economic well-being, security, revenue, politics, employment and healthcare. Neither political rhetoric nor wishful thinking can dispel the enormous impacts. _Demographic Trends Shaping the World


Of those who are left after the depopulation of the advanced world -- the primitive tribal societies of Africa and Asia along with the emerging nations -- only China is likely to have the wealth, resources, technological expertise, and infrastructure to persist in creating grand visions of great futures.

And China is virtually certain to split at the seams into competing factions -- some of them based in modern China, others based overseas in Africa, Latin America, and areas that were formerly part of Russia, Oceania, and Europe.

Already we see the beginnings of "the coming anarchy" across the middle east, central Asia, and sub Saharan Africa. The fault lines for civil wars are setting up across a number of countries in Latin America. The forces of secession are erupting from the UK, across Europe, penetrating deeply into the US and Canada, and are likely to grow in intensity as global instability builds. The schisms -- both old and new -- are building, reaching well into the emerging BRICS -- Russia, China, India, Brazil -- and throughout the first and third worlds.

Up until now, the US has been an anchor to which Europe, Oceania, and Latin America could grudgingly hold -- and an oppositional brace against which Russia, China, and their satellites and hangers-on could orient. But it is clear that the US cannot sustain its role as world-policeman, world financial guarantor, world guardian of the trade lanes, world rescuer in times of war and natural disaster, or world anchor.

The US is now undergoing a designed stealthy undertow and dissolution of internal cohesion and external power that is slowly releasing more and more parts of the world to their own fates. A slow destruction which was already occurring through blind corruption and ambition is now taking place by craft and planning. That intentional process of dissolution of cohesiveness and strength can only accelerate with the re-selection of the current US president for yet another 4 year rule.

The moderating powers of Europe, North America, and Oceania on world affairs are dissipating.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. _WB Yeats . . . The Second Coming
There is no need for peak oil, climate catastrophe, resource collapse, global overpopulation, and all the other bugaboo tools of leftist scare-mongering -- all of those meant only to facilitate the grab of power and resources, after all.

Violence, Fertility, and Low IQ Most Prevalent Among Third World People

Everything needed for a collapse of civilisation after the style of Mao, Pol Pot, or Kim, is contained within the weaknesses of human nature combined with the demographic forces at work around the globe.

Parts of the "civilised world" are likely to cohere and fortify themselves against the coming anarchy. Other parts will ally themselves with the anarchy, in an attempt to bring down the remaining foci of a livable future. Much will depend upon where one happens to be when the camels' backs begin to break.

This is where I am supposed to write: "And then I woke up, and it was all a dream."

But was it really? The shape of the shakeout above is only one out of all the possible futures. Yet the forces of dissolution and anarchy are certainly hard at work. They have always been and always will be as long as humans are what they are. Pax Americana was never meant to last forever, just as Pax Romana and Pax Brittanica could not last.

Those periods of transition can be a bit difficult, and quite unpredictable. You have choices: You can choose to fight a courageous holding action, a la The Tea Party movement and the like. You can take your chances and try to profit from the turbulent volatility in markets around the world. You can sit on your laurels and accept whatever comes. Or you can find a good place to hunker down. If you choose to hunker, be advised that there are no guarantees as to how long you will have to wait for TEOTWAWKI. You may find yourself hunkered for quite some time. ;-)

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Labels: , , , ,

Bookmark and Share

10 Comments:

Blogger MnMark said...

We haven't had an all-out world war for a couple of generations now. Maybe we're about due for one.

It seems as though the next all-out war could be unbelievably horrific, given the technological advances that have occurred since the last one. And in the U.S. we are not a relatively united society like we were in WW II.

But perhaps one after-effect of a new world war would be a new baby boom, and the "aging demographic" issue would be a thing of the past.

Wednesday, 12 December, 2012  
Blogger Matt M said...

"The future is not what it used to be."
Arthur C. Clarke

Wednesday, 12 December, 2012  
Blogger Lime Lite said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

Wednesday, 12 December, 2012  
Blogger Lime Lite said...

MnMark - what always fascinates me is when people talk about a baby boom. Yes, then what? How about letting nature take care of herself - just like in the wild, where the weak die off and when there is abundance then more young are born. Our Western societies have believed in the ponzi scheme of, if more people come into the country, then they will look after the aged. However, what happens when all these 'new' immigrants also get old? Who looks after them? It's all an artificial population ponzi scheme because governments can't live within their means. Their answer is always 'we need more immigrants'. So, in they stream, from the third-world, which they are only too eager to escape, and then live like kings in their new social justice countries, which look after them from arrival to grave. At the expense of the local population. There is always a price to pay for interfering with nature, and our modern societies are now paying the price. It's all caught up with us - all these do-good, social justice, welfare and entitlement handouts. Instead of just allowing the locals to get on with life, governments interfere. And now America is in the hands of the clueless liberals (shudder) who have had it too good for too long that they can't even see the error in their ideology. More social justice coming your way. Good luck with that.

Wednesday, 12 December, 2012  
Blogger J said...

Something is wrong with the global IQ graph.

Thursday, 13 December, 2012  
Blogger MnMark said...

Lime Lite:

I guess ultimately 'social justice' societies are just as subject to Darwinian natural selection as any other. They weaken themselves by subsidizing the reproduction and unproductivity of the weak and penalizing the reproduction and productivity of the strong. So they will disappear and be replaced by societies that are productive and strong.

In the case of the West, this replacement could theoretically be by Asians or muslims, but I suspect it will be by an awakened bunch of angry white men who insist on having a new society for themselves and their people.

So personally all we can do is make ourselves strong, smart, and productive...and watch with fascination as things play out.

White, Western liberalism and social justice will destroy itself. We just need to be awake and stay out of the way as much as possible.

Thursday, 13 December, 2012  
Blogger al fin said...

J:

Yes, the global IQ is going down. That is very wrong, but what can you do? The historical factors that caused high IQ to be selected in European, Ashkenazi, and East Asian populations have been trumped by low fertility in the smart fraction of those populations.

The other curves on the graph are population curves for various countries. The left side vertical scale is IQ, the right side vertical scale is for population.

Thursday, 13 December, 2012  
Blogger MnMark said...

Currently, stupid people who have a lot of children are rewarded for it because they are creating more stupid voters who can, in the aggregate, use the political system to steal money from the smart people. Meanwhile, smart people use birth control and economic planning to limit the number of children they have.

This sort of thing isn't going to go on forever. At some point the stupid will overreach and drive the smart underground, putting the wealth of the smart out of reach.

At that point it will again become very painful for stupid people to have children they can't afford, just as it always has been. There won't be any welfare to pay for them; there won't be any money for the government to give away.

Perhaps democracies are inherently self-destructive because of this enabling of stupid, devolutionary behavior. Perhaps the next form of government is some sort of monarchy or oligarchy where the smart rule for their benefit, making it a good idea for them to have many children and a good idea for the poor to have few.

My point is just that all these trends contain the seeds of their own destruction. It will be interesting to see how this trend of the stupid using the government to control the smart collapses.

Thursday, 13 December, 2012  
Blogger Lime Lite said...

MnMark - I don't agree. Look at South Africa, where at the turn of the 20th century, the whites and black population numbers were almost identifcal - around 1.5 million each. Fast forward to today - 110 years later - and the blacks now number 40 million and there are 5 million whites. And the blacks keep on reproducing, even though they live in poverty and are mostly indigent. They believe their wealth are their children and the more they have the richer they will be later. Don't fall for this red herring of when the welfare runs out their numbers will start dropping. Sure, it may affect it slightly, but overall the indigent, low IQ populations will wipe out the more clever among us. As you have pointed out, the more intelligent plan the number of children they can afford with their heads; the lower IQ's don't.

Thursday, 13 December, 2012  
Blogger J said...

I praised you in http://h2oreuse.blogspot.co.il/2012/12/critique-of-national-intelligence-report.html. Keep up the good work.

Friday, 14 December, 2012  

Post a Comment

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” _George Orwell

<< Home

Newer Posts Older Posts
``