society will continue to get stronger for another 50 years before pollution eventually starts lowering the quality of life and causing more costs to cleanup etc...

People have been saying 50 years for a bit too long.

Global wars. Metaphysics — Lil

If metaphysics is causing society's collapse, then things are worse than I thought. Best get busy on those other threads to sort the problems out. Or do you mean that too much time is being wasted on metaphysics that could be spent on stopping wars? I could believe that.

People have been saying 50 years for a bit too long. — Lil

May I present you with your first like, and my first genuine one...

Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, queer rights, trans rights, animal rights, conservation, climate change action... Is society getting better?

The world is getting better over time: https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health-crime-literacy-good-news

Is society collapsing? — Lil

Loneliness statistics

You can be part of 7 billion people crawling over the face of the earth but you will always be one in 7 billion.

A back of the envelope calculation shows every fourth person you meet will be lonely. Society...collapsing. You decide. I can't seem to find a analogy that could've given us an idea of what "...every fourth person you meet will be lonely." Sorry about that.

Only to the degree ecosystems are collapsing. :mask:

I think change feels like collapse to people sometimes, but all the data points to things steadily getting better. The success rate of predictions of societies collapse is quite terrible.
We’re fine. Societies not going anywhere unless people do.

It’s pure speculation, but for my own view I think society is evolving in an encouraging direction rather than collapsing. There appears a growing schism between positions of power and their thralls on the one hand, and those who oppose it on the other. The so-called social democracies over-played their hand with their pandemic response, using an emergency as an excuse to seize power, favoring authoritarianism and statism over the free choice and association of their citizens, and I believe this will return to bite them. By now people are feeling the slow choke of authority. Such sentiment, if it is there, may prove disastrous for state power, but it can only invigorate and replenish social power.

Society is changing, not collapsing. Man is a social beast (except me) and will always be, even if he's wandering a post-apocalyptical nuclear waste land. Mad Max had a society going on there. But I tend to hope for something along the lines of the movie "Tomorrowland."

But people always think they are so fucking important that the shit is going to change during their watch. LOL! Dumb fuckers. Christians aren't the only ones, by any stretch of the imagination, but they do make a good example. So many think Jesus is coming during their life. LOL!

Face it, we just aren't that important.

I don't think society is collapsing, but I think we're entering a very dangerous time. Humanity more and more has learned to modify the very ground of our existence. It started with nuclear weapons. Soon we will have the ability to genetically modify and create life at will. Nanotechnologies will allow us to control and modify living things at the cellular level. Travel and commerce between different parts of the world will lead to more pandemics. Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and related technologies the potential to cause significant disruption of civilization. There are people who believe that artificial intelligence will take over the world within the next 50 years.

I don't know what will happen. I won't be here, but I worry for my children.

I wouldn't call it collapse. I would call it an inevitable rejection (by Consciousness) of a very unhealthy way of living caused by a general embrace of over consumption, and a wishful faith in science to solve all problems, when from observation it is obvious that science and associated technology is creating an extremely unhealthy environment for Life and living.

A very, very good question.

it is obvious that science and associated technology is creating an extremely unhealthy environment — MondoR

I just happened to have recently had a minor medical procedure involving general anesthesia for a condition that, a hundred years ago, would have involved me probably dying of pain and infection. People who write things like what you wrote have not taken the time to reflect on the incredible net increase in human life expectancy and well-being that have taken place in the last hundred years as a result of -- clutch those pearls -- capitalism, and scientific progress. Walk in a room and flick a switch and the lights go on. Supermarkets full of food. Antibiotics. Car and plane travel. In 1950 the average US life expectancy was 68. Today it's 79. That's an incredible improvement in a relatively short time. Back in the 50's kids got Polio. When's the last time you ever heard of a case of Polio? Yes there are downsides to everything, but I would much rather be alive today than at any other time in human history. Inequality? Talk about the Middle ages. Serf's up!

:100:

Face it, we just aren't that important. — James Riley

Except to ourselves (which is our biggest problem).

Humanity more and more has learned to modify the very ground of our existence. It started with nuclear weapons. Soon we will have the ability to genetically modify and create life at will. Nanotechnologies will allow us to control and modify living things at the cellular level. — T Clark

Yeah. And at a more radical (reductio?) level, R. Scott Bakker refers to this as the (coming?) "semantic apocalypse" wherein we are eliminating with discursive reasoning (technoscience, FN's "will to knowledge") the very basis for our discursive reasoning – human meaning (e.g. intentionality, free will ... are just "user illusions") – such that we're reaching (we've already reached?) a terminus at which our technoscience is using us instead of the other way around because there is, in fact, no "us" (or user), and never was. Algorithms über alles! :yikes:

:up:

Ever read Ellul?

I think society is not quite collapsing, but I do think it is eroding. I don't know if there will be a sacking-of-Rome scenario, I think it more likely that there will come a time in which humans will have been conditioned to such a high degree as to make them completely dependent on technology and thus unable to take care of themselves if (when) the technology fails.

Oh yeah, decades ago and thought Ellul was merely a very sophisticated luddite à la Heidegger but since the '90s I've come to appreciate his insights (& differentiate him from old Herr Heidi).

The biggest problem with climate change that we have yet to find a way to generate virtue from hand-wringing.

I think that you raise an interesting question, but it does involve the underlying question of what we mean by 'society'? We exist as individuals within social groups, but there are so many individuals and 'others', within countries and beyond, and, so, I have a bit of a problem with the idea of society. It seems a bit of an abstract concept.

Nevertheless, I think that the abstract aspect of 'society' may be where the problem lies, and may be part of the reason why it may be collapsing. That is, because in seeing everything in terms of a wider notion of social meaning, the personal aspect may become lost. I think that most of us struggle with identity if it becomes too abstract, and remote from an actual community. The feeling of being lost in a sea of abstractions may be underlying factor within any collapse of' 'society'.

In the 1980's there were roughly 70 000 nuclear weapons in the World and in 1983 during a NATO exercise the Soviet Union was really fearing an American out-of-the-blue nuclear attack by President Ronald Reagan. The Soviet Union readied it's nuclear weapons for impending first strike by the US, but luckily the US didn't notice it.

Now there are well under 20 000 nuclear weapons in the World and neither the US or Russia have nuclear forces at such high level of readiness as in the 1980's. Many of those Soviet nukes ended up as fuel for American nuclear power plants and giving electricity American cities (they were targeted to destroy). So some things have become better and some dangers have been avoided.

Naturally there won't be a time when we will not see anything dangerous on the horizon and no problems around to be solved. And so it doesn't look so scary. Just a little.

And at a more radical (reductio?) level, R. Scott Bakker refers to this as the (coming?) "semantic apocalypse" wherein we are eliminating with discursive reasoning (technoscience, FN's "will to knowledge") the very basis for our discursive reasoning – human meaning (e.g. intentionality, free will ... are just "user illusions") — 180 Proof

I haven't read the article yet, but I will. I worry less about metaphorical catastrophes than I do about real ones.

And what if the latter are caused by the former?

I just happened to have recently had a minor medical procedure involving general anesthesia for a condition that, a hundred years ago, would have involved me probably dying of pain and infection. — fishfry

There were and are many well known modalities for all types of human inflictions. Nowadays, the only modalities that are used, are the biggest generators of income.

But aside from this major accomplishment of modern medicine, let's not forget the millions who die prematurely every year from air, water, and soil pollution, the overbaked west costs of North American and the enormous fires, the droughts, the inferno in the Middle East, the flooding in northern Europe and China, and that little man virus called Covid, which even the coopted WHO finally admitted today that "lab accidents happen all the time", when being questioned on the origins of Covid.

Technology, in just a few decades, has destroyed the lives of most people on this earth. Like cancer, humans are bent on their own destruction, by destroying that which gives them life. No doubt technology companies and Wall Street will view that as an opportunity for growth, exactly like cancer.

Society is always collapsing.

And at the same time, being built.

Your choice is which you will work towards.