this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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collapse of the old society

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Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

today’s powerful elites are choosing to perpetuate practices known to accelerate climate change and global devastation

So can we please just collapse already and eat the rich

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

While I share your knee-jerk reaction, still seems like a more protracted and calculated approach would be a Manhattan-project style response at reversing desertification, improving soil and forest coverage and diversification of ecologies by moving dead wood and biomass into increasingly arid landscapes and burying it to aid soil moisture retention and biology accompanied by repopulation of beavers and reestablishing wetlands that preserved and accumulated carbon in the soil. Things like that could, possibly, reverse trends and drive improved, sustainable weather patterns. But, that would require the rich to feed the ecologies that sustain us all and provide our sustenance without being torn limb from limb and forced to do so, which seemed unlikely from the start and never more so than now.

And, honestly, all this should have been undertaken fifteen or twenty years ago, at minimum. The outlook at this point is grim.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The problem to any solution perpetuating the current system is that rich people won't allow it. And what they do allow now, they'll probably break later.

The fix is getting rid of anyone having that much power on their own.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Tolkien warned us. Nobody can carry the ring, it must be destroyed. But nobody wants to destroy it.

Except a few anar.. ehm, some hobbits.

How do you destroy power without creating a power vacuum ready to be filled by someone else?

It would be like overthrowing the government/corporates and then placing hidden snipers around the government/corporate building, shooting down anyone staying there for too long.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Agreed. It's just that at some point some of that power, whoever is wielding it, really needs to be used for solutions and ones that are outside the current norm. So far, there's been absolutely none of that from anyone to any appreciable degree.

[–] hglman 1 points 1 year ago

There is some path where collapse is enough to make people act but not enough to destroy civilization outright. Where the current system is overturned, and we all coordinate to survive. That's absolutely realistic. Not that it won't involve a whole lot of dead people, but the total decline would need a highly intense global event that crushes food output for a few years. A shallower version where food runs short enough to cause revolutions but not so much that a everyone dies quickly seems most pluasible. Obviously that will be choatic and whi knows what comes out, but not dying is very motivational, especially when you have glimpsed death.