Asklemmy

Capable? Yes. Willing? No.

I disliked the books and haven't tried to watch the show.

But I think I disagree that our civilization is no longer capable of solving it's own problems. Rather, I think our civilization is going through one of the crappy parts of common cycles that civilizations go through. Frighteningly, this part usually comes right before really scary crappy parts.

Civilizations aren't static and the patterns don't always happen the same way, but I think we can predict that

1. Things get really shitty. People pull together for survival and build to a place of stability and prosperity.

2. The rich and powerful (being short sighted idiots just like the rest of us, but ALSO insulated from and out of touch with reality), start looting society for their own selfish, short term benefit. This destabilizes the institutions and systems creating the stability and prosperity. The population at large doesn't really understand what's happening or why, but they DO know that while they're still relatively comfortable, they're scared and they don't like it. They get more conservative and eventually turn to fascists, strongmen and authoritarians to try to get stability back.

3. This doesn't work out. It exacerbates the existing problems, makes things even more scary and less stable. Eventually war and rebellion break out.

4. When the dust settles, things are really shitty. People pull together for survival and build back to a place of stability and prosperity.

These steps aren't exact. They're trends. Lots of things can disrupt them (including famine, plague and barbarian invasions). But in step 1/4, we (humans) are actually REALLY good at collectively solving problems. In step 2 we're TERRIBLE at collectively doing anything. In step 3 we (collectively) are trying to solve all the WRONG problems... then back to step 1/4.

We seem to globally be right at the tail end of step 2. Which SUCKS.

tl:dr; This has all happened before and will surely happen again. Hostile aliens are just a modern take on the "barbarian invasion" disrupter. Beware of strangers bearing gifts.

FWIW, book three is basically "a feminized society is incapable of making the hard but necessary choices". I like the series for its concepts, but not its themes or characters. It has a lot of Incel-adjacent stuff going on.

That said, when we're being so half hearted about global warming, it's hard not to be cynical. People want the solutions to keep everything the same, but without carbon output. It's not going to work that way.

We're having a hard time convincing people that they don't need an EV with 600 miles of range if you're just willing to rest for 20 minutes every two to four hours of driving. Which would be a good idea, anyway. That's a relatively minor change compared to the status quo.

The real solution is high speed rail and bikes. How do we get people to go along with that if we can't even go so far as small changes to road trips?

Capitalist realism. Human society has always been able to solve its problems. The issue is capitalism — our current society — can't solve the problems it created like massive wars, hunger, regular economic crisis, and global warming.

Capitalism hasn't existed forever, and it won't exist in the future. Our civilization will solve the problem of capitalism by seeing to its abolition.

Context: An eco-terrorist organization that's a fifth column for an alien invasion made this statement

Our civilization is more than capable, but those who have money and power are unwilling, because that's not something they're interested or invested in.

We're capable, we just have to stop relying on technology, hierarchies, and buck-passing to solve our societal problems for us.

When we rely on technology (in this case I mean "any human-made cosntruct to solve a problem" and not just "machines"), we start falling into the Golden Hammer bias. Think of a societal issue that you care about, no matter how general, look it up, and see some results are just "So-and-so has invented an app to combat [issue]." Then you look into the app and realize that it doesn't do anything to attack the root of the problem, and instead treats some symptoms while fitting into the existing framework that caused the problem in the first place. Incidentally, that's how society has become so full of middlemen.

E.g. insurance: health care becomes expensive enough to break the bank for everyone below a certain threshhold -> someome proposes a system where everyone pays so the people who need it can cash in -> the people who need it pay for this system, those who don't need it don't pay -> the system needs overhead, so it starts charging more and attempting to drive down costs -> the providers artificially increase prices to compensate for the costs being driven down -> more people need insurance. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Tons of ink has been spilled on the problems with hierarchy, but the simplest argument I can give on why it's bad at solving societal issues is: when you put your fate in someone else's hands, you give them the ability to make choices that negatively impact you with no recourse.

Every solution to this problem so far has either been "let's just add another person who sits above the people who sit above us" (which just adds a layer to the original problem) or "let's try to make our relationship more equal without removing their power over us" which cuts down on the benefits of entrusting that power to someone else AND provides none of the benefits of an equal (horizontal) relationship.

Finally, buck-passing is tempting, especially when the problems aren't our fault. But we've become a global society of people looking to point the finger at someone else, and pay another person to do the hard part for us.

Take climate change for example. One of the rallying cries of online activists has been "100 companies are responsible for 71% of GHG emissions." Great! Now what? What good did assigning blame do? What I've been told is that now we should get them to stop. Ok, how? The response i usually get is to elect officials who will enact sanctions for polluting and rewards for cutting down on pollution. And now we're passing the buck, adding a middleman, giving someone else power over us to control our fate, and completely relying on the demonstrably broken technology that is representative government.

What I want to know is what I can personally do today, starting now, to combat the problem. What change to my lifestyle can I make that won't destroy me or my future? I'm not saying we shouldn't support representatives who act in our interests—we absolutely, unequivocally should do that (unless it hampers our ability to enact a better solution)—but I want a solution I can personally participate in, too.

Because, by and large, those solutions get a lot more good done quicker while relying less on "necessary" evils.

Those were the delusional words of someone who lived in an upside down country. Kinda agree but if a single country fails, humanity doesn't get extinguished.

I disagree. I see problems solved all the time.

I think it is still capable of solving the problems we currently have, but the biggest question is, will it?

Politics, nationalism, greed, and corporations are currently blocking attempts to solve the climate crisis.

Can we get them out of the way before it's too late? I guess we'll find out.

We can solve problems, the status quo is just to profitable for those in power. Don't you find it strange how the status quo persists despite both mainstream political parties running a Change candidate for president and winning? (MAGA is the shitters form of change, just in the wrong way)

Clearly the people are looking for solutions, even if they don't know the answers.

Consider watching a video on first past three post voting. If we change how we vote in each of our individual states , people can vote for 3rd parties and still have their vote count if their preference didn't win. No spoiler effect!

I'm partial to the notion of memetic evolution, which is to say that humans have a concurrent driver of behavior besides our genes. Less so than capability or willingness, I tend to believe that some of the memes driving us are too successful, if that makes sense. They perfectly capitalize on the foibles of the human organism and I just don't believe we're able to surmount that. The only likely way out is running through the painful cycle described in another comment here. We need to suffer sufficiently to initiate a change in the ideas by which we operate

No.

Humanity always finds a way.

I'd disagree. If you look at the problems which create existential problems for "our civilization" (more on the scare quotes in a minute), the list is pretty short.

1. Nuclear war - This is existential to both civilization and to humanity as a species. Fortunately, this one is pretty easy to forestall: don't fucking do it. And that's actually been working out OK for the last few decades. For as insane of a system as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is, it's also been pretty successful. Once every nation knew that using nuclear weapons in war meant everyone loses hard, they never got used again. Prior to that situation, they got used. And, there is no reason to believe that the US wouldn't have used them again, if the USSR didn't also have their finger on The Button. Sure, universal disarmament sounds like a better solution, but that also assumes everyone is willing to act in good faith. Just one bad actor and that all falls apart. And you can pretty much assume that there will be plenty of bad actors.

2. Climate Change - Depending on how bad this gets, it might rise to the level of "existential threat". But, most of the currently likely outcomes are probably not. This isn't to say they aren't bad and really horrific for a lot of people. But, even looking at something like a 2C rise over the next century, it's probably not going to cause the outright collapse of most major countries. Anyone not living in the US, China, India or a Western European country is fucked. Water shortages and famine in Sub-Saharan Africa are going to rise to levels completely unprecedented in history. But, from a question of "will society collapse"? The answer is "probably not". Though the surviving societies will only do so by accepting a mountain of corpses on their doorstep. And even some of the major countries might end up collapsed due to resource wars.

3. Astronomical Events - Throwing this in to avoid the "but actshuly" responses. Yes, if we suddenly discovered a big ass rock headed our way, we're likely fucked. Also, if we get caught by a massive gamma ray burst, we're all gonna get turned to jerky. But, these are so low likelihood events as to not be worth worrying about.

Other than that, there isn't all that much which could really wipe out all civilization, everywhere, at once. And this is where I get back to those "scare quotes". We don't really have one single civilization on Earth. We have a bunch of them which interact in lots of ways. While that interdependence does make things a bit fragile, it also means that there is a higher degree of redundancy. If the US went tits up tomorrow, it would have some major impacts on China, India and Western Europe. But, each of those areas has a reasonable chance of adjusting and and continuing on. There may be a lost decade or three while supply chains adjust and new infrastructure is built out, but there is nothing wholly unique to the US which couldn't be replicated elsewhere. And depending on how the US failed, the useful bits of the US economy might well be able to be rebooted by someone else. Again, there is probably a lot of death on the table, the US is a major food exporter, after all. But, China already has a history of weathering millions of people dying to famine, I'm sure the PRC government could figure out a leap forward. An with such useful farmland in the US, one would expect farms to pop back up and get producing pretty quick. Maybe not at the level of output which the US currently has, but if we've killed off half or more of the US population, then we have a bunch of useful farmland with a lot less people to feed.

I'd argue that our civilization is more capable of solving it's own problems than it ever has been, just because we are are far better at identifying them, communicating them to the rest of the world, and analyzing the effects of what we try. Just because we have not solved all our problems does not mean that people in years past would have been able to do so and we've somehow lost that ability.

Nope. There are problems that won't be solved because of the framework of the system, but there are things that will be solved because it falls within the framework. Hopefully it goes a good direction, so far it's been good for humans.

I'm the context of the story, yeah. But the premise is terrible so I'm reality, no.

No.
The only pressing problem we're at the threshold of being unable to solve is climate change.

I still stand that if politicians would grow a backbone, most of the problems we have would be solved overnight.

Human civilizations have only been around for a couple thousand years. That's nothing.

edit: by this I mean to say that it's too soon to make sweeping generalizations about what human social organizations can or cannot do. A commenter downstream rightly points out that "civilization" isn't a well-defined term in this context, although I was thinking of it as a shorthand term for the various human political, commercial, cultural, etc. organizations of a given era. My contention is that because recorded history is only a couple of thousand years old, we do not have enough information about what the various components of "civilization" are capable of, especially when they are overlapping, interacting, and meeting a novel challenge.

btw I tried reading this book but got bored halfway through, and I watched the first episode and wasn't that impressed either. I read the wikipedia summary and it's got some neat ideas, though.