Civilization collapse, signs of the past and may be happening now

RobertDyck · Yesterday 23:47:15

A couple videos: 7 Civilizations Collapsed After the Same 9 Warning Signs. The U.S. Has 8

Signs from the first video:

income inequality: rich are very rich, working people are very poor
too many powerful people fighting for the same jobs, money, or status
government spend too much, take on debt
politics freezes up. Big decisions never happen
resources run low. Sometimes it's money, sometimes food, sometimes money
military overreach. Militaries run out of cash or soldiers.
huge health or population shocks. Plagues, mass migration, etc
currency trouble. Run-away inflation, your money isn't worth much.
information chaos. Fake news, corruption, people not know who or what to trust.

These things rarely show up alone. One problem makes another worse. Debt leads to trust breakdown, which makes inequality worse, which leads to more elite fighting, and so on. Like dominoes falling.

Fall of Rome is used as the first example in the first video. Rich elite gain exemptions from tax, poor people face ever heavier taxes. Rich protected, poor squeezed, shows up in every falling civilization. Military bill: Rome spent half its budget keeping soldiers fed, armed, and loyal. Costs increase every year, but tax income drops. Rome debased its silver coin again and again; in 11-37 AD it was 97.5-98% silver, in 274 AD it was only 5% silver. Due to bad money, soldiers demand higher pay, farmers hold back food waiting for prices to climb, local leaders stop cooperating with the capital. Rome did not fall because enemies got stronger. It fell because the system stopped funding itself. Tax base shrinks, currency weakens, elites fight instead of helping fix the mess.

Also mentioned: Maya (Mexico). The video finds similarity between 3 places that look entirely different: Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Easter Island, Bronze Age Middle East, imperial heartlands of ancient China. Weirdly, they followed similar pattern of decay and collapse, and at the same time.

Today in the United States:

extreme inequality: top 1% own 32% of all wealth
elite rivalry. Political parties locked in zero-sum battles. Billionaires funding movements just to tilt the game.
debt and fiscal stress. US federal debt hit $34 trillion in 2024, with interest payments alone higher than national defence. States and cities have their own budget holes.
political paralysis. Congress struggles to pass budgets. Approval for institutions drop to record lows. Fights over basic rules like voting turn toxic fast.
resource strain. California's water wars, to power failures in Texas.
information chaos is real. Trust in news, science, and government keeps falling. Every fact sparks a fight.
America's global position is stressed. Allies question commitments. Trade wars. Military spending soars.
health shocks. Demographic stress. COVID, opioid deaths, declining life expectancy.

That's 8 out of 9 warning signs. The biggest risk is calling all of this "normal". So what will the final straw be? Possibilities: a global financial shock. Rapid collapse in value of the dollar. Sudden freeze in credit that hits everyone from small businesses to governments. Or a breakdown in trust so deep people walk away from the rules: stop paying taxes, or reject election outcomes entirely. Eg. 2008 financial crash, or wild election of 2020. Or global currency crisis, such as other countries stop using the US dollar to trade. America's grip on the world economy weakens fast, everything from gas bills to groceries change overnight. Or maybe a big climate disaster. Collapse is often not sudden, it's years of decline. Joseph Tainter wrote complex societies don't collapse overnight; they unravel piece-by-piece. Societies that bounce back trade short-term wins for long-term solutions. Fix the roof before the storm, instead of pretending blue skies will last forever.

RobertDyck · Yesterday 23:52:34

The book referenced in the video: Collapse of Complex Societies, published 1988.
Amazon: Collapse of Complex Societies 1ed
Oh! That's expensive. I wouldn't recommend paying that much money for a book. Just want to post a reference.

RobertDyck · Yesterday 23:56:24

Another book on this subject, different author.
Amazon: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition

RobertDyck · Today 00:48:10

Another video. This young lady talks fast. She's not originally from Canada, but moved to Canada. She has a bit of an accent, but slight. She talks about the BRICS nations seeking to end the US dollar for international transactions. Her argument is that Canada has an opportunity to become the new "Switzerland" of the 21st century. Will that happen? I don't know, but end of the US dollar for world transactions is a real possibility. My goal is not to promote Canada, but to highlight the fact the US is in serious trouble. It's not too late for the US to fix its problems, but if nothing is done, the US is heading in a very dangerous direction.

YouTube: BRICS Just Killed the Dollar - Canada's About to Get Very Rich

Last edited by RobertDyck (Today 00:49:56)

RobertDyck · Today 10:50:23

This relates to Mars a couple ways. First, don't repeat the same mistakes. Second, this window of time when settlement of Mars is possible may be a short window. We don't know how much longer humanity will be able. Civilization has collapsed many times in the past, could easily collapse again, and that collapse may already be starting.

kbd512 · Today 13:04:15

RobertDyck wrote:

income inequality: rich are very rich, working people are very poor

This is a problem almost exclusively created by leftists to justify their abhorrent behavior, but yes, I agree with this one. The richest people in America are almost exclusively leftists. Elon Musk is still a former leftist. He's been a Republican for a whole New York Minute. Bezos has always been a leftist. Mark Cuban- leftist. I could keep going, but you get the point. For every Koch brother there are at least a dozen or more rich leftists. The average American worker should be doing better than he or she is, but they're not, because rich leftists, who do in fact own most the means to production, but don't for one second believe in fairness, don't want them to.

Rich Leftist A-Holes and Hollyweirdos:
"Rich people are too rich. Boo-hoo. Oh woe is me. We must make those silly poor simpletons forget that we've made them indentured servants by screwing up the rest of their lives in other ways while pretending to care about them than those annoying feckless Republicans we use as whipping boys when our policies fail. Open the floodgates to the illegals. They can't focus on us when they're physically being overrun. Convince the boys that they're actually girls. Quick! Send some more billions to Ukraine while we shaft our voters in Hawaii. Tell them the climate is dying when they so much as breathe. That should keep them from noticing anything until we've finished robbing them blind."

Leftists here in America literally voted for that dog crap and eventually rioted when absolutely none of it improved their daily lives. Well, how could it? If you're already barely scraping by, how would your personal economic challenges improve by competing with third worlders for jobs? Why do they vote for the people who literally and directly caused the problems they're complaining about, but expect a different result when they continually give power to people who state through actions that they want to economically crush them?

People voted Gavin Newsom back into office during his recall election, knowing full well he doesn't care about them at all. The people who voted for him even said that about him. After he won, what did he prove with the California wildfires? He still doesn't give a crap about whether or not Californians live or die. He's never going to change. If you vote for him, then you actively seek to bring about your own demise through cold indifference to preventable human suffering.

Both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris called their own young voters, "stupid". They disrespect their own voters right to their faces because they know they'll vote for them anyway. I would find that intolerable and I'm not even young anymore.

RobertDyck wrote:

too many powerful people fighting for the same jobs, money, or status

Umm... No. This is not "a thing" here. Average American workers competing for jobs with below-minimum-wage illegals is a thing. Bezos and Musk are not "tearing the country apart" by competing for NASA lunar exploration and basing contracts. They are, however, employing standing armies of people trying to "reach for the stars".

RobertDyck wrote:

government spend too much, take on debt

This is very true. Annual entitlement spending dwarfs all discretionary spending. Who created and continuously doubles-down on the "Welfare State" to keep those poor people poor? Once again, that would be our Democrats. Free money for this / that / the other cockamamie nonsense. It'll be someone else who pays the bill, so who cares if a bold faced lie gets us elected right now? Fiscal responsibility isn't "cool". It doesn't win any votes with people who feel entitled to the work of others. Do Republicans spend too much money on wars and war machines? Absolutely. No question about that, either. Be that as it may, line up all the war spending and all the entitlement spending over the past 25 years (2000-2025) and it's not even a close contest. The purpose of legitimate government is not to rob Peter to pay Paul, nor to tell Peter why he should envy Paul.

RobertDyck wrote:

politics freezes up. Big decisions never happen

The only "big decision" that never happens relates to fiscal responsibility and telling people to pay for their own wants / needs / desires, because public money is not their money. I feel like almost all politicians, regardless of party, still haven't received and accepted this message. Everyone thinks they're entitled to something that does not belong to them, specifically. There is a refusal to stop digging. Whatever their other past mistakes, I would happily forgive and reelect a batch of politicians who recognized the need for a balanced budget.

RobertDyck wrote:

resources run low. Sometimes it's money, sometimes food, sometimes money

Resources are not low, though. There's never been a more productive time in human history. We're flush with resources. Artificial scarcity is not the same thing as a hard environmentally-imposed limitation completely outside of human control. The amount of Copper and Uranium on Earth are externally imposed limitations, for example. If we needed to make houses out of Copper and Uranium, because those were the only suitable construction materials, then the world's Copper and Uranium supply would represent a true "low resource" situation.

RobertDyck wrote:

military overreach. Militaries run out of cash or soldiers.

Now that Secretary of War Hegseth is running the show, the military is hitting their recruiting numbers before the year is half-way over, which means Uncle Sam gets to choose who is fit to serve and who is not. That's the way it should be.

Yes, the U.S. military is experiencing a significant recruitment turnaround, with most branches hitting or exceeding their goals for
Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) by mid-2025, marking a major shift from recent struggles, thanks to revamped strategies, increased recruiter professionalism, and a surge in enlistment interest. The Army, in particular, met its FY25 target four months early, showing strong momentum with higher daily contract rates than the prior year.
All Branches Seeing Improvement: By April 2025, the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force were all meeting or exceeding targets, with only the Space Force slightly behind.
Dramatic Turnaround: After missing goals in 2023, the services implemented major changes, including modernizing recruiting structures and focusing on recruiter training, leading to this recovery.
Early Success for Army: The Army hit its FY25 goal of over 61,000 recruits by early June 2025, a substantial increase from FY24, demonstrating renewed patriotism.

America is definitely not short of food or water. California's problems are entirely related to the people they elected to run their government, which are almost exclusively Democrats who simply do not care about their own people and never did, because they're so hopelessly lost in their left brain hemisphere. That's not even a dig at leftists, it's simply a statement of neuroscience-demonstrated fact regarding which hemisphere of the brain is responsible for greed / envy / "need to control" thinking.

huge health or population shocks. Plagues, mass migration, etc

Mass migration was a problem created by Democrat President Biden, to "punish" working class Americans for being so... American.

RobertDyck wrote:

currency trouble. Run-away inflation, your money isn't worth much

There is not "runaway inflation" at the moment, but yes, inflation remains a problem because the Federal Reserve Chairman wants it to be a problem for President Trump's administration. Whenever leftists see their economic worldviews repudiated by different approaches to economics, they do everything humanly possible to destroy what better men and women have built. When you install such people into positions of power that they cannot be easily removed from, disaster is sure to follow.

RobertDyck wrote:

information chaos. Fake news, corruption, people not know who or what to trust

I'm starting to feel like a broken record, but the people who most consistently and knowingly put out disinformation are almost exclusively leftists. If you have to constantly question whether or not someone is providing factual and unbiased information, then for goodness sake, STOP LISTENING TO THEM! Send a clear message to them by turning off your TV. When their sponsors eventually figure out that nobody is watching them, they'll eventually have to find real jobs like everyone else.

I know enough to not listen to someone who says:
Don't wear a mask because it won't protect you. Wear a mask to protect yourself and others. Wear two masks.
-Dr "I AM THE SCIENCE!" Fauci

Leftist media treated him as if he was the second coming of Jesus. He literally provided the money to create a global pandemic, "for science".

Almost nobody from the left had the personal integrity and courage to call-out that kind of idiocy or simply ignore it. Dozens of other similar patterns of behavior across a range of issues are why they lost credibility. Everyone with two brain cells to rub together could figure out how directly contradictory that was. Everyone, left / right / center, discovered that the people the left puts on pedestals are midwits at best, religious dogmatics at worst, and do not seem to care at all about the people they hurt. The only time they reconsider the worst of their anti-social behaviors is when it gets directed back at them.

The historical left was filled with actual thinkers who questioned everything. That's why they became such a powerful influence over modern society. They promptly abandoned all the principles which made them so successful, as-if pursuit of knowledge and truth ceased to matter. Today's left is filled with ideological dogmatics who are as incurious and self-assured of their own righteousness as the most vile "good book thumpers" from the world's traditional religions.

You cannot abandon truth and morality while expecting everyone else to blindly follow. Most of us won't do it.

SpaceNut · Today 16:19:05

How distortions occur by creating labels that are not accurate.

"Rich people" are a diverse group with varied political views, and it is a misconception to characterize them all as holding the same ideology. Historically, the very wealthy have often leaned conservative (right-wing), but recent trends, particularly in the U.S., show a shift where many in the upper-income brackets, especially the college-educated or those in certain industries, are increasingly likely to be liberal or lean Democratic.
General Trends in the U.S.
Overall Political Affiliation: Polling data has indicated that when party leanings of independents are included, the wealthiest 1% of Americans were somewhat more Republican-leaning than the rest of the population, although this gap was not as large as other demographic differences like education level.
Income vs. Education: One of the most significant factors is education. High-income individuals who also have a college or postgraduate degree are more likely to support Democratic candidates, creating a "U-shape" in voting patterns by income level, where both the lowest and highest income groups show increased support for the Democrats compared to middle-income brackets.
Industry and Occupation: Political affiliation among the wealthy often depends on their source of wealth and occupation.
People in traditional industries like oil, manufacturing, real estate, and finance tend to be more right-wing or Republican.
Those in high-tech, human services, arts, and professional/scientific occupations tend to be more liberal or Democratic.
Ideology vs. Party: While wealthy individuals might lean toward one party, their views on specific issues, particularly economic ones, can still be conservative. Many are generally conservative in the classical sense of resisting change to a system that has benefited them financially.
Variations Among Different "Rich" Groups
Billionaires: A small group of high-profile billionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates are known for liberal donations, while others like Charles Koch are strongly conservative. The general perception is that the vast majority of billionaires are very right-wing on economic issues, even if a few prominent ones are liberal.
Celebrities/Entertainers: People in the entertainment world and arts tend to lean strongly liberal, which often leads to the public perception that many rich people are left-leaning.
"Old Money" vs. "New Money": Some analyses suggest that "old money" (inherited wealth) might have different political attitudes than "new money" (self-made), with those who became rich through disruptive entrepreneurship sometimes leaning more liberal than those whose wealth is tied to long-standing, traditional industries.
In conclusion, the political views of the rich are not monolithic. While economic self-interest often drives support for conservative, pro-capitalist, and lower-tax policies, factors like education, occupation, and personal values mean many affluent people align with the left or the Democratic party, especially on social issues

RobertDyck · Today 18:20:08

Tom asked for a brief summary. My initial post is from the first video. You guys are arguing. Perhaps I should quote that video again: The biggest risk is calling all of this "normal".

kbd512 · Today 18:38:27

SpaceNut,

Polling data has indicated that when party leanings of independents are included, the wealthiest 1% of Americans were somewhat more Republican-leaning than the rest of the population, although this gap was not as large as other demographic differences like education level.

The quoted article directly contradicts the data it presents in the very same sentence! Independents are not Republicans or Democrats, nor "Republican-leaning", nor "Democrat-leaning", unless they're not actually Independents. Party affiliation vs people who will vote for whomever they think will give them a better deal at the moment are definitionally different political beliefs. Party affiliation stems from believing in the core values and platform of the party. The data doesn't actually show what we want it to show, but if we change the definition of Republican, then it shows what we want it to.

Apart from leftists, which other group of people does this "Jedi mind trick" actually work on?

It is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day" - Kamala Harris

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#1 Yesterday 23:47:15

Civilization collapse, signs of the past and may be happening now

#2 Yesterday 23:52:34

Re: Civilization collapse, signs of the past and may be happening now

#3 Yesterday 23:56:24

Re: Civilization collapse, signs of the past and may be happening now

#4 Today 00:48:10

Re: Civilization collapse, signs of the past and may be happening now

#5 Today 10:50:23

Re: Civilization collapse, signs of the past and may be happening now

#6 Today 13:04:15

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#7 Today 16:19:05

Re: Civilization collapse, signs of the past and may be happening now

#8 Today 18:20:08

Re: Civilization collapse, signs of the past and may be happening now

#9 Today 18:38:27

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