We have established that earth is nowhere near running out of physical, tangible resources like water, food, living space or energy - the amounts available are 10⁶-10⁸ times more than we are currently using, i.e. we are at less than 1 part in 1 million of our potential. https://twitter.com/hereticalupdate/status/1345110220553539584

And yet, even I have to admit that everything is not rosy.

So what's the problem?

The problem isn't out there in the world. There isn't a shortage of nitrogen or negentropy.

The problem is us.

Specifically, people worked out how to play negative sum games more effectively than positive sum ones, and some time around 1960 they closed the loop between telling negative-sum lies and getting money from the collective purse to tell more lies.

A collection of negative sum activities have managed to coordinate themselves at the heart of our civilization; civilizational parasites. (No I'm not talking about people of a particular ethnicity/religion).

The level at which things are going wrong is tied up with our values, beliefs, delusions and heresies.

A parasite at the heart of civilization that has the power to change laws, censor speech and protect itself from scrutiny or criticism can bring it all down.

And it's not just one. There are many interacting parasites of various sizes and that have made themselves comfortable in the heart of civilization, creating massive negative externalities.

Without large-scale wars or competition, peaceful civilizations will generically accrue parasites until there is no surplus left to parasitize.

Once parasites get into the process for creating and disseminating information you are truly in a bad place. This is where we are.

Many of the parasitization pathways are principal-agent problems where the principal is the taxpayer/state and the agent is the parasite.

Agents are supposed to serve the collective in various ways:

- create truth
- make economic decisions where reward goes with risk ("skin in the game")
- produce a product that is good for (boundedly rational) people
- ban products that are bad for (boundedly rational) people

Nowadays there's another problem called "virtue signalling" where everyone acts like a dishonest agent, supposedly doing something moral (helping the collective) but actually harming the collective to make themselves look good.

Social media and times of plenty have given everyone ways to inflict large harms on the collective in order to accrue benefits for themselves.

In this case, lying and appealing to people's biases in order to sell something, rather than making a good information product.

In this frame these are just two similar types of informational/moral parasite who create massive social disutility to line their own pockets. The one on the right is currently more successful at it, but they are both fundamentally doing the same thing.

We need something like a war against China, preferably one where The West loses to shock us into action and expose just what the once sleek hull of Western Civilization looks like below the waterline.

I thought that covid-19 might have done it, but it actually hasn't been bad enough unfortunately.

Pessimistically we'll just limp forward for 50 years and the year 2069 will look a lot like 2019, except with porn that's more immersive and automated fines for wrongthink administered through your Neuralink.

China will be colonizing Mars since they bought SpaceX after Elon's death and nobody in America could fill his shoes.

Optimistically?

well, that will have to wait ...