I’m leaving home in an hour to get Mohs surgery done. I think it will be a slam dunk because whatever it is that I have was caught early and we have a great civilization that treats stuff like that very effectively. So the following comes from the heart.
X is a fascinating place. It replicates the best and worst of real life. It’s a great resource if you stay away from the engagement farmers and morons. (Do as I say, not as I do.)
Marko Jukic is part of an X clique that includes David Sacks, Balaji Srinivasan (usually referred to online by his first name), Elon (who needs no surname) and a bunch of other oddball, mystical eggheads.
Why do I call them oddball mystics? Because they all seem to be obsessed with the same things: crypto-currency, space travel as a transporting religion, and fertility. There’s nothing wrong with being interested in any or all of the three, it’s the obsession with all three and the mystical overtones I find weird.
Marko himself isn’t afraid to use the “m” word. He’s frankly spiritual. I like that. Man and woman doesn’t live by bling alone.
He just tweeted a thread about civilization collapse. It’s baked in the cake, he says. There’s no going back. Civilization will collapse.
Screenshot of the first tweet. RTWT.1
I am far more optimistic about humankind than Marko is, and I, too, am not ashamed to resort for mystical, spiritual explanations. I have faith in humanity’s hard-wired survival instinct. I say Eros wins over Thanatos every time. It may not seem that way now but it is so. Think of a huge, muddy field. It looks terrible! But underneath the quagmire there are green shoots in the millions that will sprout.
Humanity has been around for at least a couple of hundred thousand years and we’ll survive this bottleneck. In what form or fashion I don’t know. I suspect that religion will get us through. But that’s about the end of my willingness to say here. For the whole nine yards, you’ll have to read my books.
About space travel. I’m all in favor of it, but I don’t ascribe to it the meanings he does. I think space travel to this crowd of tech-bros is an escape. They turn an engineering feat into a religious experience because they can’t come out and say openly that they believe in one of the traditional revelations so they’ve made up their own smart boy’s club to express these ineffable — mystical, spiritual — emotions. Whatever… and they love the hardware.
While watching the Netflix shlockumentary about Arnold (you know which Arnold), he said, grinning broadly: “Boys and their toys.” I thought: “Girls and their pearls.”
That in a nutshell is what’s happening. Not only in the West. Iran, China, Russia, and Japan are also in a demographic trough.
Boys and their toys…
Girls and their pearls…
Too many toys, too many pearls. Eh, this too shall pass. People will buckle down and work their way out of the trough.
Human beings are endlessly inventive and creative. The human brain evolved to get around obstacles — to solve problems. There is no Matrix imprisoning us and there are no pills to save us. Our very creativity gets us out of trouble and into trouble.
Every advance in human knowledge is weaponized. And the powerful weaponize the truth with lies. This will never end.
It’s a beautiful world anyway. What a piece of work is man! We’ll tinker our way around this. We’ll survive.
And please read Marko Jukic. He’s an interesting thinker.
That means READ THE WHOLE THING but I must put these screenshots up:
And
This is why I say that this crowd is a nihilistic religious cult. He’s good with numbers and he’s right about the unsustainability of the high-consumption high-immigration society, but he comes up with conclusions that are emotional — and always pessimistic — to justify his space-travel kink.
I predict that civilizational collapse will occur, but you're right that we will survive it. The two are not mutually exclusive. This has happened many times before: consider the collapse of the Romano-Greek civilization. In western Europe it was pretty total, and yet, eventually, a new civilization arose from it. People were not wiped off the face of the earth. The signs of the collapse of what Spengler called the Faustian civilization are unmistakable: not just population collapse, but also the crisis of self-belief in the West, the almost complete erosion of spiritual direction, the faith of many in bogus scientism and quasi-religous cults like wokeism, and perhaps above all the pathological reliance on left-brain thinking of most people, particularly our dysfunctional elites. Very little good art is being produced now, and what there is, is being ignored or censored. The green 'policies' we have are unsustainable. I can't see any way that this civilization can continue in a way we'd recognise as 'ours' beyond this century. But I trust that a new one will replace it. There are some encouraging shoots already, like those you mention in your metaphor of the quagmire of mud.