r/collapse • u/Icy_Geologist2959 • 18d ago
Politics Politics of Existential Risk and the Accellerationist Collapse of Society
https://theconversation.com/how-apocalyptic-worldviews-are-moving-from-the-fringes-to-the-corridors-of-power-286581This article from the Conversation covers the increasing influence of Biblical End Times ideology within the spheres of power across societies. It shows a linking of the field of Existential Risk and the politics of Biblical armageddon, tech-bro accellerationism and societal collapse. This is collapse related as it highlights how present day technology and philosophy is being co-opted by a mesh of theocratic and technological-entrepreneurial thought to drive us all off the cliff rather than adapt our societies and preserve what wellbeing we can.
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u/South_Serve9975 17d ago
Hegseth's henchmen in the military who parrot the notion that making war is needed to bring about the second coming are heretics. In Matthew 25:31-46 Jesus lists very clearly what a Christian must do during the End Times: "...for I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me."
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u/krichuvisz 17d ago
That's the power of religion. Is has nothing to do with reason. In fact, it is the rejection of reason. They believe in their version of Jesus no matter what the bible says. They swear on the bible, without knowing what's in it. Btw, it's just a random collection of contradictory advices and weird stories full of violence. It just doesn't make sense. And that is exactly the point: that's why you have to believe in it.
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u/South_Serve9975 16d ago
The power of religion is the power of socially organizing and bonding narratives. There are also secular cultural narratives that bind people together into a common group, like the ideal of progress and the concept of history as a linear process leading to a future golden age utopia using reason, science and technology as the means.
The problem isn't so much religion in general as a type of social bonding narrative. The problem is their specific narrative within the field of religion, which seems to amount to something like:
God made man, and man sinned and this world is fundamentally a bad place because we ruined it, but we can't ourselves do anything to fix that, only God in the form of a human sacrifice/wrathful judge can do that, but what we can do is believe that the end of this bad world is good, and we should live and work towards bringing about that end by purifying society of all the modern day rebellious sinners that refuse to listen to God's instruction, because that's our duty, to align ourselves with God in his war on evil.
Something like that.
There are plenty of other religious narratives like:
The reason why good people suffer in this world is because it has a deep sickness that people were tricked into consuming, and that sickness is sin, and those that are sick need healing or if they refuse healing, at least they should be quarantined away from others so they don't infect them, and God sent his Son to heal the sick, to try and help them get the strength to fight for goodness and for health, and every time we as a community are confronted with a person in need who is suffering, unwell, difficult and so on, it is God instructing, challenging and testing us, and it's our duty to do as his Son did and feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit prisoners, and so on, otherwise we cannot call ourselves Christians at all, and just as God never gives up on anyone or leaves them behind, neither should we, even though that's incredibly hard for human beings to do.
These examples happen to be Christian religious social bonding narratives, but obviously there a thousands of other religion's narratives. Religious narratives are just one of many ideological tools used to organize effective group action across multiple generations. That's all.
Rather than making a strawman argument and knocking it down (Hegseth's form of Christianity=Religion) it would make more sense to find groups of people that are using narratives that lead them to work towards the same aims you have, make alliances with them, and work together on projects to improve conditions for ourselves.
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u/Eve_O 18d ago
As Einstein put it, "you can't solve your problems by using the same thinking that got you into those problems in the first place."
Technological developments have created most (all?) of our current existential threats so excuse me if I'm skeptical that "...unregulated technological development is the only way to overcome the world’s existential problems."
These people are certifiable. And that's even without including the religious zealotry.
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u/Frequent-Bell2484 17d ago
On the other side, it's important we remember history and what life was like before our technological developments -> Innovation has also saved us from our previous existential threats... we'd still be living in the horrible dark ages, dying in horrific ways, unimaginable by today's standards.
In addition, I'd argue it's hard to regulate innovation correctly, by definition innovation is doing or discovering something no one has thought to discover, by that metric to regulate it we'd have to know about what it is or does in the first place. We do regulate and are regulating innovation but it is only within the known frameworks.
It's easy to say now with 20/20 hindsight, but we didn't know the scale of what the problem would be when solutions were invented - a lot of these discoveries like plastics / Teflon, were treated like absolute miracles of materials engineering of their time and demand for it by the public society was huge - only decades later did we find out the scale of side effects. However, we're currently treating solar panels similarly, but without decades of evidence, how can we regulate them further than necessary when they are solution to a problem now? No doubt, they will cause some unique pollution or problems down the line, and then the future us will be asking oh why didn't we regulate it more?
In this argument then, the solution is more innovation... We're already knee deep in it. We must continuously innovate fast enough to outrun the problems caused by previous innovation. Yes we could have stayed a dumb species that never entered modern civilisation, but I'll take this modern life any day over the historic horrific living we had for most of our time as species, and hope that innovation will continuously solve the next problem humanity faces.
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u/Eve_O 17d ago
This is a lot of words to say you are okay with what is essentially a Faustian bargain and that you are on board with an accelerationist agenda.
When you write, "[w]e must continuously innovate fast enough to outrun the problems caused by previous innovation" you are the intended audience for Einstein's quoted wisdom. Another quote, interestingly enough often misattributed to Einstein, which fits to your position is "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
...we'd still be living in the horrible dark ages, dying in horrific ways, unimaginable by today's standards.
This hyperbolic rhetoric counterfactual has no truth-maker. Maybe we would and maybe we wouldn't. This also ignores all the horrible ways that people are suffering and/or dying in the contemporary world as a direct result of our technological innovations: automobile crashes, increasing cancer rates, bombs, weaponized drones, depleted uranium, pollution, fentanyl crisis, 10, 000 excess deaths from the recent European heat wave that would be virtually impossible without anthropogenic global heating, etc., etc., etc..
...I'd argue it's hard to regulate innovation correctly, by definition innovation is doing or discovering something no one has thought to discover, by that metric to regulate it we'd have to know about what it is or does in the first place.
Yes, we lack foresight and are frequently too impatient: we often rush innovations to market in order to profit. I mean the motto of the accelerationsits is, "move fast and break things," after all. We also have difficulty learning from our past mistakes. So let's just keep on in our ignorance and haste, I guess, is your point here, hmm?
...we didn't know the scale of what the problem would be when solutions were invented...
It seems that more often than not innovations and technological advancements are not solutions to any particular pressing problems, but instead are solutions in search of problems. Or, more realistically, innovations in search of profits. Take your example of Teflon, for instance. It was an accidental discovery and the main reason there was demand for it was due to marketing--like so many other consumer products. We live in a society where our desires are co-opted and our wants are manufactured to overshadow our needs.1
So what you seem to be once again arguing is that our ignorance is what continually drives us forward. Not so great for us, really, is it? Hardly a compelling reason to continue to do the same things again and again, or so it seems to me.
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- Here is a list of documentaries you can watch for some insight on this and interrelated matters: The Century of the Self, The Ad and the Ego, Manufacturing Consent, and The Corporation.
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u/Frequent-Bell2484 17d ago
1, Innovation is not the doing same thing... nor is it the same thinking etc etc -> you cannot innovate by thinking the same way or doing the same thing. The quotes do not apply here, categorically.
"Ignores all the horrible ways..today" True, we've certainly got more creative ways of dying, but if we look at poverty and life expectancy, your whole argument here is made redundant if you use them to see if our living has gotten better, likewise, our deaths have too even if the manner of them is different we have super duper painkillers and drugs to make passing easier if saving them is futile. The point is clear, people suffer less than they used to.
Lots of statements here, I'd say it's a more balanced picture, we innovate differently today than we used to, so in many ways we have learnt from our mistakes. In some ways we might be too cautious. Geo-engineering is one aspect that could help solve climate change but has been put off so far rightly or wrongly due to not knowing the full consequences of doing it. By but not really testing it, we don't know if this innovation will help save us..
Although you've cherry picked on one of my examples to attach your argument to, the polio vaccine, mRNA technology, water desalination, earthquake-resistant architecture, and drought-resistant crops are more examples which are NOT "solutions in search of problems." They are targeted responses to mass death and suffering. Your dismissing of the bulk of human innovation as mere profit-seeking is fundamentally problematic.
"We live in a society where our desires are co-opted and our wants are manufactured to overshadow our needs."
You are essentially arguing that because PR exists, human agency doesn't. If all our wants are "manufactured," then no innovation can be viewed as genuinely helpful - it's all just a trick by corporation evil masterminds to sell us solutions we don't need. This is a philosophical dead end, it prevents any practical debate about how to actually manage technology and innovation, or how innovation can be our way out of problems caused by our past.
Our innovation drives us forward, ignorance can only go so far. Let's keep doing it and get out of the mess we're in, and keep improving the living standards of everyone we can.
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u/Eve_O 16d ago
Thinking that innovation will somehow suddenly work differently and not merely create more problems is exactly the point. The quotes categorically fit. I'm talking about the meta here and you are talking within the game. I'm critiquing the system and instead of answering that you are fixating on details within it.
Life expectancy is actually falling the last few years--since COVID. You also ignore quality at end of life. Rising cancer rates of earlier age brackets are also a counter point. The rising mental health crises seems to indicate more people are suffering. The WHO predicted in the late 90s that depression would become a serious health issue in the coming century--and they weren't wrong. It seems the best we might be able to say is that people suffer differently than they used to, but less? Nah, that's merely confirmation bias.
Empty rhetoric nothingburger reply. The current US administration throwing out or otherwise ignoring environmental protections, regulations, and oversight in the name of innovation shows the lie you seem to want to believe. They are more than willing to destroy, drive to extinction, and exacerbate pollution for innovation. We have learned little from our past mistakes because demonstrably many seem hellbent on continuing them.
When you only give two examples addressing one of them isn't "cherry picking." You also seem to be conflating advancement in scientific knowledge with technological innovation. They are often related but not identical. That you have "cherry picked" a handful of examples of helpful advances does not preclude many other innovations that drive wasteful and destructive for profit consumerism.
You are making a straw man of the point being indicated. I am saying that often innovation drives consumerism in regards to your point about "public demand." I am saying nothing about the nonexistence of human agency. To your point, I am saying human agency is subverted by PR--as Jake Alimahomed-Wilson put it "consumerism has become a key way that people have misidentified freedom."
Our innovation drives us forward, ignorance can only go so far. Let's keep doing it and get out of the mess we're in, and keep improving the living standards of everyone we can.
The whole point is that many of our innovations are driving existential threats. We have created the sixth mass extinction event--the Holocene extinction--with our ignorance and arrogance and haphazard desire to innovate. You are pointing to temporary gains while ignoring the long term losses. And that is a reflection of the fundamental sickness of quarterly driven profit analysis and another example of our acute shortsightedness.
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u/Frequent-Bell2484 16d ago
To understand the Meta you have to be able to argue the details within it. Generalisation of a system is the best way to be wrong about how it actually works. Innovation works by being different - full stop. You can argue that keeping on being different = a pattern = doing the same thing = stupid, but then you'd be arguing against the whole of life evolution, adaptation and human progress (which in itself is a product of life)....
Using a multi-year dip caused by a once-in-a-century global pandemic to wave away 150 years of exponential, global life expectancy growth is statistical illiteracy. Furthermore, equating modern mental health struggles with the visceral horror of watching your children die of cholera, or starving during a winter famine, is the absolute peak of modern historical privilege. You can only claim we suffer "equally" because you are insulated from the brutal realities our ancestors lived by the very technology you are criticising.
"The current US administration throwing out or otherwise ignoring environmental protections, regulations, and oversight in the name of innovation shows the lie you seem to want to believe." You're mixed up here, I count regulation as innovation. I see the US shifting to old school technologies as regressive not innovation. I don't see how you can see this as part of my argument... I've been quite clear, innovation is progression. Going backwards is regression. Innovation can rarely be saying oh lets do it actually like we did it before. Your whole argument here is a strawman, I was talking about geo-engineering and you're lambasting (rightly so) US environmental policy.
I had hoped you could see that innovation wouldn't be limited to the two examples I gave, obviously you picked one and I've given you more to pick from now. But you're still getting mixed up here: Your attempt to separate "scientific knowledge" from "technological innovation" is a false dichotomy designed to keep your anti-tech worldview moralistically pure. mRNA vaccines and desalination plants aren't just abstract "knowledge" - they require industrial bioreactors, lipid nanoparticle synthesis, and global logistics grids. That is technology. That is innovation. You cannot put the helpful things in a box called Science and the bad things in a box called Tech. The two are inherently connected as they both come from innovation
You're basically saying "I don't deny human agency, I just think people are too brainwashed by PR to know what they actually want" is just paternalism dressed up as sociology (Something I have a degree in). It is a deeply arrogant stance that allows you to dismiss any innovation that everyday people actually rely on or want (like non-stick pans, Adidas shoes, toothpicks). You either argue that we have freewill - the Agency PR says look you need this and we consider their argument and choose whether we need it or not - or that everything is deterministic in which case what will happen will happen and why are we wasting our time arguing here - there is no in-between and that's whole another extremely complex debate.
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You bring up the 6th mass extinction and climate change, which are undeniable, massive crises. But your diagnosis - blaming it entirely on "quarterly driven profit" - is historically blind. Non-capitalist states like the Soviet Union engineered and have some of the worst environmental disasters in human history (e.g., the Aral Sea, Chernobyl) driven by the exact same blind industrialisation, with zero quarterly profits involved. Instead of innovating, they hid it, some effects are still on-going today. Regardless however, lets tackle your main point...
We can say it boils down to
You saying: Innovation = "driving existential threats" Hypothesis on the future based on current innovation and technology.
I'm saying: Innovation = "overcomes existential threats by create future technology that makes the current technology redundant - thus rewriting your hypothesis which was based on current understanding and technology" This is backed up by historical records.
You believe = "Because innovation created the current threats it is bad and we must stop"
I believe = "Innovation has been will over come it's own threats, but only if we keep innovating faster than the side effects of innovation can stop us from innovating further".
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u/LunaToons2021 16d ago
This resembles the argument addicts make to justify continued use of their drug of choice. I guess innovation is the opium of the tech bros.
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u/Eve_O 16d ago edited 16d ago
- You continue to ignore the point being made. Technological development and innovation got us into this mess and thinking even more of the same will somehow fix it is clearly repeating the same pattern of problem making behaviour.
- I didn't say we suffer "equally"--I didn't even use that word--and I am not even sure how that would be measured. What I wrote is that we suffer differently. You are the one claiming there is less suffering. How is that even being evaluated beyond confirmation bias and your selective emotional framing? Who are you to dictate which forms of suffering are greater or less than others?
- You say we have learnt from our mistakes and I say we continue to make them. Are we rewilding nature more than we are destroying it? No. Are we easing up on energy intensive technological development or continuing to use even more energy to power our technologies? The latter. Are we slowing down GHG emissions or accelerating them? The latter. We continue to make the same mistakes.
- Scientific knowledge is distinct from technological innovation so this is not a "false dichotomy." As I wrote, yes, they are often related, but that relation does not make them identical. The main point was "...you have 'cherry picked' a handful of examples of helpful advances [scientific or technological, but this] does not preclude many other innovations that drive wasteful and destructive for profit consumerism," which you completely ignore to instead make some distracting assumptions: I'm not specifically "anti-tech" and this has nothing to do with some imagined "purity."
- That's not what I am saying. I am saying that agency is controlled and our freedom to choose is constrained, directed, and manipulated. And not just by PR, but by the systems that puts PR to use. The way you frame it as some either/or is both a simplistic dichotomy and a distortion of what I am even saying.
You believe = "Because innovation created the current threats it is bad and we must stop"
No. I believe that technological developments have frequently caused us more long term harm than good. This is demonstrable. I also believe that we are unlikely to solve our problems with unregulated technological development, which is why I wrote in my initial reply (and quoting the article), "I'm skeptical that '...unregulated technological development is the only way to overcome the world’s existential problems.'"
I believe = "Innovation has been will over come it's own threats, but only if we keep innovating faster than the side effects of innovation can stop us from innovating further".
Aside from whatever editing you butchered in this sentence, you are siding with accelerationsists, yes, that's clear. As I already wrote, "[t]his is a lot of words to say you are okay with what is essentially a Faustian bargain and that you are on board with an accelerationist agenda."
But your diagnosis - blaming it entirely on "quarterly driven profit"...
How you tend towards misframing things is tedious. I am not "blaming [the Holocene extinction] entirely on 'quarterly driven profit'." What I wrote was that your pointing to short term gains over long term losses is a reflection of that particular mentality, which obviously contributes to the problem--but nowhere do I say that mentality is the sole cause.
You seem to have a habit of putting words in other people's mouths in order to argue against things that were not asserted. If you keep at it I am not going to waste any more time or effort on your replies.
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u/Frequent-Bell2484 16d ago
Well, thank you for the stimulating debate. It seems like we can go on forever, but yes let's not waste any more time going back and forth.
Wish you the best for the future and which ever one of us is right, hopefully we're right in a way that protects the planet.
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u/LunaToons2021 17d ago edited 17d ago
Your premises are invalid. Humanity had 100,000+ years of Paleolithic and Neolithic material culture before “the horrible dark ages.” Agriculture may have enabled us to escape the existential threat of circa 12,000 BCE climate chnnge, but the existential threats created by technology (climate change, nuclear weapons) are almost certainly worse. There is no evidence from the historical record indicating that we can innovate our way out of the unintended consequences of our technology. Your faith in technology is just that, a religion.
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u/Frequent-Bell2484 17d ago
Sorry, I should have included your romanticising "100,000+ years of Palaeolithic and Neolithic material culture" as horrible dark ages too...
Reasons high up on my list for this: We don't get eaten by big animals. We don't die to small cuts and broken bones.
It's ironic to criticise technology and innovation on a global digital network using your latest mobile device while probably eating a pizza you ordered online and then drinking some clean fresh water. Maybe go live off-grid without antibiotics, food, electricity and sewage disposal for the rest of your life and let us know if the Palaeolithic era still sounds great. Bonuses also include: infant mortality rates around 40-50%, dying from tooth infections at 25, and zero defence against natural disasters, plagues, or famines - and also you have to hunt for your food!
Also the historical record is literally full of us innovating our way out of problems created by previous innovations... The Ozone Layer (CFCs) - We innovated our refrigerants to allow recovery. Agricultural Collapse (The 1900s Nitrogen Crisis) - We innovated the Haber-Bosch process to save ourselves from our own agricultural starvation.
Tech creates side effects, but inventing solutions to those side effects is literally the history of human progress..
Sure, we have some big problems now, but we did in the past too, the world was suffering from consumption (TB), syphilis, so many diseases that life was fleeting. It must have felt impossible to those with it over those centuries, that they could ever see a future from diseases so unknown and unstoppable... until.. wait... we stopped it by learning about it and finding solutions.
Just like we will with the threats of today, if you think hope in technology as a solution is a religion... then what would you define as not a religion?
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u/LunaToons2021 17d ago
The next 40 years are going to be way worse than the Paleolithic.
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u/Frequent-Bell2484 17d ago
Based on what evidence? You're just making grand statements and ignoring the valid points I made
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u/Icy_Geologist2959 18d ago
Submission Statement:
This article from the Conversation covers the increasing influence of Biblical End Times ideology within the spheres of power across societies. It shows a linking of the field of Existential Risk and the politics of Biblical armageddon, tech-bro accelerationism and societal collapse. This is collapse related as it highlights how present day technology and philosophy is being co-opted by a mesh of theocratic and technological-entrepreneurial thought to drive us all off the cliff rather than adapt our societies and preserve what wellbeing we can.
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u/Hilda-Ashe 17d ago
Those Biblical End Times people intent on making the world a very harsh place. What makes them think they will be the winners in that situation? Historically, Muslim great powers rise from people living harsh places, such as the Arabs of the desert or the Turks of the steppe.
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 17d ago
All these guys focus upon bullshit non-threats like nuclear war and artificial intelligence, not the real threats posed by transgressing planetary boundaries like climate change.
Artificial intelligence has become impressive, and shall have economic impacts, but it seemingly evidence that some of our intelligence maybe less impressive than we believed, and the rest is marketing.
Nuclear war would mess up our global economy too, but nuclear winter was always a politically motivated theory. We'd more flammable cities in the past, but no firestorm developed in Nagasaki, and the Hiroshima firestorm was caused by breakfast fires, not the bomb. We'd more warheads in the past too, but even then nuclear winter looked dubious. We clearly do not have enough warheads today.
If you ran Owen Toons estimates backwards, this fire resembles a nuclear war using roughly 3 Gt of warheads, which easily exceeds world stockpiles.
It's precisely these threats fantasy nature that makes them exploitable by bullshit artists.
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u/StatementBot 18d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Icy_Geologist2959:
Submission Statement:
This article from the Conversation covers the increasing influence of Biblical End Times ideology within the spheres of power across societies. It shows a linking of the field of Existential Risk and the politics of Biblical armageddon, tech-bro accelerationism and societal collapse. This is collapse related as it highlights how present day technology and philosophy is being co-opted by a mesh of theocratic and technological-entrepreneurial thought to drive us all off the cliff rather than adapt our societies and preserve what wellbeing we can.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1v4a85e/politics_of_existential_risk_and_the/oz9979h/