Hans Karlsborn on Nostr: Devon Eriksen (@Devon_Eriksen_) on X: ”Let us suppose, for a moment, that you are ...
Devon Eriksen (@Devon_Eriksen_) on X:
”Let us suppose, for a moment, that you are an oligarch, or a member of the political class.
You're on top of the heap, and things are pretty good for you. You're wealthy, powerful, and immune to the consequences of your own failures.
What is the greatest threat to you, and to your peers?
Change. Instability. Volatility. Anything that disrupts the status quo. Because you're to top of the heap now, and if the heap gets shuffled, you're unlikely to be lucky enough to end up there again.
What you want is an end to history. No significant changes ever again, as far as you can manage it. No progress. No new technology. No growth.
Except that's difficult. Because humans keep having ideas and inventing stuff. They don't wait for your permission.
And change doesn't happen because the old way of doing things stops working. No, it happens long before that, and it happens because someone found a new, better way of doing things.
So what do you do to prevent this?
You throw all of your influence behind the vision of a steady-state, "sustainable" civilization. It's something humanity has never done before, it's not how humans evolved, or how they survived and prospered, but it can written up so that it seems to make a little sense, so long as you assume technological innovation stops happening.
Which, of course, is your real goal all along. You want humanity to exist in a perpetual state of late 20th century technology, so you and your descendants can rule forever until the sun goes nova or an asteroid hits the earth and wipes us out, which you consider to be a fair trade for your people being in charge until then.
So you need:
- An end to tech innovation: quash it with laws, taxes, and safety regulations. Disrupt and disenfranchise races and subcultures which have a tendency to innovate and disrupt economies.
- Endlessly renewable energy sources which are neither cheap nor abundant, because that might trigger innovation and growth: move away from oil and gas, prevent the construction of nuclear plants, build solar panels and windmills.
- World population shrunk to a level and held at which can be sustained without new tech: Disrupt relations between the sexes, promote infertility.
- Enough political power to do all these things without fear of opposition: expand central governments, tax populations into poverty, deliberately incur massive public debt so rival regimes that occasionally win elections cannot achieve meaningful change for fear of collapsing the government.
But you have a problem. If you want to shrink the population by limiting fertility, you're going to end up with a point in time where the old vastly outnumber the young, and cannot be supported.
So kill them”.
”Let us suppose, for a moment, that you are an oligarch, or a member of the political class.
You're on top of the heap, and things are pretty good for you. You're wealthy, powerful, and immune to the consequences of your own failures.
What is the greatest threat to you, and to your peers?
Change. Instability. Volatility. Anything that disrupts the status quo. Because you're to top of the heap now, and if the heap gets shuffled, you're unlikely to be lucky enough to end up there again.
What you want is an end to history. No significant changes ever again, as far as you can manage it. No progress. No new technology. No growth.
Except that's difficult. Because humans keep having ideas and inventing stuff. They don't wait for your permission.
And change doesn't happen because the old way of doing things stops working. No, it happens long before that, and it happens because someone found a new, better way of doing things.
So what do you do to prevent this?
You throw all of your influence behind the vision of a steady-state, "sustainable" civilization. It's something humanity has never done before, it's not how humans evolved, or how they survived and prospered, but it can written up so that it seems to make a little sense, so long as you assume technological innovation stops happening.
Which, of course, is your real goal all along. You want humanity to exist in a perpetual state of late 20th century technology, so you and your descendants can rule forever until the sun goes nova or an asteroid hits the earth and wipes us out, which you consider to be a fair trade for your people being in charge until then.
So you need:
- An end to tech innovation: quash it with laws, taxes, and safety regulations. Disrupt and disenfranchise races and subcultures which have a tendency to innovate and disrupt economies.
- Endlessly renewable energy sources which are neither cheap nor abundant, because that might trigger innovation and growth: move away from oil and gas, prevent the construction of nuclear plants, build solar panels and windmills.
- World population shrunk to a level and held at which can be sustained without new tech: Disrupt relations between the sexes, promote infertility.
- Enough political power to do all these things without fear of opposition: expand central governments, tax populations into poverty, deliberately incur massive public debt so rival regimes that occasionally win elections cannot achieve meaningful change for fear of collapsing the government.
But you have a problem. If you want to shrink the population by limiting fertility, you're going to end up with a point in time where the old vastly outnumber the young, and cannot be supported.
So kill them”.