Based Camp: Could Our Civilization Collapse in the Near Future?

Description written by an evil AI (for SEO not for actual reading): In this thought-provoking conversation, Malcolm and Simone delve deep into the question - can our civilization collapse? They discuss the historical instances of civilizations collapsing, drawing parallels with the Egyptian and Roman empires, and offer insight into what a modern civilization collapse might look like. We also delve into the big societal experiments of our time - globalization, gender equality, and high levels of education. As the conversation evolves, Malcolm and Simone also discuss the implications of such a collapse on everyday life, from disrupted supply lines and increased conservatism to impacts on mobility and job availability. Importantly, they provide invaluable perspectives on how to navigate such uncertain futures, discussing the role of debt, pensions, and investments in a potentially collapsing economy. If you're curious about the past, concerned about the present, and thoughtful about the future, this discussion is not to be missed. Make sure to hit the like button if you found this information useful and subscribe for more insightful conversations like this one.

 Hey Malcolm. Hello,

Simone. We have such an exciting topic today.

Yes, indeed. Can our civilization collapse? Discuss? Yeah,

it's, I think this is such an interesting topic because we hear people talk about this and we call them preppers or we, we, I think it's a very easy thing to dismiss because if you look at the past couple hundred years civilization hasn't collapsed,

I think the first thing to establish in terms of thinking about can civilization collapse is, has it happened in the past? And the answer is yes. It's happened a number of times in the past. Whether you're looking at the Egyptian civilization of the Roman civilization or various periods of.

The Egyptians that happened to them like four different times. If you go through history, when you're talking about the New Kingdom versus the old Kingdom versus the middle kingdom, that was three periods of collapse with many collapses in between.

So in Egypt it got so bad they forgot how to write, came up with new systems writing, they forgot how to draw. It's really interesting.

You can see art falling apart and then be. Reinvented, not even rediscover, but reinvented in between these collapse periods. So I think Rome presents probably the best model of a collapse we can look at for what a collapse of our own society might look like. Yeah.

That's what people always discuss, right?

The fall of the Roman Empire and is quote unquote Western civilization falling. Yeah.

Talking about Western civilization today is silly China to an extent evolved on a different civilizational route. Japan evolved on a different civilizational route, Korea did.

If they collapse, we collapse. We're all tied together at this point. There's just civilization now. But to go back in time, with the collapse of the Roman Empire to the average Roman on the street, they probably wouldn't have noticed.

That much change in their daily lives mm-hmm. as the collapse was happening. They may have noticed that rules around religious practices were becoming more orthodox supply lines. Like they, they had less stuff in their local stores or things were getting dramatically more expensive.

Political figures may have been increasingly becoming more radical acting. But from their perspective, and I'm talking about like in the Western Roman Empire, so let's say someone in Spain not that much would've changed from their day-to-day life. And also keep in mind with the collapse of Rome, you had the Western Roman Empire collapse long before the Eastern Roman Empire did the Byzantine Empire.

And so there's this idea that collapse means everywhere. All at once goes road wire, right? Cause that's what we see in media. Yeah.

Yeah. Road Warrior Water World. We're picturing complete lack of infrastructure. No government. But you're saying that's not what civilizational collapse is, what I'm hearing from you is you're saying it's poorer services.

What exactly is it? Be a little more specific

here. It's a collapse of. Supply networks. Okay. It's a collapse of an economic system. The biggest thing that's associated with civilizational collapse is economic system collapse.

To the extent that once you have a collapse of an economic system, then you begin to have a collapse of a geopolitical order.

And presumably this is some kind of irreversible collapse cause otherwise you could define the pandemic. As a temporary

civilization? Well, No. What you have to ask is what does it look like when it's, is what we saw in the pandemic part of what you see during a civilizational collapse?

Yes. No, for sure. So I guess you could say that what many people experienced during the pandemic is what civilizational collapse would feel like. You can't get some products that you really want to get you, you can't go to work or you don't have a job, or people aren't letting you work.

Or traveling becomes more dangerous. That's a really big thing was in civilizational class. Mobility in general. Mobility. And one thing to remember is that culture often doesn't completely go away. It just becomes a lot less. Aggressive in terms of change.

So what you see is culture become dramatically more conservative for often a period of like a hundred, 200 years. Um, and, And before that, often culture is much more promiscuous or permissive, I think is the word. Both promiscuous and purpose. Oh,

so yeah. So you're going from. Freedom, recess to like cracking down.

You're in the middle of math class.

Yeah. But then things begin to open up again after that period if things survive. And that's where this question gets really interesting. So the first big point I'd make about civilizational collapse for a lot of people when they think about the existing world civilization is there's this belief that we have been on a consistent trajectory for the past 300 years or so, and we're not in the middle of any really big experiments at the moment, like at the economic or geopolitical level, and that's just factually wrong. We have started a number of really big worldwide society-wide experiments pretty recently, and these experiments affect people's daily lives.

So let's just talk so

globalism. Gender egalitarian, like sort of women in the workforce and women being educated, high levels of education in general.

So yeah, but was women being educated? I think people look at that and they're they really misunderstand the scope of that one. Women being widely educated and accepted into the workforce was one thing, but the workforce and the economy adapting to that to lower wages.

With the idea that you had doubled the amount of workers in the economy that was the bigger fallout of that. Which meant that it really became almost impossible. Not that it was really that possible before. It was actually a myth that on a global scale, it was ever realistic to raise a family on a single income.

Yeah. But there was a period where in certain parts of the US and Europe, it was possible for a 50 year period to raise a family on a one family income. That possibility is just not there anymore. So I think a lot of people, they're like, oh, you could have women like you actually see pushes for this now.

Oh, you could have women not be educated and that would solve the problem or women not work. But as long as some countries are engaging in women working that doesn't really work, then you're just choosing to be desperately poor. Is really what's going on when you make that change at a society-wide level.

Yes, some people can be wealthy enough to make that decision, but we're past doing that anymore. You see a similar thing with something like student debt, right? So student debt is something that I think affects a lot of people's daily lives. It's a big thing when people are like, what is your biggest stressor in your daily life?

A lot of people say student debt. So in 1995 in the United States through its nationally, 200 million in student debt. Right now there is 1.76 trillion in student debt. Holy smokes. So that's just like new, like if you're looking at like 2000 versus where we are with student debt today.

It's not the same kind of a game. It's the same thing with national debt. National debt, like really big amounts of national debt, didn't really begin until the seventies and then it began to distribute around the world. But then you also have the same thing with the fractional reserve banking system, or if you want to hear people like the pontificate on that or.

Currency not backed by anything. That's a fairly new concept. And a lot of these are associated with conspiracy theorists because I think a lot of the times when people started these experiments, people initially went out and said, oh, this'll lead to immediate collapse. And people started saying that for 10, 20 years afterwards.

But the reality is, if you look at Rome, if you look at the decisions that precipitated the collapse, Those decisions happened about a lifetime before the collapse, and that's how civilizational collapses often work.

But the larger point here being we're in the middle of a big experiment.

What I really care about and what I think is important, what should people be doing? What should people be doing if they believe that we won't be able to depend on our economic systems or that international trade and international travel will become more and more limited?

Like what lifestyle changes or things should people be getting out of the way now? Like bucket list items? Yeah,

so the, the constant talking point that we always have is that debt is this miraculous instrument when things are growing. And we've built our society like a pyramid scheme.

So for the past 300 years or so, the economy has been growing in aggregate all around the world. When you shotgunned your money into the stock market, it grew, you could be an idiot and make money on the stock market. Now this was because population, the number of workers was growing exponentially and the productivity per worker was growing linearly.

Yes, technology was growing exponentially, but productivity per worker was growing linearly. And so this led to this illusion of a constantly growing stock market, and we begin to build a lot of our economic systems like social Security. Again, a pretty recent experiment on those systems. And a lot of governments have similar unpaid systems like that.

And Social Security is basically a debt system in that we are taking out debt. Like any unfunded pension program is essentially debt that is held by the person who you're promising money to, but you haven't actually given the money. We're pretending like they're investing money, but they're not investing money.

And but you see this at the society level. So debt's this amazing instrument when things are growing. If I make a $10 investment in something and $8, if that is debt, and $2, if that is equity and it grows by 20%, will, my investment has doubled. But if it shrinks by just.

10% my investment has haled. And so debt multiplies the prosperity when everything is growing. And so we had the society where population rates began to slow, right at the same time as we doubled the number of workers by putting women into the workforce in mass. And so as population rates were slow slowing, we had an increasing adoption of women into the workforce, which hid.

This massive decrease in the worker supply, but now that clock's beginning to become due. And one of the things I note is that if you look, if you say that America's fertility rate will fall the same rate it did over the past 10 years continuing into the future, and there's one generation every 30 years, that means for every a hundred Americans today it, there will be, I think at 3.4 great-grandchildren.

Now of course we'll probably see some die back in terms of population fall, but no one has really handled that problem yet. So what this means is you're going to see a collapse of the basic infrastructure of our economic system. Now, what this looks like to Simone's question is a lot like Detroit.

I, I would say Detroit is just a very good picture of what a system looks like when it's collapsing because a lot of people, they hear things like, oh, housing prices are going to decrease, and it's great when a housing price decreases 10, 20%. It's really bad when a housing price is always decreasing and everybody knows it's always decreases because then there's no reason to invest in it and houses go to a dollar and houses actually cost a lot to upkeep.

So you end up with this endless urban blight. Actually this is a question I wanna ask you. How would you prepare for that, Simone? One

is, it's, it sounds and this is not news to anyone, but don't depend on a pension planner or social security.

Even if, for example, you work for a teacher's union or something like it, it looks not great in terms of you depending on that. In terms of investing on the stock market for the next 10 years. At least demographic collapse itself isn't going to be driving that. In fact, AI may cause really high increases, right?

But aside from that, my intuition is enjoy a really broad range of products. While you can enjoy very inexpensive electronics while you can it it's hard for me to think that there's in, in the face of civilizational collapse, considering how slow it goes. That there's even that much, that there's

that much you can do.

Yeah.

But also it doesn't sound like we're gonna get hit that hard as long as.

Oh, no it's gonna be bad. Okay, so what, how is our life is how bad things were for the average American, just 85 years ago. Just 150 years ago. Okay so what's

gonna get bad? Walk me through it.

Just the amounts of poverty are going to be astronomical. Just

just like. We are going to be impoverished. Other people are who's

going to be impoverished? This society? Everyone. Everyone. And I think that's the thing that is difficult for people to think about. What does it look like for just rates of poverty to be about 80 to 90% higher than they are today?

What? What does it look like if you're living in America today for America to have the same lifestyle that you experience when you go to a developing country?

So people won't have jobs? That's what you're saying

is jobs. They'll have jobs. They just won't pay very much. The government services won't do very much.

They'll be much more corruption at all levels. It'll just be much more like a developing country, and America's gonna be more isolated from this than any other country in the world. As globalism begins to collapse, America is actually the number one beneficiary of this. It's just a lot poorer.

Yeah. Like

when you read Peter's eye hands, the end of the world is just the beginning. The punchline to it is north America is actually looking pretty good in this scenario. Yeah. Um, I mean, It's , it, we will. Per his perception of civilizational collapse, be more isolated. We'll have to depend on domestic production.

We won't have

imported. America looks well vis-a-vis other countries. Yes. It's still dramatically poor. Yeah. And I think that this is one of those things where people are like, oh no, I'm struggling today. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, like, Food scarcity is a major thing for like 50% of countries populations that we think of as developed today.

And a lot of like

actual food shortages.

Actual food shortages. , or just actual a lot bigger wealth disparity where if the, now this is something that I think people really misunderstand. They're like AI will make us so much wealthier. Or if people get that poor, they'll rise up.

And our company did a lot of work in Venezuela, so we really saw things continuing to get worse. Constantly things can get so, so, so bad before people rise up. Especially in an era of technology, it is very hard to rise up when the government has, autonomous drums. And Venezuela Venezuela

doesn't even have

those, but, and so you just, you actually do not see revolutions just because things have gotten bad often. The other thing that I think people aren't seeing as much is governments are preparing for this. That's what Zero Covid is about. That's, oh, in China, that's what data social is about. It's about preparing for a collapse of their economic system.

And I think one thing we always say about ai. Is that and this is likely a topic for a different video or we can do it for the next video, but AI is the tool that finally frees the bourgeoisie for the proletariat. They don't need you anymore. They don't, they and I and I think the masses of civilization have never dealt with a period were genuinely the wealthy did not need them to maintain their lifestyle.

And I think that they have this overestimation of how much the wealthy actually care about them when push comes to shove, when they may need to sacrifice a portion of their lifestyle. If you look at the sort of celebrity class today, they literally think the world is about to die because of global warming, and they can't get off their private jets for five seconds.

Yeah. Okay, so then the takeaway from this is,

What are you doing? Let yeah.

One, I think we're raising our children to be. Independent to be both highly technophilic and resourceful online and with tech, but also highly resourceful and independent offline. Like we want to teach them.

Basic agricultural building, fixing and survival skills. And not just, here's how to survive online and here's how to get a job. But if there is no economy to, to participate in, how also can you thrive? So that's one thing. Yeah.

Two is, actually I wanna add to what you just said there. Cause I think a lot of people make a mistake here.

They try to teach their kids and their family to survive without technology. As a way to deal with this, which is, I'm, it's not like a stupid approach, it's just probably not an optimal approach.

It is an option that people should be prepared for in the event that like, AI goes really off the rails for some reason, and you have to go full Battlestar

activity and AI goes really off the rails.

We're all gonna die no matter what. It's just objectively true. So what we're going to deal with is a period of increased hardship. But we will still have access to technology. When you are thinking of farming, what you need to be thinking about is how do I farm with technology that my family can maintain and build themselves?

How do I keep the local tractors running? How do I, having technology that you can work on yourself, that's what's really important.

 the thing that you won't have access to is semiconductors. So technology that you can build with fewer semiconductors or you can build with recycled semiconductors. Is technology you will continue to have access to.

Yeah. The technology that's most likely going to become scarcity, advanced semiconductor technology.

 Yeah. Okay. So there's that. And then I think the other part is like, To enjoy late stage capitalism while it lasts. You and I go on Walmart walks in the morning and we just enjoy what's on the

shelves.

Oh, yeah.

 Also enjoy it while it lasts. Travel internationally. See as many nations as you can go on cruises, like just do stupid.

I don't know if that's my plan at all.

It's certainly not really what we're doing with our kids. So Simone has this reaction to it, right? Where she is my reaction is really focused more on preparing our family intergenerationally to make it through this. Yeah, and I think one of the most important things about any collapse scenario is that you realize that your country.

Does not matter is the primary unit of account as much anymore when Rome collapses? Focus on your family networks. You need to focus on the people who are ideologically similar to you. Who are your cultural allies moving into the future and understand that. Just by investing in the stability of the nation state, you aren't necessarily investing in your own family's future in the same way you are during a period of enormous growth.

So build your techno fiefdom, build your tribe, build your support

network, what does it look like as our economic system begins to falter? It's about relying on personal relationships and about building and investing in those personal relationships At the intergenerational level, a personal relationship isn't really that important.

If the person. Doesn't have kids. They're a strong family culture. But it is really important for other families that do have kids and do hope to survive into the future. Because when you're building those networks those provide you with, I think the beginnings of the next of the foundation of the next economy and hopefully the next great civilization.

Yeah, which is exciting, right? So you, what you are focused on is, oh, if civilization is collapsing, this is an opportunity I can get in on the ground level here. Yeah.

I'm getting on the ground level of the next civilization. That's what I'm interested in. We need the next civilization to be one that doesn't collapse because we can do that.

We can build a never-ending renaissance.

But here I am. I'm like, oh, enjoy it. It lasts

and you're like, yeah, you're like, lovepops, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you're like, you're thinking like a looter ah, smash the windows. Grab what

you can. Can't we just say yes to all the things, you know, enjoy it.

Well, It lasts. Build the next one. I think that's maximum fun. Um, And just I think

one thing we need to remember is as it becomes clear to people who have overly invested in the existing system and expected it to care for them, like people who overinvested in the expectation of social security, overinvested in the expectation of social stability.

And have become this priest class in our society that don't really produce anymore, but expect some level of social status. They are going to become angry and vengeful and I think we're already seeing this to some extent because they see the lack of hope they have after. Basically enslaving themselves to this university pyramid scheme where they put all this money to pay for this priest class.

We, we I'll try to put like a gift here that I thought was funny of what, like a university graduation looks like and people are like, oh no, this isn't a priest class.   📍 What have you seen the way these people dress and they talk in languages that almost no one understands and they give you this.    📍 This script of paper in a language that's like this dead language. And this is a priest class, okay? And you are paying money to nominally join the priest class at the lower level. At the hope that you may be able to join it at this higher level and have some sort of say as the experts, the people who decide what's true and what's not true in our society.

But really you don't, and instead you've just gone into life shattering debt to support, all of the other the people in this. It's insane. It's not a good look. It's like an obvious cult. Like our society is run by what, to me looks like an obvious cult. But isn't that what it looks like when things are about to fall apart, right?

Yeah. But it's also what things look like when they're recreated. No,

are just no. A cult has taken over our government. You could say that. And people are like no. Like when you talk to people who have bought into the cult, they're like no. This cult knows what's true. It's actually true this time.

Oh, and it's bro, they always say that. They always think that. The academic system today is not what the academic system was. 50, 60 years ago. This is a holistically the whole, like for example, let's just talk about like the way that we determine status was in the academic system. If we're talking about another new thing, this whole peer review system where like your status is determined by how many citations your paper gets, and then you get peer reviewed by other, and yet we have found out that You can submit things to peer review that are just like, what was it?

Like mind cough, but they had changed out the things for like feminist sounding things or something, and it got it past peer review, this entire academic system. It turns out it was a neat experiment. We've only tried it for about one human lifetime and it's already failing us. Okay. Academia used to be something different than what it is today, and it used to fundamentally function different than what it does today.

And if you look at the output of the academic system, it basically collapsed in the eighties per dollars fit. The amount of money flowing into the system rapidly increased, but the amount of technological output rapidly decreased. Yeah. Now you can say, oh, invention's gotten harder. Invention should have been getting harder for the past century and a half.

Why didn't it decline before that? It didn't, because the way that the system operates is fundamentally changed. And one of the statistics we always love, we talk about this in the sexuality book, but there was this great study of about 500 PhDs and the psychology of sexuality space. And what they found was that more than half of them said that they would actively occlude.

Or not publish results if it showed systemic psychological differences in, in, in the brains of males and females. Like the way that geological pro processing. Yeah. And it, and that shows to me that this entire field is more interested in promoting an ideology than it is in searching for truth anymore.

And. People are like yeah, but the good studies, some good studies might still get out there. What about the other 50%? And it's yeah, but if you're doing a literature review of the field now, you really can't believe anything because what that means is if you're trying to find is the truth, some number between one and 10, and you know that 50% of studies that above number five won't be published.

Then you and it turned out the real truth was actually only number six. You had to adjust for that in trying to determine what's true. So you end up determining seven or eight. And it's created this world where it is very hard to use what's coming out of academic fields to determine what's true outside of the few very hard sciences that are untouched by this.

But the sciences, I think that often matter most to how we interact with our daily lives, like psychology and stuff like that. And you have this huge replication crisis. We're, but 50% of studies can't re replicated. So I'm just pointing out that I think. When you have bought into the system, which you don't realize is how much of the system doesn't work the way people are saying it works.

And how much it mirrors what historically we would've called AOC cult.

And I guess one thing that we haven't even talked about, and now you're alluding to it, is m. Maybe we've been seeing the signs of civilizational collapse for a while. 30 years. Yeah. Starting with academia starting to crumble, now you're seeing mental health, skyrocketing fertility is plummeting.

Their issues with pollution there, light kids are beginning

to get shorter.

Yeah. Obesity is becoming a huge problem. Like people's endocrine systems seem to be totally screwed up. Yeah. There's a lot that seems to be. Really not working.

But it's important to not approach this like a dor.

And by that what I mean is I think apocalyptic is very tempting, right? There's this tendency to want to be to just be an apocalyptic about things, to say everything will definitely end within X time period.

Where I think the real approach to environmentalism is, Yes, there is a massive die off of species. Yes, ecologies are going to adapt to that. Yes, the world will get hotter. It will be harder for us on a massive scale potentially. But no, it's not gonna kill us all. And it's the same thing when we talk about civilization cloths.

It's not gonna be road warrior. It's gonna be the worst of Detroit when, but without the rest of the world to bail us out. It's going to be like living in a developing country today, it's not going to be the end of humanity except, and unless, because this time, you know, you had to follow the Roman Empire and stuff like that.

They didn't have nukes back then. And that's something we have to watch out for. Yeah that's, that's scary. You know what I really want to talk about in the next one is how AI changes the economy and let's do it and what that means for the division of classes in our society.

That'll be fun to talk about.

But I liked talking about this with you too. Even when it's the end of the world. It's so fun talking with you, Malcolm. I love you a lot. You too. You're good. At least we'll have each other, especially,

and the family. And that's the thing. You build durable networks, durable social networks, and the most durable social network you have.

Yeah. You can do it well if you're not a, a terrible person. Not gonna even, even if you are podcast, aren't we, aren't we? You're, You're your family.

All right. I'll catch you on the flip side,

Malcolm. Catch you on the flip side.

Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe