Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on How to personalise care.
There is a meme (in the classical sense of the word) circulating among some young people, especially young men, that “hard times create hard men, hard men create soft times, soft times create soft men, soft men create hard times”. And this sentiment, while chauvinist and not true in the strictest sense — exigencies of political economy, the natural environment, and ever-present arseholes gaming social systems at those systems’ expense to the arseholes’ personal advantage are almost always at fault for “hard times” — it does reflect a true-ish instinct one gets from the cyclical nature of stability and collapse.
Only a decadent society can collapse, because only a wealthy society can collapse, and only a wealthy society can afford to become decadent. In turn, only a collapsed society can grow out of its ashes and rise to heights where decadence is possible. After the most recent collapse which began with the Great Depression and ended with a hundred million people being immolated across Europe and Asia and Africa for no good reason, our own society has been on an upswing for three generations with only temporary setbacks that have thus far been made up for with higher and higher levels of debt. This upwelling of prosperity and peace has peaked and is now beginning to ebb once more, as conflicts inch closer and closer to the heartlands of the West and we have less and less confidence in our ability to carry our collective debts.
There are social forces at play which we are witnessing get taken over by sociopathic narcissists in real time, whose dogmas are spreading to every corner of influence, where the sociopathic narcissists are sure to follow. We have myopic technocrats bragging openly of effectuating a “Great Reset”, after which “you will own nothing and you will be happy”, once the entire economy is on a pay-as-you-go seigneurial model that resembles nothing so much as feudalism for us with trips to the Moon for them.
Not for nothing, but these fly-me-to-the-Moon billionaires are also busy buying up as much of the world’s most productive farmland as they can, in countries where their money can help them write the rules on how that land is used; during the pandemic, for example, Bill Gates became the world’s largest agriculture magnate. Because, as much as the mid-tier tech-lords and genderists and anti-racists seem to think that food magically shows up at the supermarket and the economic system upon which their fantasy lives are predicated is inviolable, anyone who knows anything about how the real world works knows that land and its cultivation are the true keys to a society’s long-term stability and prosperity.
After the United States, Ukraine has some of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, which are responsible for feeding an enormous number of people in the Old World. That this land is as we speak falling under the control of one of the world’s last powerful gangster statesmen is perhaps not an accident, after Ukraine’s revolution ushered in a government much more amenable to the West than to Russia. As unknowable as Putin himself is, it is possible he understands that everything flows from the food supply; without that, all the social games in the world dissolve into dust.
Without a stable supply of food, in other words, the “hard men” show up with their friends and their weapons and take what they want, until more “hard men” show up to stop them. Perhaps the techno-feudalists know this and will, out of their own sense of survival if not out of the goodness of their hearts, ensure a stable and ample supply of food enough to keep the “hard men” away. But that is a lot of faith to lay in the hands of a few men, who even with the best of intentions can still be quite wrong.
Either way, the view from Germany is getting interesting these days.
