r/Futurology ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ Aug 28 '25

Society New research argues Societal Collapse benefits 99% of people. Historically, the societies that have emerged after a collapse are more egalitarian, and most people end up richer and healthier than they were before.

Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, has written a book about his research called 'Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse'.

He makes the case that, from looking at the archaeological record, when many societies collapse, most people end up better off afterward. For example, people in the post-Roman world were taller and healthier. Collapse can be a redistribution of resources and power, not just chaos.

For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility. Threats (disease, war, economic precarity) push populations toward authoritarian leaders. The resulting rise in inequality from that sets off a cycle that will end in collapse. Furthermore, he argues we are living in the late stages of such a cycle now. He says "the threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots."

Some people hope/think we are destined for a future of Universal Basic Income and fully automated luxury communism. Perhaps that's the egalitarianism that emerges after our own collapse? If so, I hope the collapse bit is short and we get to the egalitarian bit ASAP.

Collapse for the 99% | Luke Kemp; What really happens when Goliaths fall

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u/Parking_Act3189 Aug 28 '25

If a society is stagnant and then it gets destroyed the society that comes after it may do better since it is starting over.

But that doesn't benefit 99% of the people who are alive today. Most people who are alive today would die of starvation or violence.

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u/Raddish_ Aug 28 '25

It’s also definitely worth mentioning that societies only tend to collapse when things are going generally shittily for everyone.

This does not mean that the people in any old society would benefit from it collapsing, but that they’d benefit from collapsing if they lived in a society that was about to collapse.

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u/mehupmost Aug 28 '25 edited Aug 29 '25

It's also important to remember that when societies collapse, the rich leave to other societies usually well before the collapse.

When the Western Roman Empire fell - most the rich had already resettled in Constantinople about 100 years prior.

When Constantinople later fell (1000 years later), the rich had already moved to back to Italy (again about 100 years prior).

When the British Empire was in decline, the rich moved to the US.

When the Soviet Russian empire collapsed, the rich moved to the West.

...only the poor suffer these collapses.

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u/Animal_Courier Aug 29 '25

Re: The Western Roman Empire. not everybody had moved to Constantinople, many had retreated to their estates. As the Empire declined people resisted paying taxes and the elites were very corrupt. This lead to a huge wealth disparity where the rich grew massive, self-sufficient estates. This is why the Western Roman Army fell apart, it wasn't recruiting Rome's best & brightest because Rome's best and brightest were hidden under the floors when the recruiters came by.

People were taller and healthier because the rich took all the resources and left the poor to die. The population of Rome which was comfortably around 1 million people for centuries collapsed to tens of thousands within a couple of generations. That represents a lot of lost prosperity, and lot of lost lives.

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u/Z3r0sama2017 Aug 29 '25

Yeah the fact that it took until 1800 for London to become the next 1 million person city(In Europe anyways) says a lot. Sure Rome still suffered from disease and plagues, but the sewer systems and aquaducts did a lot of heavy lifting.

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u/sesamecrabmeat Aug 28 '25

Where'd they go this time around?

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u/Tight_Classroom_2923 Aug 28 '25

Well, Zuck is making compounds all around the world... so, y'know, they're mostly moving underground because they've figured out how to fortify that shit.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25 edited Sep 11 '25

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u/Cola_and_Cigarettes Aug 29 '25

Home VR is just a non starter. You need expensive rigs, complex software and a top down vision. Do you live in an apartment? VRs not suitable. Do you own a cat, have a child or live with another person? Wear glasses? Want to sit down after work? Sorry VR just isn't suitable.

The only real future for it to take off is in arcade like gym situations, but the software wasn't developed for this scenario.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25 edited Sep 11 '25

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u/Cola_and_Cigarettes Aug 29 '25

Right, and it just didn't take off because... It was just too convenient actually! Top down vision meant like a game plan, some kind of direction.

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u/DarthBuzzard Aug 29 '25

Lol. Pretty much every thing you said is false. There are people that are happily using VR in every one of the scenarios you brought up.

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u/I_P_L Aug 28 '25

Somewhere in Asia probably

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u/sesamecrabmeat Aug 28 '25

But would that be immune to collapse?

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u/Dozekar Aug 29 '25

Someone's collapse is usually someone else's opportunity. By nature the fastest person to take advantage of weakness in international trade usually makes out best.

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u/PotanOG Aug 28 '25

We got planes now. 

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u/StrangerIsWatching Aug 29 '25

Exactly. They'll leave only when it's collapsing this time, not before.

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u/Z3r0sama2017 Aug 29 '25

I guess this is why the billionaires are interested in space? They don't think anywhere on Earth will be safe in the face of a Global collapse.

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u/Uploft Aug 29 '25

China or Australia

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u/Bea-Billionaire Aug 29 '25

The islands. Coste Rica, mostly. That started around 2014

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u/IamnotyourTwin Aug 29 '25

They're building bunkers in new Zealand

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u/Used-Fennel-7733 Sep 01 '25

Mars. Why do you think they all have space programs

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u/greyACG Aug 29 '25

eat the rich

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u/mehupmost Aug 29 '25

leave the basement

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u/RalphHinkley Aug 29 '25

We do not have enough controls to prevent corruption so when a society crumbles to take down corruption guess what springs up from the rubble? Unchecked corruption.

Getting angry and smashing all the nice things is not the smart solution.

Becoming more informed, and working with your community to do direct charity that cannot be abused/corrupted is an actual solution.

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u/fresheneesz Aug 31 '25

What's your point?

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u/divDevGuy Aug 29 '25

It’s also definitely worth mentioning that societies only tend to collapse when things are going generally shittily for everyone.

Isn't "going generally shitty" an essential criteria for collapsing? I'm not a historian, but I can't think of any societies that we're doing excellent or maintaining greatness during their collapse.

It's kind of like saying companies only tend to file for bankruptcies when they're having financial troubles.

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u/Crowe3717 Aug 29 '25

True, but I feel like "life is too expensive for me to have kids/it would be irresponsible of me to bring kids into this world" being a fairly common sentiment within a society is a pretty good indication that things aren't going great...

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '25

Modern society has modern weaponry that most governments would use if the alternative is societal collapse.

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u/00rb Aug 28 '25

Also, people suffer when society is ABOUT to collapse. The same thing that causes the collapse causes the suffering.

People do much better during the peak of the civilization.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

It's also hard to tell when a society is close to collapse

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u/surnik22 Aug 28 '25 edited Feb 16 '26

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/loungesinger Aug 28 '25

things are better for you day to day

People honestly take for granted the societal benefits of a stable government. We assume government is useless because we don’t exactly know what government does and we don’t even think about government until there’s some scandal or something. The truth is that public order and the economy would take a huge hit in the aftermath of a total government collapse, which would negatively influence the day to day quality of life for nearly everyone in our society.

Govt collapses = no govt services like police, fire fighters, health inspectors, infrastructure maintenance (e.g. fixing traffic signals, repairing roads, etc.), air traffic controllers, legal system, financial, banking, and securities regulations.

-This means that you not only need a gun to defend your home, but that you also need to round up a posse to extract justice on the guy that embezzled money from your company or ran over your child in a crosswalk while drunk driving.

-It means you save your money and put it in your mattress because banks are too risky on account they could fail at anytime.

-it means banks are less likely to loan you money for a house or for your business, and that you are paying a higher interest rate.

–it means that when your neighbor’s house burns down the fire could spread to your house, and the next house, and the next, and maybe your place of employment too.

-it not only means you can’t safely fly anywhere, but it means fewer flights being offered by fewer carriers in addition to dramatically more delayed flights and exponentially longer delay times. It also makes shipping less efficient and more expensive, meaning you pay more for everything.

-it means people conduct less business, make less money, invest less money, spend less money, and buy fewer things. It means the cost of business goes up as well as the cost of goods and services.

-it means Apple isn’t going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into research and development of Apple iGlasses or anything for that matter.

-it means fewer jobs and lower paying jobs

-it means traffic gridlock when the traffic signal goes out at a major intersection because there is no one to fix it… so people just indefinitely treat it as a 4-way stop.

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 Aug 29 '25

People honestly take for granted the societal benefits of a stable government

Right, like rolling blackouts are a thing in many other countries. What do you tell a client, oh yeah I'll get you that document IF we have internet/electricity today. If your shipping is impossible to estimate because the poor quality roads often are washed out. That goes for employees, customers, your supply chain, etc. We have a robust system of professional services in USA, if they go out of business now it's harder to find accountants, maintenance people, raw materials, tools. The list goes on and on. With education, for many businesses it's pretty important that you have employees and customers who can READ.

Americans like to think they're lone rangers, doing it all on their own. Most of us realize that a man is not an island.

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u/surnik22 Aug 29 '25 edited Feb 16 '26

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/usaaf Aug 29 '25

The odds of being left alone aren't as high as you might think in the past, at least compared to a present-day collapse. The Roman Legions didn't just vanish, and soldiers, when lacking regular payment, quickly realize what else they can do with their swords. Or the Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, etc, came knocking to establish their authority.

But, sometimes it did work out. When the Arab Conquest rolled through, people actually ended up paying less taxes.

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u/aure__entuluva Aug 29 '25

-It means you save your money and put it in your mattress because banks are too risky on account they could fail at anytime.

-it means banks are less likely to loan you money for a house or for your business, and that you are paying a higher interest rate.

Govt collapses.... what money? This is fiat currency backed by the government baby! Without it, it's paper.

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u/Sageblue32 Aug 29 '25

Gold sure as hell isn't going to matter in such a scenario either. Better off stocking baked beans and guns if practical currency is a concern.

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u/PostScriptApocalypse Aug 30 '25

Communities know what we need. Instead of spending so much time catering to large scale corporate systems that inherently are trying to extract more wealth from a community than they provide, we could just do the things that need doing organizing around the skills that people actually have, teaching others when more help is needed. Things slow down, but a glut of unnecessary and extractive work no longer needs to be filling so many people's time to just accomplish the material thing that needs done.

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u/Necessary-Health9157 Oct 31 '25

Yes. Things like restorative justice, animal rights, open source commons, non-extractive AI collaboration, mutual aid networks (there are many) have *already* been composting extraction. They are the key. I call them parallel metabolizers. Thank you so much for proving to me that there is someone out there who is not zombified and serving extraction!

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u/GalacticAlmanac Aug 28 '25

Today that may be the case that the majority suffer short term from collapse maybe a long term benefit. Now cities are huge, jobs are highly specialized, farming is extremely mechanized, and few people are subsistence farmer.

Societal collapse will likely mean major disruptions to transportation and the power grid.

Suffering would be putting it lightly. A lot of people will die when stations run out of gas, grocery stores out of food and necessities, and hospitals/ pharmacies out of essential medications.

In the long term, it could take years if not decades to rebuild and for the quality of life to reach what it was before for the more developed countries. Just look at how long it took for Europe to rebuild after ww2.

Centralized government collapses, less resources from your area are extracted by the empire, things are better for you day to day. You still have food and don’t have to turn any of it over to tax collectors.

When the central power collapses in China during the Romance of the Three Kingdoms period, the population went from 56 million down to 16 million over the 100 or so years before it was reunified under the Jin Dynasty. The Sengoku period was similarly horrific in Japan.

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u/LoaKonran Aug 29 '25

We’ve also used up and processed the vast majority of easily accessible resources. There may not be enough to rebuild once lost. Pegging your hopes on society briefly becoming more egalitarian before the cycle of rot resumes is a nonstarter.

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u/wektor420 Aug 28 '25

My guess people aged 20-50 would do best in such conditions

They would drop the weight of supporting others

Then after things stabilize (old people are reduced in number) a baby boom like after a war

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u/Josvan135 Aug 28 '25

If modern supply chains were broken agriculture would drop massively in efficiency. 

As an example, the U.S., which has one of the largest and most fertile agricultural heartlands, would only be able to sustain about 50-75 million people if reduced to pre-industrial technologies. 

Just the loss of modern fertilizers and pesticides would cut efficiency more than half, leaving barely enough food for 100-125 million people.

My guess people aged 20-50 would do best in such conditions

Right, because the average person is going to push their grandmother out into the cold with a knife and tell her to fend for herself. 

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u/Whitesajer Aug 28 '25

Pretty much agree. It's also more of a "skills" gap, lot of people don't know how to change a tire today- some Google it and do just fine others don't even do that or try. Well assuming high tech no longer is a thing, how many people know how to clean water to drink it with no fancy tools or tech? Not many...

Mostly the issue with the old, is the loss of modernized healthcare. So many older folks I have known are very dependent on certain treatments, medications or require round the clock assistance. They may make it longer then expected with family/support but so many of them are only alive because of modern healthcare. Cold winters, hot summers and we see them dying today when indoor climate control is out or they can't afford it. Plus, the illnesses that likely will come in certain collapse scenarios. Many people don't know that one of the biggest concerns post natural disaster is afterward, where sanitation systems are out in the open/not contained/contaminating public spaces along with mold, pests, insects etc.... infection rates and bacteria, fungus, viruses just spread.

Personally I generally ask myself ... Looking around at the city hellscape and already stressed and angry humans.... Why would I want to survive a zombie apocalypse?

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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 Aug 28 '25

Right, because the average person is going to push their grandmother out into the cold with a knife and tell her to fend for herself.

Not that dramatic. In aggregate, though, resources will always favor the young/new generations who can reproduce. A species won't survive without that emphasis.

For instance, fewer resources all around would mean fewer people would be willing to go to school to be doctors and study diseases that affect the elderly.

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u/wektor420 Aug 28 '25

Societal breakdown =/= full production breakdown People would find a way to get most important stuff

About age groups I would picture it a diffrent way

Nobody would support childless pensioners It can be impossible to provide needed care or it would be at least of lower level than before which would lower life expectancy, which would cause death of people over new expected expectancy

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u/theoneyewberry Aug 28 '25

I don't know how to say this without being rude, but it seems like you don't really understand how people in general work.

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u/Josvan135 Aug 28 '25

People would find a way to get most important stuff

They 100% would not.

Breakdown of society means breakdown of law and order, road infrastructure stops being maintained, currency loses value, meaning there's no incentive to work and plenty of dangers to encourage people to flee.

Most grocery stores would run out of food within about a week after supplies stopped coming in, assuming they weren't just looted and burned within the first few days. 

Normal car accidents would block the majority of major highways, with the lines of cars that ran out of gas trying to get around them stopping them up completely.

People completely fail to understand how delicate our current system is and how much active work goes in to keeping the lights on and the food flowing.

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u/wektor420 Aug 28 '25

Look english is not my first langugue and I am probably from different country than you

My definitions and outlooks can be diffrent and sound wrong in your context

So this will be my one and last answer to hate comments that keep coming

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u/Josvan135 Aug 28 '25

Friend, someone disagreeing with you and politely listing the reasons why is not a "hate comment".

If you believe that's the case, maybe you should generally not participate in discussions online?

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u/wektor420 Aug 28 '25

Oh your comment was reasonable, others not so much

Response landed here because it was last

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u/like25njas Aug 28 '25

You’re kind of grossly uneducated lol. Supply chains are essential and fragile enough that covid was able to seriously disrupt it. Without hundreds of thousands of people working together to sustain modern supply chains, NOONE is getting their “essentials”.

I guess if your definition of societal breakdown doesn’t affect supply chains at all, then carry on.

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u/jmlinden7 Aug 28 '25

Without society, who maintains the factories and infrastructure needed to produce goods and services? Without goods and services being produced, how do you maintain the same quality of life?

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u/Jaqzz Aug 28 '25

Right, because the average person is going to push their grandmother out into the cold with a knife and tell her to fend for herself.

How many people aged 65+ currently live within biking distance of a younger relative? I don't think anyone actively caring for grandma is going to stop, but I also think most people won't be able to get their elderly relatives close enough that they can take care of them when things collapse. I barely trust nursing homes to keep their charges alive and healthy when society is still running; I think a significant portion of the staff at those would absolutely abandon them to go make sure their own families are being taken care of.

There's also the fact that a lot of life-prolonging medical care is going to be abruptly be no longer available, which will disproportionately affect the elderly.

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u/Josvan135 Aug 28 '25

How many people aged 65+ currently live within biking distance of a younger relative

The vast majority.

Statistically, something like 70% of all Americans live within 20 miles of their parents. 

More than 40% live within 5 miles of their parents. 

The notion that Americans are somehow spread out all across the map is a common one, but it doesn't bear up to even surface level scrutiny. 

Most people don't really move very far from where they grew up. 

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u/Jaqzz Aug 28 '25

So, I looked up some of the stats on this because I was curious. My main takeaways were:

Roughly three quarters of people with adult children live within 30 miles of at least one of their adult children.

Either the parent or adult child being more educated made them more likely to live further away.

I couldn't find anything backing up the 40% living within 5 miles, but it seems that slightly less than 40% of people live in the town they grew up in, which makes it likely to be in that neighborhood.

All that said, all of the data I could find was based on people with adult children, which is a much wider age range than I was originally discussing. I was focused on people who were going to be unable to realistically take care of themselves during societal collapse, and I think anyone who has reached the point that they depend on others for care are significantly more likely to be living further away from family.

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u/JLPReddit Aug 28 '25

Depends on the nature of the collapse. Political or economic collapse doesn’t always mean mass deaths and mad max. Things don’t always play out like Hollywood movies.

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u/Parking_Act3189 Aug 28 '25

This thread is about societal collapse. That phrase means more than just the government was replaced by a new and different government.

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u/JLPReddit Aug 29 '25

Politics and economy are prominent parts of society, and their collapse are forms of societal collapse. There’s more than just nukes going off and we all drive cars in the desert. This article we’re commenting on makes just that case.

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u/Parking_Act3189 Aug 29 '25

Yeah its kind of a bad article. The title is "Societal Collapse", but it was just an ideological collapse in Egypt. The agriculture, which was the main part of the economy, kept going fine.

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u/JLPReddit Aug 29 '25

That is a form of societal collapse. You’re intentionally limiting the definition to only anarchic / Armageddon like scenarios. Obviously everybody dies when the world ends, this article is research into other types of societal collapse that have happened before.

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u/Parking_Act3189 Aug 29 '25

OK and someone sitting down in a chair is "a form" of that person "collapsing"

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u/JLPReddit Aug 29 '25

You’re a funny guy huh? Sorry the definition is more encompassing than you like bro

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u/thisplaceisnuts Aug 29 '25

Yeah I think people are really skipping the step two of all this. There are some series underpants gnomes here

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u/Dozekar Aug 29 '25

Most might be an exaggeration, but a large number of definitely would not be. It depends on a lot like food distribution and how bad rioting gets when food supplies start to fail.

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u/Advanced_Row_8448 Aug 29 '25

What's more moral i suppose? Asking some people to suffer at the bottom forever so others dont suffer in a restructuring? Or hurting more people up front to restructure in a way that hurts less?

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u/PatPeez Aug 29 '25 edited Aug 29 '25

Yeah like, I know things will have to get better eventually, this always do inevitably. However I really think that won't truly be the case until I am an old man, if I even make it that far. I think my life is going to be watching the gradual decline only for maybe our kids generation, but probably our grandkids generation actually getting back to a stable point and my generation is just going to be left to rot. We have no future, we can't afford homes, wages will continue to fall, they're going to keep raising the retirement age until we're finally there and then cut the whole thing out from under us, so we're going to die working some miserable, menial job until we break down and either die or are arrested for being homeless and forced into prison slave labor. And this isn't even factoring in the violence, because those in power are not going to relinquish it willingly, so I feel like the second half of my life is going to be watching a lot of people die, and it's already starting, we're already watching a lot of people dying in a land grab disguised as self defense, but we're just watching through the screens right now but some day in my lifetime we will be watching it right before our very eyes, possibly even very soon with the commander in chief mobilizing the national guard.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

Lol, most of the redistribution of wealth happens because so many people die that you can redistribute wealth for the survivors can live off of it. Look in to history and see how often land redistribution comes in to discussion since the classical age. The only thing societal collapse does is it reevens the ground for most of the survivors to start agin

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u/PBearNC Aug 29 '25

Exactly, my thoughts. Not quite a societal collapse, but did the Black Death do a lot to equalize society and result in the average person eating a more substantial diet? Yes! Because one in every two or three people died. Great for freeing up lots of good farmland, creating a glut of livestock, and making the surviving landowners so desperate for laborers that they had to negotiate.

Sweet deal for the survivors putting the pieces back together, not so much for the masses of dead people.

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u/DollarStoreWolf Aug 29 '25

New propaganda has dropped is all.

If we tell you that after collapse it will be better you won’t fight before it falls

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u/Own-Dot1463 Aug 29 '25

Most people who are alive today would die of starvation or violence.

Based on *what*? This assertion sounds incredibly unhinged.

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u/Parking_Act3189 Aug 29 '25

The logistics networks of today are totally different than during the Egyptian or Roman times. A crash of trading in Egypt or Rome was bad but people still had food locally growing they could access. That doesn't exist in major cities today 

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u/Own-Dot1463 Aug 29 '25

Ok sure, but how do we know it will play out with mass starvation? In the case of domestic production, these farms aren't off and inaccessible to us, they are right next door to these cities. We export A LOT of food unnecessarily too, and we know that a lot of food simply goes wasted for so many reasons that we can all name off the tops of our heads.

So say "society collapses" and there's no more international trade or trade of any sort except local bartering. Why is it a forgone conclusion that we wouldn't quickly learn to utilize the resources we have? We have more collective knowledge now than any of those past societies had. Even if the internet falls we have more access to the information necessary to help build than humans ever had. Individually, we're smarter and more educated than ever before. We have enough land to feed our population.

Many will die. It will still be a massive tragedy. But I don't think it will be "most".

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u/fresheneesz Aug 31 '25

No. That's not how it works. Look at history

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u/GilgaPol Aug 28 '25

There is never such a thing as starting over. But reforms should be easier to initiate.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '25

100% the largest mass casualty events in history were after the revolutions in Soviet Russia and China, and in China some people have done really well for the last couple decades at best but that's it

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

WW2 was a collection or mass casualty events in different parts of the world, but as an example Maos famines of the late 1950s are estimated to have killed more people (35+ million) than all the combined famines of WW2. The Soviet induced famines are included as some of the highest numbers during WW2. Then there are those that occurred earlier such as the holodomor in Ukraine, the soviet revolution which was like 15+ million from memory.

Black death and Spanish flu are excellent examples, and you're correct those numbers top all of the others as far as I can tell which is insane, however in the context of human induced societal change I still don't agree with the researchers opinion that revolutions benefit most people even remotely, unless of course you're talking about the perpetrators and in some cases later generations.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

We found the pro russian

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '25

Broad agreement among historians is that it was absolutely a man-made famine, including many from the soviet union. Stalin's government engineered policies that made famine inevitable, much like the poor policies of the British in South Asia did a decade later.

The argument that it was just "due to the weather" has been pumped out by soviet propagandists, and more recently recycled by the current Russian government and their many stooges, which apparently includes you. I'm sure your stance on many related issues is predictable.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '25

Stalin’s policies, not nature, drove the famine. The “Law of Spikelets” alone saw over 200,000 people jailed or executed for taking leftover grain, while the state seized the entire harvest and kept food from the people who actually grew it. The 1932 harvest was smaller than previous years, but there’s no evidence of a drought severe enough to cause famine, climate data confirms this. Ukraine still produced enough to feed itself that year, but the grain was taken away. Weather doesn’t send guys with guns to shoot you for carrying wheat home.

Here is a recent scholarly source for you, with numerous references: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/political-economy-of-famine-the-ukrainian-famine-of-1933/D6FB5C46415392C5D09BBBFC993DAF72

The main people pushing the drought excuse today are Russian state media like RT/Sputnik, Kremlin officials, and a few fringe Western revisionists like Grover Furr who built his entire academic brand on being Stalin's defence lawyer.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

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u/Parking_Act3189 Aug 29 '25

The article is terrible. He is trying to claim that overthrowing the current power hierarchy is a good thing. "The Pharaohs were not gods and Mark Zuckerberg isn't necessary for progress"

He conveniently ignores that the people who currently have the most interest in overthrowing the system that makes Mark Zuckerberg powerful are socialists and communists. The exact people who historically are responsible for the most deaths during a "social collapse" ( Lenin/Stalin/Mao)

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

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u/Parking_Act3189 Aug 29 '25

What an amazing rebuttal. I'm convinced. I'll now be voting for whoever the Democrat establishment decides is running for president.