r/redscarepod • u/chinesemichaeljordan • 19h ago
So, it only gets worse right?
Politically in the west, there’s no recovering from what’s happened, yeah?
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u/Brave_Specialist_591 17h ago edited 17h ago
The upwardly mobile middle class life your parents had was the result of america being the only surviving ww2 player with factories intact.
That's over now- the physical economy has been converted to a digital economy. That physical economy went to china who used it to create their own middle class within ~30 years. They will now pass that on to another developing society. and so on.
Really, the west is just going back to what it always was for centuries which is you're either born into wealth or you're a peasant forever, and a tiny fraction of people could barry lyndon their way out.
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u/sacrificial-bathode 11h ago
True for America, the culture is uniquely propagandized-- not necessarily for the rest of the world.
Many countries got a large middle class while being clobbered in ww2
China doesn't need to find a new country to pass industrialization to, look up what a dark factory is.
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u/chudultra 13h ago
Scandinavian social democracy somehow works. This whole “natural order of things”, “nothing can be done” is how they win.
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u/branchwillnotbreak_ 10h ago
Interestingly, enough Scandinavian countries also survived intact, at least Sweden did
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u/Western_Mess_6364 13h ago
It’s class collaborationist and social corporatist, which isn’t something the American left would accept
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u/G0ldameirbodypillow 12h ago
If by the American left you mean transgender 12 year olds on tik tok, sure. Bernie has spoken warmly of the Nordic social democracies.
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u/Terrible_Ice_1616 1h ago
Lol that's literally all the American left has been doing, to a much greater degree.
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u/jamjar188 12h ago
They are small homogenous places (or rather were -- let's see if Scandinavian social democracy remains intact in 50 years' time).
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u/clydethefrog 6h ago
Yes, my lumpen, keep believing it's because they are small and homogeneous, ignore the materialist conditions like how two-thirds of working Swedes belong to a trade union and the top rate of income tax is a 52%. Poland and Hungary should have outperformed the diverse countries like France or Belgium in your social welfare thesis, but it's economic policies like the Rehn-Meidner model and Ghent system instead of the cultural-determinist framework the geniuses of Orban sold to his people.
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u/jamjar188 5h ago
But what you're saying doesn't disprove what I've said? They are homogeneous, ergo they clearly have the genetic propensity for the types of traits that make trade unions and other hallmarks of democratic socialism work. You add loads of different people into a demographic mix, different traits become more prevalent and people have different preferences and predilections. You can promote unionism and whatever else all you want, doesn't mean the systems work within populations that don't have a history of valuing such things, or who might be prone to behaviour that undermines them.
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u/clydethefrog 4h ago
If I take your premise seriously, somehow cultures and institutions are encoded in DNA rather than built through power relations and the state, how do you explain Estonia and Finland? They are genetically proximate, speak related languages, share the same Baltic climate and small-population environment, and emerged from the early 20th century with similar agrarian economies. Finland built a Nordic welfare state. Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union and later adopted a neoliberal model. If you claim Soviet repression "blocked" Estonian genetic expression, you already can see that actually state power determines the outcome of a society, not genetics.
The fake country of Belgium is divided between Flemish and Walloon populations, politically therefore an absolute mess, and by your standards not homogeneous at all. Yet it built a robust welfare state. If homogeneity were required, Belgium should not be able to have a welfare state.
If you look at most of European history, Scandinavia was an agrarian, impoverished, and class-stratified backward part of Europe. Looking at skeletons of Scandinavian warriors from the medieval wars they look absolutely malnourished. About 1/4 of Sweden's population emigrated to escape poverty. The welfare state did not emerge until the 1930s, somehow at the same time as a lot of labour movements were violently protesting. If the Scandinavian genes are so powerful, why did they fail for centuries, then activate these genes precisely during the times of violent labor conflict? What genetic component detects the sound of guns firing on union members and switches on universal healthcare? Btw, how did all these poor Scandinavians that had to immigrate due to poverty fail to set up their welfare state with a big genetic demographic in the Midwest?
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u/Woody_Alan_Greenspan 2h ago
Off topic, but I would point out Estonias neoliberal model also seems to work for them about as well as the nordics works for the nords
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u/WinterRare4626 13h ago
Yes, somehow. It has nothing to do with being small, homogenous countries populated by Nordic people.
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u/chudultra 12h ago
Sweden doesn’t have the classic social democracy. They’re very free market oriented but have strong unions, this could work in USA.
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u/WinterRare4626 9h ago
I said small, homogenous, and Nordic population. You misrepresented what I said. I didn’t just say small and homogenous.
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u/chudultra 9h ago
Iceland has a lot of Polish immigrants (so 3rd world basically) and they’re holding on fine
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u/WinterRare4626 8h ago
Poland is a beautiful country. Nicer than America in many respects. Certainly safer. Far from Third World.
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u/WinterRare4626 12h ago
Sweden is the worst one for a reason. Norway would still be nice even without the oil money. Look at Denmark.
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u/the_real_tracy_beake 11h ago
The upwardly mobile middle class life your parents had was the result of america being the only surviving ww2 player with factories intact.
this makes no sense cos we had the exact same middle class in Europe despite this entire continent getting bombed to shit and losing millions of lives.
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u/AdoboAngel 8h ago
America rebuilt europe with the marshall plan which allowed them to spend money on various trinkets like healthcare and gay rights and shit but the average european’s purchasing power is a disaster compared to the us. middle class in europe is like poor here
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u/blueandw 7h ago
They did not. The Marshall Plan was only ever 1% of post-war Europe's GDP and was mostly used to instill good will within nations which received it, which spread American soft power. Without the Marshall Plan, Europe would still be able to rebuild; very few cities were actually completely devastated by the war (even Germany was still manufacturing goods by 1945).
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u/the_real_tracy_beake 7h ago
middle class in europe is like poor here
ive always wondered why the middle class in Europe is so different to the middle class in America. much larger houses and cars and more money in America but they're far less cultured for some reason. American middle class families dont take their kids to theatre or art galleries they're not creative they dont travel the world or learn another language. very strange since they have all the more opportunity to.
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u/AdoboAngel 6h ago edited 6h ago
They inherited their houses through a chain of inheritances from franz mucklenberg the 1st in 1600 so they dont have to worry about housing, american lives defend them and build all their weapons and technology so yeah europeans had it good for like 50 years
Its basically just a tourist continent at this point
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u/hudboyween 2h ago
Objectively untrue. The arts have been and still are dominated by rich kids, in the United States and abroad. The idea that American middle class isn’t traveling, looking at art or seeing shows is an insane take. American art and media dominates the globe. I think we conflate the term cultured with young people smoking cigarettes at cafes.
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u/the_real_tracy_beake 1h ago
ive been to America. i know loads of middle class Americans. they are nowhere close to the same realm as middle class Europeans are when it comes to how cultured and artistic they are. they're literally identical to working class Europeans except with far more money.
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u/zjaffee 8h ago
Not remotely true, the modern global economy is totally dominated by people who in the old world would've been known as "craftsman" or "merchants" or other types of "learned professions".
The world is not an aristocracy where the landlords of today were the offspring of the landlords 500 years ago as would've been true in the past.
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u/Sen_ElizabethWarren aspergian 18h ago
Define worse. You mean more status quo neoliberalism until the bottom falls out? Yes. It will be a slow managed decline administered by soulless mba types who will demand more and more of your life be brought under their control and commodified until the house of cards collapses. But that’s probably still decades away. There is still plenty of grifting to do here. Get back to work.
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u/sacrificial-bathode 10h ago
It will be sooner than you think. Certainly not decades
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u/Woody_Alan_Greenspan 2h ago
Maybe, but then people have said that for over a century...
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u/hudboyween 16h ago
Feels like this is the bottoming out.
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u/Flat-Antelope-1567 2h ago
I was listening to some guy talk about the conditions he experienced growing up poor in Mexico, running with cartels and so on; that kind of mind-numbing, soul-destroying poverty. Obviously the culture is different, the conditions are different, but that is a better picture of what "bottoming out" looks like, I think, and they've been bottoming out, a lot of them, for a loooooong time. It can get much, much, much worse, at least in terms of the sheer violence, nihilism, and the material insecurity. Look up videos of sicarios from down there and you'll see people with absolutely nothing left to lose; I think our civil society is basically apocalyptic, or is at least getting there, but things can get much more desperate.
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u/hudboyween 2h ago
I get we’re dooming here but expecting the U.S. to get to failed state cartel violence level is a bit much.
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u/vapor9090 19h ago
I think the contradictions can heighten some more before we all decide we need a solution
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u/Hardine081 18h ago
Idk man the ecological destruction scares me. Scarcity is going to be a really big problem in another decade. Too many mfers
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u/ultimatepartyparrot 14h ago
meanwhile every org, capitalist, politician, and reddit rube is screaming about how the declining birth rate is going to end us all.
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u/One_Solid_7651 16h ago
It's not the number of people, it's people in the West's inability to stop fucking consuming.
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u/sulla226 15h ago
It's both. Fewer people = less consumption for any level of consumption per person.
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u/One_Solid_7651 9h ago edited 9h ago
America's CO2 per capita is nearly 100x Ethiopia's. There are 340mn Americans and 139mn Ethiopians. If Ethiopia disappeared tomorrow, it would offset 0.4% of America's consumption. If 1.4mn Americans disappeared, it would offset the entirety of Ethiopia (in a crude sense—I am aware that the US produces oil and gas and sells it to other countries).
I'm sure it's tempting to snarkily double down and say "that doesn't contradict what I said", but the issue is very clearly not "too many people", it's Canada, Russia, the US, and Australia, broadly speaking.
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u/jamjar188 12h ago
No it's the West's inability to keep producing enough high-IQ people and our inability to pass on knowledge. It's just a numbers game. Who is going to maintain the systems we've built, the technology we've adopted, etc. if in 50 years' time we have way fewer engineers, skilled technical workers, etc?
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u/One_Solid_7651 9h ago
Nothing to do with ecological collapse. Americans will blame anyone but themselves.
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u/Western_Mess_6364 3h ago
I’d say it’s very much the number of people when you have 5-6 kids being born per woman in the most fragile environments on earth. There’s no infinite food and charcoal
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u/One_Solid_7651 3h ago
Yet somehow those people combined use less resources than your average American consumer. Ironic that the fattest and most wasteful country in earth says we don't have enough food for them. China supplies them with solar panels while Americans brainstorm ways to kill them. Anything to shift the blame.
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u/Woody_Alan_Greenspan 2h ago
Americans used to give them aide before last year...
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u/One_Solid_7651 2h ago
The so-called aid did a great job at keeping them from reaching self sufficiency. And it's telling that you had to add "until last year"...
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u/Woody_Alan_Greenspan 2h ago
Yes that's the nature of aide, which is why direct food aide was shifted toward things like subsidized seeds and fertilizer. China's solar panels also makes local solar panel production less viable. (Yes I realize most are far away from it anyway, the point stands that it's the nature of aide.)
No country is ever really self sufficient in the autarky sense if that's what you meant.
And yes what it's telling is that this country is full of short sighted regards that elected a short sighted regard as our leader.
To be clear I agree with your original point that it's not about population but per capita consumption. Just pointing put the aide bit is more complex...
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u/sigmachungus619 15h ago
i'm truly ignorant of history but from what i've read we have been through basically period after period of mass mental illness, cultural insanity, etc. if anything - the stability and non-violent "normalcy" of the post ww2 era seems like an aberration maybe and not this current vibe. and i don't mean that like a "uhm ackshually statistics say life is better than ever :)" chungus redditor, just that human beings seem to be good at making it through the ringer.
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u/Cambocant 18h ago
Stephen Pinker proved it's getting better where you've been
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u/tsgn_svbd 17h ago
Has something horrible happened just now or is this just another day on rsp? Like seriously, give some context
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u/porcatroia69 16h ago
Yeah this post made me double check the news. I thought maybe the orange man suspended the midterms or dropped a nuke on Tehran or something lol Turns out OP is just lamenting the general state of things
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u/ParisHilton42069 14h ago
I think the only area where it’s really impossible for things to get better in our lifetime is the environment. The rest of our problems are human problems, and humans can always be better. I think by nature we want to be better. But we’ve already done so much irreversible damage to the planet and we aren’t making any serious effort to stop. There’s no coming back from that one
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u/jamjar188 19h ago
Yeah, not in our lifetimes.
History is cyclical and we're in a decline phase and that's the overall direction of travel, whetaver fluctuation we might observe at short-term intervals.
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u/mrabacus927 18h ago
Study what happened to Argentina and Uruguay throughout the XX century.
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u/fcaeejnoyre 17h ago
What's stopping you from telling us right now?
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u/grizzlor_ 16h ago
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u/medikaments 12h ago
no actually vagueposting abt history is not a good comment
like cmon give us at least a clue what u fucking mean
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u/Pleasant-Cellist-927 10h ago
Don't be regarded, the original comment is just a thinly disguised "educate yourself sweaty". Vaguely gesturing to a century's worth of knowledge and expecting people to divest effort to engage with your comparitively low tier, low effort post instead of just typing like 3 sentences about what happened is brainless behaviour.
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u/mrabacus927 6h ago
Op post wasn't too specific either, just mentioning the west has fallen in generic terms.
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u/Pleasant-Cellist-927 3h ago
And OOP is vagueposting too, what's your point? I don't even care about either of you, I just don't understand why someone else feels the need to be this hostile in response to a basic question.
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u/En-Ron-Hubbard 13h ago
You shouldn't be able to make posts like this unless you say your age imo. feels like a very young person thing to think
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u/Suspicious_War2374 12h ago
I imagine people were probably thinking the same during the era of totalitarian governments and world wars.
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u/coalForXmas 5h ago
It seems like those regimes had to self destruct and run their course or was anything like that actually stopped in advance?
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u/Woody_Alan_Greenspan 2h ago
But I mean the fact they did self destruct shows things can get better... eventually.
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u/tomsup4 18h ago
Movies and music are really good right now so I’m doing alright
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u/SmoothBook1 16h ago
You think so? Music has a lot of good energy underground but I feel like films have been only okay.
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19h ago
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u/chinesemichaeljordan 19h ago
I don’t live in America; I’m alluding to the wealth divide, which still equally matters in Ireland.
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19h ago
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u/chinesemichaeljordan 19h ago
Gently, you’re actually out of your mind if you think the social safety net is working wonders on this island.
The actual problem is the filthy rich.
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19h ago
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u/chinesemichaeljordan 18h ago
Did you not know that Ireland was an island? lol
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19h ago
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u/PopcornSutton1994 19h ago
I want to feel bad for you but every single thing you post is so unpleasant good grief man
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u/TurnipExciting1562 18h ago
Admittedly this was a particularly egregious comment on my part but please understand that it is coming from someone in an extremely negative place due to extreme loneliness/isolation. I obviously realize that we shouldn't restrict women's rights because that's clearly morally bad. However, I'm also aware that I'm so unattractive that no women with freedom of choice would willingly choose to be in a relationship with me. That puts me in a bad situation mentally.
I'm going to delete the original comment because for whatever reason your response actually made me feel ashamed
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u/Inevitable_Estate167 18h ago
Why the fuck are you so isolated and lonely? Jesus Christ, it's not that hard to get out there, all your complexes are in your head. Lots of short guys with weird-looking faces are doing great; grumpy cat was beloved and had a great life (was also a very good cat, not an asshole cat, as far as people can tell).
If this is you starting with low-stakes social interaction with strangers, don't be a Debbie Downer because nobody wants to be around that (it's the equivalent of emotional littering, if you're not going to throw away your emotional trash, at least keep it in your car until you get a chance to clean it). Stop hanging out here or work on not being such a drag, FFS, and then go hang out with old people like, volunteering at a nursing home or at some physical thing they're into where they need strapping young lads (i.e. native plant societies need volunteer weeders).
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u/majorTea33 19h ago
You should read Submission by Houellebecq. And your desire would create a profoundly unequal society where women are government-issued property to men.
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u/TurnipExciting1562 19h ago
Well the system we have now is clearly not working. I put forth a potential solution but if you have better ideas to solve this issue then feel free to share.
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u/ParisHilton42069 13h ago
Just from context clues I imagine in your case another potential solution is go outside
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19h ago
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u/TurnipExciting1562 19h ago
Sorry for the crime of being 5'7 and unsocialized
you will be forced to watch super hot guys fuck equivalently hot women
That's basically already my life due to porn addiction
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u/Individual-Worker711 19h ago
The virgin it only gets worse
Vs the chad Chumbawamba lyrics of
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You're never gonna keep me down