[dmreedy]

Riffing on this, I think an interesting and fundamental phenomenon of societies is exactly their frequent inability to imagine their successors, or even the possibility of a successor. Each seeing themselves as a logical peak of the progressive arrow history, especially post-enlightenment (cf. Fukuyama's (in)famous The End of History[0]).

It seems to boil down to the sort of societal consensus definition of "us" that serves as a foundation for the individual definitions of "me" that comprise a society. It's why societies seem to tend to see their peers and predecessors as lesser as well; they are all their own "us"es, in some ways inaccessible to our "us". They may say the same words, but mean different things. They have the same human equipment for reasoning and synthesis, but a different set of priors from which this calculus manipulates and concludes. They seem dumb because they don't come to the same obvious conclusions we do.

And it seems to motivate conservative behavior, by way of fear. At least we can grapple and argue with our contemporaries, and scorn our predecessors. We know what they think, or at least we think we know what they think, filtered through the lens of what we think. But as a societal consensus starts to shift, and we start seeing new priors appearing, things start to get uncomfortable. We see a glimpse of a future we don't understand; we used to be with "it" but "it" changed[1]. We don't know anymore what the next ones will think. What they will be like.

They will still be humans, but they will be a different us, completely inaccessible to our us.

---

[0] I know his philosophy is more a bit more nuanced, but it's such a perfect and unfortunate phrasing, accepted so implicitly and literally.

[1] To quote Grampa Simpson

[nntwozz]

This reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot:

"We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little terraqueous globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds. We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture out into space?

By the time we are ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us; necessity will have changed us. We are… an adaptable species. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses; more confident, farseeing, capable and prudent.

For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders undreamt of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation, and another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered, by the end of the next century, and the next millennium?

Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system, and beyond, will be unified, by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe, come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross, before we found our way."

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

I think that sentiment is pretty naive.

Humans didn’t have such a perspective as they crossed oceans and continents, but these new spaces they explored became new spheres of competition and warfare.

My guess would be that space colonization if and when we reach that point will quickly turn into competition, rivalry, and warfare just like every other frontier in human history.

Even the first extra-terrestrial body humans set foot on was done in the context of the US-Soviet Space Race with the knowledge that the knowledge of rocketry gained in space exploration would also be useful for ICBMs.

[irrational]

Yes, I think the competition and combat of The Expanse is more likely than this utopian vision.

[h0l0cube]

Even in the Expanse it was more of a cold war between Earth and Mars, and a class war between the belters and the rest of the solar system. Globalization and the advent of planet-scale weapons have made relative peace and cooperation the more sensible option. The only wildcard is a sovereignty that has nothing to lose, a bitter history, and the power to exact real harm, and the closest we have to that in modern times is Russia. And the best way to avert this harm is to ensure no-one has nothing to lose.

But as I've said before on this forum, The Expanse isn't facts.

[irrational]

Of course it isn’t facts. But it more closely aligns with what we know of human history and nature than the belief that humans will ever be at peace with one another.

[h0l0cube]

Also a fact is that we haven’t seen a hot war directly between two major economic powers since WWII. Quality of life and the global commerce that drives it has been trending upward for some time. Cooperation has simply been recognised as the more fruitful path, but a global scarcity of vital resources could change that equation though.

https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#the-past-was-not-pe...

[zamfi]

Not just societies frankly -- people individually believe this as well, psychologists call it the "end-of-history illusion". Quoting Wikipedia:

> The end-of-history illusion is a psychological illusion in which individuals of all ages believe that they have experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment, but will not substantially grow or mature in the future. Despite recognizing that their perceptions have evolved, individuals predict that their perceptions will remain roughly the same in the future.

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-history_illusion)

[tialaramex]

I deliberately re-read what I wrote last week, last month, last year, last decade and a quarter century ago, less frequently with each jump, to be sure I'm conscious to what extent my beliefs about the world have changed, what I was wrong about and why and to re-examine past beliefs in light of present knowledge.

Google and Facebook among others actually provide a means to fetch periodic dumps of my data for this purpose, on sites like HN I use their history mechanism to look back through what I wrote e.g.

> The First Sale doctrine gives people who _buy_ something all rights needed to make use of it.

> It is... disappointing that modern courts have allowed the First Sale doctrine to be watered down so that today there's every chance you will buy something, paying good money, and then be confronted with new "terms" for how you may use the thing you purchased. But it's not in general clear that such an approach is legal.

That's me back in 2017 on a thread about GPL enforcement where people got into software licensing

[majormajor]

I think predicting the exact successor societies would be difficult, but there's a lot of SF out there that predicts potential ones. Like the Ousters in the Dan Simmons' Hyperion series or the Drummers in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age or various other flavors of u- or dys-topias.

Or even the Millenia of premillennial dispensationalists, for a religious alternative.

I'd argue some of those are more radical imaginations than much of what actually followed past ages.

[dmreedy]

Yeah I agree completely.

I have been thinking lately about that as a defining feature of science fiction, or I guess speculative fiction more broadly; thought experiments into other "us"es. What it's like to be something else. I don't mean to say that as if it's some novel position, just a particular facet that has been resonating.

The eschatology angle is a super interesting one I hadn't considered. If anything though, especially for the millenarian/apocalyptic flavors, it seems like almost the platonic ideal of being unable to imagine a successor; we are the end, and when we end, the world ends, preserving us forever.

And incidentally, there is still resistance there. "Don't immanentize the eschaton!"

[notahacker]

> Or even the Millenia of premillennial dispensationalists, for a religious alternative.

> I'd argue some of those are more radical imaginations than much of what actually followed past ages.

This. People throughout history have frequently predicted the end of the civilization they lived in, they just tended to get it wrong, usually because their prediction was some fantasy involving superhuman powers ending the world as we know it, and not just dumb culture wars and succession crises and poor resource allocation and the neighbouring civilization being a bit stronger and more adaptable.

[lazide]

It's a survival strategy, near as I can tell.

Frankly, even really understanding the moment is impossible, let alone something as distant as the past, or the as yet not-existing future.

That's true for the individual, and the society.

Enlightenment MIGHT come close, but the first thing in traditions that have that as an option/goal is realizing that, well, knowing things objectively/without delusions is basically actually impossible and the concept of 'us' or 'I' is basically one of those delusions. We can have FEWER delusions, and with luck we can be aware of most of them, but we can't really have zero.

So we constrict our information, scope, and framing down to what we consider useful in that moment, and the narratives come from that. Sometimes it's pretty close to 'truth' (as in, matches objectively verifiable facts with a minimal amount of suspension of disbelief, fantasy, or outright delusion), and provides useful information.

sometimes... well, it does not. Often/usually, frankly.

It requires extremely rigorous approaches to get close to anything else, and frankly the forest gets lost for the trees 99.99% of the time.

True for the individual, and for the society too.

[MichaelZuo]

> Frankly, even really understanding the moment is impossible, let alone something as distant as the past, or the as yet not-existing future.

I thought that too before, but now I'm not so sure.

Human individuals don't differ from each other that much. Sure there's a wide spectrum of physical and mental attributes such as intelligence, perseverance, confidence, etc.

But the basic motivations and behavioural patterns are close to identical, bar really exceptional outliers like Napoleon or von Neumann.

[lazide]

There was a time when I would have believed that too. It’s a probabilistic type view, which in general, on average works out to be mostly correct.

In the physics analogy, I imagine thinking of it like heat.

But, if you pick any individual, just like if you go to an individual atom, you will find that velocity, position, etc. is still impossible to predict except as probabilities on a curve. And unlike atoms, people have strong incentives to lie (to themselves and others), and a rather impressive ability to do so.

And given enough atoms/people or time, you WILL find the truly unpredictable. And you will often find the nonsensical, the self destructive, etc.

The general human motivations (or at least what we perceive them as) are also statistical averages. It doesn’t take much looking to find folks with very, very different ways of acting on them than what we’d consider normal.

Due to this fractal nature of the complexity of reality, it is a delusion thinking anyone can understand the moment. Truly, anyways.

Everything is through a lens, it has to be, or it would be impossible to comprehend at all.

[MichaelZuo]

Even someone with a large iron rod rammed through their brain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) doesn't deviate that much from the median, at least not as much as the aformentioned examples of Napoleon, von Neumann, etc...

So it seems difficult to believe anyone currently alive and capable of walking around can be meaningfully even more different.

Of course people can claim a limitless degree of difference, but their actual behaviour is what matters, not verbal claims.

[lazide]

Huh? Phineas Gage completely switched personality, including behavior.

What exactly do you consider to be ‘degree of difference’?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_nu...]?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_female_ser...]?

Ghenghis Khan?

And that isn’t even counting the vast, unending sea of often bizarre mental illness out there.

The ones you see make a list are functional enough to cause notable damage, which fundamentally restrains them within a certain band of functionality.

The ones who are functional enough to stay alive long enough to make an impact on the world at all will restrain it at an even more outlying band.

That means you can form probabilities and distributions - but you can’t really know individuals for sure.

As anyone who’s been married to someone and had kids with them who later turned out to be gay, or cheating, or whatever can attest - good luck.

[MichaelZuo]

Yes I would classify Genghis Khan, Napoleon, etc., as probably even farther from the median adult human then Phineas Gage type oddities.

But this is splitting hairs since the main point is that the maximal case can't possibly be that much more extreme then already well documented cases.

Because only the observable actions of humans in the world is after all what we're capable of perceiving directly. And this is limited to what their body, including vocal chords, is physically capable of doing, no matter how many mental irregularities they have.

Or are you confused about something else?

It's unclear what the meaning of the rest of your comment is.

[leroy-is-here]

I think that it is equally hard determining causes. We can clearly see differences between humans in the past and humans as we are today. Because humans are in the past, we easily think they are lesser and more stupid than our technological superior selves. But they didn’t have mass-produced cars and roads everywhere, so they didn’t die of weight-related heart failure. But labor was tougher, so perhaps those same men were getting drunk every night.

Our former selves realized everyone should have a right toward education, but we barely teach the trivium, the education of a free man. Instead we have politicized our education instead of requiring students to read Plato because even our teachers haven’t read him.

[qwytw]

> triumvirate

Trivium. Unless you're talking about ancient Roman history or alternative political systems.

> Instead we have politicized our education instead

Well Plato's writings were heavily politicized and controversial back in the day. So maybe it's not that different...

[leroy-is-here]

Plato would still be controversial today. Imagine that you’re being told you only see images and you just imitate what you see.

[pphysch]

> fundamental phenomenon of societies

It's dangerous to assert that this is a "fundamental" behavior, because it's not always true. Certainly, in USA and the broader West there is an almost total lack of vision right now, from leaders to cultural fabric. We obsess over Nth-derivative Disney films: where is Ursula Le Guin?

Visionaries are rejected (or killed, in the 60s) for rocking the boat, innovation has been gutted by worn as a skin suit by Wall St. We are totally uncurious about our foreign peers, some of whom are outpacing us in substantial ways.

[mlyle]

> We obsess over Nth-derivative Disney films

Pop culture is pop culture and only really gets interesting in brief flashes.

> where is Ursula Le Guin?

We've got a whole lot of great speculative fiction these days, but there's no one dominant. It's a curse and benefit of the long tail.

> there is an almost total lack of vision right now

I think the big thing we're missing is some shared set of optimism and an idea of what kinds of things we should want for ourselves. We're divided; we're feeling ennui from being at a bit of a local maximum in a whole lot of ways; looming doom of various kinds (climate, geopolitical, economic) suppresses us.

> innovation has been gutted by worn as a skin suit by Wall St.

That whole financial, administrative, and managerial class has to shrink. Look, finance is a superpower and a key export of the West and it would be a mistake to gut it, but to continue to allow it to grow without bound is an equally big mistake.

[dmreedy]

Agreed! I'm testing a hypothesis here through the dialectic, not asserting one!

There are definitely visionaries and prophets and doom-seers in each society; when I talk about societal consensus I'm talking about averages.

Though I'd hesitate to agree that vision === imagination of successors. To my mind, there's a difference between improving the extant, and having a new one. Maybe you can get to the latter by way of the former over time, and that way you get into "Gentle Seduction"[0] territory. But that also kind of amounts to a lack of imagination, and a rejection of endings.

> Where is Ursula Le Guin?

Where indeed! Though I haven't given enough of the newer generations of sci fi authors a chance myself, to be fair.

---

[0] http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html

[throwway120385]

Visionaries continue to be around, but it's so much easier to make noise that you have to really work to sift the wheat from the chaff. It's in Wall Street's best interest to have you thinking that when they stop innovating innovation is dead. But I really think this is what our culture looks like when it's becoming.

[CatWChainsaw]

The Slow Cancellation of the Future

[naravara]

> Each seeing themselves as a logical peak of the progressive arrow history, especially post-enlightenment

I'm not actually sure this is the case of pre-modern civilizations. I don't think they really had a conception of history moving in a progressive arrow, they tended to think of time as being cyclical and things would just naturally rise and fall. For any given person their lifestyles were likely to be broadly similar to their grandparents' lifestyles and the pace of change would have been very slow and manageable.

It's really not until the age of sail and discovery of the new world by Europeans that we start to see transformative changes within individual lifespans to the actual fundamentals of peoples' lifestyles and foodways and how economic production works. Before then it's just like, every 100-200 years or so barbarians attack you while you're militarily weak and your empire collapses and everyone gets raped and/or enslaved. So it goes.

[bombcar]

Part of it is we can't see the forest for the trees. From where we stand we easily and confidently determine the signing of the Declaration of Independence as a major turning point in history of our country and the world, but I suspect that for many living at the time in America it was just some stuff happening.

[kar5pt]

Most cultures didn't believe in a "progressive arrow of history". That's a fairly modern concept.

[JumpCrisscross]

Even continuous improvement is emotionally difficult for many. It’s why impending doom is a millennia-old trope.

[ted_bunny]

Not so for the USSR and PRC at least, whose ideologies directly acknowledged they were only meant to be transitional.

[TulliusCicero]

> Riffing on this, I think an interesting and fundamental phenomenon of societies is exactly their frequent inability to imagine their successors, or even the possibility of a successor. Each seeing themselves as a logical peak of the progressive arrow history, especially post-enlightenment (cf. Fukuyama's (in)famous The End of History[0]).

"Late stage capitalism" is a good example of this. Although in some ways it's possibly closer to secular End Times rhetoric.

[astrange]

"Late stage capitalism" is the opposite. People just keep saying it claiming history is going to resume soon, and have been saying it since it was invented 110-ish years ago, and yet capitalism continues to not go anywhere.

[pugworthy]

> continues to not go anywhere

Just like Bronze

[namaria]

Modern economy and policy is hardly the same as it was 100 years ago, or even 30...

[the_af]

I don't know. I don't find it difficult to believe capitalism can gradually morph into something else in say 500 or 1000 years, so that you could point at one end (let's say early 20th century) and say "this was capitalism" and at the other end 1000 years from now and say "this isn't capitalism by any reasonable meaning of the word" (I mean, not "future capitalism" but something that supersedes it and has a different shape). And it could also reasonably be believed by future historians that there was an era called "late stage capitalism" just like they now call a period of history the late middle ages.

It's just that in the span of some generations you wouldn't be able to recognize the phenomenon slowly unfolding.

I'm reminded of how the Roman Empire at the time of its big split wasn't acknowledged by its citizens as "Western" or "Eastern", and its slowly unfolding undoing wasn't recognized either. Had you asked a Roman citizen, he/she would have been surprised by the question: there was only one Roman Empire. And they believed it would last forever.

[unsupp0rted]

I doubt it’ll take that long. Capitalism depends on being able to make a profit.

It’s possible quite soon that everything will be commoditized (designed, built, and recycled by machines ultra-cheaply) and nothing will be profitable.

The end of profit is the end of capitalism.

[astrange]

This is Marxism, literally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

[tacitusarc]

Capitalism is more about markets for resource allocation and private property than profit.