[trod1234]

There are two aspects of your line of reasoning that don't jive for me.

People can choose to not place a bet by not participating in the economy, or tying physical assets to it. In other words, de-banking, off-grid farming, unemployment on welfare (not their money, printed guaranteed loss absorbed by the baseline).

The assumption that the market can always allocate the losses to the baseline has already been shown to be foundationally flawed. It depends upon whether the baseline can absorb the losses to keep the market going, not the other way around. Those who believe in MMT don't pay head to the fact that money printing has caused societies to fail many times in the distant past, in the ever quoted phrase, but it will be different this time.

When the economic engine stalls, so too does order and money-printing/debt issuance (without fractional reserve) drives this as a sieve (which we've seen over the past several decades in the form of bailout, marketshare concentration, and consolidation).

Central banks set reserve allocations to 0% in 2020, adopting a capital reserve, risk-weighted system based in fiat that is opaque and stock-market tied (Basel III modified). Value is subjective, and fiat may have store of value, right up until it doesn't.

Of particular note, societal order is required to produce enough food for 8bn globally, without order and its now brittle dependencies, we can only feed 4bn globally. Malthus has a lot to say about population dynamics in ecological overshoot.

TL;DR Half of all people die when modern chemical production (Haber-Bosch fertilizer) and other food dependencies (climate) fail.

AI drives chaos and disruption. Its like throwing a wrench into a gear system, maybe it will stall, maybe it gets thrown out (still slowing it), maybe it runs rough wearing it faster further degrading the system towards failure.

When the baseline cannot absorb the cost in terms of purchasing power, it absorbs the cost from the resulting chaos in lives.

Intelligent people pay attention to history because the outcomes that repeat in history occur as a result of dynamics that repeat, and in matters where lives or survival are on the line risk management shifts from permissive to restrictive (where the requirements of proof are flipped).

[cgio]

Thank you for the thoughtful answer. There is a certain amount of cynicism in my post, to match the cynicism of reality unfortunately. Your arguments may be valid, but who cares to rationally think and act when they can easily observe and react? A collapse akin to your description would disproportionately affect the people who don’t have the power to do either, they just accept and suffer. In history, do we have any example where that was not the case, except revolution? Even with revolutions the respite is only perceived and of the shuffle to reach the new decision structures.

[trod1234]

I'm in agreement that self-fulling dynamics occur regularly over longer time horizons, I viewed what you said as pragmatism rather than cynicism.

As for who cares to rationally think and act when they can easily observe and react?

The problem with the latter is that its a false choice. The latter simply isn't possible in any effective sense. Certain systems and dynamics become a hysteresis problem, where the indicator is lagging ahead of when it actually happens; by the time you see the indicator it can be perceived, but ultimately impossible to react to in time.

There are also simultaneous issues with rational thought being deprived broadly through induction of psychological stress using sophisticated mental coercion and torture (which isn't physical). Rational thought is the first thing to vanish, and these methods act like HIV does in cellular systems (i.e. destroying the memory of the immune system making it unable to act, instead it destroys perception blinding people).

For some reason these things remind me of the Tower of Babel story in the book of genesis. It makes god out to be the bad guy, when it seems far more likely that the dynamics became destructive. All of Humanity has psychological blindspots that can be used to manipulate them in collective and through unity. Pride often lends itself to delusion, and blindness. Destruction usually follows, and confusion occurs naturally when delusion breaks towards a witnessed reality (as survivors, where others kept dying).

It seems like the translation is off, where instead of god, they meant the inescapable forces of reality. Albeit this is getting a bit into the weeds, its an interesting perspective.

Getting back to things, the major difference today when comparing to history with regards to revolution, we are in extreme ecological overshoot (globally).

Breakdown of order translates to famine so severe that half globally die from starvation. To make matters worse, nearly every economic system on the planet is controlled indirectly by one nation through money printing, and those distortions created are chaotic (fundamentally it shares many characteristics as that of a n-body immeasurable astrophysics system that has limited visibility).

When these things happened in the past, they were largely in isolation, and outside the geographical affected areas, assistance could be leveraged for survival. This is no longer the case now. If these things collapses, it all happens to everyone at the same time. Not enough resources exist to resolve the failure, and there are no tools that would allow correcting the situation after the dynamics have passed a point of no return.

Thinking about these things rationally, preparing while we can (before it happens), is the only tool that might allow survival long term for a few. Its important that survivors know what happened and how it happened, or it will happen again given sufficient time, and that requires a foundation. Needless to say, we have many dark times ahead.

A line appears, the order wanes, the empire falls, and chaos reigns.

I do not envy those who would have to somehow live through chaos, where nuclear weapons might be used by the delusional or insane.

[cgio]

I enjoy your thinking and your use of analogy. We agree more than is evident, but you think on an horizon that eludes most, myself included unfortunately. As you say, the psychological torture of mere lifestyle survival overshadows the rational concern for true survival. To some extent, we live through chaos, but don’t have the wherewithal to accept it as such and cling to a normal that is increasingly not normal at all.