Subj : Great Replacement Theory
To   : Boraxman
From : Kaelon
Date : Wed Jun 01 2022 11:49:29

  Re: Great Replacement Theory
  By: Boraxman to Kaelon on Wed Jun 01 2022 08:52 pm

 > Perpetual population growth is simply not sustainable.  We MUST face a new
 > reality, that populations are not going to always increase.
 >
 > It is expected at some point in this or next century, that this will become
 > the norm.  We simply cannot be reliant on alway having above replacement
 > population growth.
 >
 > The size of the population will wax and wane, but the problem is not the
 > birthrate.  It is our inability to adapt to a world with education, birth
 > control, automation and machinery.
 >
 > The process is not unstoppable.  Government policy created it, and
 > government policy can be changed.

A couple of thoughts on this:

1. The United States and Australia are two perfect examples of countries that have the geographic advantages of vast natural resources, and a miniscule population to harvest those resources, to maximize their geopolitical potential.  So, at least for the U.S. and Australia, increasing population - not decreasing it - has to be the geopolitical norm, because this will allow you to tap the full potential of your country.

2. Urbanization, as a consequence of the military industrialization of national economies (largely a post-war phenomenon), resulted in the broad realignment of culture in the United States - away from the agrarian, large-family ethos, towards the urban, smaller-family ethos - and it directly paired with a higher standard of living.  In order to move away from this demographic crisis - which results in lower birth rates because of how people live, work, and play - we need to radically change how people live, work, and play.  The Pandemic helped initiate (or accelerate, depending upon which sociologist you consult) a broad re-examination of the balance between work and life, one which had not really been examined since the Middle Ages - when tradespeople worked in a place nominally distinct from where they lived, and used time-tracking (thanks to the emergence of the clock) as a way to commoditize their lifespan, rather than live more holistically by daylight vs. nighttime hours.  To achieve what you propose, we need to reinvent society to the pre-Middle Ages state, and perhaps examine a Roman era where people lived lives more fully and integrated.  However, I think the boat has largely sailed on this question, given that the modern nation-state is, in effect, a corporation that maximizes the value of its government through the extraction of revenues from its population, resources, and the trade that it can produce.

A reimagining of society in this way can either be gradual and profound -- the way the United States seems to be embarking on this, with great pains, whereby cultural conservatives are re-examining previously settled constructs, like birth control and the autonomy of a woman's body and role in society -- or sudden and extremely violent.  It is my general view that we won't see a solution in our lifetimes, because just as the post-Renaissaince world order in Europe could only be reimagined through the colonization of the New World and the demographic and geopolitical challenges that this posed, I do believe that our current planetary "world order" of corporatist revenue maximization (constant growth, constant expansion) will only be checked by a reimagined way of living and producing value.  The Colonization of Mars, or another planet, or possibly the seas below, may spur such a moment.
_____
-=: Kaelon :=-

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