The advancement of western society is the result of exploitation of the rest of the planet. But the free reign of exploitation is now hitting its boundaries as natural wealth is depleted. Self-exploitation and self-conceit will not lead to perennial growth.
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For a large part of history, western society with its ethical norms driven by social engineering, was pretty crap in comparison to other civilizations with different sets of values. The current dominance of the west is too short-lived (a few centuries) to base any conclusions.
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What do you base that on? Which civilizations were able to lift their entire population out of abject poverty, while producing rule of law, freedom of thought, universal literacy, and scientific rationalism?
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It is fudging of accounts when you say Europeans lifted their population out of abject poverty. The colonies were under direct administration of European powers (e.g, India under UK), and they suffered dramatic drops in economic product, life-expectency etc. during colonial rule.
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Universal literacy is again complete bogus. Most people are uneducated, even today. They are clueless in how to go about their daily lives in an educated manner, even in essential matters like health and nutrition. Other civilizations were far better educated.
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Which civilizations do you have in mind?
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Given that you are developing grand theories of reality at times, I'm very curios to hear "Which civilizations do YOU have in mind?". Our visions might be more aligned than we sense over twitter, who knows ;)
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If I were to design a civilization and it would be overcome by another civilization because it had better military and social control technologies, I would have failed, no? Disliking military and social control is not a mitigating circumstance in an evolutionary competition.
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The thing that is "overcoming" us, is not an other civilisation, but human-made climate change. I'm not against guidance (control with trust & agency), but i do sense progress is moving away from the militaristic/brutal forms of "education", towards more gentle ideas.
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How to navigate the accelerating climate change times as a global society best, is of course a open question. The forming concessions of some sort of hyper-technological mad-max maximum security paranoia planet seems just very unattractive, no?
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It is not as if we are getting much of a choice. Everybody is acting on what they consider to be their incentives, according to their abilities and opportunities, and the result is violent competition, global progress and eventually collapse.
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How does cooperative behaviour play into your model here? It seems, that one of the major breakthroughs of humanity in the past 100 years, has been how to organise large-scale cooperation (through communication at the speed of light). I strongly suspect, this trend will continue.
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