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Education levels, economic stagnation, and pessimism about the future, if I were to guess.
These people had life on easy mode, natural resources, human biocapital, a high trust society where you had little crime yet the lack of ambition and virtue signalling is going to cause problems that are damn near unfixable.
Well, not really. Sweden has historically had a lot of timber and iron ore, which isn't nothing, but it's not exactly brimming with hydrocarbons or valuable minerals.
The human biocapital in north west europe, especially Scandinavia is pretty good compared to a lot of other places. I forget which of them has higher reserves of natural resources but they all have people or rather used to.
Norway, with their oil and gas.
Met a few of them when I was out, cool people.
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Culture becomes parasitic when its fate is no longer aligned with of its host body. Old successful cultures were symbionts, because, like mitochondria, their ability to reproduce and spread was mostly or entirely tied to the body's ability to reproduce and spread. The culture had to make sure its hosts completed their biological lifecycle, because cultures that didn't tended to be selected against.
Modern information technology, with relative peace and prosperity, has allowed culture to become more parasitic. The culture that spreads most successfully today has started interrupting or stalling the lifecycles of its host bodies, because that is time and energy being wasted from the culture's perspective. The culture is able to jump from host to host very rapidly. It has infected the nodes cultural transmission like media and academia and no longer needs old slow biological reproduction.
Intelligent people are the most malleable, the least biologically instinctive. They have the most modifiable behavior and in some respects are the most susceptible to these cultural pathogens, or at least become the most useful hosts. The selection pressure for immunity is no doubt intense, but it moves at the speed of biological reproduction so will take a while. I think something like this cycle has played out several times in history, but never before has it been so rapid and intense because of more limited technology.
Yeah, globalised bioleninism explains a ton
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