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All those things truly suck and I agree that touching grass isn't going to fix them. I just want to push back against the "everything is falling, we are doomed" mindset. There were probably many people in the 1988 Soviet Union who felt the same way about having to recite communist bullshit in order to get any kind of decent job, and were depressed about raising their kids in a system so pervaded by corruption and irrational dogma. A few years later, the Soviet system collapsed. And it wasn't even so much because the people rose up in some glorious violent revolution, it was probably more because a bunch of people wanted blue jeans and rock and roll and meanwhile the Soviet elite decided that things needed to change both for their own personal benefit and because the existing system wasn't working very well. It is very hard to predict the future. Of course the Soviet Union was replaced by a system that became just as oppressive, but again I don't think there was anything necessarily inevitable about that.
Incidentally I think something similar is likely to happen in the US in the coming decades. Currently a gerontocracy is ruling over a social structure that is increasingly stagnant, degenerate and dysfunctional. This is likely to remain the case for one or two decades, and was also happening in the Soviet Union before 1985. Eventually someone not old and senile but merely middle-aged will come into power as the situation becomes desperate, and will promise to enact comprehensive reforms. Which, in the end, will collapse the entire edifice unto itself.
Every once in a while my mother says how Biden reminds her of the old Soviet leaders, and is flabbergasted how a country of 300 million cannot pick someone younger to lead it.
This, of course, assumes that it is that "300 million" who do the picking…
You have to forgive my boomer mother her boomer pretense. I think she's pretty sharp relative to the average anyway.
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I feel like this is self-defeating reasoning. Concerns of "Everything is falling, we are doomed" are not solved by "wait for societal collapse", they're validated. If the outcomes are "let the current spiral continue into societal collapse" or "wait for societal collapse to end the spiral", you're basically making an argument for accelerationism, but would that actually solve anything? I don't know how closely the institutional structures of Lysenkoism map onto our social structures but could a collapse actually affect our modern, decentralized online Lysenkoism?
Am I making sense?
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Counterpoint, North Korea still exist. More over, given their respective fertility rates, North Korea will likely win in a few more decades. Sure, they are both below replacement, but North only slightly so, and South is in full blown population collapse.
Win? With what? I'd like to see their antiquated air defenses deal with stealth fighters and drone swarms. Just having enough artillery shells stockpiled to level Seoul is far from sufficient to win.
They would get utterly stomped in a few decades, as opposed to being utterly stomped today. The only hope they have is reform and catch up, which isn't on the cards, or China lending a hand, and that's also extremely unlikely. Population, while far from irrelevant in war, matters far less when two powers aren't peers.
I imagine it will happen the same way as Europe. An increasingly aged South Korean population will become desperate for the children they refused to have to care for them. North Korea doesn't need to march across the border with rifles. They'll only need relatively able bodied workers able to wipe a geriatric's ass. And completely displace the political order of the society that adopts them, but you know...details.
I...don't think it'll happen that way. North Koreans practically aren't allowed to leave North Korea to begin with, the dictator semi-recently announced that the DPRK no longer seeks to reunify with the South, but to destroy it instead, and even so, I imagine any subversive tactics would themselves be subverted by the overwhelming power of culture in South Korean society (and, you know, actually having food).
No, should North Korea ever decide to conquer the South once and for all, it will be by the sword and no other method.
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I'm lowkey rooting for the Philippines to take over all of Asia in that method. They've got the only country still going strong in having children (thanks, Catholicism) and export a lot of nurses to foreign countries. For now they're still a small minority but in a hundred years...?
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North Korea started with strong cohesion and locked everything down early and very hard. That is not the situation our present structure enjoys.
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