<story><title>The Social Recession: By the Numbers</title><url>https://novum.substack.com/p/social-recession-by-the-numbers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seydor</author><text>The US must not be a low-trust society. You should try to live in an actual low trust society (where people can&amp;#x27;t trust institutions and instead revert to their family or clan). The US is not like that, people seem to trust other people they have never seen before because they trust things like justice or the US army or google or apple.&lt;p&gt;Other than that, it seems that things are progressing as normal. Since the times of the Enlightenment, there was this oxymoron of idealizing individual empowerment, while advocating that humans are social animals that must act collectively. Which is it? Well with today&amp;#x27;s technology and abundance people are drifting deliberately and decisively towards more individualism. Perhaps it is about ime to stop describing these things as &amp;#x27;problems&amp;#x27; and realize that they are the new reality. Our politics worldwide is quite ancient , and not prepared for the next phase of individual empowerment. The places of the world that are stuck in collectivist mindsets are awfully deluded like Russia, or rigidly antiprogressive, like China.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peanut_merchant</author><text>This argument feels like an oversimplification to me.&lt;p&gt;These are only two examples of &amp;quot;collectivist&amp;quot; societies. The idea that you are either strongly individualist or China&amp;#x2F;Russia seems like a false dichotomy.&lt;p&gt;Some of the happiest societies in the world employee a model that is neither rigidly collectivist or individualist (e.g. the Nordic model).&lt;p&gt;My intuition is that the solution like probably in the middle ground at a political level, while adapting to our new digital reality.&lt;p&gt;The argument that our society must embrace full individualism or fail, feels a bit like the red-scare lite.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Social Recession: By the Numbers</title><url>https://novum.substack.com/p/social-recession-by-the-numbers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seydor</author><text>The US must not be a low-trust society. You should try to live in an actual low trust society (where people can&amp;#x27;t trust institutions and instead revert to their family or clan). The US is not like that, people seem to trust other people they have never seen before because they trust things like justice or the US army or google or apple.&lt;p&gt;Other than that, it seems that things are progressing as normal. Since the times of the Enlightenment, there was this oxymoron of idealizing individual empowerment, while advocating that humans are social animals that must act collectively. Which is it? Well with today&amp;#x27;s technology and abundance people are drifting deliberately and decisively towards more individualism. Perhaps it is about ime to stop describing these things as &amp;#x27;problems&amp;#x27; and realize that they are the new reality. Our politics worldwide is quite ancient , and not prepared for the next phase of individual empowerment. The places of the world that are stuck in collectivist mindsets are awfully deluded like Russia, or rigidly antiprogressive, like China.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>Every single highly individualistic society seems to be in population decline (more so if you factor out immigrants from “anti-progressive” Muslim or Catholic countries). Individualism seems to be a self-limiting feature of society: it’s unpleasant to raise children in highly individualistic societies, which makes such societies inherently transitory.[1]&lt;p&gt;Is societal self-obsolescence how you define “progress?” How successful can your society really be if your people don’t seem to want to raise kids in it and perpetuate it? If you have to import people from collectivist societies just to take care of your elderly?&lt;p&gt;[1] The inverse is not true—many collectivist societies are also facing population walls—but for quite different reasons.</text></comment>