Primitivism

A while ago I argued that if modern civilization collapses, which is a possibility given the relentless action of the worldwide IQ Shredder that we call "modernity", then humanity will never get a second chance to start industrial civilization ever again. By lack of cheap fuel mostly. We'd be stuck, at best, with a Chinese style "high-level equilibrium trap", basically the middle ages going on forever.

To which many commenters surprised me by saying: good-riddance then. What's so bad about the Iron Age? Men were men, women were women, children were children. Yes, no air conditioning and no antibiotics is pretty bad. But you get used to that. What you never get used to is the never ending ratchet of contemporary madness. We call ourselves reactionaries for a reason; maybe we should celebrate the forcible return to Ancien Regime technology.

I honestly don't know what to say to that. I've a natural instinct to defend my current standard of living, but I can't really argue against the fact that preindustrial societies are just much healthier. It's not really comparable. As a datum, let me put forward this video. It comes from a channel that our resident Hindu nationalist, the good Lalit, put on my last post, on a white guy living in Burma, defending the Burmese against the attacks by the global islamoprogressive alliance. It's a nice channel, check it out. And now look at this video of some rakhine state kids. As he says, just being kids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ruy2s7ismA

Burma is not Africa. The TFR is a modest, but healthy 2.3. And interestingly enough they publish of the Marital TFR, which is extremely reasonable at 4 kids per married couple. I guess the Buddhist establishment takes care of the bachelors and spinsters.

Screenshot 2017-09-24 20.37.37

But anyone, it's just a joy to watch children in a rural setting, where they can play around amongst themselves, unwatched by adults, unbothered by cars and buses, playing and laughing and just being there, learning to live in society. Instead of being thrown into cages ("classes") from age 2 where they are lectured 10 hours a day on inane stuff made up by evil fat women from the government. Like we do.

Everyone would be more than glad to have 4 children in this kind of environment. They're just much less work, children raise each other and they're just a joy to look at. Again, I'm not eulogizing poverty, life in rural Burma isn't easy, and the people aren't all happy and good-natured. Poverty is harsh. But the one thing the rural poor in traditional societies do better is raising children. Which is the very thing which we, the richest societies in human history, are utterly incapable of doing. And is this inability which will bury is, likely forever.

Show this video to your mother and just watch her giggle for 18 minutes.

[…] Primitivism […]

Modernity has been an ongoing process of mining down the top soil and ore deposits. The global average end point as the fuels, soil, and metals run out will be much more neolithic looking than rural Burma.

Brave Bronze Age nudists ftw. But when I made this point in the other post people argued that metal recycling is rather easy so apparently there'd no shortage of that. 18th century technology seems doable. Don't know about topsoil though.

Don't know why they'd say that. The steel and copper we have will rust away in a few centuries and then there's no more ever again. All the surface level ore deposits are gone. You need enormous machines and massive amounts of diesel to get any at all these days. You can't do late middle ages style agriculture without plenty of iron or bronze.

the unwind will take decades, centuries. it will happen (it is happening), just not all at once, tomorrow. our lifestyle goes away, slowly bleeding out. nobody alive today will see the bottoming out.

Even in an Idiocracy scenario we aren't going to lose the capability to smelt iron for centuries. We can use and reuse scrap metal before it rusts all away.

There's tons of Coal everywhere and Trees/Reforestation would naturally happen. So, what are these cheap fuels you say would lack? You can also generate energy with Windmills and Watermills. So no, your energy argument is bogus.

When can I expect 'the big one', the cascadian rupture, yellowstone, north korean war, economic collapse, or whichever circus that will bring down the modern world? Patiently waiting thank you.

The coal is gone. All that's left requires massive machines and enormous amounts of diesel to get. Wood and windmills ain't gonna run even a middle ages level civilization.

Wood and windmills is exactly what run a medieval level civilization. Let's not overdo it. China run mostly on wood and animal power until the 20th century.

You guys realize that Windmills and Watermills can also generate electricity, right?

They seem a lot like the Mexican/CentralAmerican kids in my Brooklyn neighborhood, who were almost always easy for my very White-looking kid to play with. It was sometimes kind of unnerving to me how their parents would let them run around the park unattended. As far as I know, none of them ever went missing.

("evil fat women from the government" is perfect.)

Good luck trying to produce a lot of electricity with 18th century mills.

[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]

For children in the first world, the real danger is the automobile. We in the US have made a pact with the devil - the car allows us to have our suburban estates - but only at the cost of filling the landscape with noisy and dangerous machines which are a threat to everyone and especially to children. Without cars, most US suburban areas would be perfectly safe for children to wonder about. Of course, one can scarily imagine the existence of suburbs without cars...

That will take thousands of years assuming zero effort is point into preservation, and oxidized metal doesn't just disappear. If literally all of the metal on the earth's surface rusted away it would most likely create large, identifiable concentrations of recoverable metal oxides. No one's bothered with this though, because there's no point right now.

Intergalactic travel will not happen, instead the sun will die and destroy the earth in the process. By going the primitive route the higher IQ races will ensure their survival till that day comes. A medieval agricultural society with 100 IQ(Amish) will be a more pleasant place to live in then with 80 IQ society which we are heading for at the current trends.

We aren't going back to the iron age. Or not all of us are, at least. It's entirely possible that 9 billion humans or whatever can't live indefinitely like this, but half a billion probably could. For one thing, institutional technical knowledge is disseminated enough that even the "collapse of civilization" won't reduce the entire planet to Year Zero. In the very long term natural selection is going to produce *something* with at-least-stable fertility and the chutzpah to keep the Bantu out. Metal depletion is a nonissue. Easily-accessible ore deposits haven't been destroyed, they've been brought to the surface, purified, and are easily recoverable. Rare earth elements are mostly useful for electronics miniaturization, and I'm not sure they couldn't be recovered from PCB waste using relatively crude smelting processes if we cared enough. I can believe that a confluence of factors (dysgenics, energy depletion, mineral availability) could lead to a mass die-off down to "only" 1800 levels, but it wouldn't be the end of industrial civilization.

Yeah, rub a magnet in dry dirt and then tell us that iron is hard to find. Iron and iron oxide are everywhere! Giant open-pit mines in Australia are for the best-quality iron ore; the rest is left where it lies. You might have a point about copper, though.