i dunno man. i guess you think what you think. i need to not get pissed off online, its a waste of energy and i get super hostile with people. but if you think you can untangle all the threads and have any real certainty that things are gonna go this way or that way or whatever the fuck, you’re probably wrong. there is no predictive scientific process to determine how political systems are going to shake out, and the ideas people have about how the world functions vary so drastically that making predictions decades into the future might as well be a spiritual process. it tends to spit out whatever convictions you already have about the nature of the world. i’ve got a bit of a fixation with cults and conspiracy theories, the knots our brains can tie us into are fascinating to me, and one thing that comes up again and again is just how little the way we think about the world must rely on the facts we actually know with relative certainty, and how pernicious a feeling of certainty is for determining the truth of anything at all. if you actually do feel in any way certain that you are correct, especially about future events, that usually isn’t a good sign.

i think there is a danger that things may get very bad. believe me, i am intimately familiar with the historical context, and am not just telling myself happy stories to cope. i am doing that, but i also have what i think are well founded reservations about the predictive power of historical accounts. i think its ultimately irresponsible and unproductive to be soothsaying, and pretty foolish to boil down the monumentally complex sociopolitical quagmire we’re wading into to a binary choice. it ain’t, and your individual brain probably hasn’t stumbled upon the clear, well defined answer to what the next few decades have in store for us. if it did, that path would be clear and obvious to everybody, and we’d all agree with you, especially if we had all the same receipts. unfortunately, that’s literally never happened, and doesn’t even happen for things we do have relative certainty about, like the efficacy of vaccines in preventing disease. nobody knows what the fuck is going on, and the future is largely opaque to us. it isn’t entirely opaque, and its certainly not useless to use what we know of the past to inform our view of the present, but projecting outwards into the future isn’t helping anybody, and its far more error prone than anybody would like it to be.

so yeah. beware. talk about the historical analogies all you want, describe the details of the systems we live under and their observable flaws. those are relatively well understood. but you are making claims about how the future works, and that is not something humans are known for being good at. it actually takes a lot of infrastructure and accumulated knowledge to predict even the physical trajectory of moving objects over time, you probably haven’t cracked sociology.

i would consider not being strongly convicted of your own beliefs just generally. humans really don’t have a inbuilt method of discerning between confirmation and confirmation bias, other than exhaustive experimental research. can’t really do that on a societal scale, science hasn’t been around for long enough to really pin that shit down, and we change really fast. the patterns we’re observing from history are assembled from sparse and often incomplete accounts written by people with no understanding of our many cognitive biases. just… tons of intractable problems. not a solid foundation to build predictive models on.