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   Dan Drake 🦆 (ddrake@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 18:45:21 JST Dan Drake 🦆

   in reply to

   • John Carlos Baez

   @johncarlosbaez this reminds me of Scott's "Seeing Like a State". And the useful advice on "don't be a dick" reminds me of an interview where Douglas Rushkoff mentioned speaking with billionaires on how they should try to handle their bunkers:

   https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-01-13/the-response-survival-of-the-richest-with-douglas-rushkoff/

   The billionaires were all worried about a sudden, global collapse of civilization into a Hobbesian, Mad Max sort of world. So they build their safety bunkers to survive it. But they need to hire guards and so on, because they're billionaires and that's how they think.

   But -- the billionaires think -- how do I ensure the guards stay loyal? And how much armament would I need to protect me from my now-savage neighbors?

   They hired Rushkoff to advise them.

   But of course, the best way to deal with neighbors who want to loot your bunker and kill you is...to be nice to your neighbors and help them. That is: don't be a dick. Be on Team Human, as Rushkoff would say.

   • Embed this notice
     John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 18:45:23 JST John Carlos Baez

     Kemp's new book "Goliath’s Curse" is about the collapse of civiliations. Like ours.

     “History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”

     The old empires rose for 3 main reasons:

     1. The ability to store surplus food (grain). This made having slaves profitable.
     2. A state monopoly on new weapon technologies.
     3. "Caged land": regions surrounded by deserts and other natural barriers, which people couldn't easily leave.

     But these states contained the seeds of their own demise: "as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

     Remind you of anything?

     In steep power hierarchies, those with the dark triad of narcissism, sadism and Machiavellianism rise to the top:

     “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule China by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”

     He gives useful advice on how to stave off the coming collapse, or at least make it less bad:

     "Don't be a dick. Don’t work for big tech, arms manufacturers or the fossil fuel industry. Don’t accept relationships based on domination and share power whenever you can.”

     However, nobody notices they're being a dick.

     https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/02/self-termination-history-and-future-of-societal-collapse

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.