Amerika

In ancient Persia they invented a brilliantly horrible method of execution called scaphism where the doomed person was sealed in a tree trunk and fed junk food until they drowned or decayed in their own waste. Someone put way too much time into their dark thoughts to invent that one.

However, human societies die the same way: they are imprisioned with their waste. At the simplest level, hominids killed themselves off by defecating too close to where they ate, at which point putrid diseases killed off the whole tribe.

More complex societies die from pollution but more importantly, the accumulation of waste humans or “normies.” These are people who could not survive without civilization in its advanced form; through the process of degeneration, they have lost natural abilities like analytical and creative thinking.

The bourgeois normie is a product of the city. He can handle having a job, credit card, shopping, voting, paying taxes, and indulging the sins of the flesh, but if he were isolated somewhere without constant entertainment and a process to follow to succeed, he would wither and die.

This is why civilizations run an arc from youth to old age. As they succeed they doom themselves because they make it easier to survive, which insulates people from the consequences of their actions, making it economically most efficient to be a careless, thoughtless, and egotistical consumer.

At that point, those societies get more of these bourgeois normies. Eventually they drown out the few people who can handle analytical and creative thinking, and the normies create their ideal society, which is like Communism: warlords granting favors in exchange for allegiance.

Societies of that nature quickly turn into archetypal third world ruins, with mixed-race or trace admixture people wandering around being opportunistic and corrupt, ensuring that tyranny of incompetence prevails and the good or those who “know better” are punished.

One thought for future civilization designers: whatever civilization purges its normies fastest will take over the world. Assuming that perhaps a fifth of any generation will lack the full traits of a healthy member of the society, the loss of people will be minor.

A society that sheds normies might resemble the American West or early Europe, where conditions were hard enough to keep normies from accumulating. Once cities were established and regular food supply was present, the bloat began.

If every person had to show competence at tasks that were not predefined for them — “produce food” versus “plant these seeds in vertical rows” — their society would avoid the multiplicity of internal problems that slow, then sabotage, permanent civilizations.

Tags: bourgeois, collapse, normies, NPCs, scaphism