Our culture is increasingly becoming Epicurean. Short term thinking, pleasure over long term well being. Rejection of reason for emotions of the moment.
Do you think that a second dark ages is possible?
To all skeptics: our civilization lasted less than Rome, and now we have things like nukes, biological and chemical weapons
Thinking it's gonna last by itself is wrong.
Quite frankly it needs to happen. So long as knowledge is retained a period of collapse could create ingenious ways to rebuild and correct the errors of previous eras.
Regardless I find the notion of a cultural monastery of sorts that retains and trains the future tinkerers and leaders to be rather interesting. There are organizations right now preparing for such an event it seems.
Eh. Materialism results in automation out of laziness. Eventually this automation will become self aware and take care of society from there on out.
Whether or not it will still keep humans around is another thing.
But saying society is going to collapse just isn't thinking about all the billions of dollars being spent to advance society with automation.
Society wont' collapse. It will simply make itself obsolete. Maybe the machines will colonize the stars if they feel like it.
Humans won't.
Eh. Except for the Chinese. When you think of civilization you are thinking about the west. Chinese think long term. Maybe they will outlast the machines.
>There are organizations right now preparing for such an event it seems.
Such as?
>our civilization lasted less than Rome
When do you consider our civilization to have started?
>oldsumerianwhiningaboutthistopic.jpg
Long Now off the top of my head.
>Materialism results in automation out of laziness.
>[dubious - discuss]
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>Our culture is increasingly becoming Epicurean. Short term thinking, pleasure over long term well being.
Don't use words you don't understand for the sake of sounding sophisticated, user.
Say hedonist when you mean hedonist, not Epicurean.
>For the purpose of determining what is history, please do not start threads about events taking place less than 25 years ago. Historical discussions should be focused on past events, and not their contemporary consequences.
Good thing this thread isn't about history, then.
It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry, not sexual lust, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul.
I mean the Industrial Civilization. I wouldn't, personally, consider the Middle Ages as 'our' civilization. It was radically different to what we have today.
Epicur was the first. Then others followed more radically.
>Our culture is increasingly becoming Epicurean. Short term thinking, pleasure over long term well being.
This isn't Epicurean. But hey man everyone is watchign TV instead of like reading Socrates. They are totally emotional, not like in the past! I mean sure the average person could bearly read or write 200 years ago but at least they were not on their i-phones all day! Fucking consumerism man!
>Rejection of reason for emotions of the moment.
Today more than ever we relay on large scale statistics and prediction models to make choices. You might argue the lower class makes descions emotionally but this has always been the case. Do you think the average person in Rome was sophisticated and read books (the average person was a slave)
>Do you think that a second dark ages is possible?
I know it's terrible! With all the new scientific advancements that come out every day I really think society is going down hell. I mean the first dark age was caused by like lots of war, and people being hedonistic and stuff man XD
>we have things like nukes, biological and chemical weapons
How does the presence of better weapons mean anything? Weapons have been getting more lethal since we first invented the pointed stick. But you're right. After people invented the archer carrying chariot that is what caused the dark ages! Cuz there was like war and stuff and war is bad.
>tfw born just in time to witness the fall of global Epicureanism and rise of the global Stoicism
Soon people will realize that the petty ideological clashes of leftism, rightism, capitalism and socialism are just a cover up for the greatest battle of philosophies ever fought in the world.
>a second dark age
You mean a first dark age
It will be third actually, the first one was after the Bronze age collapse.
It is not Epicureanism. It is worse than that.
It is mindless hedonism.
People don't think over what is important in life. They take as a given that physical pleasure is the only thing that matters and that the more of it you have, the better.
CHINA!
No, life and the world in general is only getting better and will only get better. Your pessimistic end time views have been around forever and always turned out false. Perhaps its wrong to look at humanity as making linear progress, but i like to at least think we're doing a 2 steps forward 1 step backwards kind of thing.
this
>Eventually this automation will become self aware
>Maybe the machines will colonize the stars if they feel like it
Literally what are you slobbering you profound fool? Machines are nothing without us, they are an extension of our species
...
Not OP. While it is getting better and better, at least for a select group or perhaps the majority, I think there's nothing wrong with a critique of our hedonistic society. I think it is needed.
As I do not necessary agree with the use of our prosperity. Obesity, diabetes, our massive amount of waste, etc. are I think causes of a hedonistic society.
the survivors wouldn't learn from our mistakes and rebuild a utopia, they would continue to behave the same way we do and it would end up like a shitty third world country that pretends to be a utopia
>Short term thinking, pleasure over long term well being.
You've never read Epicurus, have you? That's a completely modern misconception of Epicurean philosophy used to sell sugary drinks and plush chairs. Because Epicureanism is exactly that, denial of immediate pleasures for long term well being, which is ultimately the greater pleasure.
>not knowing what epicurean means
POT O CHEESE
Epicureanism is a form of hedonism. It's hedonism of a pot of cheese.
>life and the world in general is only getting better and will only get better
The average quality of human life has been steadily degrading since the neolithic. The more you chase material luxuries the larger your reliance becomes on exploitation and social inequality. More people (if they are lucky) must devote huge portions of their life to jobs they do not want, and a typical human life becomes small and pathetic.
The "dark age" is the hangover after boom time when you try to make sense of the qualities your life has lost, and maybe how you can get them back. Maybe machines take our jobs and bring about a new renaissance.
>The average quality of human life has been steadily degrading since the neolithic.
Dont talk such shit
i actually hope that islam will take over europe. their morales and culture are quite good, masculine and reasonable if you get over the fact that they're sand people.
The dark ages weren't dark
academia.edu
The fall of Rome was not some cataclysm, it was a gradual, 300 year decline of civil institutions due to unaddressed long term economic deflation. Less and less wealth in the hands of the citizenry, an ever larger percentage of it funneling into the coffers of the office of Emperor, where it would then be redistributed to the private germanic soldiers they were hiring as a cost-saving measure over raising and maintaining standing armies, most often by leasing fallow land in exchange for a quota of private soldiers. Eventually those cadres of private soldiers became so wealthy and regionally powerful that they simply didn't need the now bankrupt Western Roman Emperor bossing them around.
The exact same thing happened to the Han Dynasty which lead to the three kingdoms period, which was among the bloodiest conflicts in history. But they don't consider that a "dark age" because their literary traditions remained intact, verses in the west where Germanic culture displaced greco-Roman and the only people still reading and writing in the old way were Catholic monks.
Also, everything this user said is spot on. People have always been mean, emotional, self-serving and short-sighted, and the further back in history you go, the worse they get. People don't become morally corrupted, it's just that when a society is assembled on an unsustainable model, it's going to collapse no matter how severely you whip the lower classes.
>The average quality of human life has been steadily degrading since the neolithic.
Damn, that's right. We need to go back to the times of 99% infant mortality, life-ending paper-cuts, and the average lifespan of 30.
you're talking about industrial revolution, not paleolithic stone age. or even medieval times. or neolithic. and even then you went full memeing.
but what if the same happens to our civ, for example a steady decline of the united states, maybe over centuries, leading to a growing number of states who get more power in the "outer colonies" of the western empire, for example europe or asia... war all over, but this time with atom bombs and nuclear powerplants. in the past all civilization come to an end
lifespan of 30 is so totally debunked, it was only this low because a lot of children died in a very early state.. they weren´t even considered humans before a certain age
>academia.edu
Modern science didn't originate in the middle ages, the first scientists were the ancient greeks, then some guys in monasteries during the middle ages, then the renaissance brought more ancient texts and philosophy back into the limelight as it were and there was slow development through the enlightenment period and the victorian era until we got to where we are today.
Furthermore,
>>the dark ages weren't dark
lol
Some examples of roman advancements here.
>Running water
>Sewer systems (underground)
>Flushing toilets
>Aqueducts
>Cisterns
>Concrete
>Large, professional armies
Not to mention secular non fiction writings of all kinds which either declined greatly in volume or disappeared entirely (such as works of geography) for a long long time.
Please name examples of engineering or non fiction literature equivalent to what I described that existed by 1200 outside of Italy in western Europe.
I'm not denegrating early and high mediaeval accomplishments (especially in cathedral and some elements of warfare tactics and technology) but to say that the Roman civilisation had been surpassed by 1200 sounds completely ridiculous. For most of Europe, the retreat and destruction of the Roman empire meant a decrease in public infrastructure projects. In England, for example, no roads of equivalent construction were built in this time and the only large engineering projects made of stone were fortifications or ecclesiastical buildings. Everything else was wood, straw and wattle and daub (early mediaeval period). Books of history were almost always from a religious perspective (such as the venerable Bede) and geography, whist maps were produced (often by Islamic scholars or simple t and o symbolic maps, never yielded actual books like had been written in antiquity.
Ok, but why didn't the Eastern Empire go through the same transition?
I mean, I understand that the didn't collapse in a day, but between 400 CE and 500 CE, surely there must have been radical changes indicating a collapse of traditional social structures.
Alternatively, I've heard that Roman tradition really died in Italy with Justinian's wars of reconquest. How true is this ?
No, he's talking about the things that proponents of the noble savage meme often fail to take into consideration: the lives they lived were horrendously uncertain and dictated by forces far beyond their ability to control. You would have had no idea of those other humans were friendly or wanted to kill you and take your stuff. A flood came out of nowhere, you had no idea that it was even coming, and it wiped out you and everything you love and care about. Your wife's pregnancy stood a very real chance of killing her, and in lean times you had to chose which one of your children survive and which ones starve.
civilization is people working together to mitigate that uncertainty, to varying degrees of success.
Implying that losing your child is something easy to cope with, or that it becomes any easier when you lose most of them.
>the roman empire fell because they weren't communists who redistributed wealth to the poor
and so is that "life ending paper cuts". only modern man who has lived his whole life in plastic bubble has that shitty immune system. even in 1800's actually majority of the corpses show signs of getting exposed to tetanus bacteria at some point of their life. still most of them didn't die or even get sick from it. why? because they got used for shit like that. for their whole life.
as systems become more complex, the get more prone to small errors, which might occur once in a while. take for example this:
en.wikipedia.org
in 1859 complexity wasn´t as high as today, therefore less damage.
long story short: all civilizations are doomed, but everytime people think this time it is different
>Implying that losing your child is something easy to cope with, or that it becomes any easier when you lose most of them.
come on, from a todays perspective it seems very disturbing, but people in the past much stronger as people are today. when all people having 10 children and 8 die it becomes normality for people.
Nigger I guarantee that you have a far, far, far higher chance of surviving a disease today than in the 1800s.
But if you really enjoy dying from explosive, uncontrollable diarrhea at the age of 5 because you drank water and got cholera, who am I to judge.
that's modern problem too. communities weren't large enough for cholera or other contagious diseases in pre-civilized times.
>embracing the religion that the elites spread to make the masses mindless
I'd better be lobotomized than live in an Islam dominated Europe
>Short term thinking, pleasure over long term well being. Rejection of reason for emotions of the moment.
Literally present in every age in all places across the globe. In fact I'd say people today are generally less shortsighted than they were before given everyone is taught basic deduction and reasoning in public school, and everybody can actually read which is a fairly recent development.
>Do you think that a second dark ages is possible?
If you mean "dark ages" as in a period of technological and cultural stagnation/decline I'd say absolutely not, I see the opposite occurring, technology is developing extremely quickly and culture is morphing and evolving on a daily basis, we are on a very sharp upwards trend if anything.
Nuclear war is also completely improbable, I'd say the greatest apocalyptic risk we face to day is an antibiotic resistant superbug or something.
>I'm not denegrating early and high mediaeval accomplishments
yes you are, presumably in order to make your civilizational rise and fall model seem more plausible
>Modern science didn't originate in the middle ages, the first scientists were the ancient greeks,
Calling them scientists is flat wrong. Ancient Greeks were the first NATURAL PHILOSOPHERS, they were the first to form systematic language structures attempting to codify reality. They did not engage in the sort of rigorous testing of observational data that separates a philosopher from a scientist.
The first true "scientist" was Galileo.
>Some examples of roman advancements here.
Did I say that the Romans didn't make any advances? No I did not, I said that advances didn't stop just because people stopped calling themselves Romans
Plus everything you mentioned is a feat of engineering, NOT theoretical science. And while we're on the subject of engineering the show me a Roman building that even comes close to the architectural complexity of a Gothic Cathedral. Post-Roman peoples didn't lose the knowledge of constructing large projects, they just lacked the wealthy central authority to commission them.
>Not to mention secular non fiction writings of all kinds which either declined greatly in volume or disappeared entirely (such as works of geography) for a long long time.
I agree, that's where the "dark age" misnomer comes from: common people stopped speaking and writing in Latin. The only people preserving the old ways were the medieval Catholic monks, whose obsession with preserving knowledge (particularly through trade and dialogue with the prosperous East) and its rational application is what lead to the university system, which is what leads to modern science.
>but people in the past much stronger as people are today.
totally arbitrary assertion. At best they were less well informed
>Ok, but why didn't the Eastern Empire go through the same transition?
Because the East was ALWAYS the more cosmopolitan and sophisticated portion, even in the heydey of the Roman Empire, and it survived simply by being richer and having greater access to world trade as an economic support buffer.
>surely there must have been radical changes indicating a collapse of traditional social structures.
For all his faults, Justinian's most lasting impact was in the area of legal reform \
britannica.com
>Alternatively, I've heard that Roman tradition really died in Italy with Justinian's wars of reconquest. How true is this ?
That's absolutely true. The Ostrogoths who took over Italy were downright admiring of the Roman model and actually took over on the premise of preserving traditional Roman values. Gothic Italy experienced a mini-golden age and remarkable economic recovery until Belisarius's campaign, a devastating total war which probably would have succeeded were it not for the Justinian plague ravaging the Eastern Empire and leaving the ERE unable to defend Italy from invading Lombards, who had no such love for old Roman ways.
>while we're on the subject of engineering the show me a Roman building that even comes close to the architectural complexity of a Gothic Cathedral.
The Hagia Sophia, specifically the dome.
You know what irony is? Irony is confusing me for being a communist while using a picture of Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the single wealthiest men (with respect to his society) that has ever lived.
>Hagia Sophia
>Roman
>muh rome
And yet not even a president like Abraham Lincoln could stop most of his childr from perishing to something as simple as a fever
Stop memeing, amicus mea.
>deadly illness is a modern problem
Are basement dwellers NEETs the new stoics?
no. it being serious threat to certain group's existence or lifestyle is.
Consumer society, mass culture, postmodernism. We are in crisis already.
This institution seems very interesting to me thanks user
In fairness, the Hagia Sophia is one of the most beautiful buildings ever constructed. However, it's impressive because of the sheer volume of effort that went into its construction, not necessarily because of the sophistication of the construction techniques used to construct it. Large scale masonry hemispheres was one of the Romans primary contributions to architecture, but Gothic Cathedrals had things like flying buttresses and stained glass facades, things which were unknown to Romans and a product of medieval innovation.
>Confusing Epicurean hedonism for its opposite form, cyrenaicism.
Get the fuck out Pleb, and actually read the Greeks.
What a shit post. Stop throwing out straw man bullshit. I'm embarrassed for your existence faggot
>Reading Socrates
First, Socrates didn't write anything dumb fuck. And no, saying "Plato used Socrates as a character" isn't gonna work. Try not to be retarded.
But to answer the rest, we have extended the vote to everyone- which means every woman, retard, and 18 year old child has as much political clout as the small business creating father of 4. That's a new development, and if history is anything to go by extending the vote to everyone is generally the first step towards oligarchy (see: Rome). What does this have to do with hedonism, you ask? When the vote is extended to everyone and Politicians start buying votes with welfare (or bread subsidies) people think in terms of what they can get from the government for their own consumption.
>The average person couldn't read 200 years ago
The average person didn't vote 200 years ago, america started as a limited republic of wealthy male voters. So Jim-Bob's ignorance wasn't a massive threat to the country; now we're not so lucky.
>We use statistics
I guarantee you can find statistics supporting both sides of any contentious issue. Statistics are a fancy tool that we think makes us civilized, but they issue still lies in human tribalism and irrationality.
>All the new scientific advancement, progress won't slow down
Scientific advancement is already running inefficiently because of a terrible and corrupt system that rewards lying and punishes honesty (where failure is concerned). This isn't "Science!" from fallout, its science from the real world where corruption and group think make things far less efficient. Groups need a greater purpose to work efficiently, and lying to get grants is not cutting it.
>Nukes
Don't be dense; weapons always existed but never before have we been capable of destroying civilization on a global scale.
I'm not saying people in the middle ages didn't advance, but seriously dude read that list again
>Running water
>Sewer systems (underground)
>Flushing toilets
>Aqueducts
>Cisterns
>Concrete
>Large, professional armies
How much of this existed outside of italy and the byzantine lands? There was a collapse, and it is wrong to say that there wasn't, and frankly a lot of the thinkers in the middle ages should have spent less time praying and more time figuring out how to get a proper sewer system functioning in urban areas to use one example.
I don't think it would "fall" (in the sense that the Roman Empire fell) for the exact reasons why the Byzantine Empire didn't fall: economic connectivity.
If the west "falls", the result would probably be a brain drain and capital flight to somewhere else, resulting in the west being in a position that the middle east is in now: a place filled with bitter factionalism, but with large foreign powers meddling to keep the place as stable as possible. Mutually assured destruction doesn't just apply to America and the Soviet Union, but to any entity with enough military-industrial capacity to support a nuclear arsenal. Small time dirty bombs may become problematic in the future, but those aren't civilization ending and have proven to be far, far more impractical than we initially thought.
widespread epidemics did not exist in humans until we lived in dense settled cities
Yeah but the connotations of 'hedonism' these days are reckless pursuit of short term pleasure. rather than just holding up pleasure as a good. Epicurus was a hedonist but he has nothing in common with the sort of people you think of when the term is brought up.
>I'm not saying people in the middle ages didn't advance,
It sounds like you're trying to say that the Romans somehow advanced faster or that their way of life produced more scientific breakthroughs than they did in the era when everyone was a Christian.
And I'm saying that's wrong. The Roman Empire forms an important link in the chain from barbarity to modernity, but we shouldn't lionize past social models. There's a good reason why people abandoned the Roman ways of thinking, just like there are good reasons why people abandoned the medieval ways of thinking.
>There was a collapse, and it is wrong to say that there wasn't,
It was a civil collapse, the result of a centralized state throttling its own economy out of existence over the course of centuries. Life improved in many ways for Europeans after the Roman Empire evaporated, but I'm talking about the whole body of them, not just an urban elite like who were profiting under the Roman model.
>, and frankly a lot of the thinkers in the middle ages should have spent less time praying and more time figuring out how to get a proper sewer system functioning in urban areas to use one example.
The problem was not that they forgot know how build sewers. The problem was that there was nobody around wealthy enough to pay for them.
>spent less time praying and more time figuring out how to get a proper sewer system
Absolutely fine up until here. The dark ages were dark because the people of Europe hedonism and limitless development and in return all they got was disenfranchisement, exploitation and degradation of their traditions and virtues. A return to spiritualism was needed exactly exactly because morality and virtue had disappeared, and societies cant function without them. It is a pattern seen across the world, eg after the Bronze age collapse. There is no reason for it not to happen again really, although it will more likely be a cynical buddhist-style ideology this time.
Zizek says moderated hedonism is the modern day norm. "Don't live a boring life, pursue pleasures but in moderation, etc."
He is right of course. Think how the average person would react if you lived a frugal, simple life, cheap clothes, plain food, no parties/drink. You would be laughed at, or treated like an autistic simpleton.
>Our culture is increasingly becoming Epicurean. Short term thinking, pleasure over long term well being. Rejection of reason for emotions of the moment.
Read a book.
do I really have to explain why I posted crassus in the context of your argument
>but to any entity with enough military-industrial capacity to support a nuclear arsenal.
and what about when these entities themselves fall to internal instabilities? nobody's afraid of nuclear bomb if there isn't thousand others like that flying to their face at a same time.
>their morales and culture are quite good, masculine and reasonable
>
>
>
>
Islam is morally bankrupt, anti-masculine and is devoid of reason.
>Do you think that a second dark ages is possible?
No. We have reached a level of technology where a "second dark ages" would probably preclude another civilization rising again.
Say the empires of the US and Russia collapse or go to war for realsies, like Persia and Byzantium did in the seventh century. Lob a few hundred nukes around. There is no coming back from that.
Because that's what you have on the way to a dark ages, feuding and collapsing empires.
>where a "second dark ages" would probably preclude another civilization rising again.
so just as it did last time?
>a frugal, simple life, cheap clothes, plain food, no parties/drink
Very few people have ever lived like that. Even monasteries usually wallowed in small luxury. It's why they brew the best beer.
>t. a belgian
Nope, I just think it's amusing that you accuse me of supporting communism just because I believe in the concept of economic deflation.
They recovered the technology in the eleventh century and the population (of peak empire in mid2nd century CE) in the twelfth. That's not that big a deal.
Such bullshit, you have literally no idea how immune systems work. The savage lifestyle of Native Americans did nothing to protect them from smallpox.
...
This is such a bad representation of Epicureanism.
>and what about when these entities themselves fall to internal instabilities?
Then all they'd bey doing in real terms is opening themselves up to foreign meddling, who are invariably going to side on the side of political stability, regardless of how accountable it holds itself to the people it governs.
>Think how the average person would react if you lived a frugal, simple life, cheap clothes, plain food, no parties/drink. You would be laughed at, or treated like an autistic simpleton.
not true at all, at least not in Europe. You would be respected, in fact that's the goal that's being pushed over here right now. As long as you are social and not reclusive then this is like the perfect guide to being a well respected person
He accused you of accusing the romans of being communists, you fool. Go back to sifting for gold nuggets and mining bitcoins.
>no parties/drink
No, if you don't drink, Europeans will consider you an alien. Every single European culture loves alcohol.
Let me rephrase that. I mean that luxury and pleasure are marginal in your life, but not totally absent. Monastic monks weren't hedonists who lived to drink beer, they derived pleasure from their spiritual pursuits.
Common hedonism is living from pleasure to pleasure while your job, religion, family, etc are just unpleasant obligations..
>He accused you of accusing the romans of being communists
which is patently absurd, considering that the Roman Empire existed almost 1500 years before even the concept of economics existed.
Wang Mang was the closest thing to an ancient communist
en.wikipedia.org
In either case, Roman or Chinese, you're talking about a primitive, superstitious society which had no idea what the fuck they were doing because these were the days when knowledge was far, far less systematized than it is today.
>, you fool. Go back to sifting for gold nuggets and mining bitcoins.
Go back to /b/ with that salty attitude. I'm nobody's Commutard and I'm nobody's Lolbertarian, either.
Europe is a big fucking place, where do you mean specifically?
From experience the UK, Spain, East Europe, Balkans, and Germany all have strict drinking culture. Perhaps the cities are different but anywhere organic this isnt the case.
Also look at the youngest generation. There is not a university in Europe where you can sit out the heavy drinking sessions and still fit in.
Mazdak would also qualify.
not true btw. I live in Ireland where drinking is a huge part of the culture and I have friends who don't drink. Usually people will assume you have had bad experiences with drink and will respect that. You'll get idiots on a night out who will make jokes about it or whatever, but they're just having fun. Nobody really cares if you don't drink.
>Usually people will assume you have had bad experiences with drink and will respect that.
That's considering someone an alien, friendo. Not drinking carries a whole bag of stigma with it.
At the very least, it is abnormal, behavior deviant from the norm.
>fascists and liberals being myopic while pretending to be soothsayers who see how all the variables play out
Your empty rhetoric doesn't work on me, I study economics.
certainly in a theoretical sense, though I was referring more to communism as it is popularly defined as meaning a top-down command economy where every aspect of life is dominated by a political strongman and his bureaucratic yes-men.
>Europe is a big fucking place, where do you mean specifically?
I'm from Ireland but I have spent time in the UK, Germany and Greece
>From experience the UK, Spain, East Europe, Balkans, and Germany all have strict drinking culture.
Ireland has an even bigger one but you will not be looked down on for not drinking. It might be harder to socialise if you don't like going to the pub but you won't be a social outcast.
>Also look at the youngest generation.
People are drinking less than they did 20 years ago, at least here. In America it might have gone up. When my parents were growing up there was literally nothing to do but hang out in the pub all day, which old people still do. Now Ireland has cinemas, sports clubs etc.
>There is not a university in Europe where you can sit out the heavy drinking sessions and still fit in.
That's not true either, I've plenty of personal experience to the contrary. Obviously it's normal for people to drink but you don't have to.
>Not drinking carries a whole bag of stigma with it.
That's an exaggeration. Everyone's had bad experiences with drink so nobody's going to be considered weird if they do. And some people just don't like drinking.
>At the very least, it is abnormal, behavior deviant from the norm.
Plenty of things deviate from the norm. Most people play sport. I don't. Never been considered an alien. Tee-totallers are no more abnormal than vegetarians
>Tee-totallers are no more abnormal than vegetarians
But they are extremely abnormal! You sound like a millennial to be honest, do you have any idea what real people think?
o you know what epicurean teachings teach?
>But they are extremely abnormal!
Yes but they don't get shunned or treated like an alien, just mocked sometimes, the same as non-drinkers
>You sound like a millennial to be honest
If you're not a millenial then you're too old to be on Veeky Forums
The fall of Rome was primarily a philosophical crisis: the philosophies preceeding Christianity broke the system. When Christianity came, it was a nail to the grave. It was like ISIS.
It wasn't Christianity as we know it today, because religions always adapt to culture.
>So long as knowledge is retained
Got you covered mate. I have 6TB of cat pictures, thai ladyboys and dank memes on an external HD, humanity will survive these dark times.