Up or Down

>does not follow
It's a common line of rhetoric to say that we are either advancing society through an action, or degrading and degenerating it. I think it's a really simple look at things, and that it's often a look that deliberately leaves out details that might say otherwise. Look at the populist garbage we have on the TV nowadays, and how it wants you to think that in the last 15 years, we have somehow moved either forward or backward. On what basis have we done so? How do you quantify this? What are the units of societal progression? The best we have is quality of life models defined in the study of economics.

It's a fair assumption that anyone pushing this shit without fitting it to a scale or model has ulterior motives. It's just an abstract simplification of things and it can easily be fitted to political narratives without need for any details like that. Pure unadulterated ideology.

>self help tier garbage
See above. If you don't buy into it, but you still want to have a sense of feeling like you're advancing society, then you can make more informed decisions. You can make more informed decisions because you don't take a reductionist stance on what matters to you.

Thinking back on it now, I realize why you said non sequiter.

I think it is necessary to evaluate your actions as beneficial or harmful to others around you. But when you apply it on the scale of the society, you don't really have a solid basis in making that evaluation. You're one of many, and it's difficult to draw a cause-effect relationship between what you're doing and the effects it has on your society. It's difficult to even put a scale to what your society is, though I'd assume most people mean your country.

You can be a lawyer pushing case law for example. That has the potential to have a wider affect on things that could either be beneficial or harmful to people. But it may be beneficial to some, and harmful to others. How do we quantify the net good it does?

Or you can act on a smaller scale in your more immediate community. And you can draw a cause-effect relationship like the above much more easily and without needing anywhere near as much time to observe the changes it makes. The amount of people you affect is smaller too, so it's easier to evaluate just how many people you're helping and how many you're hurting. And if you're doing this to the people you want to do it to.

We are advancing, we have accomplished things previous generations never thought possible. No one has to watch their children wiped out by a smallpox epidemic anymore, we have advanced science to the point where we can perform experiments to try and figure out what happened at the start of the big bang, our democratic institutions, though imperfect, have put an end to 1000s of years of autocracy. As for wealth, who decided it is a sin? If normies want to attend concerts, go clubbing and be in bliss for a few hours, what is so terrible?

You might be inclined to claim I want to do nothing about the negative effects of all this or that I ought to stop glorifying progress so people take things like pollution more seriously. On the contrary, it is exactly because we value progress that we must work to preserve the environment, develop a sustainable economy and help economies progress past the Dickensian sweatshop stage, because technically that is progress as well.

I'm sure that human development is as a whole linear and may have universal properties.

Modernity was the beginning of the end. We learnt how to accelerate, but the fragile human body cannot keep up with the autoproduction and self-organisation of the body politic of capital. We created a monster and now that monster is evolving faster than us. Human 'progress' is not development but rather a fixture, a way of puncturing grapple-holes into the fabric of time in order to delay the inevitability of entropic disaster. Entropy is something not yet realised, and yet is simultaneously organising its own self-creation - We are both participants and spectators in the techno-singularity of human genocide.

We are neither degrading nor advancing, there was never a time when we were either.

Human development is more like a ribosome than a straight line. I can't believe people still don't understand this.

>as a society

Whose society? "Global society"? That isn't a society any more than a nation-state is a "family". What a silly question.

Then what's our destination?

feels like we're plateauing tbqh

History doesn't have a narrative you giant cuck it just happens.

That's not really an answer and you're using "cuck" wrong. At least use the classic "faggot" instead.

Only reason I'd say that claiming we are progressing is a moot point, is because all civilizations progress from where they were yesterday.

It has yet to translate to anything sustainable. Degeneracy can still find a seat at what man considers the most important tables.

Not trying to sound doom and gloom but if history has pointed out one thing, it's that you can have revolutions, radical changes that are motivated by virtuous intent, that actually sustain virtue, but it never lasts simply because you can't control everyone. Eventually some new blood comes forth who finds and relishes in exploits.

Which is the sole reason governments are what they are. It's a vain attempt to play shepherd, to possess said control, but given man's unpredictable nature, we occasionally have to suffer some corrupted and flat out wicked leadership.

And that's the cycle. Progress, collapse, rebuild. Wash rinse repeat.

The very fact people of the future will have to suffer the collapse though, it should really make people of the present ask this questions- We're only here for 50-70 years on average, right? You take nothing with you on your next journey. You woke up one day on the day of your birth, among somehting that was created before you, which is this giant rock floating in vast space. One day again, you are going to wake up among a place that was created for you before you ever reached that place as well.

So what's REALLY important right now? Your desires? Or others?

Going off on a tangent, my bad. But still..

Yo hol up,
It can be said with certainty that technology is definitely progressing. Acknowledging this, who is to say that the march of technological advance is not the primary mode of cultural development, to which everything else is secondary?

Advancing quantitatively. Degrading where it counts.

633 "What about all the countless and rapidly escalating symptoms of decline then?" — The bigger and stronger you get, the more you eat and drink, and therefore the more you piss and shit. How hard is this simple truth of life for you retards to grasp?

634 Nietzsche: "The concept of decadence.— Waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned: they are necessary consequences of life, of the growth of life. The phenomenon of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life: one is in no position to abolish it. Reason demands, on the contrary, that we do justice to it.
It is a disgrace for all socialist systematizers that they suppose there could be circumstances — social combinations — in which vice, disease, prostitution, distress would no longer grow.— But that means condemning life.— A society is not free to remain young. And even at the height of its strength it has to form refuse and waste materials. The more energetically and boldly it advances, the richer it will be in failures and deformities, the closer to decline.— Age is not abolished by means of institutions. Neither is disease. Nor vice."

637 Let's try to view the purported "decline" from a slightly different perspective, so that maybe even some of you retards can finally understand that there's really obviously no such thing. Imagine you were living in the nineteenth century, and someone came along and asked you whether you wouldn't mind tolerating a few "fag pride" parades and some retards on TV screaming that nigger slaves from Africa are equal to you, in exchange for moon landings, relativity and quantum theory, nuclear fission and genome sequencing, as well as countless other mind-bogglingly incredible achievements in all fields of human endeavor including the birth and rise of the greatest and last philosopher himself. What would you respond? — QED, there's no decline, and, as I've already explained, the only ones who are declining here are those who insist there is.

Occasionally there is news of some new discovery so apparently science is still trundling along and some new big thing might come along.

When was the last time things collapsed? In many places the closest thing to it was some meme war long before the industrial revolution.

If progress is measured by virtue, why can't material progress help with this? If you are illiterate and must spend most of your time tending to your sheep and potatoes, what virtue you have is wasted and your works could be wiped out in a famine.

Is it not patrician and virtuous to want to learn more about the material world? Doing so has forced us to ask difficult questions and awakened many, it is preferable to the way religion was in the past, both for practical and spiritual reasons.

>So what's REALLY important right now? Your desires? Or others?
I don't know. Maybe no one's desires are important.

>occasionally
if biotech grew faster it would come with a warning label: explosive

i guarantee we'll have superhuman gene mod babies in 50 years

idk no one fucking k

Because of man's unpredictability. Progress means nothing if conflict and differences are being spread.

You could hide yourself in a bubble on the sideline. Shut the world off from view. But there are men on the outside competing for power and exploiting their fellow man, creating conflict when otherwise there would be none.

Some men get off on control, reigning over others, bringing harm on others. It satisfies their ego, they believe it adds to their self worth. They may even be so incorrect to the extent that causing harm actually makes them feel like "more of a man."

The unpredictable nature of man, means anything is possible. When man has no boundaries or chooses to ignore said boundaries...terrible things are entirely possible. It's the precursor for the collapse.

That should cause someone to ask for answers. What is evil, why does it exist, and how can we avoid it.

Unfortunately for some, the answer the isn't in science either. Science is no more than a tool to be exercised by the will of man's heart. Or his inherit nature. Science is like money. If the one wielding it wishes to do evil, they will do exactly that.

So all this progression, in science and technology, as fascinating as it is, it's not the answer to anything other than convenience and curiosity.

With all that progression, we still have a problem at the foundation of man.

Rome collapsed roughly after 400 years.

America has only been around for 239 years.

But what if progress isn't necessarily the answer? What if virtue rests within that which sustains. Not in hording or extravagance, but in temperance?

The material world as you define it, is fascinating and can create new means of convenience and efficiency and might probably be a reward to the virtuous. But unfortunately I personally don't see how it will save anyone or anything from moral decay or degeneracy, which ultimately leads to the conflicts, wars, exploitation etc etc

It's like, someone who commits a crime to put food on his table. Through technology you could give that man a new job, way of life. And sure he might reconsider his path. But what about those who just relish in control and exploitation?

These are the men who will go further than the average person to satisfy their inherit degeneracy. Just a few of them can achieve tremendous amounts of power, simply because of a majority, who are inherently content and exercise said temperance, who don't really share the same ambitions. Before you know it, they're under a yoke of propaganda, lies, being programmed to think as their leaders think, when otherwise they could care less. This dynamic is pretty intense if you think about it.

>I don't know. Maybe no one's desires are important.
I should have refined that question. That's my fault. But I meant to ask, if ones own desires are more important, than the well being of others who can't seem to help themselves in the moment.

I only ask this because of how short our time is here. Obviously some people will think this is there one and only life, therefore they convince themselves it's all about themselves and their desire. I'm not saying there aren't people who reside in the middle either....This is just a question I've been asking myself lately.

I like to think of society as a wheel being rolled down a road; each spoke and section of the wheel is a different ethic or tradition that comes in for some time then phases out for something else and overtime a diametrically opposed ethic will come in. This also will eventually fade as the cycle continues. The wheel is in motion and society may adapt similar or previous mentalities or attitudes; but ultimately we still are making progress down a road.

This - if you think fall for the progress meme you are literally falling for marxism

>Progress means nothing if conflict and differences are being spread

>In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Progress != solely technological progress

aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-science-and-technology-come-to-a-halt

I don't think the development of skills require a reign of terror before hand.

Depends on what.

Materially speaking, we are in the most advanced state of society ever.
In other senses, we are not.

There is no modern world leader of the same caliber as a person as Marcus Aurelius.

The "enjoy the decline" alt righters have to be the dumbest bunch of spergs in recent political history.

>growth-decline dichotomy

Advancing through economics growth despite society

CREEEEEEEEEEED!!!

Advancing to what?
Degrading in what form?

We in the wealthiest, most peaceful, most free, most advanced age seen so far

And none of it actually matters.

*tips fedora*

It matters a little.

Literally the only thing that matters in the long run is art.