Dreams of the Collective Unconscious - by BLAP

David Friedman has a neat post1 about how every big modern American political group has a different apocalypse myth, each playing out in parallel. It’s catastrophic climate change for the left; total coastal-elite institutional capture for the right; AI takeover for the rationalist sphere. Fifty years ago it was overpopulation. Over this time period I would also add Cold War nuclear fears, peak oil, and Y2K. Friedman also mentions the apparent rise in dystopian themes across literature and film (it’s always been interesting to me that “climate fiction” forms a whole genre). These range from “explicitly fiction, but with some allegories to contemporary social issues” to “realistic concrete fear exaggerated into unrealistic scenarios”. He’s puzzled by this trend, since many statistics would suggest the world is on a positive trajectory. Part of what makes the pattern so odd is that, by objective criteria, the world has not only not gone to Hell, it is in multiple respects strikingly bett

David Friedman has a neat post1 about how every big modern American political group has a different apocalypse myth, each playing out in parallel. It’s catastrophic climate change for the left; total coastal-elite institutional capture for the right; AI takeover for the rationalist sphere. Fifty years ago it was overpopulation. Over this time period I would also add Cold War nuclear fears, peak oil, and Y2K. Friedman also mentions the apparent rise in dystopian themes across literature and film (it’s always been interesting to me that “climate fiction” forms a whole genre). These range from “e