>>2482I'm just going to pop in here and fundamentally disagree with you on nearly every point. Except maybe the short-term fragility of supply chains (which is basically a truism).
I think the core of your misunderstanding is that you are confusing governments and social relations with what is actually the structure and prime mover of modern society: capital flows and capital accumulation. In this way your claim that current societal problems portend of some major systems collapse is both right, on a surface level, and wrong in a crucial way. Since, the collapse of the federal government, although I am deeply skeptical of this, is in no way a collapse of the actual systems of control and domination, which are truthfully in the hands of corporate elite and transnational capital.
It is also in this way that you are only correct to point out the short-term vulnerability of supply chains; the fluidity of transnational capital means it is only answerable to the whims and decisions of separate governments in superficial ways.
Furthermore, your point relating to the desirability of Amish society seems to be far too idealistic, if we put aside the massive concerns most people would have with such a change. Idealistic in that it assumes that by rejecting the cultural forms of capital accumulation we are somehow free of the economic or material domination as well. No, the Amish are free only from the modern cultural manifestations of market forces and have only managed to revive the outmoded face of societal structure, while still in the same boat of economic domination as the rest of us. Not to mention it remains to be seen how long that cultural facade can hold against the revolutionary force of capital.
It is what appears to you as cultural collapse that is in fact the system reordering itself completely in service to its economic ends; not collapse but refinement. It may be worthwhile to wonder just how malleable humans are, and whether this restructuring might not push us too far, but it would be a misunderstanding to see it as degradation at a system level analysis.
As a final note, whatever health benefits the Chinese may have inherited from the generational concentration of Chi will have to be measured against the material demands of global capital on their descendants.
Addendum: any appearance of communist thought in my writing
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