Settler colonialism is the age old answer to declining opportunities and stiffening class hierarchies that lead to social discontent and civil unrest. The ancient Greeks did it. Greece, around 800 BC, began to become overpopulated, so they sent their poor people across the Mediterranean, setting up colonies in Italy, Spain/Iberia, and Asia Minor/Turkey/Anatolia. The Vikings did it. Their raids and resettlements occurred after a period of population growth that either exceeded Scandinavia's carrying capacity, given the technology of the time, or made it so anyone living there who is not from an established family would be miserably poor. Hence the Vikings: the raids and raiders.Early Modern Europe sent its poor people to the New World and Australia and New Zealand. It worked.Early America, especially pre-1900, had the Wild West. If you were poor in the east and didn't like your life, the wisdom of the day was "Go west, young man!" The West is where you could find your fortune. And American social scientists even knew, in the late 1800s, that the end of the frontier would bring social conflict and civil unrest to the country, as the "safety valve" of having a frontier to settle was turned off. (The safety valve metaphor, of course a product of the Industrial Revolution, was made famous at that time as a way to express the concept that closure of the frontier would lead to pressure building up in the country, which could explode.)And sure enough, the late 1800s and early 1900s saw the Progressive Era, the main cause during which was the Labor Movement, when workers, who now couldn't just move west and build a farm or start mining minerals or trapping beavers, had to form unions and go on strikes in order to get high enough pay, enough days off, and enough benefits not to be miserable. So the unrest happened exactly when the frontier ended.Russia developed the same way (see pic). Russia grew so big for the same reason as America: to push its excess poor
>>526245438>muttoids do bad things>whatabout Russia
>>526245438>Russia grew so big for the same reason as America: to push its excess poorIt grew because it could and the people they killed weren't white.If we tried that everybody cried crimes against humanity, even though we killed only slavs and jews.
>>526245438population farther and farther afield and away from the established areas where class hierarchies were already set up and upward mobility was next to impossible. So Russia got huge by casting out huge numbers of poor settlers to Siberia and then Alaska. Settler colonialism is also how the Third World today is handling its own social pressure. Send the poorest to the West in order to relieve pressure in the home countries. And Western elites want those poor anyway for the sake of cheap labor. Hegel argued that when a society stops growing outward, it starts growing upward (more class stratification and stiffening of the social hierarchy). To avoid this, you need lands to settle.The intergenerational poor have been a problem in Western countries for, as the name suggests, generations. The New Deal and Social Democracy relieved social pressure in America and Europe in the mid 20th century, but rolling back the New Deal and Social Democracy since the 1980s has caused pressure to increase, which is inevitably going to lead to social conflict and civil unrest. Look at Occupy Wall Street. It was crushed, but it will return because the pressure is still there and in fact is growing more severe.Yes, societies function pretty deterministically when you look at them from the large historical and sociological perspective. This doesn't mean there is no "free will," but it does mean whatever free will there is is limited. So perhaps the West needs to adopt the age old problem-solver: settler colonialism. America and Europe could take or buy some territory in Africa or South America, the only available lands in our age (poor enough to be willing to sell territory, for the right price), and then send the poor Americans and Europeans there to settle and establish new lives. Would this work?Today's poor aren't the poor of the 1800s, who were virtually all farmers and a few craftsmen, and who had these skills and could just settle new land if land were available.
>>526245976Today's economy is radically different. Farming skills exist only among a few percent of modern populations, whereas a century ago most people knew how to farm. So this would be an issue to be solved: what skills and jobs would the settlers have and do?But I'm just opening a discussion. Could settler colonialism work for the Western poor of today, like it worked for thousands of years for previous societies?
>>526246120Population growth, leading to overpopulation and class conflict, leading to poor people being sent to foreign lands, is how civilization spread across the world after agriculture began. Every place where farming didn't develop independently saw farming introduced by settlers leaving overpopulated societies where opportunity was very limited. If the whole world is now civilized and overpopulated, then what do you do with the excess poor population so that they don't make trouble in their home countries?The New Deal and Social Democracy answered this question in the 20th century, but it took exceptional circumstances to even get the New Deal and Social Democracy enacted. You don't just have elites willing to pay high taxes to help ordinary people become middle class out of the goodness of their hearts, so repeating the 20th century solution may not be possible.
A big theme (and dream) in 20th century culture was space exploration and eventual colonization of other planets and moons. People assumed outer space would be the next horizon for settlement, the new frontier.But by the 1970s, with the moon landings and space probes, it became clear that space is far too inhospitable to human life for settlement anytime in the near future -- not before there are giant scientific and technological leaps that make terraforming planets like Mars a feasible option. (I've read estimates before of how many millions of years of transporting gases to Mars it would take to build an earthlike atmosphere on that planet. Yes, it would take MILLIONS of years just to make Mars habitable.)So we're stuck on earth for a while. We'll need to find a solution to overpopulation and poverty for here on earth, or else deal with endless social conflicts and civil unrest. Or, the final option is to get rid of the excess population, which our leaders are sort of doing by suppressing fertility.
>>526247315we don't have an excess population of ethnic europeans. if anything we have too few
And frankly, our leadership has been quite ethical in its behavior about reducing excess population through suppressing fertility by social engineering. People say they want kids, but if the world is already overpopulated, what' the point? To give your kids miserable lives?Fertility rates have been dropping around the world for generations, so that now only sub-Saharan Africa has fertility above the replacement rate. Even India and Latin America will soon have shrinking populations and be like Japan, since every region has dropped into sub-replacement fertility. This is not a bad thing. It necessary. It means that in a couple centuries, the human population should be back under a billion, since Africa will also peak soon and then see sub-replacement fertility, probably within another generation or so.
>>526247544The "underpopulation" discourse has been trendy for about a decade now. Before that, all talk was about overpopulation. So these trends change.On the whole, the world is vastly overpopulated. And the West is no exception because our leaders are importing hundreds of millions of foreigners to keep the populations growing. You could say whites are underpopulated, but that's kind of a moot point when humans in general are overpopulated and white countries (historically white countries) are importing hundreds of millions of foreigners and becoming overpopulated anyway.When 95% (see pic) of mammal biomass on planet Earth is human weight and the weight of livestock, something is wrong.So let's say we stop the immigration. Then we still need to lower the global population by probably at least 90% of industrial civilization is going to be sustainable for centuries and millennia. And whites might have to number a few hundred million at the most, and still use fewer resources than today, or else make much more efficient use of the same resources.As it stands, one first world person uses millions of pounds of concrete and steel during a lifetime, and many tons of food and other materials. All this is pulled from the ground somewhere in the world, so even if rich countries aren't using their own resources, or if they have no resources like Europe and Japan, they still use up the resources of other parts of the world. It might end up being the case that industrial civilization is a flash in the pan, something that happens, lasts a few centuries, and then disappears while medieval ways of life return because only simple agriculture can be sustained for centuries and millennia.
