Here’s a news flash, bubba: The coming crisis of the 21st Century is probably going to be population-based, but the exact opposite of the projected over-population problem we’ve been harped on and on and on about for decades. What’s going to be the primary crisis is going to be the implosive crash of the world’s productive population, and the hollowing-out of things. The “Marching Morons” problem, shown in “Idiocracy” and a bunch of short stories by Cyril Kornbluth ain’t gonna happen the way they imagined: Instead of internally generated morons, we’re going to see the productive populations of the world swamped by the dregs of cousin-marrying “civilizations” like the Islamics and Africans. Even China is going to have problems, because nobody wants to admit the salient fact that socialism and the social welfare net basically remove any real need to raise kids to take care of you in your old age.

Europe is about to learn this the hard way. They’re importing all those vibrant foreigners in the hopes that they’ll settle down and become complacent little burghers, contributing to the welfare state. Only thing is, they’re more accurately going to become human cuckoos, parasitizing the body politic. End result? The effective death of European civilization within a generation or two, unless the impending collapse serves to wake up the body politic. Which I doubt it will… Rome probably saw what they had coming, but couldn’t muster the will to do a damn thing about it, either.

The German defense budget and lack of will to support a real military is the modern equivalent of the equestrian and patrician classes of Rome looking the other way when their members started “thumbing” their sons, so that they’d be unavailable for military service. Germany has lost the will to survive, and while that may be a case of historical karma coming due, the fact remains that the strongest economy in Europe is currently uninterested in defending itself in any real way, at either a macro- or a micro-level. You could tell they were lost, when those pictures of all the pretty girls welcoming their conquering rapists were seen carrying the placards saying that they’d rather welcome rapists than racists…

When the women lose interest in breeding with their own, your culture is dying. You see the same thing with regards to that syndrome here in the US, with all the middle-class white girls choosing to breed with the minority du jour rather than their own kind. They’ve been so brainwashed by the left that they think they’re doing a good deed, when the reality is that they’re assisting their own ethnic suicide. I defy anyone to show me another example of a civilization where the upper classes have adopted the mores and values of the lower classes with such alacrity and unquestioning fervor. None dare criticize it, either, lest they be termed “racist”, despite the manifest damage these “gangsta rappers” and such have done to their own ghetto culture.

The disasters to come are going to be entirely unforeseen, by the “conventional wisdom”. That’s just the way of it… Were you to have a time machine, and then use it to go back and interview the average person of intellect back during the 1890s, none of them would have likely seen the sort of carnage coming that WWI represented. A few did foresee, like Bloch, but they were dishonored prophets in their own times.

What takes us down will likely be something entirely out of left field, a black swan event. Exactly as it is equally likely that the “experts” are going to miss the things that might come along to save us from our folly, like Musk making space accessible enough that we start to see real economic effect from space-based resources in our lifetimes. That, right there, is a game-changer.

On the other hand, the f**king arrogant ass might well drop an asteroid on us by mistake…

Basically, Cowen’s scenario is about what I expected around 2010 or so. These days I am slightly more optimistic about the future than I was around 2010.