Is The Future Degeneracy?

Is BowTiedBull Correct?

BowTied Bull

has been tweeting for a few months now that the future will include crazy amounts of degeneracy. Are they right? I thought it would be fun for me to really dive into this so here we go. This is also a guide on my thinking process in case that sort of thing interests you.

Before we move on to anything else we have to define degeneracy. The Oxford dictionary says: “having lost the physical, mental, or moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline”. Websters dictionary describes degenerate as: “having sunk to a condition below that which is normal to a type”.

The issue I’m having with both of these definitions is that they’re very subjective to the observer. Fortunately, what they do have in common is that they both have some kind of decline associated with them, that we can work with.

Who does society generally call degenerates? Typically people that have gambling issues, alcoholics, drug addicts, sex addicts, anyone in industries that involve sex and more. So usually when society is calling someone a degenerate what they’re usually describing is a lack of control. Someone that lacks discipline and gives into their impulses. So if we combine the dictionary definition with what society generally thinks and remove the subjective nonsense you get a definition like, lets say:

‘A person with a lack of control over their impulses that eventually causes their life to spiral in a downwards trajectory.’

One huge difference between humans and animals is that animals act on instinct and impulses, we humans can chose to ignore them. So another way you could describe a ‘degenerate’ is someone that is reducing themselves to the level of an animal. Now that we understand this a little better, how the hell do we measure it?

Well, addiction is a lack of control. So let’s see if we can find some stats on people that are addicted to things that degrade their lives.

This is a chart from the NIH showing overdose deaths by drug. Putting fentanyl aside because it’s so potent, not really worth looking at for what we’re doing. Besides cocaine and meth, the other street drugs seemed to have recently been trending down but an increase from 2010 levels for sure. Prescription Opioids deaths seem to be trending down overall though.

I hit an obstacle, while researching this stuff I noticed how hard it is to find year-over-year data on addiction. You can find stats for “right now” but finding studies, charts and numbers for the % changes over the past 50 years is not trivial. This makes my job here a little bit more difficult. While we can all easily assume that addiction is increasing, you’re not really having a serious conversation if you don’t have studies and numbers. A lot of people seems to be really concerned with overall numbers but that’s actually not that informative. Sometimes numbers can lie, here’s an example: People didn’t have phones with internet back in the day but they did have porn magazines. Let’s say theoretically you get stats that says 70% of adults watch internet porn daily. Before you consider this a problem, you have to dig a bit deeper. How many times a day did people in the past open their porn magazines vs how many times does the average person today visit a porn site? It’s hard to see if we have a problem without the past numbers. I can figure this out but this is all causing this article to get way more complex and time consuming than I wanted it to be so we’ll move on.

Let’s measure something else, a fun stat we can look at is obesity rates.

NIH Chart

According to a study by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, half of the adult U.S. population will have obesity and about a quarter will have severe obesity by 2030.

https://vimeo.com/user55838552/review/378857945/aee4b9ffbc

This study alone shows that Bowtiedbull is standing on solid ground with his statements. This was a very high quality study with a lot of participants and they accounted for bias. It basically said If trends continue, by 2030 half of Americans will exercise a detrimental lack of control aka degeneracy multiple times a day.

“The findings from our approach suggest with high predictive accuracy that by 2030 nearly 1 in 2 adults will have obesity (48.9%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 47.7 to 50.1), and the prevalence will be higher than 50% in 29 states and not below 35% in any state. Nearly 1 in 4 adults is projected to have severe obesity by 2030 (24.2%; 95% CI, 22.9 to 25.5), and the prevalence will be higher than 25% in 25 states.”

Where I will not agree with Bull is the part where they say this is not reversible. Things that involve human psychology are always reversible, all It takes is one man to start a global trend of getting people to attempt to master their impulses and not be ruled by them. This stuff is not rocket science, it’s the basic thing you get taught in military bootcamp. In bootcamp they make you stand still and not move no matter what happens. Some people think it’s stupid but that’s because they don’t understand what’s happening. When you’re standing completely still “At attention” some things will start to happen that you will have to resist. Parts of your body start to itch, ants and flies will crawl on you, your feet start to hurt, you want to laugh. You have to resist all these things and the more you do it the better you get at resisting your impulses.

Control.

I still have hope for the world, I think if we all do our part in mastering these things and teaching the ones who come after us we increase our chances of surviving this era.