The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that advanced societies are precariously balanced and can face sudden downturns due to their complexity.
Niall Ferguson's quote highlights the inherent fragility of complex civilizations, indicating that while they may appear stable, they are often on the brink of disorder. When such societies encounter overwhelming challenges, they can disintegrate rapidly, demonstrating the unpredictability of human progress and societal structure.
In practice
In a speech about societal resilience, one might quote Ferguson to emphasize the need for robust systems.
It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.
If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.
Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it.
For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps- competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization.
Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.
Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. ... That is the end of the Great Divergence.
The less I have, the freer I am to do whatever I want to do.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
Because your brain uses information from the areas around the blind spot to make a reasonable guess about what the blind spot would see if only it weren't blind, and then your brain fills in the scene with this information. That's right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn't consult you about this, doesn't seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene.
This woman is beautiful and clever: but how much cleverer she would have become if she were not beautiful!
And so, lastly, does the very name of "Catholic", which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house.
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