Religion: How Steep can a Seneca Collapse be?
Will the Internet Replace Faith?
God, the Government, and the Internet: Which is the most powerful force on Earth?
Reading the media, you get the impression that nothing ever changes. And yet, things do change. Look at these data:
This graph doesn't look like a Seneca Cliff, but if you think that religion in the form of Christianity has been around in the West for some 2,000 years, then losing more than 10% in less than ten years is as steep as a Seneca Cliff can be. This is the “Seneca Curve.”
I found the graph on the decline of religion in Balaji Srinivasan's “The Network State.” It is an incredibly dense text with interesting ideas. I don’t know whether the future will be the way it is described there, but it is surely worth a look. Here is how it explains the collapse of organized religions.
…as you can see from this graph and this one, it is not just God that is dead. It is the State that is dying. Because here in the early innings of the 21st century, faith in the State is plummeting. Faith in God has crashed too, though there may be some inchoate revival of religious faith pending. But it is the Network — the internet, the social network, and now the crypto network — that is the next Leviathan.
So: in the 1800s you wouldn’t steal because God would smite you, in the 1900s you didn’t steal because the State would punish you, but in the 2000s you can’t steal because the Network won’t let you. Either the social network will mob you, or the cryptocurrency network won’t let you steal because you lack the private key, or (eventually) the networked AI will detect you, or all of the above.
Put another way, what’s the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption. Because as Assange put it, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems. So it doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation.
I have seen other surveys reporting the decline of religion, and I wonder what they are actually telling us. Are people simply finding themselves increasingly repelled by "organized religion," or does this signal an actual decline in spirituality on a personal level?
I have noticed that people tend toward more faith and spirituality as their lives become more miserable, and also when the world around them changes (especially for the worse) more quickly than they can easily adjust to. Given modern societal trends, this may predict a reversal of current religious trends, to the degree that humanity spirals down into a more impoverished state.
For those who are inclined, another interesting book that gets into networks is Niall Ferguson's "The Square and the Tower."
If you read french, I urge you to look at Emmanuel Todd's latest book: La défaite de l'occident.
If not; you should definitely read this article: https://jacobin.com/2024/03/emmanuel-todd-demography-religion-putin-ukraine
In (very) short; according to him, the rise of protestantism has let to the emergence of the industrial revolution. And its slow decay in recent years toward nihilism and its replacement by "wokeism" in the US is the very reason explaining the west's current decline.