[onlooker]

I know this sounds like an inane question. But I am posting this precisely because it seems some here question the interpretation of certain circumstances and events as wishful thinking. As though some here who are more doomerish wish for whatever reason for this doom to transpire. Let me make it clear in regards to myself I do NOT wish for the world and civilization to collapse. Yet I am honest with my own interpretations and analysis. This honesty leads me to believe that we are in a very precarious situation as a species and a number of factors seem to be conspiring to lead world-wide civilization to a crash and/or collapse scenario. Already, certain areas of this planet you could say are already experiencing severe strains and collapse scenarios. We in rich countries have yet to feel the more severe impacts but it is just a matter of time. So NO I do not wish to forgo my relatively comfortable life but it now appears inevitable that all people on this planet will experience severe disruptions. I do not know of anyone who wishes hardships for themselves.

[ennui2]

People are hard-wired for prediction. There's very little difference between betting over who will win the superbowl and having a knock-down drag-down fight over doom. We're very future-oriented. It's just that we've evolved to scan for threats in the near-term (weeks, months, next couple years). So if something looks like it will happen in 5-10 years, it's natural to either hit the snooze bar or kind of mentally cook the books to think it will happen sooner so that it falls within the batten-down-the-hatches zone.

Socially I would think proving that you can predict the future put you at elevated social status, and so there's huge ego gratification in being able to "call" something. That's why gambling exists. Your value to the tribe increases a lot if you can prove you can see the future.

We're also past-oriented in the sense that we're pattern-matchers. We try to use the past to inform us about the future. That's Greer's entire schtick. He just keeps giving us history lessons about how the Romans did this or that and drawing parallels to today to try to prove that history will repeat itself. Same deal with the overshoot and die off. If yeast in the petri dish do x, then we will too.

These strategies are better than nothing at trying to divine the future, but they aren't infallible.

I've just become more interested in the topic of prediction and how it interacts with psychology since coming back here.

Note the case of Nate Silver for how this cuts both ways. Nate Silver "called" the last election cycle, whereas Karl Rove made an ass out of himself on national TV denying that Romney was losing. Before long, Nate Silver was held up as some sort of Nostradamus, but even he can't bat 1,000.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/02/ ... ate-silver

There is some lazy thinking here as far as those who religiously follow Gail or Greer's blogs. They defer to their talking points, their spin, their analysis, their air of infallibility. Or Zero Hedge or Alex Jones or Nate Silver or Jim Cramer.

Not only that, but this latching onto a prediction becomes very integral to a sense of self (hence doomers). You see it also play out in politics. Theories say that this or that -ism leads to TEOTWAWKI or utopia. We desire predictability, simple causes and effects. We hate chaos and randomness. But at the macro level, you have a combination of black swan events that make things worse AND white swan (if you want to call them) that make things better than we thought possible.

And yet it's very difficult to dislodge these ingrained views of the world.

Ultimately things proceed as a series of probabilities rather than clear 1s and 0s.

[jedrider]

I am just counting how many Super Bowls I have to go through before we cross the line to the other side of whatever awaits us. Its a lot of suspense predicting the end of our world. At least, I can count on Kunstler to point out whatever is wrong with our current collective experience as solace before a transition which may NOT happen on my watch, but is neverthess felt as ripples in our doom-er consciousness.

I think we fear that if we don't expect it, ask for it, it will strike us by surprise, which we fear even more.

[Newfie]

Doom is happening. I see the natural world deteriorating all around with the ever increasing prospect that humanity is committing suicide by gluttony.

Do I want doom? No.

I want humanity to go on a diet.

Will the vast majority of people experience that as doom? Yup!

It's all a matter of perspective.
......
So back to the OP perspective, do I want doom? Yes and no. Yes for everyone else and No for me. Selfish? Yup. I want us to stop being short sighted wastrels at the first possible moment. I want us to take appropriate action to mitigate the depth of the future doom. Those actions will cause doom in the present, but lessen doom in the future.

[ennui2]

Depending on your perspective, doom has been happening since the neolithic revolution. There's a difference in perspective when you feel you have 10,000 years of BAU left vs. 50 vs. 1. It's like, when you first finish gassing up the car, how much do you worry about running out of gas vs. running on fumes in the middle of nowhere? The sheer fact that you'll run out isn't the issue. It's the overall threat to you and yours. Grieving over the loss of biodiversity for its own sake is the weakest emotion of all (for the vast majority of us).

[Timo]

The re-fuel gas light just went on on earth's dashboard. The questions is, who's driving? Everyone and their puppy monkey baby is a backseat driver to our reality. The vast majority of humanity is quite relaxed because BAU means there will be a gas station right around the next corner, thus allowing the continuation of BAU en perpetuity. The minuscule minority of humanity realizes that simply re-fueling the tank and allowing the continuation of BAU is precisely the problem that will doom us all. For the vast majority of us, the future, and whatever problems might arise when we get there are someone else's problems to deal with. Either we'll be dead and not have to face the consequences of our actions, or someone else will have developed a new technology to address the problems that we're causing by our actions today. Either way, no one needs to worry. Have fun. Spend some money on something. Being a good, indoctrinated consumer always helps the economy, and that's our most pressing concern.

Have you ever witnessed such a grave injustice being committed that you've wished the worst possible and miserable outcome for the perpetrator who caused that injustice? Some people are so evil that you cannot help but wish the worst upon them. Damn them to Hell!!!!!

On a planetary scale, that same desire translates to Death to Humanity! Doom will certainly teach them the stupidity of their ways!

That is, if they're smart enough to make the correlation between their actions (cause) and their doom (consequences).

Suicide is a conscious decision. Right now, humanity is not conscious of our decisions.

[ROCKMAN]

Here’s some rather negative expectations: “This 'Chart of Doom' explains when a global recession will begin”

http://www.aol.com/article/2016/02/08/t ... -245951603

[Outcast_Searcher]

At least, I can count on Kunstler to point out whatever is wrong with our current collective experience as solace before a transition which may NOT happen on my watch, but is neverthess felt as ripples in our doom-er consciousness.

You can count on Kunstler to babble endlessly to bring in a buck.

You can't count on him to have any clue what he is talking about.

Example of one thing I did know a lot about, since I did a LOT of work on it (i.e. me and lots of other I/T folks all over the world ensuring nothing much would happen) for many months in 1999 as a database expert at IBM -- was Y2K.

Let's review Kunstler's (less than) sage advice re Y2K:

http://kunstler.com/mags_y2k.html

Writing this in April of ‘99, I believe that we are in for a serious event. Systems will fail, crash, seize up, cease to function. Not all systems, maybe only a fraction, but enough, and enough interdependent systems to affect many other systems. Y2K is real. Y2K is going to rock our world.

People will consequently suffer. I don’t know how much. Some people may lose their lives - but more likely at the hands of a disabled medical establishment than because of civil disorder, loss of power, starvation, bad water, or other projected horrors (though these, too, are possible).

It's nice that with this thing called the internet we can review peoples' records, and evaluate how good their advice is.

So clowns like Kunstler were "helping" believers like you out by selling you all sorts of helpful stuff like Y2K buckets for many times what they were worth. Fabulous (for Kunstler).

And what happened? A few minor computer reports had the wrong year on the header. And that's about it. And, given all the hard work tens of thousands of software technicians were doing to ensure virtually every critical system would work, as well as ensuring there were all manner of (well tested) backup plans in place just in case something was missed made this COMPLETELY PREDICTABLE. But of course, one would have to actually look outside the echo chamber of doom at the real world to be aware of the likely outcome. Oh, and be honest enough to inform one's readers/followers, even if that meant less profit for the event. (Or, of course, he could have just kept silent about it, if he were only a "sage" in certain areas. Better to admit "I'm not an expert at computer tech on a global scale" and maintain his credibility, if he had any.)

You may as well tell us you're enamored with Cramer for banging on a gong while pumping China on his show.

So if you want to listen to lots of uninformed doomer nonsense, then by all means, enjoy listening to Kunstler. If you actually want to learn how to prep, adapt, invest, live, etc. -- NOT SO MUCH.

[Newfie]

Timo,

Re: suicide as a conscious decision. I think we could argue this endlessly. Opinions can vary, but I think there is a lot of evidence that there are many forms of suicide that are not nearly so cut and dried. It's often the case that the "victim" is hears different voices, different internal arguments. So if you consider we here at Peak Oil as some bit of humanities conscious then just by virtue of the fact that we are chatting means humanity has some awareness.

And then there is willfoull ignorance, which would seem to be the case of the political and business leaders. There is not one good reason that they should not know.

Like the lady I knew who smoked, and got lung cancer. They agreed to give here treatment provided she quit smoking. Which she did, until she got home and commenced once again, and she got cancer again, and died. Was that suicide? Opinions will vary.

[ennui2]

Here’s some rather negative expectations: “This 'Chart of Doom' explains when a global recession will begin”

http://www.aol.com/article/2016/02/08/t ... -245951603

The first thing I do when I see someone post a link here is look for the author and see what kinds of things he or she tends to post. Charles Hugh Smith is a perma-doomers. Look at his writing history:

http://dailyreckoning.com/author/chsmith/

Not a single positive article. He even took a pot-shot at Bernie Sanders. And he's part of the doomer "remnant" over at Peak Prosperity.

I just can't be moved by a writer whose vision is permanently fixed in doom-mode.

[Timo]

Newfie, no disagreements with you, but I was mostly making that point rhetorically. Mostly, anyway, though I'm well aware of the twisted turns the brain can take when it starts going down a suicidal path. Maybe I should have distinguished "voluntary" from "consciously."

But, when you get right down to it, there is so much involuntary and subconscious BS going on in the brain when someone makes THAT decision. BS is a rhetorical reference, too. Nothing BS about it, actually.

As for us here at PO, sure. Most of us get it. We're here voluntarily, everyone except for Lore, anyway. We're in a very small, very insignificant minority who, to varying degrees, understand that the train has already left the station. Some of us are still trying chase it down the tarmac to climb aboard, while others of us are simply waving goodbye.

Others who get it are busy making their own modes of transport to get off this effing planet to blow up thermonukes over the Martian poles to create an atmosphere to geo-engineer a climate suitable for a 2nd summer home, complete with an electric powerwall, and falcon-wing doors. And Bernie will be the benevolent emperor.

WOW! That was some good stuff! I want more!!!

[onlooker]

Well, I like MD the Mod's reference to we are all like Nero fiddling with his violin while Rome burns. I think what separates us from most people is two fold. First, we have recognized the tremendously difficult predicaments we are in and second we are able to fully confront this revelation. So how would a psychologist classify us, I do not know. Maybe somebody here has some insight.

[ennui2]

The flipside is (as Cypher said so well in The Matrix) that ignorance is bliss.



If happiness is the only true barometer of a life well lived, taking a red pill is really no blessing.

[onlooker]

Funny Ennui, how the pill taking only applies if one does NOT have to deal with reality. In most cases one DOES have to deal with reality.

[ennui2]

Funny Ennui, how the pill taking only applies if one does NOT have to deal with reality. In most cases one DOES have to deal with reality.

OK, I'll stop being so confrontational and just kind of say my piece, based on my 10+ years of red-pill-dom.

I can't find the exact figure of speech, but everyone experiences their own personal doom with its own timing and circumstances.

The reason I suffered so much back in the day is that I had too much of an empathic response to macro-level events. I would keep up on Desdemona Despair or watch Homeproject on Youtube and feel really angry and frustrated that this was happening and people either didn't acknowledge it or even if they did, that they didn't care.

Doomerism is ultimately about feeling victim to forces beyond your control, no different from being stuck in a vat in The Matrix, and if you unplug, then you're left navigating around a planet-sized cesspool with flying robotic spaghetti monsters who want to kill you.

My way of working through it was to try to abandon the Moses complex because I realized that my sphere of influence is very narrow. The turning point was the fall of 2008, ClimateGate and Nopenhagen. Any illusions I had of being an activist died around that time. I drew a circle around me and my immediate family and I "made a plan and worked it" as Pops would say. But that plan had to be tailor-made for my unique circumstances, my assets and liabilities.

In the old days, I used to always trot out the fat Truck Nutz guy on this board to keep slagging ignorant red neck AGW-denying coal-rolling truckers. I still despise those kinds of people, but since I never expect them to change, I'm no longer mad at them. It's hard to be angry unless you, deep down, think you can change them. Kind of the nagging spouse mentality, trying to get their husband to change back into Prince Charming. Therefore, I have become mostly apolitical these days, because there's really no way for the policies I'd like to see happen to get realized, and there's few sources of stress that gnaw at me more than feeling politically impotent, which was especially bad during the waning days of the GWB administration.

The last gesture I took towards activism besides the obligatory donations to Sierra Club and the like was trying to start Transition in my town, which face-planted. However, in the talks I've had with my friend who DID manage to start one, the process of doing that really didn't liven her mood a heck of a lot. So she is now a fan of people like Guy McPherson ("Nature Bats Last") and Dark Mountain.

http://guymcpherson.com/2012/09/let-go-or-be-dragged/

This quotable is particularly relevant to some here, PStarr especially, who never misses an opportunity to take a swipe at a group of people or a lifestyle he despises:

Our remaining time on this orb is too short to cast aspersions at those who live differently from ourselves...

Ibon said this place can offer a speakeasy for people to rant and rave. But I think one reason so few people are here now is that, for most, it's just not necessary to keep that primal scream thing going day upon day, year upon year. At some point you have to "let it go" (hence the Frozen images).

THAT is the reason I picked ennui as my username (ennui2 is just because I forgot my password with the other account).

The emotion that I associate with acceptance in the grief cycle is ennui.

It's not depression or rage, it's just kind of a submission to the way things are, because at the end of the day, none of us here have enough leverage to make any difference outside of our immediate friends-and-family sphere of influence, and even there it's dubious if they don't see eye to eye either (like my parents).

So the bottom line is, outside of reviving an old bad habit, I really have no driving need to come here and engage. There are a LOT of ex-members who don't come here and probably never will again. BigTex popped his head in here briefly and then took off again, for instance. I'm part of that tribe, NOT the doomer faithful. So all I'm doing is giving you people a window into how at least some of us who used to obsess on this 24/7 have moved on.

And when I say move on, I mean it.

Let's say the dollar collapses or NK nukes SK or oil goes down Seneca cliff or any of those fast-crash scenarios. I have already mentally run through those scenarios a zillion times! I'm ready to just flip the switch when life starts to really suck and sheer survival becomes touch-and-go. It doesn't have the same fight-or-flight or bargaining effect on me. And so a lot of the rhetoric that passes through here, like Monte's debt-bomb narrative, it just doesn't frighten me. It's not so much that I think these things won't or can't happen, it's that I've already played it through so many times that I'm not going to panic the way most people will, and I'll just take it as it comes.

Now, I get it. Some of you, maybe most of you, enjoy the game-theory aspect of trying to make sure you've got the best shot at making it through the bottleneck. To me, though, that's bargaining, especially if you fixate on it too often.

I have found things to focus on other than researching doom or prepping that give me a sense of pride and accomplishment. I've had more free time of late because those things I am gearing up to do nights and weekends are still ramping up, but when they do, I really won't have much time for anything else.

[onlooker]

Ennui, thanks for that in depth analysis and introspection. I guess this topic here is as good as any for us to come clean as to why we are here. For me, it is simply an almost detached mesmerized fascination with the topics we discuss. To witness this slow unraveling of the world we live in and the prospects of the human race is kind of a macabre fascination to me. Sea Gypsy stated that if you are here and are not consequently doing something about all this then you need professional help. I beg to differ. Maybe because in the end none of this should be a reason to panic or anything. It is simply a reminder as that this fragile temporary existence is exactly that. So to me it is about looking at this reality squarely in the eyes. I just happen to believe in taking the red pill, knowing the reality of a given situation. Now perhaps ignorance is bliss but on the other hand trying to hide from reality is a futile endeavor. So I am here just chatting about reality not what so many of the blind masses see as reality. The future has a funny way of becoming the present. The ultimate example of this delusion is the political campaigning going on now, so detached from the real trajectory of humanity as to be a total joke.

[Newfie]

Newfie, no disagreements with you, but I was mostly making that point rhetorically. Mostly, anyway, though I'm well aware of the twisted turns the brain can take when it starts going down a suicidal path. Maybe I should have distinguished "voluntary" from "consciously."

But, when you get right down to it, there is so much involuntary and subconscious BS going on in the brain when someone makes THAT decision. BS is a rhetorical reference, too. Nothing BS about it, actually.

As for us here at PO, sure. Most of us get it. We're here voluntarily, everyone except for Lore, anyway. We're in a very small, very insignificant minority who, to varying degrees, understand that the train has already left the station. Some of us are still trying chase it down the tarmac to climb aboard, while others of us are simply waving goodbye.

Others who get it are busy making their own modes of transport to get off this effing planet to blow up thermonukes over the Martian poles to create an atmosphere to geo-engineer a climate suitable for a 2nd summer home, complete with an electric powerwall, and falcon-wing doors. And Bernie will be the benevolent emperor.

WOW! That was some good stuff! I want more!!!

Me too! LOL

At one point I was keeping track of suicides I had a passing acquantinences with, including ex brother in law. Was something like 13. Mentioned that to a buddy of mine and he said he quit at 25.

The MSM, with all its BS and hyperbolic terror fear drives me nuts, I don't watch at all, and the better for my mental health.

What is clear to me, among a few things, is we collectively have NO ability to prioritize appropriatly. If we are not suicidal then we are 5 year olds loose in a candy factory, with some deadly poisons laying around.

[ennui2]

Sea Gypsy stated that if you are here and are not consequently doing something about all this then you need professional help.

The corollary of Guy McPherson's quote is that life is too short to allow yourself to feel bad that you're not living up to someone else's standards, especially if that someone is a random anonymous individual on the internet.

Think of how many people looked up to someone like Mike Ruppert as their sage, who, in the height of his self-importance, bloviated about building lifeboats and all, and in the end he wound up living his last days moping around a trailer park and shooting himself.

There is a LOT of egotistical jockying for status within the doomerverse. I don't read a lot about it now, but it used to be a lot of "my preps are better than your preps" or "my bugout location is better than your bugout location". It might as well be suburbanites competing over who has the best lawn or the fanciest car.

For instance, not that long ago Planty was trying to downplay the end of Alaska as a petro-state by bragging about Alaska's rainy-day fund. This is all ego talking. My chosen hunker-down location is better than YOUR hunker-down location.

So I find it ironic that there can be so much of an appeal to ecological spiritual awkenings and what not and then when you get down to the nature of the discussions on a day to day basis, they are just as banal as anybody else's. This sense of superiority that doomers have is usually unearned.

[onlooker]

Yes and the ultimate critique is the one of your not preparing for doom in the right way or something to that effect. In fact in lieu of all of these circumstances surrounding sustainability on Earth, we still are mortal beings destined to live probably not more than 100 years. So doom is our destination in however manner one wishes to examine it. So in fact the question of what is the right way to prepare for doom is like asking what is the right way for a human to live. I say in whatever way you or I or anyone chooses to.

[Newfie]

Ennui and onlooker,
Some interesting thoughts. I can see a lot of myself in those passages. I see little reason to think that humanity will do anything intelligent to mitigate the disasters it is brining upon itself. I used to read Desdemona most days but one day an article about elephant ivory just got to me, not a clue why that particular topic, but I just can't go back.

I will suggest a couple of more reasons into be here.
First I think this is a pretty sharp crowd and if there is to be a fast crash guys here ill be more likely to see it coming, early warning system.
Second I need someplace to air my ideas. I find I think different when I write. This gives me a chance to write out my ideas and review them.
Then there is some camaraderie.
And I just like trying to understand human behaviour, kind of a hobby. This place gives me an opportunity to think about and vet some of my ideas.

I used to think this place would help me with my bug out plans, and maybe it did. I found much fault with most ideas and developed my own very different plans that suit us. We are on the cusp of finally effecting those plans, within a month. So that much is settled, the dye is cast.