Collapse - Part 4/5: Bargaining
Applying logic to evidence
In 1/5: Denial, I introduced the concept of Collapse and touched upon reality denial.
In 2/5: Depression, I wrote about my maddening experience of becoming Collapse-Aware.
In 3/5: Anger, I laid out some of our predicaments and reiterated the inevitable conclusion.
In 4/5: Bargaining, I discuss some of the less-discussed aspects related to Collapse, including some simple truths that often trigger cognitive dissonance as they contradict people’s intuitions and parochial worldviews.
As the series is intended to be enjoyed in its entirety, as well as to conserve space, I aim not to repeat myself, assuming readers have absorbed the previous posts.
If you’re a new reader, I strongly suggest starting at the beginning. If you’re an old reader and would like a recap, check out my post Our Planet-Sized Gordian Knot. If you think chatbots are super cool, don’t miss DeepSeek says Civilisation is Doomed.
Domination
Taming fire to pre-digest rich protein sources enabled our growing brains to develop a record-setting number of neuron connections, ultimately leading to the evolution of language, crucial for socialising, organising, and collaborating over time and space at scales utterly unique to our species. Our opposing thumbs came in handy, too.
Although it didn’t realise it at the time, the Universe had begun plotting against itself via suicide by paper-clips. Unfortunately, saner voices aren’t prevailing.
In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Our formidable brains’ knack for hypothesising about possible futures enables us to engineer for the more desirable ones. We’re constantly playing out possible scenarios in our heads, even down to how to best phrase a snippet of communication for an unfamiliar audience… such as this opener that I have, after countless iterations, finally perfected. I think.
Intelligence is so evolutionarily profitable that excelling at it has been positively selected for since its nascence. However, to self-replicate well, an organism also requires motivation. This is accomplished via our irresistible desire for sex & need for connection, our constant wanting to improve our situation, and, above all, our wish to survive at all costs. All of this and much more is running under the hood, so deeply ingrained in our brains that it requires serious introspection to even notice how completely it all dominates our existence, let alone resist the primal urges.
Hedonic adaptation is so effective at rebalancing our brains’ pain & pleasure reward systems that we never stop wanting more & better. It’s why drug addicts must constantly up the dose to achieve the same high, a tragic doom spiral, and why billionaires can’t stop hoarding wealth, a tragic doom spiral for the rest of us. It’s why, a year after either winning the lottery or losing a limb, we have in both cases reverted to our baseline 7/10 mood, as if it had no long-term effect on our happiness. It’s nuts.
It should be mentioned that people suffering from excruciating conditions such as survival struggles, chronic illnesses or parenthood remain perpetually cursed to a below-average baseline happiness level until a cure is found or the kids move out. That’s not the same.
It’s also why we can’t have nice things, such as a healthy, sustainable civilisation on planet Earth. Nothing is ever enough for us. Stoics and Buddhists recognised ages ago that our ever-fleeting happiness is a brain bug and worked diligently to develop a mentality to circumvent it, striving instead for lives of meaning and contentment.
Tragically, our primal cravings always eventually overpower our learned wisdom sooner or later, poisoning our societies and dooming us to repeat our civilisational collapses each and every time we manage to erect one. This time, we might even make it past The Five Stages of Collapse to the one that threatens to end our species’ timeline: Environmental Collapse. Between Spermageddon, The Insect Apocalypse, ever-rising CO2 levels and scores of other predicaments that will culminate in an Uninhabitable Earth, my money’s on extinction in the not-too-distant future.
But first, Civilisational Collapse. And that one is already a done deal.
We’re idiots
Intelligence is merely a muscle; it can be wielded any which way. If combined with reality denial, its host inevitably veers off a realistic track right into the gutter. Splat.
Although we did our best to pass our hard-earned indigenous wisdoms down through deep time via genetic imprinting, we could never forever override the evolutionary programming running in the background below our more recently developed — and very self-delusional — pre-frontal cortex, a mere tool for our true nature, evolved to propagate its genes above all other considerations, happiness & a livable planet included. If it hadn’t, we wouldn’t even be here today, so be glad for that, I guess.
When prophets and scouts cry wolf regarding distant threats that we can’t intuitively fathom and therefore cannot innately respect, our palaeolithic wiring malfunctions spectacularly, raising what I dub The Deflector Shield against truths too heavy to bear, a veritable slew of intellectual dishonesties:
Ignorance and denial in all their forms. Wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, self-deception. Hundreds of cognitive biases, not least cognitive dissonance. Irrationality, stupidity1 — even intelligence, as it merely improves our excuse-making! Greediness, stubbornness, shortsightedness, callousness and selfishness. Arrogance & hubris. In-group conformity. Highly naive models of the world that lead to all manner of flawed ideologies and delusional beliefs. To boot, we have psychopathy, sociopathy and narcissism to deal with, plus our inability to properly grasp probabilities, exponential growth, and threats not directly in front of us.
As if that wasn’t enough, we now have the behaviorally maladaptive outcomes of AI-assisted propaganda by bad actors, like when Americans fall for the long con and vote for instilling some kind of fascistic Fourth Reich, prematurely triggering their Empire’s Decline and Fall: a Long Descent into Dark Age America.
My God... Is it any wonder we are utterly unable to face reality? So many ways that sensible thought and action are being overruled. Our maladaptive behaviours are deeply ingrained into us biologically, now expressed both societally and culturally via socioeconomic drivers that are so out of control that we don’t even know what to call them. The Thing?
Self-reflection
When one harbours an opinion so fringe that collapsology contributor Paul Chefurka pegs it at 1-in-10000, it’s good practice to check and re-check the basis for the opinion ad infinitum because of the overwhelming empirical likelihood that one is quite simply mistaken, despite all one’s convictions.
That we all are products of a combination of our genes and circumstances, or nature and nurture, is a common-sense understanding most people unindoctrinated by unfounded foundational beliefs — somehow not an oxymoron — hold without much effort. But guess what! In a mind-boggling case of epistemic luck2, I’m right about everything. I really should be worshipped.
In all seriousness, naive realism is a serious matter and explains rather well why we all think everyone else is crazy.
“In social psychology, naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.” - Wikipedia
“We should be dubious of our own certainty.” - Daniel Schmachtenberger
But, pray tell, when was the last time you actively sought out contradicting evidence, let alone were swayed by it?3
Examining the Evidence
So. First of all, I obsessively re-examine the evidence for Collapse day in and day out.
Unfortunately, pretty much everything concerning the polycrisis and metacrisis leading to inevitable collapse just gets worse the more one looks, so while my days sometimes begin with a flickering smidgen of hope that somehow trickled back into my soul during the night – Surely it can’t be as bad as it seems – they usually end with Wow, it’s even worse than I thought! Golly!
Rarely do I make it through an entire day before anxiety sets in and I have no choice but to drop my demonic devices, deject the dreadfully despairing denouement, and desperately dart outdoors in doleful, despondent, downcast disconsolation to distance myself from the dire directives of doom. Dang.
The problem predicament is that whenever I take a solid break to protect my actual sanity, I’m doomed to eventually return to witness our #FasterThanExpected collapse prognosis having worsened yet again, such as the risk of clathrate dominoes boiling us in a few short years — just one of countless examples I could inundate you with4.
My choice is thus between having my spirit ground to dust on a daily basis or desperately disconnecting, but then returning to have my mind blown anew. Pick your poison. Unfortunately, blissful ignorance is off the table for me. Yes, I do get jealous.
Know Thyself
And then there’s the question of my personal flaws and traits.
My unfortunate penchant for melancholy colours draws me to focus too much on the negatives in life, inevitably affecting my mood. But does this mean my assessments are pessimistic? No, it just means I’m no fun at parties. There’s a difference.
The upside downside to this trait is that I notice the Doomsday Glaciers ahead sooner than people busy playing their game of rearrange-the-musical-deckchairs on Planet Titanic at max volume. Party party.
Realists like me are often mistaken for pessimists because most people suffer from an optimism bias, so my realistic assessments seem pessimistic compared to theirs. Personally, I think realists are vitally important — provided they are both honest and correct, both huge ifs.
I’ve been accused of black-and-white thinking. There is some merit to that, because I’m not shy about offering opinions without knowing the full picture. I might as well quote collapsologist Tom Murphy directly, for it applies very well to me, too:
Being an INTJ, I rely more on intuition and abstraction than on what I sense around me in the here-and-now. Scientists must do so in order to develop theoretical frameworks. I have a healthy appreciation for the concrete (experimentalist in me), but do still lean on abstraction. I have noticed that I tend to generalise situations, looking for the common lesson. I like to synthesize. It’s the distilled product that sticks with me in long-term memory. I am prone to make a statement based on a wide variety of inputs over the years, but when challenged to cite specific examples, I struggle to recreate them: I’ve already chucked them out in favor of the overarching principle. — Tom Murphy (source)
I consider philosophy & science, i.e. logic and evidence, to be the best way to figure out what is really going on. This reeks of Enlightenment yada yada, which of course has more than plenty of merit, even if its fruits were ultimately hijacked in pursuit of greedy growth.
However, these so-called left-brained traits fall far short in usefulness when deciding what to do about it all, compared to, dare I say, feminine qualities such as emotional nuance and maturity, superior social intuition, and the resulting strong sense of connection with community, holistic harmony, and solid sustainability. Or maybe it’s mostly just about testosterone levels. I think it’s about time for the patriarchy to eat some humble pie and simply acknowledge that we men are fundamentally unsuitable for leadership, but that’s a topic for another time.
I try to embrace humility, a trait that trumps cleverness, as it functions as a self-correcting mechanism for delusions that can lead one astray. I remind myself that I’m empirically guaranteed to be wrong about many things, and I'm as susceptible as anyone to confirmation bias. This last one is particularly hard to agree with, as being wrong feels exactly like being right.
I apply Bayesian reasoning to the wailing of doomsayers, a group typically over-represented by catastrophists. I’m wary of narratives, including honest ones (as you should be, of mine). Basically, I try to retain a healthy dose of scepticism.
As a rationalist, I am almost emotionally attracted to becoming less wrong. Couple that with being introverted, and it’s no wonder that I spend most of my life living in my head while everyone around me vomits social lubricant all over each other as if enjoying oneself is the meaning of life or something. I wish I were more like them. They seem so happy.
Perhaps hardest of all for me has been to decipher what parts of my (now latent) depression are attributable to which causes; candidates include anxiety, chronic tinnitus, sleep problems, parental worries, unemployment, multiple heartbreaks, loneliness, illness & death in the family, and, of course and above all, collapse awareness. Long-term depression tends to make people very pessimistic, and much introspection is required to properly discern between sad facts and sad fiction.
My long period of Collapse study was necessary to determine the reality of the matter, which is crucially important to me. It took a massive mental toll and strained some important relationships, but I’ve reached my conclusion and have finally stopped studying it full-time, which has been a relief.
I have looked straight into the abyss. I see what is coming. I understand enough.
The Repugnant Consequences of Overshoot
When in a state of Overshoot5, many strategies that were once fruitful suddenly flip and become suicidally maladaptive.
It’s a very unnatural thing to have to accept. Practising some form of restraint is nothing new, but when things get ridiculously dire, ridiculous readjustments are called for. In a planetary predicament, rationing and planning ahead on a truly vast scale become necessary, but this is notoriously tricky to execute well.
Reality check: Impending collapse qualifies as ridiculously dire.
It’s like an overburdened ship that’ll sink if it doesn’t rid itself of some weight. It’s a simple concept, really. The problem arises when there’s great disagreement about whether we are in overshoot at all, plus whether the Corruptible powers in control wish to make any compromises or sacrifices, such as willfully dismantling themselves. (They never do.)
Clearly, we are in such a disagreement today, with entire peoples, nations, cultures, ideologies, religions, governments, economists, centrists, green-growth environmentalists etc., feeling and believing, for different reasons, that we are not at all in Overshoot, or it’s not their problem or responsibility or ability to do anything about, and that we should absolutely keep extracting and growing. Most of the rest of us tacitly follow along, honestly not minding (!), deep down inside, that the entire biosphere and fate of humanity and millions of other species are sacrificed at our altar.
Reality check: Most people don’t think seriously about ethics and have very few principles they’re willing to make great sacrifices for, but they enjoy pretending that they do.
We should want the opposite of that. We need the opposite of that. We must do the opposite of that, or we won’t make it, not only in terms of retaining a decent level of civilisation, but also as a species. The more damage we do now, the more we will suffer in the end. Our obscenely immoral squandering of priceless time and precious finite resources is coming at a truly devastating cost.
Let’s give it a little think
Armchair philosophers such as myself enjoy exposing the crux of the matter by bringing it clearly into view through thought experiments, purposefully simple in order to make them both easy to understand and difficult to refute.
When in Overshoot, most things involving the flourishing and expansion of the human enterprise backfire horribly. This leads to all sorts of unusual and sometimes repugnant conclusions, of which we shall now savour a few. Brace yourself.
AnthropocentrismQ: What would happen if humanity were magically gifted an entirely new pristine continent?
A: We would, out of need, greed and sheer habit, immediately flood into it to occupy and commence extraction of natural resources, leading to exactly what we don’t need for a global civilisation in dire Overshoot: more people, pollution and waste.
“The shackles of the global culture of growth are now at least as strong as any chains made of DNA and thermodynamics.” - Paul Chefurka
This answer highlights the structural and systemic issues regarding our species and the societal and cultural traps we have fallen into — themselves, I posit, a symptom of the underlying cause: ungovernable deep-seated human behaviour developed, via Darwinistic biological & sociological evolution, for the steppes and not the cities. It’s a fundamental mismatch and simply won’t work.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey
How does one work around — let alone fix — such deep causes of cancerous behaviour? I’ll leave that question hanging as a futile exercise for the reader.
Simple Truth: We are the ultimate invasive species, a cancer on Earth.
Sacrifices & Game TheoryQ: What would happen if a person, company, nation, or entire continent were to make the necessary sacrifices of restraint?
A: The rest of the cancerous growth would outgrow and envelop it, leading to exactly the same end result: Collapse. The restrained would wither and lose power to the unrestrained.
“Greed is good.” — Gordon Gekko, the character few understood was the villain.
In a globalised world, the Tragedy of the Commons becomes a global tragedy. For a different outcome, one would either need Everyone to want to share equally (which I opine is unrealistic), or to regulate Everyone via a Global Authoritarian State, which wouldn’t work for other self-terminating reasons. Anyway, we’ve got neither.
“There is no institution on this planet that could enforce a law against billions of people unable or just unwilling to change their lifestyle.” - Sabine Hossenfelder
Therefore, regarding our inevitable outcome, it matters not one dolt what anyone does to “reduce our footprint”, a gaslighting term literally invented by an oil company. Everyone in Europe could wander into the nearest ocean in an act of altruistic self-sacrifice, and, after three minutes of silence for the fallen, everyone else would excitedly flood into and occupy the newly available space, rendering the sacrifice moot on the species’ level. I mean, it would be stupid not to, right?
Simple Truth: The mother of all collective action problems has no solution.
N-order effectsQ: How about we impose a carbon tax and redistribute the wealth to people in need?
A: The tax itself is a great idea, but the problem is that people will spend it.
We’re getting to stuff that rubs hard against our human intuitions. Let’s think things through a bit.
Wealth acquired by anyone not already positively swimming in it is spent. In the middle class and above, it’s called lifestyle creep, and below it’s called living standards or even sheer survival. If billionaires share some of their spare wealth, or governments do handouts, or someone gets a raise, it gets spent. It’s kind of the point.
But what we call it doesn’t matter regarding physical realities, as the sounds we make are merely reverberations in the air. Compassionate action feels great. I love it, you love it, we all love it. Some of us more than others, perhaps, but it’s arguably both a core pleasure and a necessity for the human race to flourish as it has. But when we flourish too much, we end up going deeper and deeper into Overshoot.
So ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether we satisfy the siren calls of the angel or the devil on our shoulders, as both lead to doom. The ancients realised long ago that the Gods toy with us for sheer amusement. We were drawing dead all along.
“Even something as seemingly altruistic as health care selfishly focuses on human health, to the exclusion and often direct detriment of ecosystem health. Are we really doing ourselves favors in the long term by making the destructive human enterprise healthier, more populous, longer-living, and therefore better able to carry out its damaging activities? If this sounds abhorrently anti-human, it’s because the human enterprise is currently relentlessly anti-planet. Anything that is anti-planet will dismantle ecosystems that serve as critical life support for humans, spelling failure for the human enterprise. So it’s really the human enterprise that is anti-human by way of being anti-planet.” - Tom Murphy in To What End?
Like overpopulation, wealth-sharing has real-world implications. Consuming resources damages the Earth further. Just existing in modernity comes at a great, unavoidable price, regardless of your “personal footprint”, because you exist within a nation that enables your existence — recall the abovementioned cancerous behaviours by your nation’s neighbours.
These are cold, hard facts that we must grapple with. Ultimately, we must weigh sacred values against the survival of the species. I’m not saying I want to live in a world where we don’t help people in need. I want that a lot. I’m saying we need to think really hard about where the balance falls today.
Very Uncomfortable Truth: Moral questions aside, redistributing wealth furthers Overshoot.
If you believe in egalitarian principles of reducing inequality, I’m with you. It’s of the utmost, paramount importance. Just not in the way you were thinking!
We shouldn’t raise living standards in the Global South up to the North’s, e.g. via Carbon tax redistribution schemes.
We should reduce overconsumption in the North while remaining low in the South.
All reality-tethered honest thinkers arrive at the same conclusion: Lowering consumption is the least bad and fairest option, and the sooner we begin a controlled, voluntary contraction of our wasteful habits, the less chaotic the decline will be.
It is vulgarly immoral of us in the North not to willingly lower our own living standards as far as possible as quickly as possible. It’s pure, unbridled selfishness.
But we won’t. The spice must flow.
FuelQ: Energy: the cheaper the better, right? Let’s find some!
A: Free energy would be just about the worst thing imaginable, as it would pour infinite fuel on the fire that is destroying our world.
Jevon’s Paradox describes the law of human nature regarding how, when something is made more cost-effective, we just use more of it instead of appreciating our savings. Market efficiency corrupts technical efficiency in this way, a clear case of our aforementioned desires overriding prudent restraint. Something that is remarkably difficult for people to accept is that improving the effectiveness of destructive human endeavours does exactly that.
“All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology. There is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that it previously produced.” - Jared Diamond
Objective truths of this flavour tend to clash hard with The Deflector Shield because they’re so anti-anthropocentric, and people blind to them tend to get very upset when one brings them up.
When in Overshoot, our ultimate demise is hastened by all short-term growth. The best response is the opposite of what everyone wants, but when they’re blind to the situation, have their own alternative facts, and refuse to listen to reason, we have a huge problem.
If we knew what was best for us, we wouldn’t want increased effectiveness. But we certainly think we do! In misguided techno-optimism, we pin our hopes on new technologies like nuclear fusion and geothermal energy, not realising that all these Hail Marys are being thrown into an Abyss brimming with sleeping monsters.
The truth is that cheaper energy won’t get us out of this mess. As long as it fuels our insatiable desires, it will only make things worse.
There’s nothing wrong with cheap energy if the energy itself is capped. It’s the abundance of it that’s a problem.
Uncomfortable Truth: Cheap, abundant energy is what enables us to destroy the biosphere.
Victims of our own successQ: Aren’t babies just adorable?
A: Cancer.
Before I get in too much trouble, I’d better explain that I don’t mean actual babies. I mean unmade ones. Making babies while in Overshoot is suicidally self-defeating: cancerous behaviour on a species level.
If Homo Sapiens lived forever, there’d be over 100 billion of us by now, and the world would already be dead. Along with free energy, an anti-ageing pill would be the worst thing we ever invented.
Uncomfortable Fact: It’s crucial that we don’t live very long.
Similarly, if there were only a few million people on Earth living sustainably as hunter-gatherers, as we once did, we wouldn’t have an overpopulation problem, and we wouldn’t be destroying our environment. Overshoot situations would still occur, but would be kept to small, local scales, wouldn’t deplete finite resources necessary for survival, and wouldn’t permanently degrade or destroy the biosphere with unnatural forever-poisons.
So, we can conclude that our population count is so relevant to our predicament that we might as well call it everything. And yet, well-meaning, reasonable people spend their entire lives denying that overpopulation is a critical factor. This is pure anthropocentric bias. It is typically born out of empathy and optimism, but fails at basic arithmetic:
Overshoot = Population x Consumption
“We are a plague on the Earth. It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so... either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us,” — Sir David Attenborough
“It’s our population growth that underlies just about every single one of the problems that we’ve inflicted on the planet.” — Dr. Jane Goodall
When people instinctively scoff at the mere suggestion that the Earth is overpopulated, you know they are very far behind.
They’re not necessarily stupid, per se. The problem with our super wicked problem isn’t so much our reasoning faculties as it is the Deflector Shield protecting us from inconvenient truths. Unless intellectual honesty is a core principle for someone, when a claim goes against both their instincts and worldview, they effortlessly reject it.
During Overshoot, having babies morphs from being a beautiful, meaningful and life-affirming act to a questionable, irresponsible, damaging, immoral, and even unethical one. When a grand awakening to our predicament eventually occurs, maybe the obnoxious question Why aren’t you having children? will morph into the even worse Why are you having children?
Unbridled procreation used to serve us well on the species level, but now “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” — E. O. Wilson.
But then, evolution has never looked forward in time. Why would it begin now?
For those aware of our predicament, it’s a surreal task to have to weigh rational, ethical restraint against a strong emotional and biological drive for reproduction. Especially women struggle a lot with this.
Unpopular Opinion: Having children during massive Overshoot is extremely selfish.
Energy is the economyQ: What if we manage to end capitalism?
A: It won’t solve our predicament.
The profit motive thrives on our innate desire to prosper and spread our protoplasm far and wide. Elders of yore recognised the doom-spiralling nature of capitalism, outlawing usury and practising regular debt cancellation in desperate attempts to keep it in check.
It didn’t work. As the profit motive so perfectly serves our greedy nature, it was only a matter of time before it overwhelmed all measures of constraint and overtook the world. I reckon that most civilisations discovering fossil fuels eventually succumb to the irresistible lure of free energy slaves, but that’s purely an academic question at this point. It’s done. It’s over. A few were enough, and they outgrew and consumed the rest.
However, capitalism ultimately only functions as a delivery system for the energy that fulfils our needs and wants. Money isn’t real; it’s merely a claim on materials and energy. Energy is the economy. One can argue that capitalism itself is devouring the entire world, but that doesn’t mean that any other energy delivery system would have worked any better. Humans are programmed to find ways to get what they desire.
The profit motive is so overpowering that it can only be curtailed by force. The only hypothetical solution for this is outsourcing all our authority and power to ethical parents able to constrain us, a benevolent authoritarian state — impossible in practice, because power corrupts and there’s no such thing as a benevolent dictator6. It’s a shame that a benevolent SGI wasn’t ready in time; that would’ve been cool.
Our constant wanting for better lives is the engine of our undoing. How we arrange for our wants to be met doesn’t really matter. God doesn’t read spreadsheets. Okay, my metaphors need some work.
It would be the same under any system of governance in modern industrial civilisation; at the end of the day, it’s a simple question of energy and physical realities and their limits, not immaterial concepts inside our heads.
Pick your ism, none of them can flaunt our mental shortcomings for long, and certainly not with magic juice and godlike tech at their disposal. Many have been tried, but none of them have proved sustainable, even when bypassing all constraints of human decency.
No one in our dominant cultures can even imagine a truly sustainable world, let alone how to get there from here. The Collapse of Complex Societies seems to be an unavoidable fate that we simply cannot deny. I reckon that the pragmatic problems of colossal civilisations render their feasibility impossible when harsh realities are taken into account, such as the immutable laws of physics, ecological realities, our psychology and biology, as well as game-theoretical unsolvables regarding social dynamics between adversarial groups and classes. Fossil-fueled tech run amok and Tainter’s theory of diminishing returns to complexity are part of it, but it’s not even all. Whatever the reason, like an incompatible right-person, wrong-time relationship, it just can’t work 🕷💔
Our fever dream of infinite growth will be the final punctuation mark of our species’ timeline unless we somehow grow up real quick. I see no signs of this happening. We seem perpetually delusional, irrational, greedy, scared and stupid.
It's just plain unsustainable 🤷🏼 We ain't got nothing on tardigrades, silver fish, bats or millions of other species that have achieved evolutionary perfection. We're a cosmic joke. We think we're oh so special. The only way we're special is how impressively suicidal we are. We’re linear, exponential and unsustainable. The End.
Have there been any cultures that lived sustainably? Sure. But where are they now, apart from the last dying remnants? Societies that sacrificed longevity for a short-term, massive growth boost ultimately prevailed. Our trajectory might have been initiated via fire, language, agriculture, and money, but it was falling into the trap of fossil fuels that sealed our fate, as it enabled us to go way beyond mere overgrazing.
We’re destroying the biosphere, and There Is No Planet B.
Uncomfortable Truth: Fossil-fueled civilisations are destined to self-destruct.
See also: The Great Filter
Enveloping darknessQ: We keep getting smarter and more advanced; we will figure it out, right?
A: I’m afraid not.
First of all, the ease of surviving in modernity enables everyone to pass on their mediocre genes, so we’re actually degressing in average quality. Nature used to cull the herd of the weak; now, we keep everyone alive just because we can. No, I’m not advocating eugenics here, just describing what is happening.
Moreover, the question itself reeks of solution-seeking.
Put simply, our predicament is the result of tech and abundant free energy run amok. More of the same won’t save us. Unfortunately, “You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it” (Einstein), and our minds aren’t changing remotely fast enough. The best response is unfathomable to us: Stopping.
That aside, every day, our elders atrophy into cognitive decline, their insights and wisdom lost, like tears in the rain. Meanwhile, massive new crops of clueless, attention-hacked horny teenagers with underdeveloped frontal lobes join the ranks of brainwashed voting consumers on a daily basis.
That generational churn replaces the wise with youngsters in desperate need of guidance and governance is, of course, nothing new. The passing down of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding has worked well and led to considerable (anthropocentric) progress. However, when our educational institutions critically fail, it spells disaster.
This question of their failure is a big topic, but generally speaking, I think that they have fully succumbed to the profit motive, are failing at their primary task of teaching students how to think, and rarely even lead to worthwhile careers anymore. It’s recently been facilitated by sociopathic tech bros who believe in moving quickly and breaking things — mission accomplished — but it was all set in motion long ago, way before 1971, when it really took off.
Our smartphone-addicted youth have put ‘brain rot’ in the dictionary. Or rather, we did it to them. What we have now was predicted by Sagan: scientific illiteracy in a bamboozled public. Our leaders are socio-evolutionarily selected for shortsightedness, as no one with proper values rises to the top in our dishonest cultures in the first place, and bad actors have assumed full control.
It’s a catastrophic failure on the societal level, a total neglect of our ethical duties as guiding, responsible elders. Some argue that schools were always flawed7, snuffing joy and creativity out of our children as they do, mainly functioning as babysitters so parents can do what’s deemed more important than being truly present in their children’s lives: growing the economy.
Journalism has likewise been compromised. As hyperspace hypersped the #enrage-to-engage attention game, it was forced to devolve back into tribalism to survive. Social media took over the world in the greatest power grab of all time, and politics, all about microtargeted misinformation now and forevermore, is experiencing a polarisation gulf so wide that we disagree on reality and have given up even having a conversation, the result being the gradual disintegration of institutions, governments, national alliances and society in general.
These are but some of the components of the meta-crisis. Regarding the inevitable result of the rapidly deteriorating biosphere, it all takes way too long to fix. Monolithic entities take decades to turn around, and our societal norms are simply not evolving at the speed we need them to — nor even, it seems, in the right direction anymore.
History corroborates the Collapse cycle well. Take a look at this quote from Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail regarding the final stage. Recognise anything?
“Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses; they worship celebrities instead of divinities…. throw off social and moral restraints — especially sexuality; shirk duties but insist on entitlements.”
The signs of collapse are as clear as day.
The most valuable resource of all: TimeQ: What about all the progress we’ve made!?
A: You don’t seem to understand the urgency of the situation.
In 1992, some 1,700 of the world's leading scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in the sciences, issued a Warning to Humanity:
Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.
This was thirty-three years ago. Since then, we have added 2.7 billion consumers to the planet, almost doubled our annual emissions, and not only continued, but accelerated on our highway to hell — and continue to do so.
We have totally failed to heed the warning. We have ruthlessly squandered priceless time at the expense of untold numbers of current and future lives. We should give anything to go back and try again, if we could. Even steel-manning “progress” to assume it doesn’t just further the destructive human enterprise, it has amounted to flapping our arms to slow our plummet into the abyss.
Most people who speak of “progress” don’t even grasp the basics, such as the fact that renewables cannot save us, let alone the components of the meta-crisis. They are incrementalists, or even worse, accelerationists. They are immature, ignorant, immoral, unwise, or worse. Take your pick; either way, it’s simply not cutting it.
Simple Truth: Ignoring the realist’s warnings has doomed us all.
InsanityQ: Do you think your writing will help?
A: Help, as in save us? Impossible.
As societal change eclipsed biological Darwinism as the determining factor of our fates due to its sheer rapidity, we began evolving from tribes into vast, optimistic Empires that consider ignoring Cassandras a feature and not a bug. We are 0 for 80 and counting on our sustainable empire attempts thus far, but everyone always thinks, “This time, it will be different”. History proves otherwise.
“The earth is littered with the ruins of empires and civilisations that once believed they were eternal” - Camille Paglia
Expecting my writing to make a real difference when nothing else has would be the classic definition of insanity. There is no pragmatically remotely realistic way to save civilisation from collapse, even assuming we all banded together on this, which we absolutely will not. My entire blog is like a snowflake in hellfire, the briefest blip in pulsating darkness. The public prefers Mr Beast, a man who can’t smile with his eyes despite infinite riches, not depressing ol’ me.
Sad Truth: Penetrating the Deflector Shield is impossible.
On Guesstimating
The myth of progress is born from a period of ever-improving conditions and growth, lulling us into our overly optimistic assumptions and a false sense of security. The myth of the apocalypse alleviates a desperate emotional need to end exhausting, torturous worry about one’s likely dismal fate by embracing an expectation of the worst. Both stray from a sober assessment of the situation, which is that the outcomes fall on probability distributions.
Your next date, business meeting, audition or chess game can go any which way, some more likely than others. Although the Universe is deterministic in nature, because it’s beyond our ability to predict, the best we can do is guesstimate likelihoods.
Climate scientists function as superforecasters via the wisdom of (expert) crowds. However, as they too are only human, they too fail.
For example, we are currently as likely, statistically, to end up at 1.5 °C above pre-industrial civilisation temperatures as at 6 °C (which would terminate our species), yet we focus almost infinitely more on the former scenario, an extreme discrepancy. Why? It’s because:
“The interpretation of [climate science data] is unavoidably conditioned by human bias — methodological, epistemological, and psychological.” — Roger Hallam
Recalling the abovementioned significance of avoiding extinction, it should be the other way around, if anything. That’s what’s so maddening: humankind’s behaviour is completely irrational, even among experts!8
Much will also depend on our collective response. Will we party until The End, or doomscroll? Will we grab some rusty pitchforks? Will we continue Business As Usual (BAU), build walls to keep a billion migrants out, and suggest that they eat cake? Will it all end in debauchery or nuclear armageddon or both?
It’s almost impossible to say, but there’s a probability distribution there somewhere, and local situations will vary greatly. I recommend bewaring prophets claiming certainty and instead work with realistic probability assessments. Take predictions with a grain of salt (including this blog), but please do look into it. We’re talking about the fate of the world here.
“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.” — Stephen Fry
Pessimism
The disposition of pessimism is a personality trait, just like optimism. Many pessimists are self-aware and do try to calm their worrying, but it’s easier said than done, and neurotic traits often keep them ruminating.
Just like the rest of us, pessimists often struggle to discern the signal from the noise or are misled by the truth, such as when they fall for anecdotal evidence. Some labour under poor critical thinking skills, or don’t think in probabilities at all. Some never consider naïve realism, forgetting that they don’t know what they don’t know. All of these shortcomings are notoriously difficult to notice, and I myself make many mistakes. One just doesn’t see it.
The catastrophisers have it worst of all. Many people in the Collapsosphere are convinced the sky is falling within 5-10 years, a highly improbable outcome. Some nasty scenarios involving tipping points with near-unimaginable outcomes do make it possible, but it's very unlikely. We’ve probably got a few more years than that. (Yay.)
So what will happen?
As the evidence continues to accumulate, awareness of collapse will continue to build until, as I wrote in Part 2, “Eventually, it will be everyone.”
It was once considered cool to smoke, weird to be vegan, embarrassing to thrift-shop, and acceptable for men to sexually harass women at work; all of this has reversed over a few decades in large societal shifts. Our materialistic cultures will eventually change, too: needless consumption will one day be uncool, and smartphones will be broadly recognised as a major hazard to mental health.
Unfortunately, this change was needed long ago, right after branding became a thing and made consumerism our religion. It is still happening way too slowly, hindered by overwhelming forces pushing as hard as they can in the exact opposite direction. Nothing we’re saying or doing is penetrating the Deflector Shield for enough people to instigate proper change quickly enough, and our cultures and systems of governance are more than just entrenched; they are locked in.
Game theory locks us into arms races and other survive-or-die behaviours. We are not a global society, eager to cooperate. No nations are wilfully, let alone maximally, degrowing. We are not a hive mind. If anything, we are more individualistic than ever. When people philosophise about the way humanity and civilisation may change, adapt and overcome, they always forget that most of us really only just care about ourselves.
I expect desperation and strife to keep increasing until someone proves they weren’t bluffing with their threats of nuclear annihilation, the extinction risk that tops the list for good reason.
“Whatever I feel in the moments before I vapourise in a nuclear blastwave, surprise won’t be part of it. Maybe relief.” — Gnug315, Our planet-sized Gordian Knot
Our species is fundamentally unable to stop growing, even if that means destroying the foundation of life on which we depend. Therefore, our behaviour won’t change, and the bad trends will continue. Collapse is guaranteed; the rest are merely details.
Climate alarmists are warning of a temperature increase of +2°c by 2035 and +3°c by 2050, which the insurance industry estimates will result in two and four billion deaths, respectively. Take that with a grain of salt, as it will depend greatly on our responses, but recall, e.g., that world hunger is entirely preventable. We simply choose not to.
I am not academically gifted enough to perfectly parse neither the alarmists’ nor the actuaries’ claims, but the current trends of never-ending heat records at land and at sea are terrifyingly clear. But I do see disqualifying faults with the climate moderates, who absurdly assume we will suddenly and drastically alter course, e.g. make huge progress towards “Net Zero” — itself an impossibility relying on both the invention and successful implementation of non-existent carbon removal technology at completely ludicrous scales (plus solving the rest of the meta-crisis, not to forget).
By assuming delusional strategies to be possible and operating with the utterly unrealistic and thus inexcusably immoral strategy of carbon budget overshoot, they’re able to sound slightly less alarming, estimating a rise of 2.7°C by 2100, which even they admit is still a catastrophe for humanity. These delusions afford our leaders the only way they can avoid being officially labelled as completely insane by continuing BAU.
Because I have enough common sense to see the moderates’ obvious faults, I personally lean towards the alarmists’ prognoses being more probable.
The matter of unflinchingly marching towards Hothouse Earth aside, forget not that rising CO2 levels are just one of many predicaments, and also be aware that my series on collapse is far from exhaustive. There’s plenty more I haven’t found room for.
One could well argue that we’re 150 years into a three-century global collapse. Barring nuclear war, it will be a long and extremely uneven catabolic collapse where we cannibalise both ourselves and our potential future to hang on as long as possible.
I believe humanity is incredibly adaptive and industrious, but also innately shortsighted and flawed, so all adaptations will continue along the same vein: avoiding voluntary sacrifices and restraints, clinging on at any cost, preferring lies over inconvenient truths, and always wanting more.
I see zero signs of anything resembling a course change. I fully concur with the author’s analysis in The End of Capitalism (read a review):
“There is no alternative for the industrialised countries. Either they end growth voluntarily, or the era of growth will end violently, when everything that forms the basis of our way of life has been destroyed.” — Ulrike Herrmann
I’m certain that we will never voluntarily degrow at the necessary scale, so, to me, the conclusion is clear. Some take it even further than collapse:
“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we do make it through collapse as a species, some semi-modern salvage civilisations will last until everything is fully depleted. It will be a weird, highly uneven mix, and might will make right, as always.
If you live anywhere near a coastline, take a look at the tallest buildings and imagine the ocean sloshing around them. Imagine what it will be like for future people to observe a world full of submerged cities. Imagine the tales they will spin.
The Situation
Let’s take a big step back and look at the big picture.
There are 8.2 billion people on Earth, which we, in our infinite stupidity, keep adding to. We are way above carrying capacity, born by copious ancient sunlight stored as fossil fuels, for which there is no substitute.
On a global scale, nations and peoples decimated by pandemics and wars barely count as hiccups on our overall trajectory. On the species and civilisational level, life goes on. Genocidal cleansings make way for prime real estate. Lose some, win some.
These tragic events are not comparable to the collapse of industrial civilisation, which completely dwarfs such minor setbacks. When resources have run dry, infrastructure has crumbled, and Nature has been damaged beyond repair, Earth won’t be able to support anything near its current population, and certainly not at anything resembling our high living standards.
Worse than collapse, we have extinction risks and risks of astronomical suffering to worry about. From an anthropocentric, species-level perspective, the difference between 95% vs. 100% of humans dying is much bigger than 95% vs. 10% because of the long-term significance: the impossibility of rebound, and thus the total loss of humanity’s potential.
The analogy of racing towards a cliff makes sense if we’re talking about possible extinction, but because that isn’t yet guaranteed, it’s more like we’re in a house that’s burning to the ground. We should save what we can and learn to live primitively again. We’re facing a population bottleneck, as we have done before.
Sadly, accepting reality is beyond our capabilities. The root of our problem is behavioural, and that’s where we should focus - managing our flaws, not treating their symptoms.
I find it criminally negligent that leaders are forsaking their ethical duties to shepherd us all. I don’t care how “difficult” it is to do the right thing; we’re talking collapse and the 6th mass extinction of life on Earth, likely including ourselves — 8.2 billion lives plus countless more unborn. Nothing remotely compares to this.
They should be tasking psychologists and sociologists with engineering the social changes necessary to instil massive societal and cultural shifts. The nudging away from maladaptive behaviours must be upped by several orders of magnitude. We should ground planes and ban cars, tourism, advertising, branding, plastics, fast fashion, beef and planned obsolescence — just for starters! We have zero time to dally about. None. Not a single day.
We could, theoretically, completely change course, but the unimaginable social change necessary won’t be instigated until the death toll rises so high it makes the opening scene of The Ministry for the Future routine. By then, it will be far too late to save much at all, let alone shift to a sustainable infrastructure of everything.
Surviving and thriving as a community is supposed to be a team effort. It’s not enough to have a scientist warn of impending doom, like in every Hollywood disaster movie ever made. We gotta act, and act faster than fast: we gotta act decades ago.
But we didn’t, we don’t, we can’t, and we won’t. Too few of us are even capable of fully grasping the seriousness of it all. It’s almost like we’re Programmed to Ignore.
The value-action gap is bigger than ever, and thought experiments that expose our rampant immorality, such as Peter Singer’s drowning child scenario, cause us to splurt nonsense while our cognitive dissonance triggers big time. Donna Meadows drives home the point that our values shape our goals, which shape our actions.
I’m sorry to say, but we have horrible values.
Degrowth is too alien a concept
So much of our consumption is wasteful nonsense that we can and must do without, but as most cultures are addicted to it and countless industries and thus people rely on it, managing the transition on a global scale is overwhelmingly daunting.
One starts brainstorming utterly unfeasible changes, such as the voluntary abandonment of dominant dead-end ideologies and the abolishment of private property rights, because that’s the level we’re at if we want to even attempt to de-escalate the situation. Obviously, none of that will happen.
People who truly care about a future habitable world correctly identify degrowth as the least bad option moving forward, despite the impossibility of executing it without massive suffering and loss of life. Proper degrowth at the scale we need to avoid an ever-worsening outcome would incur a worldwide financial depression, ensuring a global collapse of life as we know it, as everyone simultaneously stops doing everything non-critical for survival — what Nate Hagens, in order to avoid using the C-word, calls The Great Simplification.
Unfortunately, our consumerism-based economy is the very foundation of modern life, so when the economy contracts, life contracts. Capitalism, dependent on growth as it is, collapses under major economic contraction, and financial collapse is the first stage of Collapse — swiftly followed by commercial and political, then societal, and finally, the nastiest of all, cultural collapse.
The result of a thorough contraction of the human enterprise would thus be political and societal breakdown along with unprecedented cultural confusion, a bona fide End-of-Days crisis. We would witness rapid deglobalisation, supply chain failures, an energy crisis, famines, geopolitical chaos, and massive migrations with no safe havens, as the privileged countries cannot absorb vast hordes of migrants without themselves failing both structurally and culturally. Not that they’d want to, if history is anything to go by.
Least bad? Lord, just take me now.
How is this the least bad, again? Because the alternative, where we crash into a brick wall and suffer a simultaneous global and total ecological breakdown, is far worse.
We should just collapse, i.e. begin a controlled contraction of all human activities, if we want a Just Collapse, but we all know down to our bones that we’re never going to embrace that, so the least bad option is completely off the table. I mean, why do you think we’re in this mess in the first place? ‘Enjoy now and pay later’ is more than merely modern man’s motto. It’s our entire way of life.
Degrowth will never happen voluntarily
Not only is degrowth as terrible as it sounds, it’s also much easier said than done. No revolutions ever asked for less.
It would require abandoning materialism and individualism, and embracing both consequentialism and voluntary sacrifice at hithereto unprecedented scope and scale, but this clashes way too hard with all kinds of sacred and cultural values of moralistic and religious natures, ie. qualitative values that are impossible to measure, such as justice, affection, health, wisdom, joy, freedom, morality, satisfaction, culture, and integrity.
Philosophers spend their entire lives trying to figure out the best compromises for everyone to get along. Most of them remain purely hypothetical, as the demons of our nature keep rearing their ugly heads and sabotaging them. Graeber's quote, “Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to,” sounds great until one glance at the news will remind you that many people do not wish strangers particularly well.
Equally maladaptive are the Angels sabotaging our species’ longevity. When consequentialists explain why pushing fat people off of bridges is the least bad option, or when utilitarians explain that we shouldn’t try to save everyone, most people say that they don’t want to live in such a world — to which I can only reply, Don’t worry, you won’t.
There’s just no way out, which is why I call it a planet-sized Gordian knot. Something’s gotta give, and that something’s the population count and our living standards.
We should be shepherding the globe as one on Utilitarian principles, willing to make difficult but necessary sacrifices for the good of billions, but we show no signs of wanting that. Nationalism is too deep-seated, colonialist extraction continues unabated, our cultures are pathologically immoral, class war is never-ending, racism refuses to die out, guns must be pried out of cold, dead hands, and everyone still just wants more, more, more.
Psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, criminals and the just plain greedy and power-hungry hold too much sway because decent people don’t have it in them to do what it takes to stop them by any means necessary9. Instead, we allow ourselves to be bought and sold, brainwashed and manipulated, and byte-hacked to bits. A worsening cost-of-living crisis locks an increasing number of us into survival mode while the profit machine keeps everything humming along beautifully, and value-driven leadership is so long lost that it sounds almost quaint.
Decades into the realisation of our unsustainable growth, the Deflector Shield remains so firmly in place to such a degree that I can’t find intelligent discourse about collapse with my otherwise intelligent friends. They’re completely sunk in their own little ponds, culturally indoctrinated to live individualistically, selfishly and hedonistically, oblivious to their ethical duties to their own children and completely impervious to greater realities that void all their pointless parochial concerns.
The topic of Collapse is so far removed from public discourse that any mention of it is vaporised in the never-ending flood of profit-motivated, attention-hacking, irrelevant, narcissistic, nonsensical noise.
People have various reactions to prophecies of doom, including those based on logic and evidence, none of them being 'Wow, that sounds serious, please tell me more!' The few who more or less agree we’re screwed don’t want to talk about it, and the rest live in some form of ignorance or denial.
If people can’t see that we're in gross Overshoot, or comprehend that ever-rising CO2 levels will actually wipe us out, or recognise that nothing we’re doing is remotely enough and things are just getting worse, I don’t even know what to say.
I’ve stopped trying. They’re simply too far behind, too biased, too distracted, too ignorant, too optimistic, too stupid, too intelligent, too dishonest, or too arrogant — too something. I know this sounds harsh, but at the end of the day, to paraphrase Dan Dennett, there's simply no polite way to tell people they're reality-blind.
It’s when you take this and everything else into account that it becomes truly hopeless, the trajectory locked in, the predicament even bigger than the sum of its parts. There’s zero hope for any good outcome. Reconciling oneself with the loss of a future is one of the major mental challenges that collapse-aware people must confront (the other being ostracisation).
A few collapse-aware people with zero lived experience are optimistically drawn towards romanticised nostalgia of subsistence farming sans fossil fuels, glossing over the fact that it’s back-breaking work that yields poverty-level living and that the tyranny of community tends to rule out Kumbayas.
Besides, what preppers and organised self-sufficient homesteads and communities will do when cities become death traps and tens of thousands of desperate people drive onto their puny crops is not something any of them have yet provided an answer to, let alone a good one.
Conclusion
Anyone attempting to understand the complexity of Collapse will inevitably fall victim to flawed extrapolation. - Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk
It’s completely beyond the scope of anyone, including the most learned and wise experts, to fully grasp the complexities of the world, the meta-crisis, or collapse. My own understandings are based on a few glimpses of the full picture; it would take many lifetimes to fully grasp the complexities.
After a couple of years of almost full-time study, I can discuss collapse ad nauseum, but perhaps not recall all the data. Nor can I match the salient phrasings of brilliant books, writings and presentations, nurtured into existence through years of careful study and contemplation.
However, I understand it sufficiently. I’m certain that I’m right about our overall trajectory. Not that it’s difficult to see, exactly:
This short series on Collapse cannot do the topic justice; it barely scratches the surface. The meta-crisis is so vast it defies full description; the white paper herein gives an excellent introduction.
People generally agree that we need to use fewer resources, and puppeteer politicians promise some progress on that Soon™, but it’s really all just virtue-signalling while we continue partying until the ultimate bubble bursts.
The ideal option would be for the entire globe to undergo a fundamental paradigm shift in consciousness, changing everything about ourselves and our civilisational structure, societies, and cultural norms. I simply don’t see it happening, let alone in time. That ship has sailed.
Our locked-in materialistic cultures, survival instincts and the Tragedy of the Commons dilemma are pitting us all into a race to the bottom of the oil well, and we will gladly do anything to hang on a little longer. Geoengineering is obviously a given: It’s the “smart” thing to do.
When ultimate austerity is eventually thrust upon us against our will and all our illusions finally shatter, the yarns the few survivors tell their grandchildren about the luxuriously tranquil COVID-19 lockdowns will eventually evolve into unprovable tales of a paradise lost.
I hope so much I am dead wrong. I fret for my children and the future. Collapse Awareness crushes my mental health, renders all long-term planning surreally moot, and affects my relationships deeply. Observing humanity continue BAU right into a self-made apocalypse is nothing short of mind-melting.
When you’ve seen the writing on the wall, it’s already a bona fide meaning crisis. What is the point of anything when our children have no future? How do you get therapy for reality? I have some theories, but please don’t hold your breath for Part 5/5: Acceptance. This blog series you are reading is very real. I’m on a journey here. A long, brutally bleak one.
I desperately try to remain sane in an insane world where desperation and outrage are called for and depression is a completely natural response to the pathological insanity of humankind, not just among the perpetrators, but among the broad public who seem to neither know nor care just how bad it is. I feel so alone.
I can think of no good ending for this post. Perhaps that is appropriate.
- Gnug315
Thank you for reading. If you "enjoyed" this post, please like or share it :)Read Collapse - Part 1/5: Denial
Read Collapse - Part 2/5: Depression
Read Collapse - Part 3/5: Anger
(To come) Collapse - Part 5/5: Acceptance
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.” - Albert Einstein
A cognitive success that results from fortuitous circumstances rather than competence.
Biology & Darwinism convincingly explain why we don’t — in fact, it explains everything about why we Behave as we do. One of my favourite books.
Follow The Collapse Chronicle for a daily dose of despair.
A state of overpopulation combined with overconsumption, resulting in obscene levels of waste, pollution, depletion of life-sustaining finite resources, and environmental degradation that is eroding and destroying the environment we depend on for life itself.
For complicated reasons related to, as usual, human psychology, social dynamics, and game theory, that we won’t get into here.
“The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.” —H. L. Mencken
“Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach. Then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.” — Huey Newton
E.g. this excellent post uses Bayesian reasoning to consider experts’ ability in estimating AGI risks, considering their emotional and professional biases.
“If you cannot convince a fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.” - Leon Trotsky
This is the third time I have attempted to read this article, and still i have not finished it, distracted by reading the links, and exhausted by the sheer depth and breadth of it all! - but i wanted to say THANK YOU, as it's an incredible read, you cover so much, and reading it is the mother of all reality checks. I have listened to so many hours of Michael Dowd's talks already, but I still very much appreciate your particular summary here and the referencing and books linked to as well.
Jan, you're not alone, and we're there with you, not that it changes anything to the outcomes. "Valar morghulis" - all men must die... What can we learn from people / friends having a prognosis of likely earlier than expected death? -> cultivate what brings you true inner joy and peace, and spend time with the people and natural places that count for you.