[ennui2]

"So where does one park these noble sentiments? Do we simply lock them away in a nostalgic cupboard of distant childhood memories and surrender to the collective cynicism?"

That's what I've done, basically. I spin my fairy tales as an escape, and a way for me to feel like each day is worth living, while I do the minimum required to muddle through BAU, all the while having written off humanity's long-term prospects since ~Nopenhagen. Not something I'm happy about, considering that I'm a parent.

[Ibon]

Hi Loki,

I am sorry I accidentally edited your post instead of pressing the quote symbol when commenting on what you wrote. So I ended up inadvertantly deleting your post which I feel bad about. If you still have that saved please repost. Anyway, here was my response.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')LOKI SAID: Even in counter-culture America, techno-utopianism reigns supreme.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ennui2', '&')quot;So where does one park these noble sentiments? Do we simply lock them away in a nostalgic cupboard of distant childhood memories and surrender to the collective cynicism?"

That's what I've done, basically. I spin my fairy tales as an escape. Not something I'm happy about, considering that I'm a parent.

[Loki]

No worries Ibon, luckily I write everything in a word processor. Here's the post you accidentally deleted:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'T')o assume we are genetically incapable of acting collectively toward self preservation is paradoxically a point of view that comes from an intangible collective mind set.....that currently is deeply cynical.

[ennui2]

What I find interesting, which is something I didn't notice before and couldn't offer to people here, is that at school, they are covering doomy topics like climate change and GMOs and the pacific garbage patch. So before, I used to lose my cool when my daughter was acting especially bratty and feeling too entitled to service and creature-comforts by telling her that the future isn't going to be very pretty, but then I kind of clammed up, but now she's getting a dose of kind of doom-lite(TM) at school. And this is an elite suburb. There's every reason in the world for teachers to not even broach these topics. So they do, but they sidestep the bigger ramifications of overshoot and limits to growth.

I think the common theme is that "awareness" that we covet so much only goes so far. It feels good if everyone finally gets on the same page of what the problem is, but if we don't actually do anything about it, who cares? The end result is the same. It's just that the frog is aware it's boiling in the pot instead of being in denial.

Recently I was at a friend's house who is heavily involved in Transition, and after a few years of doing it, her eyes being wide awake at the increasingly grim trendlines, she's pretty much written off civilization as we know it, and is looking for ways to just found a Dark Mountain support group to kind of hang on emotionally.

All I could tell her is that in my case, acceptance feels a lot like denial, and I'm not happy about the similarities, but when I was knee-deep in this sh*t and coming to this board every day, I was just flush with stress-hormones in my system and I just felt like I was trapped in a gas chamber, powerless to stop events outside of my control. Now, instead of feeling like I have to prepare my lifeboat or become some big-ass activist, I concern myself simply with trying to stay generally functional and carve out my share of personal happiness out of the time we're all given. I think I'm doing alright by that, although I wouldn't move the needle of anyone here with my "preps".

[Pops]

I took a few weeks off from here recently, during that time I read a couple of good books about the unconscious/subconscious mind and how it combines our perceptions with our previously held beliefs and builds a storyline to hand over as reality to the conscious mind.

That's what I was going on about in Ralfys thread on the killer AGW Argument, the subconscious is the fashioner of realty, not some upper level logic like we all want to believe. That's the Magic Loki is talking about I think. The unconscious works really hard to maintain continuity within and between it's various story lines even if it must make a logical leap here and there.

Which pretty well explains why we haven't and are not liable to see a GW/PO opinion shift untill the preponderance of evidence in daily life is undeniable. If that happens over a short period many ideas and ideals will rapidly fall since they are incompatible with AGW/PO/overshoot/blah/blah. If it happens slower then the overall mindset will change slower.

I also just posted up a couple of charts from J Brown in the "why is oil over $110" thread that shows pretty plainly that the oil available on the world market for import has been declining since '05. That is pretty close to the definition of PO is it not? Still the 100 million dollar oil & gas marketing campaign is that we're entering a new era of abundance, the tag line is
Who you gonna believe, us or your lyin eyes?
.

[Beery1]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'I') can remember a time when I believed we would through collective will make the intelligent decisions a few minutes before midnight to avoid what to me back then seemed obvious collective suicide.

[Ibon]

In the latest essay published yesterday by John Micheal Greer on his blog, he raises the question of a reinvented America that might be compelled to embrace a collective vision that I suggested as a lost noble sentiment and one that Pops pointed out referring to President Carter's speach. Greer is by no means predicting this, but he does raise this as a potential which is a noble vision in the face of the current collective cynicism.

The speach by Carter will one day be resuscitated and may very well be his most lasting legacy.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... erica.html

We don’t yet have the vision that could guide that process. I sometimes think that such a vision began to emerge, however awkwardly and incompletely, in the aftermath of the social convulsions of the 1960s. During the decade of the 1970s, between the impact of the energy crisis, the blatant failure of the previous decade’s imperial agendas in Vietnam and elsewhere, and the act of collective memory that surrounded the nation’s bicentennial, it became possible for a while to talk publicly about the values of simplicity and self-sufficiency, the strengths of local tradition and memory, and the worthwhile things that were lost in the course of America’s headlong rush to empire.

I’ve talked elsewhere about the way that this nascent vision helped guide the first promising steps toward technologies and lifestyles that could have bridged the gap between the age of cheap abundant energy and a sustainable future of relative comfort and prosperity. Still, as we know, that’s not what happened; the hopes of those years were stomped to a bloody pulp by the Reagan counterrevolution, Imperial America returned with a vengeance, and stealing from the future became the centerpiece of a bipartisan consensus that remains welded into place today.

Thus one of the central tasks before Americans today, as our nation’s imperial age stumbles blindly toward its end, is that of reinventing America: that is, of finding new ideals that can provide a sense of collective purpose and meaning in an age of deindustrialization and of economic and technological decline. We need, if you will, a new American dream, one that doesn’t require promises of limitless material abundance, one that doesn’t depend on the profits of empire or the temporary rush of affluence we got by stripping a continent of its irreplaceable natural resources in a few short centuries.

[Newfie]

Ibon,

I really like your writing and find you to generally be one of the most lucid folks out there.

On this one, however, you have lost me.

I just don't see the future in the same way you do. I have lost all hope that mankind can do anything to stop what is going on.

I am cynical through and through.

In some weird way it is sort of like becoming an atheist. When you fully realize God is gone, then you realize that YOU only are the one to do things, to make decisions, to judge. In a wee way, we become God, for there is none above us, we are ultimately responsible.

But the downside is a nihilism, for if there is no God then there is no ultimate "Right" or "Wrong." It all becomes self referential, there is no longer any BIG thing out there to work for. Having been an atheist for many decades, I find I these old feelings of hopelessness and futility and "loss of center" returning. I have experienced this before and know that I will likely be able to find some kind of peace with my new reality, even if it lacks the grandeur of the old one.

From my personal perspective, becoming an atheist was taking a "red pill." I have decades of looking at "others" whom I consider to be in denial about something that is just so intuitively obvious. Therefore it does not surprise me that folks are so reticent to accept where we are going. I believe (funny choice of words for this bit) that humanity will never change over climate change or sustainability as surely as I believe that we, collectively, will never give up our religious dogmas.

Geeze, I hope that made some kind of sense.

[sparky]

.
Each of us shape their mindscape from living and learning from it

I'm a dog .....,yummy food is to be taken , meat is the best !
sleeping by the fire is sweet
a good fight is fun ,female butts are fascinating
To be in a pack is right
the thing about GOD hurt my brain , too complicated

I'll survive if I can , if I cannot , no big deal but I will try hard
I don't need all this stuff , it's there , enjoy , it's not there ..tough luck

[PrestonSturges]

I tend to think we'll come up with clever solutions to our problems then get back to the serious business of wrecking the world.

As doom has become such a pervasive part of right wing politics and they stockpile bullets for their race war, I figure if people so obviously brain damaged believe in doom, it's simply not coming.

[SeaGypsy]

Good thread.
Carter is on the fine line between reality and hope. I'm with Newfie on the hope and Sparky on the reality. Ibon and Carter have a valid point as proven by the 'Greatest Generation', the survivors of the great depression (Mark 1).

The 'Roaring 20's' followed by the terrible 30's and nightmare 40's did produce some fine humans and spawned the beat generation, in turn the alternative communities movement and so on. The period also created many mad people and suicides galore.

Lacking a crystal ball, prophesy at this point in time is near enough to impossible.
IMHO we are in a period of exponential novelty simultaneous to reaching real limits in resources. At some point the exponential functions at play must exhaust themselves.

We used to have Carlhole around here promoting the idea that the 'Singularity' would provide a kind of immortality, effectively allowing the continuance of novelty effectively in perpetuity. Carl dropped away when the collective here lost patience with his simultaneous promotion of a criminal called Rossi, whose perpetual free energy device was going to supply the energy requirements of the hardware for the software we were all going to become part of.

The soft hardware which we are actually composed of is both perpetually vulnerable and incredibly resilient. The individual is weak, the genus is strong.

'Giving up' altogether is effectively suicide and to be sure, not everyone will 'give up'; nomatter what happens. There are powerful collectives going to extremes to perpetuate, despite the undeniable fact they run on a tank which is running towards empty. There are very few powerful individuals in terms of being able to perpetuate without the aid of these collectives. We have collectively lost sight of our real resilience, the one we have had all along, that which came from nature.

[sparky]

.
Oh well a bit of classical knowledge gone to waste !

Diogene "the dog" was an Athenian philosopher
IE in greek dog is cyno , he started the cynic school
famous for living in an old barrel with no earthly possessions
once going to the market he commented "how many things I do not need "
or walking the streets in day time with a lantern
claiming he was looking for an honest man
a fine winter morning ,Alexander of Macedonia then supreme ruler of Greece
and about to embark on his world conquest, went to see him in his barrel
stood in front of him and asked was he could do for him
"get out of my sun" was the answers
the meaning is also "do not try to overshadow me "

Alexander conquered all the known world and died young
Diogene died old ,having conquered himself

don't bother about how stupid or smart people are
we are animals , it's our saving grace and should be OK
as long as we remember that fact

[SeaGypsy]

30 years ago there was a thing called 'IQ'.
10 years ago there was another thing called 'EQ'
Now there is a thing without a name, which I think of as 'Emotional Resilience'.
In a few years there will be another thing 'SQ' for 'Survival Quotion'.

There are many kinds of intelligence and it is less than intelligent to separate them all; despite that we all have our strengths and weaknesses. A person most would write off as a hopeless alcoholic reminded me recently: "Don't give up on human nature. There have always been good people and there always will be."

[PrestonSturges]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', '.')
Oh well a bit of classical knowledge gone to waste !

Diogene "the dog" was an Athenian philosopher
IE in greek dog is cyno , he started the cynic school
famous for living in an old barrel with no earthly possessions
once going to the market he commented "how many things I do not need "
or walking the streets in day time with a lantern
claiming he was looking for an honest man
a fine winter morning ,Alexander of Macedonia then supreme ruler of Greece
and about to embark on his world conquest, went to see him in his barrel
stood in front of him and asked was he could do for him
"get out of my sun" was the answers
the meaning is also "do not try to overshadow me "

Alexander conquered all the known world and died young
Diogene died old ,having conquered himself

don't bother about how stupid or smart people are
we are animals , it's our saving grace and should be OK
as long as we remember that fact

[Econ101]

Building a new America is essential. The old doesn’t have to be torn down but rather it will morph into the new America. It will be an America that rejects central control in business (large corporate NWO giants) and central control in government (nanny state/globalization).

These new trends are already emerging in the form of new urban homesteaders moving into areas of cities and counties that are in disrepair and need gentrification. These neighborhoods and communities want prosperity individually so they know the community must be prosperous. They want things to be local, shops to be owned by neighbors, cafes owned by friends, storefronts operated locally.

What’s changed in this country is the politics. The country is suffering self-inflicted political wounds that are strangling the energy of its populace and protecting and serving corporate interests over local enterprises. The politics demand conformity to central ideals, high taxes and regulation on small business, absurdly generous and broad social support programs and social messages through media and entertainment reinforcing it all.

At one time it was a given you had a good paying job, probably for a local company in an enriched and creative environment. It was a given you could start a business and the government would not be there to hinder. It was a given you would get a good education not an indoctrination.

It was very good for most people once in our country but its not that way now. Why? because of uncounted poor political decisions that many thought were going to ease poverty, promote equality and save our environment. These ideas grew to an extreme, not only here but around the free world, and now we see the result: Bankrupt central governments having depressed business and industrial climates with shiftless populations poorly educated after having attended a lot of school with few real prospects except increasing hand outs from the government.

Its all totally reversible when we turn our backs on big government and multi national corporations in favor of much smaller constitutionally focused government and local/regional enterprise supported by a business friendly environment.

[Econ101]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PrestonSturges', 'I') tend to think we'll come up with clever solutions to our problems then get back to the serious business of wrecking the world.

As doom has become such a pervasive part of right wing politics and they stockpile bullets for their race war, I figure if people so obviously brain damaged believe in doom, it's simply not coming.

[mmasters]

I don't know why so gloom, it's not our generation that is going to get in trouble, it's the next generation or the generation after that.

We have natural gas, and super-batteries, OLEDs and all kind of things about to come out of the woodwork.

It's shouldn't be too difficult to insulate oneself for this lifetime for anyone here on the board.

If anything there's some great investment opportunities over the next few years due to PO that should pad the wagon plenty.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'I')bon,

I just don't see the future in the same way you do. I have lost all hope that mankind can do anything to stop what is going on.

I am cynical through and through.

[dinopello]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kuidaskassikaeb', 'T')he funny thing for me is that kids today seem much more together than we were.