by Ibon » Tue 16 Feb 2016, 21:12:33
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')I would venture, with zero proof (and knowing I might get bashed for mentioning it, but that is alright, because I am willing to admit ignorance here) that doomer and optimism are mutually exclusive.Just as a mental exercise and allowing myself to be freely bashed for not being smart enough to figure out (without help) how I might be wrong here.
The main thing that annoys me in people's posting habits is a sort of pattern or template-based way of thinking. Someone has reached sort of an epistemic closure in their head and every time they have something to add, it is merely a restatement of their conviction, their paradigm, if you will. They are fitting world events to their paradigm rather than actively thinking things through or reevaluating. It's a closed-mindedness.
What tends to happen is people either only interact within an echo-chamber of the liked-minded (which is just a feel-good circle-jerk) or they coexist with dissent but merely talk past the other but never really actively incorporate any new data or question their convictions.
This is true not just with doomers but anybody's ideology in general. Ideology (or any strong opinion) is wrapped up with identity and ego and so people protect their viewpoints via various mental gymnastics.
This applies to generations and the collective cultures that make up the mindset of nations or bio regions or religions. It is the renewal that comes out of generations and also out of unstable calamity events that shift narratives and thinking.
I think about my dad, a menonite farmer from eastern Pennsylvania, who in WWII was a soldier stationed in Rome Italy where he met my Roman mother , an irreverant Italian cosmopolitan concert pianist. Now you tell me how two such different human beings with such radically different backgrounds would have ever come together without a world war?
My own family experience happens to explain some of my optimism around cultural adaptability and plasticity and what an elixer destabilizing events can be in reshuffling the cultural deck.
The catalyst of consequences...... human overshoot will create physical challenges that may be as calamitous as a world war, in this same way I can envision how an Overshoot Predator may one day help to bust old and stubborn paradigms and one can appreciate his power to bring about change in a similar way that I have Hitler to thank for my existence.