PeakOil is You
Sheeple Thread (merged)
Re: To educate sheeple or not educate sheeple...
by BigTex » Fri 11 Jul 2008, 11:24:27
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('allenwrench', 'D')o you speak with sheeple about PO or are you past that stage and just prepping and hunkering down?
I will talk with anyone who is interested. However, the entire thesis, while simple and logical, takes time to develop in a conversation with a rookie. Thus, I have to be careful about the way I talk to people about it, because often I am still going over the assumptions on which my analysis is based when they stop me because they're too freaked out. That's frustrating to me, too, because it doesn't even allow me to get to what my thoughts are on what all of these events MEAN with respect to the future.
I don't like the word sheeple either. People are just living the way they were taught to live. It takes time to change such fundamental perceptions of the world.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') won't go as far as end of the would. (for now) When TEOTWAK arrives, I believe there will still be people and an earth. But you have made an excellent checklist of problems facing humanity BT. And from such a checklist one can use it as a springboard for prepping best one can.
Yes, this stuff is depressing, but as survivalist we must work beyond expectations of doom and work towards solutions the best we can. (And no, I am not talking about pie in the sky solutions.) I am talking about practical and real solutions survivalist use to defeat the 7 Enemies of Life
7 Enemies of Life:
Fear and anxiety
Cold and Heat
Thirst
Hunger
Boredom and Loneliness
Fatigue
Pain and Injury
Mental preparedness and physical fitness are the foundations of all our survival quests. For the mind guides the body, but an unfit body is not able to respond to the minds guidance.
So make sure you guys are getting exercise and eating right or depression can come from an unhealthy foundation.
Here is a thought that I had this morning and it helped clarify for me where we are at right now:
Any time a civilization collapses, the obvious question is "if they were smart enough to build that thing from scratch, why weren't they smart enough to maintain it once they had it built out?" The answer, of course, is that these societies start to fracture, and the cause of these fractures is understood to be a combination of resource limitations, overpopulation, poor governance, etc. Chief among these, though, is usually resource limitations.
Looking at the matter close up, how would members of a complex civilization be expected to react to news that their whole way of life is temporary and soon to pass away into the entropy hopper? I see one of two reactions--denial or acceptance. For those who deny it, they make no allowances for the processes that are chipping away at the sustainability of their society and thus hasten its collapse.
For those people who do accept what is occurring, and that is many of us here, strange things begin to happen. On the one hand, these individuals are going to make what personal preparations that they can, and not depend on the government to provide them with any protection from the coming troubles. On the other hand, and this is more subtle, these people are also going to begin to lose confidence in their society and way of life. They are going to simply lose the uniting vision that allowed the civilization to develop in the first place. Since these people are being guided by reality, their perspective will begin to be adopted by more and more people, and thus there will begin to be a collective loss of faith in the systems and institutions of their civilization.
As we all know, independence is very inefficient, so as more and more people begin to turn toward independent lifestyles to compensate for the failing institutions of their society, the whole society becomes less productive, and thus what made the society powerful or wealthy in the first place begins to be undermined.
This process proceeds on two tracks. There are the actual causes of decline--typically resource depletion and overpopulation--but there is also the psychological reaction of a growing section of the populace that I describe above. The effect is that rather than bringing the society together to face the challenge, as may have happened earlier in the society's existence, now a self-reinforcing cycle of deterioration begins to take hold.
I believe that's where we are at today. More and more, people are simply losing faith in this system of industrial civilization, and thus rather than putting their shoulder to the wheel within the system to preserve it, they find that they just don't have the will to try to save something in which they just no longer believe.
Where does that leave us? Squarely within the decline period of yet another civilization.
What do we do about all of this? I don't know. Jack seems to think that eating popcorn will help.
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BigTex - Intermediate Crude
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Re: To educate sheeple or not educate sheeple...
by VMarcHart » Fri 11 Jul 2008, 11:45:06
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('allenwrench', 'I') was once lost, but now have found...
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('allenwrench', 'W')e should never lose sight of the fact that we were ALL Sheeple at one time in our lives...now we are Rams!(BTW, am I seeing oil trading at almost $147?)
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VMarcHart - Heavy Crude
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