Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
We now know that lemmings are too smart to stampede off a cliff to get their population down. But humans aren’t.
Just about the entire population of this country, and those of many others, are sleep-walking toward their own destruction without objection and without any particular effort to avoid it. Sleepily, these folks will agree if asked that something should probably be done, but when that something means that they will be adversely affected in the short term, they lash out. They can be shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that the world will soon run out of cheap petroleum; but when gas prices go up, governments fall. Continue the march.
About 10% of the adult population is ready and willing to run amok in the streets, brandishing guns and hyperventilating about “civil war,” because an idiot lost an election and can’t accept it. Nowhere near that number of people would even consider making a fuss about the approach of a self-engineered doomsday. It has reached the point that thoroughly panicked climate scientists are now publicly advocating civil disobedience.
I cannot comprehend this massive, near-universal indifference to reality. Climate change alone should be enough of a threat to induce enough fear and loathing to prod a populace to action. But climate change is not the only, and may not in the end be the worst or most immediate, threat we face:
- Industrial farming is destroying irreplaceable topsoil and underground water deposits with terrifying speed, and poisoning surface waters with chemical and fertilizer runoff. As a result, toxic algae blooms are suffocating more and more lakes and rivers, and dead zones — large areas where the water is so deprived of oxygen that nothing can live — are proliferating at the mouths of virtually all of our rivers.
- Industrial fishing is scraping out the last vestiges of the life that once teemed in the world’s oceans, and with the help of climate change is posing a real and present danger to a major part of our food supply.
- Cheap, plantiful petroleum, which made possible the Industrial Age, is running out, and so is the Industrial Age. No one has a clue how we are going to live without petroleum, but it is increasingly likely that people now alive are going to have to figure it out.
- There are far too many humans living on the planet now for the planet’s resources to support. Yet it is the policy of every government on earth to support growth of the population, growth of the economy, growth of consumption forever and ever, amen.
- By most measures, the American healthcare system is more expensive and less effective than that of any other developed country. The broadest and one of the most telling standards is life expectancy, which is falling and is now (largely due to suicides and deaths of despair) five years less on average than that of any other wealthy country. Declining life expectancy is one of the most reliable precursors of systemic failure.
- And then there is of course climate change as well, responsible for punishing storms, raging wildfires, spreading desertification, intense heat waves, and rising sea levels flooding more and more coastal properties.
Yet the conventional mantras of our lives remain unchanged; growth is paramount, technology will save us, somebody will think of something, continue the march.
The behavior of lemmings as portrayed in a Disney movie years ago — their suicidal stampede of a cliff as a method of population control — has been widely condemned by biologists. No animal on earth, they claim, is dumb enough to do that.
I beg to differ.
Your estimate that 10% of the adult US population might engage in a right-wing armed revolt seems like a reasonable figure to me. To wit: if 40% of American adults are either Republicans or right-leaning independents, and 70% of those are election deniers, and you further guesstimate that between a quarter and a third of that group might be sufficiently foolhardy to take up arms against …well, against society as a whole, then a sum of 20 million or so potential neo-rebels would certainly seem plausible.
Sounds like a lot! But scattered over the vast continental US, these right-wing forces would be spread thinly indeed. Added to that, January six showed us just how pitifully lacking these folks are in competent leadership, as well as in tactical and logistical skill sets. And talk about a public relations disaster! January six put an end to whatever support they might have gleaned from the military and law enforcement rank and file.
Another element of their undoing could well be their penchant for engaging in social media. I feel confident that US law enforcement officials know where most of the neo-rebel leaders can be found, and, when the revolution heats up (if ever) many of them will find themselves being dragged – kicking and screaming like the petulant toddlers they are – from their moms’ basements and away from their precious laptops.
In the final analysis, though, I believe that their rantings and ravings will never come to actual civil war. for, much like their leader, what these neo-rebels really lack are balls.
“I cannot comprehend this massive, near-universal indifference to reality.”
I can. Although I would say it’s more of a rejection of reality as an indifference to it.
It’ll be interesting to see how our “media apparatus” handles this towering inferno in Changsha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ju0_mmHulg
I’m going to go out on a limb (lmao) and predict this skyscraper will still be standing tomorrow, and no one that matters will inquire “How can this possibly be? Buildings made out of steel either vaporize in mid-air or drop straight into their footprint when they catch fire. Isn’t this what the most recent Laws of Physics tells us?”
“Have the Laws of Physics changed … yet again?”
I live in world Tom where the media can tell me with a straight face that part of the military strategy of the Russia Federation in Ukraine is to attack their own postitions and instillations repeatedly and with malignant intensity. The Russians love nothing more than to shell and rocket and mortar themselves every chance they get.
And do you know what? When viewed thru the 9/11 Prism in which I view EVERYTHING, the pushing of this absurdly weird and disturbing fairy tale is not only unsurprising, the fact that it is accepted by almost everyone makes perfect sense.
What would’ve shocked me to my core, is if a vast majority of folk arrived at similar conclusion at roughly the same time, and said to themselves, no military organization tries to blow itself up mid-operation, and therefore I must conclude, this is single most nonsensical narrative I have ever been exposed to.
Since 2006, when after three shameful years of rejection, I made my decision to accept “reality,” I have called this era we are living in, the Age of Insanity.
But we are well beyond that now. Insanity doesn’t even begin to address the reality of our collective situation.
We have now fabricated for ourselves, we humans, a World of Total Make Believe, and though we can’t exit this universal stage like the misrepresented Disney lemmings, in a blind and headlong dash for a cliff, we are going out like cartoonish characters nonetheless.
Same, same Max. One starts to think they actually come from a different planet, or they dropped into an episode of Seinfeld’s “Bizzaro World”. There are a couple under-the-surface things that really bother me. One, you can’t really talk about it rationally with anyone in general because of all the memorials, wars, and such. Watching Orwell’s “1984” in real-time. Heck we even have our “Two Minutes of Hate” expanded to hours on cable news.
The second point are the NIST responses to the AE911 enquiries. To sum up, NIST didn’t include those factors because they chose not to look at them. When they do try to explain issues the bold-face lying or factual gymnastics makes you really despair for society. Who gets up in the morning and has to believe their job, mortgage, private school for the kids depends upon making up a complete fabrication and disseminating to the populace? Institutional Sociopaths I guess. Explosions from Building 7? They would have been at least 120 dB and heard throughout the area. Well, they were heard and have you ever seen a video of a building demolition? Loud bangs are what they want to avoid because the energy is focused inwards – ya, freakin’ morons…
And NIST’s fantastical modeling of Building 7 goes from falling debris from the Towers up to the moments before collapse. Does not include collapse mind you, because they cannot account for the actual physical phenomena as observed by millions of lying eyes.
And I’m an Engineer that has to deal with the Laws of Physics on a daily basis. I don’t have the option of massaging them to my political will as I could end up very dead (high voltage substations). This infuriates the Engineers and Architects the most at the professional level. The professionals take and oath and hold a license to protect the public and be truthful in their transactions. I guess NIST gets a pass – because if “they even think about it” it must be true. (Yup, writing this post Trump Hannity interview).
The best explanation I can find for the larger social phenomena topic of this essay is we are all on the Mickey’s cartoon train heading for the cliff and most of us want to be in Dining Car. That’s it. Have to be honest, I have those tendencies too, and a good part of reason why we choose to live where we do – and approach other locations with a sense of short term viability.
I have to apologize to Tom for always being late in the Comments. My only excuse is I spent a couple years in the deep dive of The Oil Drum and this site is more like free diving (snorkeling) where I can drop in from time to time.
In America only 5% of the people are science literate and then, mostly in their preferred field. That means in any social setting you’re the minority of the minority. A lonely feeling.