by mos6507 » Mon 29 Mar 2010, 00:01:22
Humans are social creatures. We always seek approval. And I've identified a fixation on my part over how other people feel about doom, and about me being a doomer. There are practical reasons why one might want to spread the word of doom, but at a personal level, it would be incredibly liberating not feeling like a closeted homosexual because one is embarrassed about how people would view you if you "came out" to them. One could say the same thing about a great many minority ideas, like being an atheist.
I wonder sometimes about what kind of person has the guts to strut down the street openly proclaiming his or her doomerism. The world kind of needs a "doom pride" parade. I guess I saw Transition as a way to hide behind the solidarity of a group. But good luck finding other doomers at a local level. They are too few and far between.
So at an intellectual level, whether peak oil has or doesn't have credibility based on how people slot me into some subculture categorization shouldn't matter to me. After all, I no longer even identify myself as truly belonging to the people who would be judging me, and yet the animalistic part of my brain still craves approval and fears rejection.
The topic of doom is such an elephant in the room that I am convinced that a great many people probably would be openly doomer if they didn't at some subliminal level know that doing so would make them social outcasts, and so they 'self-correct'. The warning signs that flash before their eyes all the time get back-burnered. If it's not actionable (and most would feel that it isn't--powerdown and doomsteads are totally out of the question) then they can't allow themselves to latch onto it and go through the endless fight-or-flight stress.
I think this is part of everyone's cultural programming. It's the reason why most people don't look like Jesse James, riddled with tattoos. Everybody feels like they have to conform to a certain minimum acceptable cultural norm. And part of that is not questioning the growth paradigm. I don't say that as if to impugn corporate america or the NWO for imposing that on us (as so many of you do). I think that runs to the bedrock of who we are as a society and TPTB merely reflect that back onto us in a vicious cycle.
But the fact remains that the process of evangelizing peak oil to those who are in that mindset in some sort of Milquetoast inoffensive way is impossible. The conclusions of peak oil (which doesn't even really HAVE to include die-off) are just too contradictory to the story of infinite growth to accept.
So it's clearly a red pill / blue pill thing, and the only way someone is going to cross over is if they grasp the red pill on their own.
Remember, the web is a PULL technology. When I stumbled upon the peak oil concept with dieoff.org and all that jazz, I voluntarily clicked through all those links. I could have just tuned out. I didn't. How many of us here became doomers because someone personally approached them about it, unsolicited? Probably very few if any. There was some trigger-point that grabbed you, and you kept going down the rabbit hole.
So you can tailor the message any way you like but no matter what, the person is voluntarily swallowing the red pill. He isn't being actively converted.
The fact that I've spoken to my mom endlessly about doom and she still hasn't taken the red pill is instructive. How can there be a more trusted source of information than your own next of kin? If that isn't going to work, then certainly most peak oil awareness programs are destined to only pull in the small minority of people who are already predisposed to this for one reason or another.
So I guess what I'm saying is that peak oil will never be considered credible because people's universal assumption about the world is based on a lie: that we can infinitely grow in a finite system. It is like the bombshell of evolution and the earth revolving around the sun combined.
I know people hate it when doomerism is laced with quasi-religious rhetoric, but it is truly an epiphany, a life-altering moment of enlightenment. Maybe for technocopians it might not have seemed like that much of a shock to the system, but for most of us it was. It was like a punch to the gut that lasted for days. The adult equivalent of being told that Santa doesn't exist. And people wonder why peakers aren't considered "normal"? If you can process that sort of information and then stroll back to continue your life totally unaltered, then that is what's not normal.
And that's what I literally tried to do for close to five years. I lived a dual life of going through the motions during the day and doomer by the keyboard at night, and it's just not healthy. Not that stressing out on doom is healthy either, but it's perfectly natural.
So why don't we lay off on trying to blame doomers for being weirdos? It's a tough cross to bear.