[copious.abundance]

I rarely comment on these boards anymore- but now is the time.

I will put it bluntly: living in doom-land 24/7 is not mentally wise. The constant hyped-up of horrors of doomers slowly erode away the pleasure that life affords. Mornings become a nightmare of collapse- so do afternoons, evenings, holidays. Being a doomer is risking mental illness.

We all will die individually- collapse or not- nothing will change that. But living with horror movies constantly self broadcast to the brain is slow suicide. You live, but there is little pleasure in life. You meet people, but see them all as cancer, or stupid fools, and can't really enjoy them. Hanging out with people who constantly predict, or wish for, a massive die-off is dangerous to the will to live, happiness, and mental health. Comments on this thread indicating Mr. Ruppert's death was part of a conspiracy show how much paranoia and mental damage can result from constant exposure to the ideas of Doomers. it is a world of mistrust, fear, and a loathing of the human race.

Many Doomers have already killed their happiness years ago.

And for what? Most of the fears, like the predicted oil collapse of 2010, didn't happen anyway. Killer asteroids never came, AIDS or Avian Flu did not runaway mutate into a world killer. Financial collapse did not lead to social breakdown- the problems were dealt with. Most doomer "truths" turned out to be bad predictions and wound up scaring the life out of many people for nothing.

This is not to say that there are not problems in the world or that things can't still go bad. But all life is risky- and that fact hasn't changed since the Roman days. Even if collapse did happen, it really doesn't change the fact that we will all die individually. Nothing really earth shattering has changed.

I feel sorry for this guy. I feel sorry that he fell into a social group that only amplified the dark side of the psyche. I feel bad for all those who fall into doomer camps and get their life sucked out of them. Life is actually fun and exciting. People are very fascinating and can be a source of great joy. There is good in people as well as bad. There is fun in life as well as danger. You were meant to live a happy life- to be responsible and mature but also to care for yourself as well.

Mr. Ruppert's outcome could be in the future of many who comment and read here regularly.

Don't hang around in dark places that are dangerous to your soul. Don't throw away your life on somebody's theory. I was once a doomer and have found that over most of it was not just wrong but a complete waste of life. I am much happier now and wish that for others.

You only get one life- don't throw it away. Recognize that "doomerism" is a powerful form of mental illness that convinces its followers that it holds all the truth. It is an inherently suicidal belief system- a less extreme example of a cult but dangerous nevertheless. There are many who have made the change and stepped back into a mentally healthy world.

+1.

[Rod_Cloutier]

You only get one life- don't throw it away. Recognize that "doomerism" is a powerful form of mental illness that convinces its followers that it holds all the truth. It is an inherently suicidal belief system- a less extreme example of a cult but dangerous nevertheless. There are many who have made the change and stepped back into a mentally healthy world.

This is precisely it. Doomerism appeals to people already suffering from depression, mood disorders, ect. Misery loves company. I regularly interact with James Easton; he openly admits he live alone in a small apartment, on disability benefits for his schizophrenia. He has made 5 full length 9/11 movies, and posts on you tube daily. At some point you have to 'get over' 9/11 being an inside job and move on. Some people can't.

I spend alot of time following the news, and the alternative media. Michael Ruppert was definitely one of my hero's, it was sad to hear this news today. While I am a news addict, at the same time I still work a 45 hour work week, I have a wife, kids, and a dog. We go to movies, we travel together, we have picnics in the park and campfires.

I'd do even more of the fun stuff, if I wasn't worried that the powers that be are trying to ruin the world for the rest of us. I'd spend more on entertainment, reading and travel, if I didn't feel the need to prep. and stockpile food, emergency supplies, and what have you. John Michael Greer's stair step decline model I believe is the best case scenario for the future of the world; it won't all be bad.

Michael Ruppert was a hero. We need more people to follow his courageous path of speaking up against injustice. He will be missed.

[copious.abundance]

Wow, so now even his suicide is becoming a conspiracy theory. Note some of the comments:
http://www.ballerstatus.com/2014/04/15/ ... s-suicide/

People like that have psychological issues. No other way to put it.

[Pops]

I didn't listen to the guy, he seemed to look for trouble when there is a lot in plain sight, but I know he got lots of folks to think about something beyond the party line. Good for him.

I think it's a fine line between trying to understand the questions and becoming convinced you have all the answers - the later is online everywhere you click. Thinking outside the box and losing touch are separated only by degree - and it doesn't matter which side of the fence you're on.

I'd say more folks have checked out over unfulfilled optimism than misplaced pessimism.

[Lore]

I didn't listen to the guy, he seemed to look for trouble when there is a lot in plain sight, but I know he got lots of folks to think about something beyond the party line. Good for him.

I think it's a fine line between trying to understand the questions and becoming convinced you have all the answers - the later is online everywhere you click. Thinking outside the box and losing touch are separated only by degree - and it doesn't matter which side of the fence you're on.

I'd say more folks have checked out over unfulfilled optimism than misplaced pessimism.

Well said, Pops!

[dukey]

I think this was him at his peak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQR2z4YCzDw

[noobtube]

Don't worry. Be happy!

That seems to be the theme, in this thread.

Some things never change in the American dysfunction.

[cynthia]

I first heard Michael Ruppert when he was interviewed on KBOO, Portland Oregon's Community Owned radio station. He was an interesting speaker and gave me much to think about. I subscribed to From the Wilderness and eventually joined peakoil.com in 1995, due to the information he imparted.
It is tragic when despair trumps the will to live. Only Mike (and perhaps those closest to him) knows why he could go on no longer.
I raise my little glass of Merlot to toast his life and give thanks for his service to humanity. I believe he was activated in the spirit of a positive-outcome agenda. Does not "sounding the alarm" imply hope/intent to correct a bad situation?
I take responsibility to sift through information and accept or discard what makes sense.
Thank you, Michael Ruppert for offering information that illuminated an alternative perspective that made more sense to me than the mainstream media.
cynthia

[ennui2]

We all will die individually- collapse or not- nothing will change that. But living with horror movies constantly self broadcast to the brain is slow suicide...Many Doomers have already killed their happiness years ago.

I am totally with you here and have the anxiety-attack to prove that I learned this lesson the hard way.

Mr. Ruppert's outcome could be in the future of many who comment and read here regularly.

Not to betray anybody's privacy but I do know of at least two once-regular posters here who are clinically depressed. Did they become attracted to doom because of the depression or the other way around? All I know is wallowing in doom doesn't make it better.

You only get one life- don't throw it away. Recognize that "doomerism" is a powerful form of mental illness that convinces its followers that it holds all the truth. It is an inherently suicidal belief system- a less extreme example of a cult but dangerous nevertheless. There are many who have made the change and stepped back into a mentally healthy world.

I think it can be, yes, but I think the ultimate form of doomerism is acceptance. It's not that you have to be a cornucopian. You can accept the overall doomer prognosis. But you stop feeling like you need to somehow change hearts and minds, save the world, or even engineer yourself to be last-man-standing post-bottleneck and just make the most of your life one day at a time.

[ennui2]

...more folks have checked out over unfulfilled optimism than misplaced pessimism.

Ruppert, despite whatever hard times he had fallen into, hardly was living the life of the poor Syrian refugees that are being cited here as experiencing "doom" first-hand. He was living in the richest country in the world and enjoying some degree of minor celebrity status. It seems rather hypocritical and a bad role-model for him to have once presided over a survivalist community of sorts, and then to give up long before things are so horrific that the only way to survive is to use all those emergency preps and reskilling that collapsenet was supposed to be about.

[Graeme]

I have been affected by the negativity expressed on this board too. But I don't think that is was this that lead to Michael's suicide. We may not know exactly why he did it but this letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence written in 1997 may explain a large part of the early pressures he was under. I don't know what affected him recently.

Here is his wiki page. This might explain his recent mindset.

As recently as 2010, Ruppert lived in Los Angeles, California and launched Collapse Network to build sustainable communities across the world. But in 2011 he announced on his Lifeboat Hour radio show that he was relocating to Sonoma County, California, because he thought that it would be a safer location in the event of societal collapse. Ruppert left the Collapse Network in May 2012.

[Keith_McClary]

Wow, so now even his suicide is becoming a conspiracy theory. Note some of the comments:
http://www.ballerstatus.com/2014/04/15/ ... s-suicide/

People like that have psychological issues. No other way to put it.

I didn't pay much attention to him, but isn't it a bit unusual that there is no "official" confirmation (AFAIK). Don't they usually investigate deaths by gunshot?

[KaiserJeep]

Michael Ruppert's documentary movie Collapse (2010) was in fact what brought me to realize that there was trouble in our future as FF's became harder to find and more expensive. I spent a couple of weeks after I first viewed it tracking down facts and doing the basic math - and I still believe that he was both correct and accurate in his movie. As late as 2010 the man was a credible figure.

But I just watched the 6-part online version of the Vice documentary APOCALYPSE, MAN. It's a very different story. Within a minute and a half, Michael is showing pictures of the Japanese Tsunami and giving casualty figures that are 10X as great as those reported. Then he attributes those same tsunami casualties to the radiation released from the reactors and calls it an "extinction level event" (ELE), a term popularized by the fictional disaster movie Deep Impact (1998). He made entirely fictitious claims that the reactor fuel was melting into the Earth and would poison the globe. Soon afterwards he mentioned that Chernobyl had caused "a million casualties" due to radiation.

The Japanese tsunami casualties are all due to the wave, and none are due to radiation. Fukushima Dai Ichi is the third greatest nuclear accident, but nobody was killed and just two people were injured by radiation. Nor was anybody killed or injured by radiation at Three Mile Island, the second worst nuclear accident. The actual radiation casualties at Chernobyl were 30-34 depending upon who's figures you accept, and were entirely among the firemen who stood above the burning and open nuclear graphite pile and poured water on the burning bricks, wearing inadequate protective gear.

Sadly, the latest documentary is proof that this man was mentally ill. The last few years of his life are a history of Michael Ruppert being welcomed into one community after another, and then of him walking away from the people he had met and the places he had made for himself.

My wife the CPA just completed yet another tax season, and told me that the economy shows unmistakable signs of an accelerating improvement. Income levels of all her realtors here in Silicon Valley are up 2X to 6X on the average, versus the last six years. Gasoline prices here in the Valley are averaging just over $4/gallon, after peaking at $5.35 two years ago. Food pricing is up here due to the drought, but not as much as I feared.

I am now a believer in the "slow crash" scenario, something that happens over 2-5 decades, and I am expecting that Americans will adjust to the changes as they happen. IMHO Michael Ruppert was obsessed with his own version of doom, and found the increasing evidence to the contrary to be unacceptable, denying reality until he could do so no longer, and put a gun to his head.

Even his personal tragedy is something that we should learn from.

RIP, Michael Ruppert.

[Pops]

It seems rather hypocritical and a bad role-model for him to have once presided over a survivalist community of sorts, and then to give up long before things are so horrific that the only way to survive is to use all those emergency preps and reskilling that collapsenet was supposed to be about.

Whatever prompted him to check out I kinda doubt that hypocrisy was on the list, LOL

There is no doubt that endless hand wringing and searching for dots proving that we're all about to die is a poor mental health exercise if the point isn't to attempt to do something on a personal level to be more resilient. Whether it's Ruppert doing a show (or whatever he did) or some guy on the internet reposting endless streams of GW hysteria, PO doomerisim, crazy government conspiracy crap or whatever, fixation without action is bound to be as harmful as mentally holing up in the basement with a bunch of guns.


As the man said, 'What you think about you become'

So if you think about doom and do nothing, you are indeed a Doomer because "doom" means fated to a bad outcome.

But if I consider the threat of whatever flavor of doom strikes my terror button, then do something to become resilient to that threat (buy insurance, save money, grow a garden, pay down debt, whacko stuff like that) I feel - because in actuality I am, more resilient and not necessarily bound by fate. In which case I'm not a doomer at all, in fact I'm by definition a realist, at least to an extent. Interestingly, by facing and doing something about what scares me I actually become more optimistic in the truest sense of hope and confidence because I'm not completely dependant on externalities.

OTOH, dismissing any and all threats with a shrug and a "tisk tisk, silly doomers" simply means one is as drunk on their own Kool Aid as the whacko in the basement. Worse it means they are completely dependent on externalities for their happiness and well being.
Or fate.

[Ibon]

The world didn't collapse fast enough to match Ruppert's internal dialogue so he pulled the trigger.

I can't help but feel ambivilent about Ruppert's suicide. I joined him at a round table discussion way back in 2005 at a peak oil conference and for awhile followed his work. Way back in 2008 I came to the consclusion this guy was deranged. In spite of his paranoid mental illness he did open up a lot of people's eyes to the truth of peak oil. Madness and visionary perspectives do go hand in hand at times.

On the otherhand it does not lend much credibility to peak oil when your spokesmen or women are deranged. You do not bring peak oil to the mainstream of understanding with guys like this.

[SeaGypsy]

I think I went to his site maybe twice, where I was implored with one of those horribly annoying ads for a 'survival kit' which I listened to the first few seconds of then clicked out, only to get one of those even more horribly annoying 'WAIT! ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO LEAVE THIS PAGE?!? WE HAVE A SPECIAL DISCOUNT JUST FOR YOU!'- to which I have always thought 'F off and F U!'

From this perspective his suicide can be viewed as another version of the wall street jumper. His business model began to fail in 2010 and never recovered, since it was based on the need for most other people's business model failing in order for his to succeed. Quite pathetic. OK, some sympathy for the mentally ill is appropriate, but when they busily feed off other's mental illness- I'm less predisposed to sympathy than disdain.

[Sys1]

Michael Ruppert was right about the fact we are heading to collapse.
But as a doomer, I know it's hard to deal with the "boring" reality of business as usual lasting and lasting...
That's why I stopped any prep to prevent becoming mad about waiting.
I personnaly enjoy having fun with my childrens, going to cinema, reading, playing video games and programmation.
Anyway, we are all doomed, peak oil or not. So have fun! (But don't get a 30 years credit or living in a place without public transport)

[dohboi]

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014- ... -c-ruppert

[Loki]

C8, your rant is entirely out of order. You may suffer from mental illness of some kind, but try not to project it onto others. Thanks.

The world didn't collapse fast enough to match Ruppert's internal dialogue so he pulled the trigger.

I didn't follow Ruppert's stuff, he was always a bit “out there” for me. But no one knows why he opted out. Could have been his “doomerism,” could have been something else entirely. A farmer acquaintance of mine recently put a gun in his mouth. I have no idea why, his brother said he had no idea why. It happens with all walks of life, but older, unmarried white men with financial issues are particularly at risk. Ruppert fit this profile to a T, as did my farmer acquaintance.