The anger comes from a feeling of powerlessness.People have to understand that long before facing down a Malthusian catastrophe you were most likely to die of some untreatable medical condition or in a war. That the health of the biosphere and the oil we're burning still in the ground offered no solace to facing down a life expectancy of 30-40 at best. This is why people tended to clutch at religion as an opiate, something that is, outside of Islam, giving way to atheism. (I would argue that a great many who go to church are in fact atheists going through the motions out of conformity.)
Most of the rhetoric I have read in the doomerverse has been an attempt to sort of deal with this lack of power. It's more whining to the converted than anything approaching, let's say, political activism. Sure, there's references to some mythical global epiphany like the
zeitgeist movement, but it's basically a mindgame people are playing because the last thing anybody's gonna do is tap their neighbor on the shoulder and tell them the planet is in population overshoot and that we should abolish money.
Time to trot this chart out again.
Again, I think part of the difficulty people have dealing with this is the fact their starting point on the grief cycle was being in the center of first world affluence, believing that progress was a straight line that would bring us a Jetsons style existence. The higher your expectations are for your life, the farther you have to fall. But this perspective is based on ignorance of history, even recent history. Imagine being born in the "greatest generation" and being drafted into WWII. You would have felt upset for having to likely die on the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima. You'd be sad about man's inhumanity to man in general, but you'd have to resign yourself to feeling that the cause was just. Compare that to being drafted in Vietnam. Now compare that to being a spoiled but bored cubicle worker. Now compare that to being a
Chinese man dying during the Great Leap Forward.
Having enough perspective to be able to step back and think about things like CO2, biodiversity loss, dwindling natural resources, it's really a luxury when you think about it, because most people's concerns were much more up close and personal.
I think the reason someone like Mike Ruppert offed himself is that being sad over the macro-level is really setting yourself up to fail. No one individual, not even an activist like Bill McKibben, is in a position to significantly alter the final outcome. There's a certain hero complex that overtakes you and you think your job should be to save the world otherwise you're complicit in killing it. I think at the very least it drives some to be obsessive keyboard jockeys and clicktivists, because that's the easiest way to feel like you're somehow changing hearts and minds, fighting the good fight from behind the keyboard. I think the only thing we're really obligated to do is tend to our proverbial gardens.
Mike chose to wallowing in a trailer park, medicating himself with booze.Don't be him.