mefistofeles wrote:Maybe this isn't a very kind thing to say but I was looking at a website called politico.com and utter shocked that they didn't have a single story about oil. --snip-- Peak Oil is more important than EVERY other issue that we are talking about today. So is everybody else out there just dumb for not getting Peak Oil?
Nope. Stupidity isn't the major reason for why public concern over Peak Oil isn't as great as it should be. It may be a factor in some cases - the average human IQ of 100 isn't sufficient for dealing effectively with the sort of social/economic factors that humans live with. But even among smarter folks, you will find a decided lack of careful attention toward subjects that merit it.
The major reason for that is conditioning. Most people have ingrained "blind spots" that, to mix metaphors, prevents them from seeing the box that they habitually think inside of.
Joseph Sobran is a very smart man. Read these two essays by him.
1.
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2008/080304.shtml2.
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2008/080205.shtmlHow is it that a man capable of writing the first essay, about Marxism, could commit the sort of perceptual, logical and/or mental blunders implicit in the second? Why would a man who can analyze Marxism so adroitly become so inept when confronted with evolution that he must resort to argument by mockery? It's a blind spot.
Sobran's reasoning probably occurs in either, or both, of two invalid forms. First, he may be thinking that since the Marxists were wrong about Marxism, they were wrong about evolution, too. Second, he might be thinking, since he's Catholic, that his religious creed has trump cards over scientific evidence; i.e., Galileo has nothing to teach him.
(Actually, the Marxists do make a mistake in their thinking on evolution. They erroneously concluded that the component parts of our species were essentially "equals," that any two hominids, given the same environments and opportunities, would do equally well, and that biological inheritance does not broadly favor one race more than another. But insofar as the Marxists believe that
humans evolved from more primitive species conflicts with Joseph Sobran's belief in
divine creation, I think that the Marxists are right and that Sobran is wrong.)
Atheists frequently have blind spots, too. Not about religion: I'm reasonably sure that the atheists are right there. (I'm an atheist myself.) But many leftist atheists are also
racial egalitarians, despite the copious scientific evidence and published official statistics that ought to undermine everyone's belief in racial egalitarianism.
They say that all taboos seem ludicrous... except the ones you were raised with. And in our media saturated culture, the media bosses have had the biggest say in which taboos will be indoctrinated among us, the American public, and which taboos will be exposed and reduced, whether by reason or by mockery.
I'd go ahead and identify which ethnic group comprises nearly all of the media bosses, but, if I did, I'd invoke yet another taboo which the media bosses have had a major part in creating and promulgating, and the result would be, on the part of some of you here, an irrational opposition based mostly on the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.
So, no, lots of the people who ought to be raising an outcry over the significance of Peak Oil, but who are not doing so, are not stupid. They are behaving in accordance with their conditioning. As do most people, most of the time.