Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 09, 2023, 02:16 PMTeaching people to self-educate, the only path to deep knowledge.
At least for me, the whole Doomstead Diner project has been an exercise in self-education. As good as my education was (and it was about the best available anywhere in the world from my elementary school years at the United Nations school in Rio for children of diplomats, bankers and military officers through high school at Stuyvesant and the Ivy League at Columbia), until the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in 2007-8, I was 100% unaware of the connection between available energy and the monetary system, as well as the issues of resource depletion and climate change. I was only dimly aware of the problems of population overshoot and waste and the dependence of food production on fossil fuels.
When I first started figuring it all out, my initial conclusion was "oh, we'll have to go back to living like Amish people on farms with horses". Then I figured out why living like that would be impossible, and we would end up back at stone age level hunter-gatherers, because agriculture itself was unsustainable. At first I subscribed to the Doomsteading idea (thus the name of our blog), because I felt setting up an off grid living situation was a good solution. Then I realized how come this doesn't work in the absence of a larger community of like minded and equally well prepped individuals, and how expensive and inequitable the solution is. Relatively few people have the resources to set up a good Doomstead, particularly amongst the millenial and later generations.
Another aspect of my learning over the last 15 years has been my increasing disaffection for science, technology and modern medicine. I used to be a big fan of all these things, and the perpetual progress of the human race. I used to be a big believer in the ability of human ingenuity & technology to solve all problems. Now I believe that for every problem we think we solve with technology, we create at least 2 new, more difficult and more dangerous problems, so the more "advanced" our civilization gets, the worse off we actually become.
As important as all this newfound knowledge is to the future of the human race, to this date AFAIK there is no university level Major labelled Collapse Studies as you have Women's Studies or Black Studies programs. Anyone interested in this still has to pop around through a dozen different disciplines from History, Political Science, Anthropology and Archaeology to Economics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics, to Environmental Science, Meteorology, Geochemistry, Biochemistry and Medicine and more to begin to get a grasp of the scope of the issues involved in Collapse.
My own journey through these topics I feel is a good Roadmap for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the Collapse of Industrial Civilization we are immersed in, and I hope at some point to retrieve all my writings from the original Doomstead Diner that traced my own journey to understanding what is happening to our species and why it is happening. Perhaps if more people had this understanding, something might be done to make some positive difference in the outcome. Continuing with the level of ignorance we currently have assures a REALLY BAD outcome. When theoretically very smart people write about how optimistic they are for the future and how solvable our energy problems are if we just pay attention to the 3 E's, we are in real trouble. It's one thing to be wrong, it's another to be so collosolly and completely wrong it's like concluding that 1+1=Purple or that on a planet over stressed with 8B people we need to encourage more reproduction because our biggest worry is depopulation. ::)
It is time to stop listening to people who are really, Really, REALLY WRONG.
RE