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Started by K-Dog, Sep 15, 2023, 11:24 AM

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RE

Quote from: Vegematic Deluxe on Apr 29, 2024, 09:34 PMAlthough I agree that continued growth is completely unsustainable, I question the assumption that there are only about 10,000 people who realize this. Most confirmed doomers eventually get exhausted proclaiming a truth that nobody wants to hear.  I believe that even with the massive suppression of truth, there are no doubt huge numbers of people who refuse to don the rose colored glasses and understand the unprecedented disaster our species is facing.

Depends on what you mean by "realize"?  If all you mean is that a person can see the society they live in is failing and that we're heading for a reckoning, the number is far larger than 10K, and getting bigger all the time.  I can see the change in the people I talk to IRL, I can see it in pop culture and in fiction.  I definitely see it in the participation in groups like Extinction Rebellion and even Right wing Natalists.

If however you mean people who really understand Collapse, what underlies it inside our current culture and the mechanics of how all the different manifestations fit together the number is far smaller.  Even some of the very best academics and historians like Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter who have written detailed books analyzing collapse of prior cultures and the scientists of the club of Rome who authored the Limits to Growth Study and Richard Duncan who proposed the Olduvai Theory or Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring have a relatively narrow focus and only see collapse through the narrow lens of their specialty area. For a complete understanding of the economic, social, political and scientific reasons we are utterly and completely fucked, you are talking a number far smaller than 10K, you can probably count the number of people on your fingers and toes.

You don't necessarily need to know the entire history of the Middle East going back to Biblical times and the modern history of Colonialism and resource wars that have led up to the current conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza to protest against it though, nor should you need to have a complete understanding of the real estate market to protest against homelessness or detailed knowledge of geochemistry to understand how dependence of fossil fuels has created an unsustainable consumption level of energy and protest against that.  The more things you understand though and the more relationships you can draw in, the better the chance you can bring together the critical mass of people necessary to effect change.

Unfortunately, even with the understanding, trying to get the word out when the most powerful forces in society want it surpressed is a mighty difficult thing to do, so developing any kind of organized resistance to the self destructive trajectory of our civilization is close to impossible.  All we have is a bunch of fractured pockets of opposition to some ofthe more obvious and egregious problems.  At this point, it doesn't seem very likely that any sort of effective, organized resistance and change of BAU will occur before we inevitably run into a cascade failure of many systems failing at the same time.

The best we can do is to keep tabs on it and understand it as best we can, then explain it to whoever will listen.  Perhaps it will help them negotiate their own future as events progress.

Save as Many as you Can.

RE

K-Dog

#1
QuoteIf however you mean people who really understand Collapse, what underlies it inside our current culture and the mechanics of how all the different manifestations fit together the number is far smaller.

The number is indeed small.  Jared Diamond * has some exposure.  For the purposes of argument I'll guess 17 people in a thousand have heard of JD.  Of those 17 are any of them doomers?  No they are not.  You need four times 17 or 68 people on average who have heard of Jared Diamond to find a doomer.

The pool of people needed to find a doomer is now at 4000.  It is going to take even more than that who will understand that the deep state actively suppresses doomerism, and that doom is baked in the cake even if more become aware of it, because of Silent American Censorship ** .

But lets stay with the one in four thousand people is a seriously informed doomer.  Not a run of the mill 'activist' who just needs an issue to bitch about without any real understanding of it.  Mommy and daddy issues float their boat.  Not an understanding of the graph on the left.  You meet them, and you think they understand, but they do not.  This is OK.  Sane people think there is more sanity than there actually is.

The population of Canada and the US combined is about 377,000,000.  This number divided by 4000 gives:


94,250

Less than my compromise number by 750 people and I did not choose 17 and 4 to make the numbers work out.  I picked them because I think they are reasonable guesses.  This suggests the number of people who know about active Homeland Security Censorship are limited to those who actually experience it, and not all of them.

* Do all doomers know about Jared?  No, but I assume most do.

** Veg is one of these privileged few.  He knows his you Tube Channel will be stuck at 1000 subscribers for all eternity.  Algorithms have seen to it.  Who wrote those algorithms, and why?  Unfortunately I know.


RE

Quote from: K-Dog on Apr 30, 2024, 10:05 AMThe number is indeed small.  Jared Diamond * has some exposure.  For the purposes of argument I'll guess 17 people in a thousand have heard of JD.

I'd bet that is a huge overestimate.  It's not really critical though how precisely you guess how many people are well informed about collapse, it's enough to know that relative to the size of the population as a whole it is small and because it is small these people are easily marginalized and portrayed as cranks.

If you're one of the people trying to get the word out also, you have to be really careful about how you portray things, because you'll immediately turn people off.  If you portray the situation as bad as it really is, people either won't believe it or if they do become so hopelessly depressed they don't see what you can do to make a difference.  If you portray it as a consequence of Capitalism, most Amerikans will dismiss it as Commie propaganda.  If you blame the rich, it's because you're jealous, along with being stupid and lazy.  If you tell them they have to give up their cars, they wonder why life would be worth living? lol.

So it's pretty hard to tell the truth and make any headway with it.

RE

K-Dog

#3
Quote from: RE on Apr 30, 2024, 01:25 PM
Quote from: K-Dog on Apr 30, 2024, 10:05 AMThe number is indeed small.  Jared Diamond * has some exposure.  For the purposes of argument I'll guess 17 people in a thousand have heard of JD.

I'd bet that is a huge overestimate.  It's not really critical though how precisely you guess how many people are well informed about collapse, it's enough to know that relative to the size of the population as a whole it is small and because it is small these people are easily marginalized and portrayed as cranks.

If you're one of the people trying to get the word out also, you have to be really careful about how you portray things, because you'll immediately turn people off.  If you portray the situation as bad as it really is, people either won't believe it or if they do become so hopelessly depressed they don't see what you can do to make a difference.  If you portray it as a consequence of Capitalism, most Amerikans will dismiss it as Commie propaganda.  If you blame the rich, it's because you're jealous, along with being stupid and lazy.  If you tell them they have to give up their cars, they wonder why life would be worth living? lol.

So it's pretty hard to tell the truth and make any headway with it.

RE