Quote: (03-10-2015 09:34 PM)Teutatis Wrote:
Poor libertarians/gold bugs/conspiracy theorists, they have been consistently and horrendously wrong about the economy for 6 years straight and yet they still keep their "the fall is coming any minute now" mantra.
TL;DR: The WORLD isn't going to hell, you are. Get it while you can.
"Mantra"-- interesting that means a word with no inherent meaning, used to distract one from the world so one can reach inner, disconnected peace in meditation. Doomsaying does have a mantra-like effect-- the outside world is hopeless, so one can not feel worry from it.
I have noticed this "doom is right around the corner" alarmist stuff ever since I was an adolescent, at first in myself. It's an aspect of one part simple short-term reinforcement and two parts of adolescent thinking:
First you get short-term reinforcement because people listen to your alarmist shit. If you are skilled at it, you can make it convincing, and people do have a natural propensity to consider what is offered as "emergency warning" information. Nice if you're Jewish in Germany in 1933, but 98% of doomsaying is just wrong or is about something you can't affect.
Something changes and "it" never happens, or "it" happens but there was nothing you could have done about it-- like say for instance that epidemic everyone was scared about a couple months ago.. Ebola? Most people didn't have the resources to flee to a cabin in Montana to escape it even if it did happen.
The adolescent parts of doom-saying:
1) Thinking you are smarter than all the people trying to figure out the solution to the problem of "peak oil", the "unsustainable debt" , "the terrorist problem", "the cold war". "feminist decline".
The smartest people in the world don't sit around and let shit happen, they're hearing the alarmist stuff too, and they don't want their nice lives to get fucked up. So they're improving solar panels which I understand are far more efficient and rugged than even five years ago, and starting Tesla, which may be overbought but is making electric cars sexy. And, if you are amidst the smartest people in the world, sorry but probably you are too busy fixing or inventing shit and not posting on or reading RVF.
2) Not realizing
the feelings of impending doom you notice are accurate perceptions of what's going to happen to YOU, not to the world. We project those feelings of insecurity out and decide what's really wrong is something out there.
We all disappear, completely and forever, and as Freud said the defense mechanisms serve the purpose of allowing you to function without become insane from this insoluble quandary. The specific mechanism used in the "World is going to hell" psychological defense is to project our own anxiety about our doom onto the world outside, with an implicit hope that there is a solution-- fix the budget, fight the SJWs, kill the ISIS morons--and those might be good worldly goals, but they don't change the inevitability of doom.
Once about 40 years ago I was talking doom to my father, the peg on which to hang your doom ideas then was the environment.
"Iron ore used to be 4X %," I mentioned to him, "Now it's only X%. We're going to run out of stuff to make steel out of"
He dismissed this, and told me people had been foretelling doom forever, and that
someone always figures something out. Maybe not for YOU, yes YOU are doomed, but "everything is going to hell" is a shallow and adolescent type of thinking that's been around forever. In the year 1000 people made preparations for the end that seem laughable now. Living in 1000 probably sucked, no hot water,chicks over 17 probably had bad breath lolzlzl. (Shakespeare includes having sweet breath as an attribute of a desirable lover in his writing.)
WE are doomed, yes, WE disappear. Pump out babies and have an ice cream or something.
Get a job at State and fix the Ukraine or ISIS. I think something like 1 out of 50 or 100 applicants get hired. Or relax poolside. The EARTH doesn't flame out for about half a trillion years I think, from the expanding Sun. I'm a nervous guy, but even I'm not going to worry about that.