sixdollars wrote:
Nothing has caused me more cognitive dissonance than overshoot / peak oil. It's weird, but I find myself flip flopping between not caring about overshoot and peak oil, to caring too much. It's like when I read about it, it makes so much sense that I cannot logically refute it. The big picture takeaway is extremely depressing and makes me wonder about the timing and if I should even bother worrying about it. Part of me thinks that there's not really much you can honestly do anyway, so it's best not to worry... the other part of me thinks that it's stupid to just do nothing.
After a few months of not reading anything about it, it's like it goes to the back of my mind and I no longer fear it or think it relevant anymore. I sometimes think this is my brain in denial employing a natural defense mechanism. Does anyone else have this happen? Just me?
The problem is, I have yet to hear a convincing argument against overshoot/peak oil that didn't involve high levels of cargoism... I'm waiting though. I actually spent a good amount of time trying to find analyses that could persuasively refute overshoot/peak oil, sadly, I found none that were very convincing.
I hear that a lot of people are attracted to this sort of narrative because it's thrilling doomer porn, but I honestly can't fathom why anyone would WANT to believe in overshoot or peak oil, it's pretty depressing. I'd much rather NOT have heard about it at all to be honest. It's like when Morpheus offers the blue pill vs. the red pill. Just take the damn blue pill..
My belief is that human intelligence evolved to be finely attuned to environmental, cultural, economic, etc. changes that occur within one human lifetime. The reason for this evolutionary adaptation is that there is ZERO survival advantage to being able to detect and address problems that don't occur within a single lifetime (how could there be a survival advantage to a certain type of brain if it didn't actually help the individual himself survive?).
So my starting point is that human intelligence can be staggering in its grasp of concepts, nuance, subtlety, etc., but it has blind spots, and one of those blind spots is long term processes that are not easily observable, but which nevertheless affect a species' survival. A popular one now is, of course, climate change, and what you see with people in many cases is a complete inability to grasp why it matters
to them, and all sorts of culturally filtered rationalizations for why it isn't a big deal.
Throughout the history of every species, there are always environmental limitations that normally prevent them from doing too much damage to their habitat and other species, and the long term survival of a species is normally a function of the ongoing suitability of their environment.
With humans, though, it's a little different. We have systematically overwhelmed every natural barrier that would have otherwise kept us in any kind of steady state with our environment.
- We have moved to the top of the food chain and then mostly transcended it (though we are still working on wiping out the dangerous germs).
- We have hunted all potential predators to the brink of extinction, and we keep the remaining cute ones in zoos.
- We have conquered hunger to the point that starvation is more of a political tactic than a serious environmental threat for most humans alive today.
In other words, we have conquered our environment in a comprehensive way, and the effort is ongoing. We think of this as a triumph and a tribute to our massive intelligence.
But what if that whole framework is misplaced? What if we are not actually a meaningful culmination of organic life at all? What if every step we took out of our natural habitat and stasis with nature took us one step closer to extinction,
even though we thought it was doing just the opposite?
If we as a species were basically destroying ourselves through the destruction of our environment, would we know? I would suggest that for a person with no cultural lenses it would be obvious that if you kill all the animal life, stress the soil, pollute the waterways, grow your population exponentially, etc. it would be obvious that your species was experiencing its last gasps, but there are no people without cultural lenses. We all see things through the values and beliefs that make up our cultural operating system.
The real problem IMHO is that we have a cultural operating system that doesn't allow us to see the error in the way we are interacting with our habitat. Since our cultural lenses are what allow us to make sense of the world, it's very hard to take them off for any reason, even if it's a good reason. What this leads to is sound arguments like peak oil and overshoot running into a messy web of cultural beliefs about the "specialness" of the human species, and how our species are not subject to the same processes that govern all other life. That's where cargoism comes into the picture and acts almost like a religion in many people's minds.
If a person is able to allow the truth of these dark messages to get past their cultural filters, it often just creates a sense of despair because when the problem is viewed clearly it becomes obvious that there is no solution other than the human species suffering the same fate that every other dominant species in history has suffered when environmental changes cause their habitat to no longer be conducive to their own survival.
Seeing too far into the future can be a depressing experience. When no one is really interested in knowing what the future holds, it can also be an isolating experience.
I've always thought that the next ice age would clear away the delusions associated with modern humanity and its fascination with industrial capitalism, and that's going to happen whether we cut back on burning fossil fuels and reproducing or not. It's just a question of whether it happens 400 years from now or 40,000 years from now. These time periods are blips in geological time, though, so it really doesn't matter whether we wreck ourselves or get wrecked by a bunch of ice, the end result is the same: the human species will likely become extinct in the future, and our total time inhabiting this earth will be the equivalent of staying a couple of nights in a 100 year old hotel and imagining that it belongs to you because you have a key to your room and the workout center. It's just hubris.
Will we travel to other planets and live there? Doubtful. The fact that simply getting to our own moon took a monumental effort in a society with enormous surpluses and we only did it a few times makes me think that humans are probably safer on earth than they would be anywhere else. We evolved to live here, with this air, with this solar radiation, with this gravity. We are earthlings. To go live on a new planet (assuming you could find one) you would need not just enormous lead times, technology that doesn't exist, and gigantic surpluses to commit to such a project, but you would also need a level of cohesion and cooperation across the whole human species that has never occurred at any time in our history. And it still might not work.
I think what is better to do is to focus on the present, this moment, and do what you can in that space. Like our own personal deaths, the death of our species is also just part of life. We shouldn't dread the realization of the mortality of our own species; rather, we should celebrate the fact that we ever existed at all (as we should do with ourselves individually).
The hole you don't want to fall into is what you might call "species nihilism", or perhaps "cultural nihilism", where you begin to feel a sense of futility over everything, not just your own life. That's a heavy burden to carry, and you have to ask yourself some serious questions:
Why does it matter what I think about any of this stuff? What value is there in ruining my own peace of mind over something that I'm not even supposed to know about? After all, I'm only supposed to know about bad things that can happen in a single lifetime. That's what I evolved to deal with. That's what I am optimized for.
When thinking about how to metabolize all of these ideas, I like how Anton Chigurh put it:
Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule? I think that's good advice for each individual, as well as a subtle criticism of the entire life support system that we have created for ourselves.
But I don't think the entire thing falls apart if it isn't 100% correct about everything. The vibe I'm talking about is the "we're completely right about everything and anyone who disagrees just doesn't understand it or is an idiot" undertone that you can get when reading Austrian economics books. Overshoot had a very similar tone.
