Interesting person on LJ

[liveonearth]

theheretic is a type I diabetic and former science fiction writer. I was wandering around in his journal and it is full of great ideas and interesting thoughts about our future and human nature.

Here's a quote from the middle of an entry about why he is alive, which in a word, is "insulin":

Optimism is a terrible evil, one of the greatest ever, imho. Like religion or shame. It is a destructive creation meant to enslave. Its very hard to explain why unless you're a serious pessimist like me. Optimism has positive results, but the negative ones are maddeningly squashed and ignored. People don't learn when they're optimists. They just keep thrashing around until they're dead. And usually, after they've infected more idiots with optimism so they'll die too. Peasants aren't optimists, they're just realistic about their odds of survival and accept an early death as the cost of being alive at all. If we were less greedy for comforts, and less optimistic, we'd have avoided the pitfalls that have already doomed our civilization, and will send people like me off to a painful death.

Comments

[theheretic.livejournal.com]

Look up the words: "Peak Oil" in Google and get back to me.

[neptunia67.livejournal.com]

OK, I looked it up. Your point is?

Some arguments to consider

[theheretic.livejournal.com]

Best case: the third world stops improving and halts its level of development. Worst case the third world starves or riots and the first world joins them. This would make delivery of Insulin rather unlikely and I would experience a terrible death. You might look up "Ketoacidosis" on WebMD.com. As I used to be a Survivalist and have a pretty low opinion of how people treat each other, from misunderstood indifference to deliberate evil, knowing I'm going to face death because people can't get along is a humiliating realization. And I really believe that they'd rather kill each other than compromise their "dreams". Optimists pretend that Peak Oil is someone else's problem, either because they can't believe that Oil, a limited resource, can run out, or because they think it will run out in decades or centuries rather than pay attention to the already declining production and existing wars over oil that began recently (Kuwait 1990-91, Iraq 2003, Nigeria 2006).

Pessimists and Cynics like me know its our problem and we Americans will face the wrath of the rest of the world for centuries because WE STOLE IT ALL. We burned it up. It was a chance to bootstrap the third world into first world amenities: clean water, sewage treatment, hospitals, roads. All that is gone, possibly forever.

I keep my fingers crossed that advancements in solar will be seized by the govt and given away to the third world so they have something to be grateful for and a way to advance themselves towards a world which will HAVE TO BE sustainable, whether it wants this or not. And Optimist wouldn't prepare or make the effort, because Optimists believe that someone else will do it, that they live in the best of all possible worlds. Candide, by Voltaire, published around 1760, clearly and concisely disproved optimism with numerous examples. Optimism is just as wrong as the Flat Earth Society and the insistence of Phlogiston being responsible for wood combusting in a fire.

Why do I care about what the third world thinks? Because I know that wars start over Envy, and the USA is sitting on unmineable and expensive to extract oil shale, which fools in the third world will likely claim is and ace in the hole instead of a useless non-resource within our borders. The third world has lots of conspiracy theories whose villains are always Yankees (Americans) operating from the shadows. We're the cause of the world's troubles, they say, and no amount of reality will dissuade them. An optimist would say that the World Trade Center never fell, but it did, didn't it? And the men responsible blamed us for hurting their homes. The whole world has men who hate us like that. An optimist would ignore that hatred and blithely visit on an EcoTour and get kidnapped and dismembered in the deserts or jungles because they were ignorant. I believe in human nature. I have seen its cold eyes with my own.

Please take the time to consider your philosophical position in context with both history and modern reality. Or ignore me and go on your merry way. It's your life, after all. Self determination is well and good and accepting other's beliefs and respecting their choices is a very American truth. I'm also Pro-Suicide. Anyone who wants to off themselves leaves more food at the Table for me. They always get my gratitude.

Re: Some arguments to consider

[neptunia67.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You make some very valid points. Your description of "Optimists" sounds more to me like people who prefer to spend their time wearing blinders than people who have a favorable outlook or see opportunity (as I understand the definition of optimism).

Call it what you will, I can't argue any of your points. I KNOW this country has caused many problems in the world, that people are suffering and we are wasting and hogging the resources on our planet. I am very grounded in reality and what's going on around me, and always interested to hear opinions.

Re: Some arguments to consider

[theheretic.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I think our biggest problem is that we've become people who treat the world in a very binary fashion, treat other people like tools to be used and discarded. We've turned into barbarians, like the Mongols invading Europe. We invade using whatever tricky advantage we can gain, scope out the resources, take whatever we can grab and often spoil what's left so no one else can use it and compete against us in future, then leave. Small wonder that Americans are hated worldwide, and Californians and New Yorkers most of all, even in the rest of the nation.

It bothers me that we've become a nation of selfish idiots. We are entirely involved with consumption, with getting ours. I don't think it was always like that, but I may be blinded by revisionist history they taught us in school and the history books are written by the victors, after all.

Rome took 4 centuries to fall. Spain fell in one. Britain fell in decades. America seems to to have fallen in around half a century, starting in 1968 (Free Love was a terrible thing), war in Vietnam (which we lost), the Cold War (which we won, barely), and all that deficit spending has finally come home to roost. I see the current crisis, which is only half-way over at this point, to be the beginning of the end of the financial system which allows the USA to be cooperative states. After the Dollar fails, we need replacement currencies and a total refusal to back US securities by the individual states so we aren't paying China for centuries into the future. We're better off losing faith and focus on our real product: food. America grows enough rice, in California, to feed a billion people. America grows enough grain in the midwest to feed another 2 billion people. We literally feed half the world. That's our Ace In The Hole. Its all dependent on water supply and soil fertility. We will be forced to convert to sustainable agriculture over the next 5-15 years, and figuring out the water supply problem will depend a great deal on the weather, I think, and how well we get along with Canada. Their Frasier River has enough to divert to irrigate the Great Plains and recharge the Ogalalla Aquifer. That's a big deal. We'd need their permission to build a canal and take lots of water, though, and they're not interested right now.

In the long run we'll be bioengineering crops to grow with less water and fix their own nitrogen into the soil so most of the legwork isn't required any longer. People have to get over their hangups about transgenic crops. Its the future. People who disliked looms broke them. People who disliked iron cursed it. Both types fighting the future lost. The future always wins. We can count on that. That is why, despite the low depression caused by the oil collapse, in a few decades things will improve again. Here in the USA it won't be Mad Max or The Stand or anything like that. It will just be poor, smelly, dirty, sticky, humble pie america for about 20 years. I can deal with that, so long as they keep delivering the insulin. So can you. The Third World is going to suffer. We'll be a lot better off.