{"id":66127,"date":"2023-11-13T10:20:39","date_gmt":"2023-11-13T15:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66127"},"modified":"2023-11-13T10:20:39","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T15:20:39","slug":"todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-clxii-reality-is-an-inconvenience-to-beliefs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66127","title":{"rendered":"Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXII–Reality is an Inconvenience to Beliefs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXII<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Mexico (1988). Photo by\u00a0author.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Reality is an Inconvenience to Beliefs<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s brief Contemplation was prompted by The Honest Sorcerer\u2019s latest article<\/a> that looks at the latest energy \u2018breakthrough\u2019 (seems there is one every other week) and how it\u2019s going to save modern civilisation, our species, and the planet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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In this globalised world where virtually every economic transaction has become finacialised, and one cannot for long survive without some type of revenue stream (because we have lost the skills\/knowledge to live apart from our complex and monetised energy-averaging systems), it seems to me that everything has become a racket\u200a\u2014\u200ain terms of a fraudulent scheme.<\/p>\n

And \u2018energy\u2019, being the most fundamental of \u2018resources\u2019 for life, has been fully captured by the multitude of racketeers\u200a\u2014\u200aas has all the revenue-generating\/-extracting aspects of our sociocultural existence.<\/p>\n

War. Politics. Food. Health. Education. Resources. You name it.<\/p>\n

These are all being leveraged by our society\u2019s ruling caste, grifters, and wannabes to generate revenue. And attracting investment capital with some technological\/innovative \u2018breakthrough\u2019 works because of our ongoing (if very misguided, primarily due to recency bias) belief that human ingenuity and technological prowess can solve all \u2018problems\u2019\u200a\u2014\u200apredicaments without \u2018solutions\u2019 don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

As I more deeply explore the story-telling nature of our species and the psychological mechanisms at play during this communication process, it is becoming clear that it matters little\u200a\u2014\u200aif at all\u200a\u2014\u200athat the narrative being shared aligns with physical reality or not. We believe what we want to believe and all it takes is that the tale we are being told needs to be \u2018plausible\u2019, provide us with a sense of agency (especially self-efficacy), reinforces our self-esteem, reduces our cognitive dissonance, is believed by many in our social circle, and is being told by a \u2018trusted\/authoritative\u2019 source.<\/p>\n

Dave Pollard, who writes here<\/a>, has put forward a \u2018Law of Human Beliefs\u2019 (see his latest here<\/a>) that is quite relevant to this observation:<\/p>\n

\u201cPollard\u2019s Law of Human Beliefs:<\/em> We believe what we want to believe, not what is actually true. We want to believe in happy endings, simple answers, the inevitability of progress, self-control, karma, responsibility, destiny, miracles, a proper order of things, the power of love, and infinite human capacity and agency. Most of us want to believe in a higher power that can step in when we falter. We want to believe what those in our circles of trust believe (even if it\u2019s crazy, gaslighting or propaganda). So we tend to seek sources that reinforce those beliefs and ignore those that undermine or unsettle them. Our hopes and expectations are determined by those beliefs. Our worldview is the sum of those beliefs, hopes and expectations, and bears no necessary resemblance to truth or reality. This invented reality<\/em> is the only way we can make sense of a world that is impossible to grasp, to understand, or to ever really make sense of.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our denial of reality is strong and often, if not always, cannot be overcome. We go to all sorts of lengths to rationalise and justify our belief systems, regardless of evidence\/facts that challenge them.<\/p>\n

And as Ajit Varki has postulated in his and Danny Brower\u2019s theory on the origins of the human mind<\/a>,<\/p>\n

\u201cThe human ability to understand and consider our own mortality without being consumed by fear seems natural to us. In fact, it appears to be just one manifestation of a peculiar human ability to ignore, rationalize, or outright deny obvious realities, and even to believe in multiple or alternate realities at the same time\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even when we do acknowledge such realities, we tend to indulge in magical thinking, behaving as if these statistics apply to everyone else, but not to ourselves. Many humans also ignore or even deny scientific and societal realities such as biological evolution, anthropogenic climate change, human \u201covershoot\u201d with nonrenewable resource depletion, gross degradation of our environment, massive expansion of national debt, ballooning healthcare costs, covert or overt racism, and so on.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(See Rob Mielcarski\u2019s site, un-Denial<\/a>, for a lot more on this subject.)<\/p>\n

Biogeophysical limits\u200a\u2014\u200ameh, it\u2019s not reality; it\u2019s just another conspiracy theory by those tinfoil hat-wearing ecofascists. Please disregard all that \u2018collapse\/overshoot\u2019 nonsense and carry on with your consumption and dreams of perpetual growth on a finite planet\u2026oh, and please send us any investment money while you\u2019re at it (and\/or encourage your government to) so we can solve those predicaments the nutcases keep yammering on about.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXII Mexico (1988). Photo by\u00a0author. Reality is an Inconvenience to Beliefs Today\u2019s brief Contemplation was prompted by The Honest Sorcerer\u2019s latest article that looks at the latest energy \u2018breakthrough\u2019 (seems there is one every other week) and how it\u2019s going to save modern civilisation, our species, and the planet. In this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4,5,6,7],"tags":[150,1330,6464,22093,669,5833,30370,33947],"class_list":["post-66127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","category-survival-2","tag-collapse","tag-denial","tag-denial-of-reality","tag-ecological-overshoot","tag-reality","tag-steve-bull","tag-todays-contemplation","tag-todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66128,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66127\/revisions\/66128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}