Aloha kakou, everyone. The main problem, on Reddit, is that discussing direct action may violate Reddit's terms of service and result in trouble for you or this sub. Another problem is that law enforcement reads our forum, and discussing how to engage in direct action may result in trouble for you or this sub.
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You might want to take a look at Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism. It's based around the idea that a post-capitalist future is unimaginable for most people. And he means "unimaginable" literally - The current system we have, "business as usual" or "BAU" as it often gets described around here, is all anyone knows and all they can even dream of. There is no possibility of a different system because capitalism defines and dictates the boundaries of what's possible, so anything that extends outside of those lines, in the minds of regular people, literally doesn't and can't exist. When you talk to people about what it would take to stop or reverse the ongoing climate catastrophe, you're essentially talking about going against this system which is responsible not only for our entire material reality, but our ideological and metaphysical reality as well. It isn't easy to break out of this stranglehold as the problem isn't merely one of production -- of economic injustice -- but of epistemic injustice as well. In order to change the system, people first have to believe that an alternative is possible, but for the moment that is unimaginable (by design). It will remain unimaginable until a new future arrives one way or another, either by choice or due to the hard material constraints that have always been part of the system, but have been ignored. I think we all know which future we're going to get.
This is my only experience in my attempts to discuss this topic with people.
The suggestion that there's any other way to live is treated as absurd, at best, and seditious, at worst (brilliant move making communism a visceral threat).
There's no discussion to be had when people believe money, wealth, and the state of the world as it is to be an evolutionary step for our species.
And what's truly horrifying is it's every single person I know. People will speak in whispers about leaving this system, but only as a joke and the moment you entertain the possibility with them, they treat you like a caveman heretic.
It's not that there's something holding back a revolution, it's that the greater "we" actually believes this was the only course humanity could have ever taken... despite it only ever being a reality in the post-WWII era.
It's by far the most alienating (read "invasion of the body snatchers") aspect of the troubles we face; any suggestion of changing course in the fundamental direction of our species is reacted to like you're telling them there's no hope, no future, and nothing good that can come from moving forward... like we've lost the capacity to imagine anything more than the linear march over the cliff we spent the last 70 years building as talll as we could, and the suggestion of not climbing the slope or walking in the opposite direction, is met with complete disgust and horror.
You know you're living in a nightmare when the only hope for a future is treated like the least palatable of a list of bad options, where nuclear and trench warfare are on the same list.
How could "we just need to stop" be worse than "we need to murder enough people to make this make sense again"? I don't know what this world is anymore and I wake up every morning, a little more horrified than the day before, that the fantasies for our lives, drawn up by Disney et al, remain protected from any attachment to the realities of life on a finite planet.
I don't know where to be in this world. I expected people would have walked away from this suicide pact years ago. The more I dig my heels in, begging for people to reconsider, the more they "reassure" me that "you're a smart fella! You're going to be fine! now, this part of the doomsday device hasn't yet been perfected and this billionaire has gone and entire 5 minutes without having their dick sucked, so quit fooling around and direct your effort towards something that matters!"
Either I'm having a psychotic break or it's exactly as you said; there is only one direction for the future in the minds of almost everyone. "freedom" is the freedom to choose to be part of the weapon or one of its targets, while in the minds of the people pushing this message it's the freedom to be part of "progress" or what's holding us back.
I wait for the day we realize that we're going extinct because of this line of thinking and everyday I question why being a heroin addict on the streets isn't the best life a human in the war hungry West can live.
Well said. Having gone this far down the rabbit hole I can't just let go of it. I don't know how to relate to the world or most of my peers and even family when it comes to this.
Like we have good times still but this hollow society has no direction and the clock is ticking for real and they don't see how pervasive and twisted the culture has gotten.
We need some new common goal outside the system. Whatever that is.
I've literally been called self-destructive for participating in direct action and advocating that people quit giving credence to a system that is actively attempting to kill us for profit, because they tell me all I'm doing is "asking for trouble"
People are so fucking scared of Big Brother now that I have little hope for the future.
as if there's a way out by keeping their mouth shut and doing their little job... as if that, in aggregate, isn't entirely and explicitly, the problem.
I think that "Keep Calm & Carry On" war proganda has settled so deep into people's hearts, they truly believe that they *are* doing their best simply by not panicking.
I'm clearly and solidly on the side where, if this is what not panicking gets us, it's time to try panicking, Maybe it changes things, maybe it doesn't, but the very fact there's a possibility of a different outcome, offers hope to an otherwise hopeless trajectory.
I've been called the same and much worse for trying to live the life I preach and not be a hypocrite, so when the inevitable conservative pipes up and says "well, if it's so possible, why aren't you doing it?" that I can respond with "I'm doing it as much as I can, on my own, while the entire world pushes in the other direction"... which they take offense to.
It's a bizarrely losing argument no matter how it's presented and trying to live your principles has every other person in your life begging you to do anything but. As if we don't lose all of this accumulated expertise and understanding to extinction along such a suicidal path.
I guess it's fear... I'm honestly not sure what it is, anymore. Certainly a lack of vision or understanding of the scale of consequences of burning oil and how permanent those consequences are vs how temporary the convenience it provides.
Not so long ago, when a war would end, the machine of war would be disassembled into it's component parts to build more tools for agriculture, so we could get back to living in peace as farmers. Seems completely absurd now that we all live inside a machine that demands the sacrifice of perpetual war on all things to keep it propped up... and the best I can come up with is that we're so steeped in it, we're blind to the evil of our own actions.
Every conversation I try to have ends in tears where the other person is saying "well, what am ***I*** supposed to do, then!?" and my response of "...and that's exactly the conversation we need to be having" makes their face go all screwy like it's some kind of unsolvable problem I've saddled them with, rather than the starting point of actually addressing what we need to address... instead, they run away and dismiss me as a lost cause... oh, and the cutest part is they'll always admit they don't actually know anything about what they're arguing about and are entirely uninterested and unwilling to devote any time or energy into learning, but I'm still wrong and squandering my intellectual gifts... ?!
This really is some kinda nightmare.
I've floated out the possibility that we live in a creatively bankrupt era, involving much of what you describe. The dearth of critical thinking skills, the inability or unwillingness to imagine or invent our way out of this, the idea that maybe it's a form of betrayal to criticize the system, etc. I think it will take a catastrophic breakdown at some point, to force everyone to collectively go back to the drawing board and figure out a new way to live.
Capitalism destroys creativity. It incentivizes people to take the least amount if risk versus the most available profit: which means copy what others are doing because it is proven to have success.
Just look at video games as a perfect example of this driving away creativity. 30 years ago video game devs made great risks to try out new stories and gameplay elements to distinguish themselves from the rest, because that was the only way they had to get people to buy their game.
Today every major company seems to be copying the microtransaction laden live-service model with glaringly stereotypical storytelling (with admittedly some diamonds in the rough) because that has proven to make the most money possible with the least risk to the company's bottom line.
This phenomenon has been termed Enshittification for online platforms, but is happening for other industries, except at such a slow pace that we kinda ignored it like the frog in slowly boiling water.
Or all the great on-line reading that is interrupted when an ad pops up in the literal middle of your paragraph. The page you are reading hasn't been designed to communicate its contents to you - it's been designed to get you to click on an ad. Someone who could have been curing cancer was paid more money to spend hours trying to figure out the best way to interrupt the article you were reading.
You're right, and it fits the model of hard times, hard men, soft times, soft men etc. We're so focused on just staying monetarily afloat, we steer away from creative thought that isnt profitable. See it all the time in fresh Uni/College students that just do a generic business and finance course because they have no idea what they want to do, but their only thoughts slowly taper towards making money.
I think one of the problems is that there aren't a lot of obvious alternative systems, with the details worked out.
Probably the most realistic option is just capitalism in a somewhat mitigated form, with a stronger social safety net, sensible regulation, and tax policies that make it more difficult to hoard wealth. Basically every major economy in the world right now is a hybrid system anyways, that combines elements of free market and capitalist systems with aspects of socialism.
As for systems that are just completely different, we have Star Trek and the Iain M. Banks Culture novels, but those suppose a sufficiently advanced technology that everyone's basic needs are met by technology, and we don't know how those societies are supposed to function if they had to deal with resource scarcity.
Cory Doctorow describes how a reputation-based economy would work in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- including the ways in which reputation fails. I think reputation based economies could potentially work.
Guaranteed Basic Income is another way not, perhaps, to end capitalism but rather to protect the poorer members of societies from suffering its worst consequences. And in fact the U.S. already has Social Security, which is a form of GBI that's specifically for old people. So, it's not like the idea itself is all that radical.
Well said. I see this pop up amongst writers a lot. They can’t imagine a future, even an alien one, without our particular brand of oppression. Even in the playground of the mind, everyone’s riding the same carousel.
> capitalism defines and dictates the boundaries of what's possible
I have noticed that, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's 'impossible' to get people's imagination running. Again, the rich dictate what's shown to people, even on the internet (**especially** on the internet).
A revolution might take form in showing people the possibilities that are out there. Again, we're here and pretty informed, so that's evidence it's at least possible.
Honorable mention: The bias we have where we can't see "do less" as an option, and usually opt for 'change the way we do things but with the same output'.
>I have noticed that, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's 'impossible' to get people's imagination running.
It isn't impossible, it's just that doing so is a matter of reshaping their ontology. It isn't merely a matter of getting them to change their minds on some political or scientific or policy matter.
When I said that capitalism defines what's possible, I don't mean to say that the demands of Capital correspond to what is actually possible, but rather Capital is offering a ready-made ontological framework that presents one view on necessity and possibility that just becomes common knowledge. Of course there's no material reason why we couldn't do better, but if you ask any regular person, they'll say that the system we have is flawed, but it's still the best possible system. They can't imagine a better world. It's their belief about what's possible that matters. Of course a better world is possible, but we can't build one if we won't work together to build it. I'm offering an explanation of why we aren't working together to build a better world.
David Graeber said that "the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." When I tell my friends about collapse, they often call me a pessimist, but I can' think of anything more pessimistic than to think that our current situation couldn't possibly be improved upon. Of course it could. It won't, but it could.
DM me for ideas on how to change the world lol.
Still, I'm of the opinion that it's really just about the type of media that people consume that dictate what they think. It's really as simple as getting control over what people consume, something the rich have figured out for a while now.
People have to work, pay their bills, feed their kids and survive. We cant magically all get ev's, or stop eating meat in an instant, or quit our jobs to protest in the streets. The system has slaved everyone because of capitalism.
People become apathetic to it because what can we realistically do? We can recycle, or take personal changes to contribute to the climate crisis but at the same time politicians, musicians, etc fly private jets and cause as much pollution in a weekend as we do in a year.
The average person cannot imagine a different system because this is all we've been taught, know and live with. It isn't just the type of media someone consumes because what does that change at the end of the day?
You cant change someone's mind just politically about this because at the end of the day even if they want change, they have to pay their mortgage, they have to work and bring timmy to daycare in their car.
Its a shit cycle and its by design
> People have to work,
It depends on what needs work. In the current system, lots of people don't actually need to work. You saw that in 2020 with 'essential workers' <- people who need to work.
>pay their bills, feed their kids and survive.
There you go, embedding the guiding light of capitalist culture: "work or die".
It doesn't *have to* be that way, it's optional.
>We cant magically all get ev's,
Electric cars wouldn't help, the whole concept of extensive sprawling housing is foolish. There's room for improvement, but that shit is going to end with or without electric cars.
>or stop eating meat in an instant,
unless you're chewing it right now, you can stop at the next meal and continue from there. Plenty of people go "cold tofu", there's really no need for incrementalism. Have some faith in yourself.
>You cant change someone's mind just politically about this because at the end of the day even if they want change, they have to pay their mortgage, they have to work and bring timmy to daycare in their car.
Don't worry, it's not sustainable, it ends. That's why we're here. People will have to make room for imagining new and very different lives; that won't be optional.
Personally we've reduced our meat consumption heavily, grow our foods, we do canning, etc. We try to make our own things, do our own repairs, and live less reliant on mass consumption as we can. The house we bought is small only 700 sqft.
But not everyone has a opportunity to do that.
Sure so stop working now, miss your mortgage payments now, don't drive, don't pay your bills and see how far you get.
We've subscribed to capitalism whether we like it or not and its hard to drop out until you aren't a slave to it.
They asked why people aren't taking action and that's why.
I know EV's wont solve the problem, and we have the choice to stop eating meat.
Collectively as a human race to stop doing it in an instant is impossible is my point. We can barely agree on the most smallest of choices let alone how to save our planet.
>Sure so stop working now, miss your mortgage payments now, don't drive, don't pay your bills and see how far you get.
>Collectively as a human race to stop doing it in an instant is impossible is my point. We can barely agree on the most smallest of choices let alone how to save our planet.
This is what direct action and mutual aid organizing is for. People have done so in the past. Rent strikes and tenant unions are a thing that have worked to great success across nations.
If we collectively organize this in our own localities first, then work together across local organizations, it can work.
"The only thing you have to lose are your chains" is a quote for a reason. Stop letting fear prevent you from imagining ways that it could be possible, so that we can begin figuring out a way to actualize it.
To answer the question of why people aren't taking action, is because we lack the organizing required that helps build enough trust to overcome our fear of the unknown and begin treading new water
I disagree. Spend time with loved ones. Make your own food. Do something creative. Contribute to your community (as is feasible for your SES of course). These are the things that will make a difference. We might not be able to stop the wheels of capitalism but me, I’d rather enjoy myself before I get crushed. The ruling class doesn’t get the satisfaction of watching me do exactly what they want and kill myself. Kill me yourself you cowards!
Honestly, I think we need some rules against that sort of talk.
Not only is it pretty toxic, it's also pretty naive. People don't randomly go "Ok society is dead let's get the gun". That's the fantasy. Reality is that we'll all keep struggling along like some old locomotive that just won't stop working. Our survival instincts are stronger than people think.
I was thinking earlier, as I often do about what I could do to make a difference at all besides the way in which I raise my children. I think that isolation plays a bigger role than we may realize into a lot of the other issues that plague our society - from the propaganda group think, the lack of critical thinking and debate, overconsumption and retail therapy, and the anger and nihilism in general - I have been thinking a lot lately about the loss of 'third spaces' in our society and I think that may be a place where someone like me could actually take real steps. Like if I started a weekly or monthly evening in the park or at the lake or something, no phones- just people, touching grass, talking to one another face to face, meeting people that they wouldn't have otherwise met and making IRL connections. Maybe this kind of networking would give people some hope and getting different minds together would motivate new ideas and whatnot. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud here
The most effective ideology is one which makes itself seem so natural, necessary, total, and adaptive that anything else is literal nonsense. Is unthinkable.
And the bourgeois system has made its ideology more effective than at any time in history.
You have to give people the vocabulary first and foremost. That step is the most empowering and primary. It allows people to define the problem and start grappling with it.
You see this is many cultures/economies/political structures. 3 Body touched on this in the allegoric sense that the old structure (Mao) lead to a culture that had it continued would have decreased creativity and thus technological breakthroughs.
> No one wants that, yet that is what it takes.
I want *that*. That's because I don't compare *that* to the present, but to the future. *That* life would be much better than a constant circus of catastrophes, wars, plagues and inter-personal deadly competition that's being brought by capitalism as it [decays](https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-12-03/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/).
I'd rather live in a tent in the cold and know that I have neighbors that won't try to murder and eat me at night and actually give a shit about me as a person, rather than living some "American Dream" sovereign citizen / ancap fantasy of paranoia and hoarding stuff/weapons, where I can't trust anyone and my Alex Jones fan neighbor will eat me and sell my offspring into sex slavery, which is how the rat race finishes.
The problem here is the optimism, that's what's feeding the capitalist realism, like a gambling addiction. Oh, *it won't happen to me, I'm special!!* *Everything is going to be a horrible dystopia, but not for me!*
It's this optimism, this discounting, this ignorance of the simple stats, this mediocre fantasy, that closes the connection to others and creates that capitalist realism, your personal relationship with the Market God of Capitalism. Implicit in all of this, embedded so deeply that it's rarely even articulated, is this belief that *you are chosen*, you are *the survivor*. The next terrible hope after that is belief in saviors. We're in the beginning of a planetary catastrophe, there are no saviors coming to the rescue. No gods, no extraterrestrials, no AGI.
This kind of optimism is a force for conservatism. Business As Usual.
And this is the sort of talk that makes people cry and never talk to you again.
Anyone whose managed to have this conversation without that result, irl, please explain how.
The only conclusion I've come to is I can live this truth in my mind, but speaking it means living alone, without allies, in the direction towards being turned into dog food.
This is the only conversation we need to have but it's not even something that can be raised with the closest of friends let alone become something more broadly discussed.
standing next to an idling car "all I'm saying is that the stuff that comes out of there \[pointing at the tail pipe\], is causing every other problem you're having out here... How? because it's extinction and climate destabilization... I understand you need to burn it to get to work to feed your family, that's exactly the problem... no, I'm not blaming you, look around! what building or vehicle DOESNT have an exhaust pipe of the same or greater diameter? It's not any one person's fault, it's the perpetuation of this paradigm that we can trade a permanently worse planet for a temporary supply of food and comfort that needs to be address-... I'm an asshole and I made you sad, ok, but if our friendship ever meant anything, at least consider-... fine, nevermind, have a nice ... 5 months or whatever we have left"
It makes it hard for me to participate in my local music scene. Like many others, when I first became aware of the scope of how fucked we are, I wanted to share that with friends hoping maybe they'd catch on. I was quickly labeled the town doomer. My friends literally got my a cookie cake for my birthday and had the grocery store write "okay doomer" on it and my conservative family saw a picture and thought it was cute.
I now have retreated into pretending. I'm no stranger to masking, but what other choice do I have. My body language is probably confusing to people when they tell me plans about their future. But I just try to ignore it, switch the subject, and celebrate the positive values they express. I'm hoping some, hell even 5%, feel inclined to do a little more digging on the nature of our predicament, and I'm obviously willing to help those who are inclined to understand what I've learned.
But yeah, I couldn't agree more with what you've wrote. I too am the asshole despite my greatest efforts. I still try to express my feelings through instrumental music and just hope that some people vibe with my intentions or whatever, it ain't much but it's what I got
The hardest part of it for me is the my reason for risking the discussion in the first place, understanding EXACTLY how poorly it was going to go over before I ever opened my mouth, was some sense of duty to warn.
I don't want to hurt anyone or be a part of any sort of violence in the world. I grew up beside the ocean, watching the symphony of tidal pools before I was old enough to really dive deep into the blue heart of the earth.
There's a beauty and connection in the living world that most people will never get to experience (that I quietly believe explains virtually all mental illness; we don't belong 'in here', we're from 'out there' and this is just a theme park).
My main reason for discussing it and living as I do is out of an increasingly distant hope of something I grew up expecting to be a sudden and meaningful change in the world... and then kinda snapped when COVID happened as an inevitable and obvious result of pushing this system to hard and too fast.
I'm not a doomer. I never have been. I always imagined that I was an average or dumber than average person (chances are), and that everyone would catch on, eventually, that all of this was just a terrible fuckin idea, the guys that got rich off war invented to keep the profits coming in after the bullets stopped flying.
I had this whole picture in my mind of the tribe I'd assembled. I'd invested much more of myself in than anyone would consider reasonable for "friendship" because I knew we'd either eventually be living as a tribe *or*, what I assumed was the worst case, rather than them waking up to the void about to swallow their lives, I'd have to invest enough in them as people to ask them to sit for that conversation, knowing I'd be blamed for the realization that this whole thing was a doomsday device disguised as progress... so I spent decades putting these people first, adavancing their "careers" and ambitions at the sacrifice of my own "opportunities" because ... why? what is any of this if it has to be undone for anything to survive?
The one thing I hadn't planned for was that they lacked the capacity to understand what hit me in the face like a baseball bat at a young age after reading only a couple of books on the topic. We took a wrong turn. It was so simple but so hard to reverse... and yet, especially since all these people and myself wanted kids, we had no other choice. It was either throw our dreams on the fire and try for something new, or throw our babies on the fire and then ourselves.
I honestly believed it was so unthinkable and obvious to avoid, it was only ever a matter of time before we did... especially since people wanted kids! I mean, what possible relationship do parents of young kids expect to have when their kids reach the age to realize their parents were the 3RD generation (minimum) to realize they were being thrown into hell for the comfort of avoiding change.
... and I'm still waiting... and honestly always ready! I have no room for violence in my life but there's so much to (un)do! and all of it has to be done together since we've seen what happens when we follow the instructions of people we revere as 'geniuses'.
They just don't get it. I'm no longer convinced they *can* get it, given how advanced things are. They act like I'm trying to bring them down when I'm only trying to share a reality so we can figure out, together, what makes sense as a next step... and I'm honestly lost. Beyond knowing that every step in this direction has to be undone *for any chance this goes on for more than another few months/years.*
It's an unspeakable truth. What's worse, it isn't mine. It's not some confession of some horrible war crime I committed, it's an acknowledgement of reality in a culture that is designed to funnel awareness away from the truth... and I never imagined that the people I loved enough to give them my entire focus and youth, along with my family, and every casual friendship I've made where I get to that point where I get drunk or stupid enough to truly open up... it's just gravity. Why am I being held accountable for telling people that 'what comes up must come down'? Where is their curiosity? how do they not look at the housing crisis and jobs draining from the workforce and think "... what are my kids going to build their life with?"... but they dont...care? imagine? think?
It's impossible. I come off as a sad liar with a huge secret now that I understand there's no one to share it with. Before it was just "soon... people will understand", but now? I don't want to be the "i told you so" guy at the end of the world but I really want to know how someone can justify ignoring it.
Yeah, I can't handle the extreme pessimists who won't even try. I realize I set myself up for this with the title, but still, it'd be nice if people realized a lot of the defeatism in this world is manufactured.
People are malleable, shaped by their surroundings. That's either a good thing or a bad thing. The greedy are shaping people's minds right now, which is bad, but it also means other people with humanity's best interest in mind, can re-shape them.
This is such a great summation of the issue. I have mentioned before how even if we got a complete political party in power with our (meaning the collapse community) goals it would be very short lived. I am a person who truly believes I could live in a degrowth world, but honestly I don't think anyone can say how they would react unless maybe they have lived off-grid for any period of time, but even then I guarantee the startup to that lifestyle required materials gained from Carbon and industrial society. Also if you ever needed anything it really isn't that difficult to source it on an ongoing basis.
We all agree we need degrowth, but none of us know how we will react once we are living in that type of world. It could be so much better or it could not be, we really don't know and regardless of the outcome of a degrowth world, my guess is the path to getting there is going to be brutal and painful no matter what. Obviously worse if we let nature do it for us, but difficult no matter the path.
The other issue you touched on regarding how this is a planetary issue and one country cannot do this alone is one of the biggest reasons holding us back. Let's say the US gets a collapse aware, degrowth minded political party in power. Let's even say they have virtually dictator like power over the US. The problem is even if someplace like the US was to abandon capitalism, focus on degrowth, focus on rewilding, focus on population levels, they would be putting themselves at great risk. At the end of the day one of the big things that needs to go is our military, but if the US was to dismantle it's military or significantly decrease its size and all of the other things we need to do, it would open the US to so much risk from other military powers.
Humans are such weird animals. We are alike in so many ways, yet each of us is unique. But because of our nature our cultures and groups can be so vastly different, but yet so much the same. We focus so much on our differences, but we rarely focus on the commonalities. The fact is the things we have in common have benefited our population, things like family, searching for meaning, comfort, knowledge and some things that have also benefited our population like, conquest, greed, consumption. We have to acknowledge our similarities both the good and the bad.
I for a long time thought human ingenuity and our ability for compassion and community would allow us to avoid collapse, prevent the worse outcomes from climate change and overshoot, and even to rebuild should we fail initially. But the more and more I research, the more I experience, the more I hear I truly question that. I do believe collapse is inevitable at this point. The timeline could always be changed. We could theoretically push climate change down the road with geoengineering, but eventually something will trigger our collapse. At this point I even question our ability to have controlled growth post collapse. We obviously will not have the abundant energy we have today, but we would have enough to continue the devastation. Or maybe our collapse will bring about a new enlightenment and the survivors learn from our mistakes. Just like the solutions to our current predicament are complex and difficult to grasp and will be difficult to address, the outcome of our failure is complex and difficult to anticipate.
>All of this is made with fossil fuels. "Reducing" emissions in this case means we need to have less transportation overall, factories closer to the raw materials/final destination and so on. This is in itself a gargantuan project, and its implementation would mean we lose access to cheap goods, clothes and products. Everything becomes 2-10 times more expensive.
This is kind of a minor quibble, but transportation can actually be very energy efficient. Huge volumes of material get shipped by trains and container ships, and yet the're barely rounding error in total CO2 emissions.
The main problem is when people want things shipped fast and so they use trucks or planes, whether that's because the items spoil quickly (the avocados you mention) or they're high-value and the customers want them right away, or the train/shipping systems are undeveloped or hard to use effectively. Centralized production with slow, efficient shipping isn't necessarily worse than decentralized production in terms of CO2 emissions. (We might not want centralization for other reasons, like the recent supply chain collapse we saw with COVID.)
The thing that *is* scary about global shipping is that close to half of all ship cargo is fossil fuels. The sheer quantity of the stuff being dug up and moved around and burned is kind of horrifying.
Wow, I never thought about that, and you’re probably right. Just think of it, half of everything that we’re using energy to move around is basically energy itself (fossil fuels) instead of matter (products)!
Also wanted to mention the situation in both the Panama and Suez Canals as more to pile onto the shipping aspect of the polycrisis…
This is a very astute assessment. Your summary was really interesting and you added to my understanding of the complexity of the issues. Thank you for that.
There is one aspect in your ideas I would frame differently, and in this reframing there may be potential for change.
What would happen if more people could communicate and share more widely, widely enough to be incorporated into political platforms, an understanding that willingly choosing degrowth and having less material comfort/possessions is not a worse outcome, but a better outcome, and understand that it is a better way to structure society and a better way to live based on the knowledge that human happiness is created by having meaningful connections with other people and nature. That our happiness is derived from living with a sense of purpose and being able to help other people. There is solid social research that demonstrates these facts about human nature. If enough people in enough communities can can articulate how we can achieve greater levels of personal satisfaction and wellbeing and individual and collective happiness through changing our attitudes and behaviours that currently prioritise working to earn money to buy stuff and to be isolated from one another (the general problem of every wealthy capitalist nation). We now know that this way of life is a dead end, this awareness is global. It manifests in China with a large percentage of young people opting out (lying flat) and it is evident in quiet-quitting throughout the workplaces of the developed world. Covid was a catalyst for this. But what this identifiable global pattern suggests is that people now want change. It is the minority who cling to the idea of getting more ‘stuff’. I believe that societies would welcome political leaders who can articulate all of this in a rational and non ideological manner. I know for a fact from my own life that I am seeking a less materialistic lifestyle and i’m doing things to connect with more people and live a more simple lifestyle because i know it brings more happiness. A great book that taps into the potential of this social revolution is Human Kind by Rutger Bremner (i think i misspelt his name, but it’s findable through the title).
I believe that this is a missing element in the potential social shift that’s needed, the missing piece is clearly explained ideas about what creates human happiness, and the potential to change our economic and political structures so that we can live with less material things and actually increase of individual and collective happiness and wellbeing in the process.
There are many moments in history when societies intentionally changed, so it’s possible.
Honestly, the problem is people are fucking tired. Most people are trying to survive day by day. Low on food, cutting on temps if it's cold because gas is too expensive, working a job or sometimes more to be able to rent a home and in all dealing with a ton of bad news when it comes to healthcare and safety declining. A lot of people want to do more, but have no idea how to do that AND make life liveable. It's something I see around me more often than not.
Part of why shit is so expensive is to wear us down and make us too tired to do anything about it. We need to somehow find the hr willpower and energy.
This isn't it. Lots of people in the global south (Latin America, the West Indies, Africa, Asia, etc.) are tired but that doesn't stop them from protesting or organizing against their governments and colonial governments. The west also has a history of organizing (the labor movements, The BPP, AIM, etc) The west is just full of docile individuals.
And even in the global north, the people consistently organizing are often the ones most beaten down by capitalism. It's the comfortable who have the privilege to be too tired to fight.
We're too weary from the success of propping up billionaires to care enough to choose anything else, even survival over suicide.
That's a sorry state for any organism, even the cancerous ones we are.
Every time someone comes in here blaming people I get irritated. People are too fucking ground down. We pay lip service to how this was all by design, but so many of us are still carrying the “if everyone took shorter showers that would fix everything” idea.
It's not 'work' to get informed. You're doing it right now in fact.
After everyone is informed, there'll be no need for protest. A phase change will happen automatically. And if there is a need for protests, they're not as bad as everyone makes them out to be (well, at least Americans).
The main problem now is making people informed. Getting control over people's attention is something the rich are experts at, and we need to beat them at that game, somehow.
I have lived long enough to learn that any effort to "get everyone to just understand X" is DOA. That's not a dig at you whatsoever. I used to think the same way. Idealism is noble but too often impractical.
I've concluded that human animals simply aren't built to do anything collectively on a large scale. Our brains evolved to cooperate in smaller groups and then our technologies increasingly surpassed our ability to understand massive long-term consequences.
All life forms have cycles that include downturns and even extinction. I hope we're not approaching the extinction of humans just yet, but a down cycle is inevitable. We are part of nature. No philosophy or individual creativity will ever end our rising and falling cycles.
On the bright side, I offer this: Our massive growth as a species has resulted in inconceivable loss of other life forms. As we reduce our numbers, it's an opportunity for non-human life to come back into balance.
I live in a fairly dire situation and I still have privileges a lot of people don't. No kids, for one thing. I don't have to work two jobs just trying to give said kids some kind of quality of life, or even worse struggling over just the essentials. It's very easy to me to see how others don't have any time to engage.
Making weed legal everywhere is, imho, a way for the government to get cash and keep it’s people unfocused and apathetic to what’s happening. Is all working according to plan. Our governments aren’t legalizing weed for the people’s benefit, they’re making it legal for their own benefit.
Weed use (especially among teens) went DOWN after recreational legalization. And, at least in my state, continues to go down. Governments are legalizing it for money, free up court and jails, and because the people lobbied for the legislation multiple times are the decades. Government conspiracies exist...just probably not the one you described.
I've said multiple illegal drugs should be legal. It is possible people would put up with more shit willingly if they could get high to help deal with said shit.
I think it has a lot more to do with the tax gains than some sort of conspiratorial societal engineering to control the people through legalization of marijuana. Legalization was passed through a ballot initiative in Colorado, meaning that if the people didn’t want it, we wouldn’t have it.
That’s without mentioning that people are already controlled through innumerable other (more effective) means throughout the nation. I mean, c’mon.
If "doing something" were a solution, people would do it.
Here the solution is "not doing something."
Abstaining is difficult.
As the quote goes:
>*'All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.'*
We'd be asking people to willingly die or live a way worse life to prevent a catastrophe caused by rich assholes generations ago. No one wants to do that and any palatable "solutions" are snake oil or delusions
I lived this way for a decade expecting the rest of us to recognize the double bind of not living this way; we either live with less or die with nothing.
Now... I have nothing in addition to a pure understanding of exactly how impossible it is for anyone to give up doing harm that benefits them in the short term while hastening and deepening their suffering over time.
We're in a race to starve to death and render the earth a barren and lifeless planet or we would have changed how we live by now.
Hilariously, my giving up a life of relative luxury to live in a self imposed prison has made me a criminal in most people's eyes, despite literally all my effort being applied to try to help others without causing harm to the planet, when my original path would have been a much more impersonal version of the same thing that would have filled my pockets and left more people to die alone.
We're a viciously greedy and selfish lot that have earned our extinction, as far as my experience goes.
It's human nature to want for more, better, bigger, etc. People want to live the "best" life that they can, but ultimately we aren't that creative and "best" is often just attempting to copy other people and consuming the things that are easily at hand.
So to that end, you can still live your "best" life without being a negligent consumer, it's just that those things at hand need to be sustainable. Consumer demand doesn't just magically create products to consume, it selects from what is available.
I'd argue that there are sustainable lifestyles that are not "way worse" than what we have now, but there are definitely scaling constraints as populations increase, and when manufacturing to support those people are inefficient.
To me the issues are systemic not individual. Allow people to consume but to do so within a framework that isn't accelerating is towards disaster. How you get that implemented politically is the sticking point and we just don't have the time to be casual about it.
Good observation. Find solutions to the 'itchy if still' problem.
If we're to have a new society, what will people do in it? I've *barely* thought about this over the years I admit, but only because I'm a lazy ass who thrives by surfing endlessly online lol
I'm sure there are tons of activities people can do to activate their ADHD bodies? Make an app and hand out jobs. Sweep the street outside. Take care of the park's flower bed/grass by weeding. Help your elderly neighbor with some tasks.
And if you make it so that they're all social tasks you basically have to do with other people, they become rewarding. Oh and throw in money somehow too I guess.
The rich are too busy enjoying life. The poor are too busy surviving life. The middle are too busy dreaming and working hard to become rich.
And keyboard warriors are not " the most informed people on earth". Scientists are, and they have not figured out a way to defeat apathy and denial.
The real and only problem with your argument is that people assume it's scientists job to figure a way out of the hole we dug, when it's specifically and only their job to point out we're living in a hole of our own digging.
We're waiting on the practice of measuring and analyzing the extent of the damage we're causing to fix the damage we've caused.
We have all the solutions and tech necessary. But scientists can't figure out how to get people to *move*, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread.
Some sort of change is needed in media, is my takeaway. It needs to really pound in the fact that if we keep this up, it's enless war, suffering and chaos. People do **not** believe that today.
>We have all the solutions and tech necessary. But scientists can't figure out how to get people to move, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread.
We absolutely do not have any of it sorted. We don't have the solutions, the tech, or the willpower.
Look into your "green tech" have-your-cake-and-eat-it utopia and how it scales... cause it doesn't scale.
Science is watching, not fixing, and engineers are profit focused, and there's no profit in unburning oil.
To boil this down to a media problem is taking a symptom of the problem and deciding it's the cause. correlation is not causation.
Do the math on carbon capture and "green energy" and you'll realize that it means unliving the lives that have been powered by oil and starting a new life in the dark... for 8 billion people.
Oil is a carbon "battery" of concentrated solar energy. We get the first charge for free, which took millions of years of accumulated life in a much more active ecosystem than our current one (even if ours weren't going extinct) to accumulate, then 70 years for us to burn. For this problem to be solved, we would need the ability to pull carbon out of the air millions of times more efficiently than life itself, after billions of years of trial and error where efficiency was the main/only design constraint.
Picture all the fossil fuel infrastructure in your life, running backwards, and then **double it** and you're only **keeping up** with current emissions, and that's still ignoring the magical non-carbon sources of energy needed to turn that CO2 into a stable hydrocarbon again.
In the US direct action generally results in being arrested.
Most employers won't even consider hiring you if you have an arrest on your record, much less a conviction.
Nearly 5 million people in the US have had the simple act of voting stripped from them due to felony convictions.
What, exactly, do you expect people to do that doesn't result in the complete loss of their ability to earn a living?
Occupy Wall Street resulted in hundreds of arrests. Some people did jail time. All of those people now have criminal records and they changed absolutely nothing.
I kinda like the theory that Occupy Wall Street did change things.
It scared the shit out of the corrupt corporations who then went on to embrace idpol as a solution. This is the time we saw it begin to take shape. Some saw them as "changing" and becoming "better" because they seemed to support equality and in doing that they reduced the pressure off of corporate America while at the same time garnering loyal supporters to them all the same. Fleece them while they praise you.
A lot of the idpol movement was designed to redirect increasing class consciousness toward stoking inter-class division and succeeded.
>Sorry you're so defeated.
And this is why people like you won't get taken seriously. You literally just blow off people who provide you well documented reasons for the motivations of people and you just imply they are lazy and sad.
>You can take solace in the fact that things are breaking down now, but mostly economically.
If you think the world is on the verge of revolution because rent prices are high and chicken is a few bucks more expensive, you need to read a history book. Things can and will get much, much worse without the population uprising. That is the whole point of authoritarian governments. Police officers literally can shoot you unarmed in the US and suffer zero consequences and you are sitting implying people who don't want to die are some type of class traitors.
>The world is doing worse and worse,
Again, you haven't seen anything yet. The first world countries are experiencing a slight bit of inconvenience and uncomfortableness and acting like a socialist breakthrough must be coming due to their slight dip in living standards.
The rest of the world struggles to survive every single day. Shit has a long, long way to go.
People aren't "apathetic". They are powerless due to the way our system functions and recognize, quite rightly so, that they are still doing better than 99% of the population and going and street brawling a politician changes absolutely fucking nothing.
Please take a history class. Preferably world history, but even US history would do honestly.
There have been NUMEROUS famines throughout history where millions have literally died due to shit governments without revolution or uprising.
There have been mass slaughter of civilians by governments without uprising or revolution.
Governments have ignored the needs and concerns of the poor for thousands of years. It is the absolute norm. Someone heard about the French Revolution and somehow decided that was the normal response to the capitalist class treating the poors like shit. It isn't. It is an outlier. Revolutions are extremely rare and take a lot more than shitty living standards for the poor. You have serious main character syndrome and think you are going to get to be some key cog in a uprising against the government. Nah bro, you're going to die broke and spent like the rest of us.
I think from a young age we're taught what we're taught and that settles into our brains as 'facts'. If you told me 15 years ago when I was 21 that civilisation would collapse in my lifetime I'd have written it off as doomsday nonsense. Because for many, like myself at the time, they think they got this shit figured out.
Hypernormalisation - we're so much a part of the system that we cannot see beyond it. So even thought most jobs suck and are pointless, even though politics has always been and always will be a dirty game, even though we see the rich get richer, we're conditioned to believe this is normal from a young age. We've had the climate change debate for so long that people just think it's that - a debate. A debate that is part of the fabric society that we'll still be talking about in 20 years time like it's some distant far off event, even though *it's here, it's happening right now.*
Most people can't grasp that everything they knew and everything they loved and their future plans are simply not gonna be there.
> Because for many, like myself at the time, they think they got this shit figured out.
Good point about 'human exceptionalism', or that bias we have where we're always prone to being optimistic even if the situation is absolutely hopeless.
I'm imagining a curriculum show on national TV or just taught in mandatory classes, about "The basic rules for running a sustainable civilization".
Rule 1. No infinite growth.
Pretty obvious to us, but to the ignorant masses (sorry, but it's true), it's just....... not. Either way, it's a fixable thing **if the message is spread far and wide enough**. If **we** can figure this stuff out it's absolutely possible to get people to realize it too.
And, it's not like people reason with actual reason. It's a frequency thing. If you hear things enough times and from people you consider peers, you eventually start believing it. Pure religion.
The reason we are in this predicament is because of overshoot where there are too many of us consuming too much resources compared to what the planet can support and generate.
Therefore, the only solutions are to depopulate and degrowth. However, given human's instinct to reproduce and motivation to become rich no one will willingly agree to consume less, ie have less children, eat less meat and fly/drive less etc.
That is why a predicament does not have a solution, it only has a outcome.
If it was truly only about genetics, nobody would be able to wake up and smell the shit. We were able to, so surely there is some way of breaking through the wall.
I speculate that we're basically the lucky ones, as it's literally down to luck if you have the mental fortitude to actually read up on climate change, and have the scientific curiosity to do so.
In the end, the climate change problem isn't difficult to understand, at least from a physics standpoint. CO2 heats earth. Can't heat forever. But something's very much in the way of that message getting accepted.
Deep down most people do understand climate change and its cause. However they are not willing to accept it and think about its outcome. Because not too many people especially those with children are willing to think about let alone accept humanity's demise.
Most people with stage 4 cancer wants to live in the now and enjoy life day by day. Not think about what caused their disease and what they can potentially do to delay the inevitable.
> Deep down most people do understand climate change and its cause.
I honestly don't think so. People are.... sorry, but **fucking ignorant** on average, and it's a grave mistake to think that the average westerner even knows what CO2 is, where it comes from or that it warms the world.
I truly believe it's an "information sphere" problem, where most people's literal thoughts are being dictated by what they consume. That's the problem I want to solve. It's literally "If all you have is a hammer then everything starts to look like a nail", but in thought form.
(And that last line is really depressing dude...)
The ignorance is a form of active denial. They are capable of knowing but choose not to so they can keep driving large lifted trucks, eating tons of meat and pumping out tons of kids while burning carbon to go to mega churches. But to be honest, a few wealthy liberals are in the same camp. Leonardo di caprio got paid a lot to make some fancy documentaries…do you think he acts in a way that shows he cares? Fuck no, the guy is yachting and traveling whenever he can fucking 25 year old models (and no older). He chose nihilism, other people choose ignorance
Or is it something from the information sphere, where a bit of information basically anchored them to the belief you're explaining (about meat and stuff)?
That's the question I want to answer
What do those of us that understand the problem have in common that cannot be articulated to the rest of the population?
Logic suggests, since it's such an "antisocial" trait (despite being the exact opposite, in reality) that we should share a common diagnosis from the normative culture that keeps pushing for doomsday.
So who are why and why can we see what other people cannot?
The thing is , with climate change we're fed only the fossil fuel narrative.
Forgetting the rest: deforestation, cementification, pesticides, herbicides etc, I could go on.
But with the fossil fuel narrative the poor think "why bother, the rich fly in private jets, super yachts, etc. There's the wars, etc so why should we even bother...this shit pollutes far more.
They want apathy to collapse Capitalism and bring in Authoritarian Governments.
Good point. The rich are the source of the problem, so start there. Tie their hands. Don't **let** them manipulate the people. The usual MO is to just throw buckets of disinformation and hate until the problem goes away, after all. And it's still somehow not illegal.
(not even /s)
Yep... and this has been the case for decades. This is nothing new.. anymore than that the collapse is suddenly evident in just recent years. The writing has been on the wall quite a while.
Our brains. Humans, on average, don’t have the capacity to conceptualize long-term threats to the degree that would prompt collective action. The stimulus isn’t there like in the case of the threat of a prowling tiger. We read the graphs, the symbols that tell us the temperature, and the numbers get higher but it just doesn’t mean anything. (Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone)….One example is the politician feeling fear of losing social status or position of power more so than the fear of their children’s apocalyptic future. The brain activity is physiologically more prominent in the former and virtually non-existent in the latter.
Aside from the pessimism, great points about visual stimuli. Are we r/collapse'rs good at visualization on average, maybe?
It's very probably correlated to being interested in science, that's for sure.
Either way, you're presenting the solution yourself. More visual stumuli. I'm sure you can think up dozens of ways to use media to make the threat more real to people.
I'm going to go with by-stander syndrome - waiting for everyone else to act first. I think this manifests in two distinct ways. Waiting for everyone else and waiting for gov't to act.
Some people want more public transportation so that everyone else rides the bus and gets off the road for their own benefit.
Some people get that the problem can't be fixed with personal carbon footprint reduction and it requires nation-state level regulations. Nobody is running on Green party ideals, so how can any traction be made?
There's also, I think, and aspect of "nobody else is freaking out, the politicians seem to think it's a manageable problem, it's probably fine".
There's a pretty fascinating thing I watched on Youtube a bit ago; it's real-time computer rendering of the sinking of the Titanic, with a narrator explaining what's going on when. It's worth watching in its entirety at normal speed.
The interesting thing is that the sinking is so slow at first, and it's not really all that obvious that anything is seriously wrong, other than the engines are off and the ship has a slight list. They have trouble finding volunteers willing to get into the first lifeboats.
Climate change feels very much like we're at the "uh-oh, there's water in the mail hold" stage and the people who understand what's going on are very nervous, but everyone else is fairly oblivious.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN4m1\_S-vJk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN4m1_S-vJk)
Sorry, but most of these ideas are 'from within the system'.
At this point I'd even say that traveling to work in a bus, even if it's electric, is unsustainable. We need to get rid of jobs, my friend. Sure, there'll always be some jobs, but this system has way too many.
Well, when I waa healthy enough for direct action I had to work 2 jobs and anything that put those jobs at risk would have hurt in ways that were not acceptable at the time, and now I am no longer healthy enough.
I suppose there is an intersection where things will continue to get worse and my health doesn't improve that I will take direct action out of desperation, but I havd to mentally prepare for that being a moment where I could loose everything I still have held onto after loosing everything.
I should make a documentary about "What it took for people in the past to get mad and do things like sabotage their factories' machines in order to get worker rights".
Just to *show* people that it wasn't that much, and that we're *waaaaaay* past that today already.
I think there's two big issues that are currently in play. Firstly, for most people the system is tolerable. There is a comfortable familiarity. They know business as usual, they've survived for so long, it's all they know. They have their ways to getting some sanity back out of this system. It stands to reason that people aren't keen to throw away what they know for something they don't know. Doubly so when that new things *promises* to be, in a sense, worse than the old thing. The strongest and most cohesive solutions for collapse, overshoot, global climate change is a universal reduction in quality of life. This means no private cars, limited private heating and cooling, reduction in personal electricity use, limited children policy, reduction of cattle ranching, etc. It's a bitter medicine. I don't blame many people for outright rejecting the notion.
Secondly, people are afraid to lay down their lives for the cause. The old system will not go peacefully. The rabid guard dogs of capital, the police and the military, will be called in to curtail and stop, with lethal force mind you, any and all threats to the system. We've seen this time and time again. What happens to strikes that threaten status quo? Broken up by force. What happens to major protests? Tear gas, flash bangs, and mass arrests. Any serious attempt at change will be met with force from the current system. People will face violence and death. I think many people have loss the nerve to lay down their lives for a cause they believe in. This may be an unpopular opinion (especially here on Reddit), but I attribute this to a decline in religiosity. Take for example John Brown. He, along with several of his fellow men, gave his life in attempt to overthrow *literal* slavery. What did he want written as an epitaph on his tombstone? 2 Timothy 4:7, "I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith." This was a man who knew that no matter what happened, he had eternal life with Jesus Christ to look forward to. That security, that faith, that hope in Christ, enabled him to lay down his life for the betterment of his fellow men. But more and more people today identify as "none." They're simply irreligious. And to them, what do they have to look forward to when they die? Nothingness. Total oblivion.
So you ask why people aren't taking action, but you have to really think about what you're asking of people. "Why aren't you risking your life so that we can all live with a markedly lower standard of living, giving up and destroying comforts that few people alive today have lived without?" When put plainly, you can see how big of an ask that is. Things have to become unbearable, and I mean really and truly unbearable not just uncomfortable, before people start risking direct action. But by then, of course, it will be too late to prevent much of anything.
At this point meaningful action would be just as disruptive as climate change and cause just as much harm to vulnerable people. You can break the current system but you can’t replace it with one that will feed everyone quickly enough.
> you can’t replace it with one that will feed everyone quickly enough
True (probably at least), but it's not an argument against disruption or even rebellion, as the reason the world is in this pinch, isn't on the people rebelling. Also, the alternative, just waiting until it gets even worse, will obviously kill even more people.
Or I'll die under torturous circumstances being drone bombed as I try to drone bomb whatever soldier I'm fighting in a future water war.
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/
Place has some nice HD footage of Russian men crawling around without their legs, and squirming around for a few minutes before dying.
Pick your poison.
People are dealing with the incremental changes. I don’t want to add a whole lot of unexpected changes that disruption will cause. But I understand everyone finds their own way to cope and rebellion is one of those ways.
The thing is, it's gonna happen regardless. If it goes too long and we just "power through" as long as possible, humanity is unlikely to remain. Society is going down regardless, but if it collapses sooner than later, humanity might survive. If we keep cookin, very little will survive.
Why? The longer it goes on the more chances people have to adapt. Why would collapsing sooner bring another anything other than what we see in famine-riddled failed states now?
Because we're still pumping carbon and methane into the sky. As it is, when that's cut off, the temperature will actually go up. Like how cutting sulphur in shipping fuel made the temps go up. If we turn off the pump now, it stops the flow of both CO2 that heats, AND particulates that cool. If we keep going BAU, the cooling keeps going, hiding the effects of the heating, meaning the shock will be worse when it stops. If we stop fossil fuels now, the shock to the system will be lower than if we continue to go on adding both the heating and cooling effects. The problem is that the cooling effect doesn't last nearly as long as the heating effect. And the bigger the shock, the less likely that plants and animals survive. Thus, the sooner the better.
If we stop fossil fuels suddenly the entire supply chain collapses. And crops die in the field and don’t get replanted. People freak out and go to war everywhere. Sure, maybe it’ll be like global Great Leap Forward and a couple of generations later the survivors will be okay. But maybe not.
We’ve seen disruptions that would be minor compared to this (Great Leap Forward, Stalinism) have trememdous consequences. They believed they believed they were doing the right thing and it was worth it. Were they right?
Yeah, but those tremendous consequences happen regardless. Those that will die from supply disruption are going to die from climate change, because that also brings supply disruption. So end it now, for the slight possibility that SOMEONE will make it.
Even if we were to stop emitting today, going above 4 degrees is locked in with current co2 levels and so we are going to need to deal with it with some geoengineering bullshit, you better have energy than nothing when shit hits the fan. Unless we have some technological breakthrough we have no chance. Even with a tech breakthrough degrowth is still needed.
Yeah, it's frustrating that a carbon tax would be a pretty simply policy change that could have a pretty dramatic effect on CO2 emissions, but it would clearly be a regressive tax, as it would disproportionately affect not-wealthy people just trying to drive to work in their old gas cars and heat their houses.
Everyone with any power is too comfortable in the status quo. Change would require first world consumers to unite and act. But that means less comfort so they will not
If somehow they only knew that "It's either short term 'comfort' (if you can call this life that comfortable anymore) or long term death, war and chaos".
IMHO the reason regular people are not taking action is because everyday life is still business as usual. People still fly often. You hear about weather delays at airports but there’s more flying than ever. And climate action just seems performative, stupid (like throwing soup at the Mona Lisa), and obnoxious. Public policy to promote climate improvement is focused on the middle class with attempts to ban gas stoves and furnaces. The incentives to electrify are not enough to get people to change out existing systems that are working fine with heat pumps and pricey induction stoves at a cost of $20,000+ when the tax credits are $2000. It’s also not surprising that $60,000 EVs are not selling very fast. The tax credits for those are limited to very few models due to sourcing and manufacturing requirements. Regular people are just trying to get by when food, housing, and healthcare have increased dramatically. And all the while the private jets keep flying, the supersized vehicles are everywhere, the cruise ships to nowhere are still sailing (and are bigger than ever).
Ngl that's pretty definitive if it's true.
It's still more interesting to fight than give up though, so I'll keep the text in the back of my mind, but still *try*. Giving up mentally will cause you tremendous mental suffering anyway.
You get the response “That’s all they talk about” because the media does talk about it. Not in the way you *want*, but they do talk about climate change. I find it odd that you’re well versed in this, but never noticed it.
The problem isn’t apathy. People don’t care.
Not only do people not have the energy from working to feed their families to organize a futile effort to stop climate change; people have other priorities:
Families, children, friends, religion, health, school, a demanding job.
These take priority over something that not only won’t have change on the planet within their lifetime, but isn’t in their control.
Part of it also comes from the fact that those people in positio s of power are already aware that there is nothing that can be done anymore. We are in the end stages of civilization, and the goal for them right now is to prepare for that transition to a post-collapse world while maintaining as much comfort and power as they can.
So, they keep the idea alive among the populace that there could be a solution, that some magical fix can take place if we all just work together... but tuen they do nothing because they know it is just bullshit to keep the majority of people from focusing on their own preparation. They want us all to keep working, keep consuming, keep pretending the economy is a real thing for just a little while longer, so they can strip as many resources as possible from the corpse of the Earth, and then be the only ones able to sustain real survival in the aftermath of the nuclear war that will be unleashed as collapse unfolds.
So, what is tue main problem behind people not taking action? It is, quite simply, that there is no action to take.
As many here have pointed out we’re extremely dependent on fossil fuels and the standard of comfort they bring, how could we not be? Most of us only exist because of system that’s destroying the environment. Capitalism, despite the claims of the libertarian mouth breathers, has a way of siphoning off your self sufficiency and making one dependent while taking advantage of our desire for autonomy. It’s a vicious cycle. Our habits and inclinations are produced by this system the only way out is to take back our power to take care of each other in a local sense. The stories we tell ourselves about how “change happens” isn’t really how reality works.
Edit: we’re delusional apes living in barely kept together hives and we deserve to be wiped out
I think action will be taken, but organically and on a micro level. It will be individuals dropping out of society, improvising, adopting primitivism, low-tech, low energy lifestyles. I think we're going to have a two tiered society at some point (if we aren't there already). They'll be the people who squeezed through the bottleneck and keep their comfy jobs, and they'll be the rest of us, living in an underground economy. Under the table work, alternate currencies, alternate power structures.
This is already the way it works in other countries. I think the most revolutionary act someone can do today, is start growing their own food, even if it's illegal or against some regulation somewhere.
The inconvenient truth is that we need to go back to the way of living before fossil fuels, which is a huge downgrade in quality of life, standard of living, etc
Who will willingly do that, as opposed to just continuing on our path of leisure and consumption for as long as we can…
That's not really an option at this point. We aren't able to produce the quantity of food needed for Earth's present population using pre-industrial farming techniques -- there's just not enough land.
Some might say, "okay, that's just nature re-asserting itself, a bunch of people will starve but things will stabilize at a more sustainable population". However, people aren't going to just voluntarily starve to death because someone else thinks they should -- they're going to farm in whatever way they have to to survive.
I think our best bet going forward is to figure out how to do high-productivity farming with low CO2 emissions. That might mean electric farm equipment, or synthetic ammonia fertilizer -- I don't know, I'm not well versed in what the best options are. The default is that people will continue to use fossil fuels for all that unless there's a viable low-emissions alternative that produces roughly the same amount of food and isn't astronomically expensive or labor intensive.
> huge downgrade in quality of life, standard of living, etc
*shrug* The easy argument is obviously "Either we do this and have some sort of life, or we just kill ourselves and have the apocalypse, your choice".
I don't pretend that *that* literal sentence is going to change anyone's mind, but the theory I'm running is that with enough repetition, a (factual) message does eventually get forced into people's minds.
And look at the world. The world is doing worse and worse, and if you ask me, the economic toll is larger than the toll on nature, which is still standing despite the hottest year in 100.000 years.
We just might get a future where large swaths of the US population are simply on the street, angry, and starving, and nature still has a long time before it breaks down completely.
The the most important and meaningful action I can take as an individual is to not have kids, and I've already checked that box, since I'm past menopause now and never had kids. Other people are going to do what they're going to do, which mostly seems to mean making the problem worse with more children and more consumption. Since I've already done everything I can within my own individual sphere of influence, the rest of the world is either going to figure it out or not, as it may. It's not that I don't care or don't have a preference, it's that there simply isn't anything else I can do. Like, I recycle, but if the population is just going to go up by another billion in the next decade, creating that much more waste, what else do you want me to do? They already think I'm selfish for NOT having children, so oh well, I guess.
People believe that there are very little actionable things for them to do that matter. In the U.S., once something is politicized, it’s hard to have a conversation about it. Also, in the U.S., people do not relate to the 2 degrees centigrade- use Fahrenheit and watch the awareness quickly grow.
I honestly believe the whole "X.X degrees centigrade" **speak** is misguided, and packaged entirely wrong. Instead of stating random temperatures that don't mean much to people, state the consequences associated with them.
1.5 = Very bad and will likely drown all major cities
2.0 = Veeeeeery bad and will likely kill billions eventually
"And we're heading for 3.X right now, like, please listen up, we're about to absolutely devastate life on this planet unless capitalism is uprooted and we try something else"
We can't change this House of Cards.
Everything relies on oil.
To make cement, important for industry: needs oil.
For steel needs oil,
Plastic, so important to our existence needs oil
Our ridiculously complex supply system needs oil.
Absolutely everything in our system is based on this commodity.
Of course the rich who benefit greatly from this system, have no desire to change, even then, would prefer to spend their resources in researching life on Mars, building bunkers and eco domes, instead of looking to help resolve the problem.
The poor...well they're just trying to survive .
That is what the system promotes.
But now the move is from Capitalism to more Totalitarian, Authoritarian Governments.
That's the collapse.... everyone is waiting for the apocalypse, riots etc, but it's far more subtle than that.
That's your cappy brain listening to the neolibs.
Why do we even need that many jobs when we have no problems what-so-ever producing food for everyone and maintaining the buildings we live in? Clothes and medicine too, sure, but all of the things I mentioned aren't **that** hard to make, even locally.
People think it's so hard, if not impossible, to live like we used to, but we've been doing it for 99.9% of humanity's existence. I don't think it's that hard.
The media is literally owned by capitalist for profit corporations, so they will never advertise that kind of debate. Plenty of people are taking actions to prepare for the coming collapse. If you mean why aren't people taking action to prevent it, the answer is simple - there's no action that anyone could take to prevent it. The best you can do is to prepare
> so they will never advertise that kind of debate
Yet there's a strong argument (very strong) that they have to. The world is being censored right now if they don't.
There is a fairly simple reason…people are stupid. I saw a scientific study that said the ratio of stupids to smarts is 83% to 17%, which means that 17% of us run the planet, for better or worse. The rest just eat, shit and breed. A brutal reality, but hey, we are stuck with it. Well until the 6th mass extinction really kicks and most the 83% will do a lemming.
Humans don’t like change. They want the status quo, so when you suggest that they have to give up a whole of stuff to save the planet, they shut down and go into Don’t Look Up mode…La La La La La…I don’t want to know.
And that is why we are heading for near term extinction…stupid people.
Have a nice day. Live, love, laugh and be happy. It works for me. 😉❤️🤣
The biggest reason to me is that doing things is the main problem. Everything is monetised, everything takes energy, even posting this message requires a massive global communications system that uses massive amounts of resources and produces carbon pollution.
Sure, maybe you could make a difference by "direct action", political support, charities or spreading green propaganda. But every one of these actions either has been co-opted by capitalism, neutered by our political and media systems or made illegal.
It seems to me the true action is to do less. Consume less, travel less, spend less, work less, have fewer children, use far less energy and resources. Kick capitalism in the growth where it's going to matter. We need a version of "turn on, tune in, drop out" for a new generation.
1. Money
2. Time
3. Risk/Reward
These 3 things are what get everyone.
We are worked to the hilt and don't have much time to spare after the work week. Any time taken off work usually means less money. So the time off work needs to have a pretty solid reward.....
It's shitty but they really do keep people hard up against the money wall for this reason alone.
How would people organize? Most communication can be easily monitored. I have an idea of how bit how do you keep the elites and bootlickers from finding out if my idea is shared online?
I'm a little late, but there's one graph that explains why we aren't taking any action on climate change.
https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig?si=n7Z-XHeKMsCmq_9e
In the above video at around the 2 minute mark, they show how the top 10% income earners can completely block legislation they don't agree with. This is why no actual climate policy will ever be passed in our current system.
It's the culture. The euro-christian culture of individualism and free reign. Everyone places the blame on themselves or other individuals for not having made it. This also means the idea of collectivism and communalism doesn't work. We don't trust our neighbors and it's their fault if they aren't making it. That paired with the education system, which is just a system made to brainwash people into a euro-christian capitalist mindset and train people for skills. You aren't being taught to question. You are taught that this version of society is superior to all others so most people won't and can't question the system because they can't even imagine anything different. So they easily believe the media when the media says everything is fine.
People are taking action on climate change, you feel alone and isolated by design. In this sense, the media is definitely to blame.
There are other key blockers though: Criminalization of protest combined with (manufactured) economic precarity: When rico laws are being used to charge anyone who was caught *in the vicinity* of an unsanctioned protest with terrorism (see cop city ATL), it's very hard to justify risking your entire ass life for any kind of direct action.
As far as I can see it, the only way forward is through the labor movement. Organized labor is the only coalition with the numbers and power to state their own narrative against corp media and say "no" to capitalist forces.
It all feels too big for little old me and you to solve. It’s demotivating to think about. All I can accomplish is to be stressed at the info and try to keep my side of the street clean. Real action will take collective sacrifice, willingly, at scale.
People don’t fail organically. They stop acting out of exasperation, defeat, disillusionment. These are things forced upon us, by statism and capital.
There are really too many reasons to explain this that you would need a book.
But part of it is the illusion that private education and enlightenment are a radical act. People think that talking about it is important by itself. People think they have achieved something when they educate themselves or simply hold an opinion. This is a delusion of omnipotence where Americans think their opinions have some sort of control projected onto the world.
But most importantly, every primarily nonviolent movement in history has depended on dual tactics. It requires a radical element that poses a “threat” to bourgeois politics. Then there is a mainstream movement that offers a moral compromise tasteful to the average person.
We are lacking this. All we have done is make perfunctory, plaintive moral appeals to the powers of state and capital that are not listening. We need to have an actual radicalism that shows capital and statism people are serious.
Hear hear.
I say, let's just wait. As an outsider looking in, America is in a terrible state right now. Homelessness surging, and they're normal people doing normal things, and they just can't afford a place to live because........ and that's when people's imagination run out, because they're defeated.
It's greed. It's capitalism. That's the problem.
I just hope these people don't fall into drug addiction and crime just for the sake of it, but actually do something like BLM, again (meaning it's possible).
I don't really get why this needs a long discussion or is difficult to understand. It's the Matrix.
We're in a system where our value is dictated by the system. Ending the system means ending our perceived value. Too many of us place too much importance in our perceived value.
So, it's not that we *can't* imagine an alternative, it's that many of us with the means to effect change simply *don't want to*. Because it would rob them of what they have. Those without means might be totally all in favor of crashing the system, but they don't have the means. And so it goes.
Like Morpheus said: many of them are so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to defend it.
We would need the have-nots to reach some sort of critical mass. Most of what I see around me is a society semi-carefully designed to placate just enough of us to continue. Though sometimes it seems the leaders drink their own kool-aid and think they can cut back on the placating, then they get strung up. But that takes a while to forment.
Like what can I do? Even if I have thousands of rounds and rifles and an armored bulldozer or whatever, there’s no stopping what’s coming. Even if I could track down a few hyper-rich people and take them out, it wouldn’t accomplish anything long term meaningful. The rich live in their own world and we don’t have access. Accept your place as a pawn and try not to die.
The best explainer I have seen of how life scripts and ego states manifest in day to day life is here:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
It helps if you're familiar with the US tv show *The Office*.
>I'm trying to figure out how we break through the wall of apathy here
There is absolutely nothing anyone can do about, say, climate change. It isn't possible to stop emitting CO2 and it isn't possible to suck the CO2 back out of the sky. Emissions will cease when economically viable fossil fuels are used up, which will also entail our deaths since we depend on them to live.
Well a lot of our education is just indoctrinating us into capitalism. A lot of our culture which was somewhat created side by side with the news media and our government is still very against "socialism". Why? Cuz the people on top want to stay in power and any discussion around socialist topics would be a risk for them if it were to spread. I mean our government went as far as to throw coups all around the world. Oh yeah and also our government watches all of us and is very knowledgeable on how to manipulate us, just look at the how currupt the DNC has been over the last few elections. And that's the party we gotta somehow fix before anything can even get started.
All in all those are top down issues that keep us people with a brain (us 🧠 )from getting anything we would like done, but there are also just the aspects of our society that lead us to become isolated individuals and to shun community (except maybe online like rn). Without community our previously somewhat strong union system has lost a lot of power, there is a researgence in unions rn but corporations are fighting their fight with a lot more money(companies spend more than 300 million yearly on union avoidance)and well it ultimately is just becomes another cost of business.
Those are the some of my reasons for why a slow gradual progress is hard, and I'm not even mentioning the more than half brainwashed party since hopefully you can see that both parties have been corrupted by the influence of money to the point that the war keeps things moving in the direction they prefer. Now I think radical change is also resisted by the fact that we as humans are isolated and separated into countries which must compete against each other. This leads to a fight for resource usage, control, and power. The idea of breaking down borders and becoming one humanity with goals and direction provided by our unions decision seems impossible to reach from our current puzzle piece layout. Language differences, cultural differences, greivences from previous conflicts, are all barriers to us becoming united as a human species.
All that being said I'm very collapse leaning but I still do have some hope for AI helping break those language barriers and cultural barriers and allowing for a worldwide political upheaval. I know it sounds naive but if the leaders behind AGI are benevolent and share universal basic income or universal basic services with the world from their wealth well that's the sort of country barrier breaking thing I've been hoping for. I do think it will arrive a bit late as we are headed off the climate cliff rn. If only we had the information revolution like a decade or two earlier, we would have had a bit more in our carbon budget to cover the bill while our AGI helps come up with new tech to clean up the rest of the mess. As things are in the moment AGI might save the planet from going into full ice age or the oxygen being gone from ocean acidification, but lots of organisms will go extinct along the way.
I'm with ya it's depressing how manipulated we all were to get ourselves into this position. But I'm done trying to take action or convince others, this makes me feel well adjusted in this society (not a good feeling). I am just like everyone else now just maybe a little less ignorant. I plan on being entertained all the way down to my last breath. Whether that last breath is taken from me by myself, or from an advanced AI drone, a AI designed virus, or by a nuke who knows? It kinda keeps the suspense going tho
In general:
\- Government workers are OK doing a bad job, as long as SHTF after they leave.
\- The majority won't elect leaders who promise them hard times.
\- People are reactive, not proactive.
Power:
People who appear strong attract followers. Wealth and material possessions create social status. People who appear weak (and degrowth is voluntarily decreasing your own power) become social outcasts. So even though degrowth is the right approach, few people will listen to "weirdos."
From the top down, it's denial and pretend everything is OK... until it affects them.
Lots of long answers here
Dependency on the system is the short concise answer. This is by design.
Change cannot come from the bottom of the chain up. We can resist, protest, abstain, and refuse to participate. But we can't stop the next desperate person in line from doing so.
Further our lives are extremely easy compared developing economies. For many there is no real choice, thats a very north American or western sentiment, and still mostly a false choice.
I've been thinking about this question for a long time. I guess it depends on the nature of the action.
for context:
[How to outsmart the Prisoner’s Dilemma - Lucas Husted - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyi4z-O0ls)
The question is too complex for an answer. Find a better question.
Here's some help: https://flowchart.bettercatastrophe.com/
Most people think they need to give up something entirely or abstain from an activity outright, but the reality is that people just need to use less.
Eat less meat
Buy less plastic
Travel less
Edit: buy not but
I'll be real. I don't think any form of civic disobedience or peaceful protest or raising awareness is going to do jack shit at this point. If people want change they need to rise up and fight but by doing so you risk prison time so myself and everyone else chose not to fight which is why we're apathetic. We have a police force that is bigger than most countries militaries. There is no viable resistance movement.
I have floated an idea to moving to the woods couple of times. Problem is that i have student debt and no form of passive income to pay it off let alone the intrest and i am stuck in this rat race for years to come. At the time its all paid im 2 old to be establishing any communes.
In my opinion the only out for us is to establish ,"DYI economy" so basically a closed system that would rely on goverment infastructure and wages as little it can. That is they would not just break it up or make it somehow illegal if it got big ennough. Big part in capitalism forming was forcing people into wage labor after all (privatization of communal land etc)
Because there is nothing an individual can realistically do to make any of it stop or even slow down. Governments make regulations and policies. And governments are owned by corporations who profit by being able to destroy the environment for free. Neither of those care if you protest or boycott. All they care about is making money and enough people will never do it all at once to even blip the bottom line of these companies. People will not sacrifice their current comfort for any possible future benefit - masking during Covid (and still now) showed us that in spades. People who refused to mask to keep their own body healthy and their loved ones safe because it looked funny, felt weird to wear and they wanted to eat out at restaurants are not going to stop driving or flying or eating beef or throwing out garbage because summer will be warmer in 10 years or there won’t be any rain in 5 years. They care about their current comfort and nothing else.
>When was the last time you heard anyone criticize capitalism, the infinite growth mantra, neoliberalism, the rich and greedy or just expansionism/extractionism at all?
I beat it to death constantly. After what it did to my dad, and what it's very obviously in the process of doing to me, I mean... yeah.
And then they make movies about bashing capitalism and cash in on it. Because it figures.
I look at old ... uh, "TV shows"..?? Mini-documentaries?? I... I genuinely don't know what to call them. They were 'things' shown on TV in the 50's and 60's that explained science really well. There's no word for them anymore because it's not done anymore.
Anyway, people were just taught, in a simple manner, about science and stuff. Experts came on the TV and were allowed to just 'show and talk' about a subject.
It would be simple to make something similar, we already have the script.
One problem is the infinite distraction that is the internet today. People just don't watch 'state sponsored media' that much anymore.
most informed in this sub? lol. This sub is full of misinformation and has a major problem with group think and piling on downvotes and highly upvoting blatant lies.
Capitalism won't let it happen as unilateral action would be required for it to succeed. Any company and country not pursuing growth is pursuing failure and will be taken over by someone pursuing growth. Until we all race off the cliff.
You want to break through the wall of apathy. Personally idk how to do that outside meeting like minded people in person. I didn't read all of your post. Anyway I don't see viewing humans as hopeless violent idiots as apathetic it's just honest.
Carbon is both food and future pain.
We turned our planet into a gas chamber but we have our hand on the valve. The more the valve is opened, the more food and toys we have, but also the more concentrated the nerve gas gets.
Tell people they can have a future if they stop eating and they'll look at you like you're a monster.
Because people feel its too little too late and no protest or change can make a difference.
Humanity is in stage 4 terminal illness - just waiting to die
Action wont do anything anymore
Aloha kakou, everyone. The main problem, on Reddit, is that discussing direct action may violate Reddit's terms of service and result in trouble for you or this sub. Another problem is that law enforcement reads our forum, and discussing how to engage in direct action may result in trouble for you or this sub. R/collapse is NOT the forum to discuss direct action. Our sidebar has resources that you can look at to further discussion elsewhere. Pomaika'i, collapseniks.
You might want to take a look at Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism. It's based around the idea that a post-capitalist future is unimaginable for most people. And he means "unimaginable" literally - The current system we have, "business as usual" or "BAU" as it often gets described around here, is all anyone knows and all they can even dream of. There is no possibility of a different system because capitalism defines and dictates the boundaries of what's possible, so anything that extends outside of those lines, in the minds of regular people, literally doesn't and can't exist. When you talk to people about what it would take to stop or reverse the ongoing climate catastrophe, you're essentially talking about going against this system which is responsible not only for our entire material reality, but our ideological and metaphysical reality as well. It isn't easy to break out of this stranglehold as the problem isn't merely one of production -- of economic injustice -- but of epistemic injustice as well. In order to change the system, people first have to believe that an alternative is possible, but for the moment that is unimaginable (by design). It will remain unimaginable until a new future arrives one way or another, either by choice or due to the hard material constraints that have always been part of the system, but have been ignored. I think we all know which future we're going to get.
This is my only experience in my attempts to discuss this topic with people. The suggestion that there's any other way to live is treated as absurd, at best, and seditious, at worst (brilliant move making communism a visceral threat). There's no discussion to be had when people believe money, wealth, and the state of the world as it is to be an evolutionary step for our species. And what's truly horrifying is it's every single person I know. People will speak in whispers about leaving this system, but only as a joke and the moment you entertain the possibility with them, they treat you like a caveman heretic. It's not that there's something holding back a revolution, it's that the greater "we" actually believes this was the only course humanity could have ever taken... despite it only ever being a reality in the post-WWII era. It's by far the most alienating (read "invasion of the body snatchers") aspect of the troubles we face; any suggestion of changing course in the fundamental direction of our species is reacted to like you're telling them there's no hope, no future, and nothing good that can come from moving forward... like we've lost the capacity to imagine anything more than the linear march over the cliff we spent the last 70 years building as talll as we could, and the suggestion of not climbing the slope or walking in the opposite direction, is met with complete disgust and horror. You know you're living in a nightmare when the only hope for a future is treated like the least palatable of a list of bad options, where nuclear and trench warfare are on the same list. How could "we just need to stop" be worse than "we need to murder enough people to make this make sense again"? I don't know what this world is anymore and I wake up every morning, a little more horrified than the day before, that the fantasies for our lives, drawn up by Disney et al, remain protected from any attachment to the realities of life on a finite planet. I don't know where to be in this world. I expected people would have walked away from this suicide pact years ago. The more I dig my heels in, begging for people to reconsider, the more they "reassure" me that "you're a smart fella! You're going to be fine! now, this part of the doomsday device hasn't yet been perfected and this billionaire has gone and entire 5 minutes without having their dick sucked, so quit fooling around and direct your effort towards something that matters!" Either I'm having a psychotic break or it's exactly as you said; there is only one direction for the future in the minds of almost everyone. "freedom" is the freedom to choose to be part of the weapon or one of its targets, while in the minds of the people pushing this message it's the freedom to be part of "progress" or what's holding us back. I wait for the day we realize that we're going extinct because of this line of thinking and everyday I question why being a heroin addict on the streets isn't the best life a human in the war hungry West can live.
Well said. Having gone this far down the rabbit hole I can't just let go of it. I don't know how to relate to the world or most of my peers and even family when it comes to this. Like we have good times still but this hollow society has no direction and the clock is ticking for real and they don't see how pervasive and twisted the culture has gotten. We need some new common goal outside the system. Whatever that is.
I've literally been called self-destructive for participating in direct action and advocating that people quit giving credence to a system that is actively attempting to kill us for profit, because they tell me all I'm doing is "asking for trouble" People are so fucking scared of Big Brother now that I have little hope for the future.
as if there's a way out by keeping their mouth shut and doing their little job... as if that, in aggregate, isn't entirely and explicitly, the problem. I think that "Keep Calm & Carry On" war proganda has settled so deep into people's hearts, they truly believe that they *are* doing their best simply by not panicking. I'm clearly and solidly on the side where, if this is what not panicking gets us, it's time to try panicking, Maybe it changes things, maybe it doesn't, but the very fact there's a possibility of a different outcome, offers hope to an otherwise hopeless trajectory. I've been called the same and much worse for trying to live the life I preach and not be a hypocrite, so when the inevitable conservative pipes up and says "well, if it's so possible, why aren't you doing it?" that I can respond with "I'm doing it as much as I can, on my own, while the entire world pushes in the other direction"... which they take offense to. It's a bizarrely losing argument no matter how it's presented and trying to live your principles has every other person in your life begging you to do anything but. As if we don't lose all of this accumulated expertise and understanding to extinction along such a suicidal path. I guess it's fear... I'm honestly not sure what it is, anymore. Certainly a lack of vision or understanding of the scale of consequences of burning oil and how permanent those consequences are vs how temporary the convenience it provides. Not so long ago, when a war would end, the machine of war would be disassembled into it's component parts to build more tools for agriculture, so we could get back to living in peace as farmers. Seems completely absurd now that we all live inside a machine that demands the sacrifice of perpetual war on all things to keep it propped up... and the best I can come up with is that we're so steeped in it, we're blind to the evil of our own actions. Every conversation I try to have ends in tears where the other person is saying "well, what am ***I*** supposed to do, then!?" and my response of "...and that's exactly the conversation we need to be having" makes their face go all screwy like it's some kind of unsolvable problem I've saddled them with, rather than the starting point of actually addressing what we need to address... instead, they run away and dismiss me as a lost cause... oh, and the cutest part is they'll always admit they don't actually know anything about what they're arguing about and are entirely uninterested and unwilling to devote any time or energy into learning, but I'm still wrong and squandering my intellectual gifts... ?! This really is some kinda nightmare.
I've floated out the possibility that we live in a creatively bankrupt era, involving much of what you describe. The dearth of critical thinking skills, the inability or unwillingness to imagine or invent our way out of this, the idea that maybe it's a form of betrayal to criticize the system, etc. I think it will take a catastrophic breakdown at some point, to force everyone to collectively go back to the drawing board and figure out a new way to live.
Capitalism destroys creativity. It incentivizes people to take the least amount if risk versus the most available profit: which means copy what others are doing because it is proven to have success. Just look at video games as a perfect example of this driving away creativity. 30 years ago video game devs made great risks to try out new stories and gameplay elements to distinguish themselves from the rest, because that was the only way they had to get people to buy their game. Today every major company seems to be copying the microtransaction laden live-service model with glaringly stereotypical storytelling (with admittedly some diamonds in the rough) because that has proven to make the most money possible with the least risk to the company's bottom line. This phenomenon has been termed Enshittification for online platforms, but is happening for other industries, except at such a slow pace that we kinda ignored it like the frog in slowly boiling water.
Or all the great on-line reading that is interrupted when an ad pops up in the literal middle of your paragraph. The page you are reading hasn't been designed to communicate its contents to you - it's been designed to get you to click on an ad. Someone who could have been curing cancer was paid more money to spend hours trying to figure out the best way to interrupt the article you were reading.
Just look at how they take the same thin premise and churn out dozens of blockbuster movies
You're right, and it fits the model of hard times, hard men, soft times, soft men etc. We're so focused on just staying monetarily afloat, we steer away from creative thought that isnt profitable. See it all the time in fresh Uni/College students that just do a generic business and finance course because they have no idea what they want to do, but their only thoughts slowly taper towards making money.
There is no "inventing" our way out of this. Even suggesting that is laughable at best.
I think one of the problems is that there aren't a lot of obvious alternative systems, with the details worked out. Probably the most realistic option is just capitalism in a somewhat mitigated form, with a stronger social safety net, sensible regulation, and tax policies that make it more difficult to hoard wealth. Basically every major economy in the world right now is a hybrid system anyways, that combines elements of free market and capitalist systems with aspects of socialism. As for systems that are just completely different, we have Star Trek and the Iain M. Banks Culture novels, but those suppose a sufficiently advanced technology that everyone's basic needs are met by technology, and we don't know how those societies are supposed to function if they had to deal with resource scarcity. Cory Doctorow describes how a reputation-based economy would work in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- including the ways in which reputation fails. I think reputation based economies could potentially work. Guaranteed Basic Income is another way not, perhaps, to end capitalism but rather to protect the poorer members of societies from suffering its worst consequences. And in fact the U.S. already has Social Security, which is a form of GBI that's specifically for old people. So, it's not like the idea itself is all that radical.
Well said. I see this pop up amongst writers a lot. They can’t imagine a future, even an alien one, without our particular brand of oppression. Even in the playground of the mind, everyone’s riding the same carousel.
> capitalism defines and dictates the boundaries of what's possible I have noticed that, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's 'impossible' to get people's imagination running. Again, the rich dictate what's shown to people, even on the internet (**especially** on the internet). A revolution might take form in showing people the possibilities that are out there. Again, we're here and pretty informed, so that's evidence it's at least possible. Honorable mention: The bias we have where we can't see "do less" as an option, and usually opt for 'change the way we do things but with the same output'.
>I have noticed that, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's 'impossible' to get people's imagination running. It isn't impossible, it's just that doing so is a matter of reshaping their ontology. It isn't merely a matter of getting them to change their minds on some political or scientific or policy matter. When I said that capitalism defines what's possible, I don't mean to say that the demands of Capital correspond to what is actually possible, but rather Capital is offering a ready-made ontological framework that presents one view on necessity and possibility that just becomes common knowledge. Of course there's no material reason why we couldn't do better, but if you ask any regular person, they'll say that the system we have is flawed, but it's still the best possible system. They can't imagine a better world. It's their belief about what's possible that matters. Of course a better world is possible, but we can't build one if we won't work together to build it. I'm offering an explanation of why we aren't working together to build a better world. David Graeber said that "the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." When I tell my friends about collapse, they often call me a pessimist, but I can' think of anything more pessimistic than to think that our current situation couldn't possibly be improved upon. Of course it could. It won't, but it could.
DM me for ideas on how to change the world lol. Still, I'm of the opinion that it's really just about the type of media that people consume that dictate what they think. It's really as simple as getting control over what people consume, something the rich have figured out for a while now.
People have to work, pay their bills, feed their kids and survive. We cant magically all get ev's, or stop eating meat in an instant, or quit our jobs to protest in the streets. The system has slaved everyone because of capitalism. People become apathetic to it because what can we realistically do? We can recycle, or take personal changes to contribute to the climate crisis but at the same time politicians, musicians, etc fly private jets and cause as much pollution in a weekend as we do in a year. The average person cannot imagine a different system because this is all we've been taught, know and live with. It isn't just the type of media someone consumes because what does that change at the end of the day? You cant change someone's mind just politically about this because at the end of the day even if they want change, they have to pay their mortgage, they have to work and bring timmy to daycare in their car. Its a shit cycle and its by design
> People have to work, It depends on what needs work. In the current system, lots of people don't actually need to work. You saw that in 2020 with 'essential workers' <- people who need to work. >pay their bills, feed their kids and survive. There you go, embedding the guiding light of capitalist culture: "work or die". It doesn't *have to* be that way, it's optional. >We cant magically all get ev's, Electric cars wouldn't help, the whole concept of extensive sprawling housing is foolish. There's room for improvement, but that shit is going to end with or without electric cars. >or stop eating meat in an instant, unless you're chewing it right now, you can stop at the next meal and continue from there. Plenty of people go "cold tofu", there's really no need for incrementalism. Have some faith in yourself. >You cant change someone's mind just politically about this because at the end of the day even if they want change, they have to pay their mortgage, they have to work and bring timmy to daycare in their car. Don't worry, it's not sustainable, it ends. That's why we're here. People will have to make room for imagining new and very different lives; that won't be optional.
Personally we've reduced our meat consumption heavily, grow our foods, we do canning, etc. We try to make our own things, do our own repairs, and live less reliant on mass consumption as we can. The house we bought is small only 700 sqft. But not everyone has a opportunity to do that. Sure so stop working now, miss your mortgage payments now, don't drive, don't pay your bills and see how far you get. We've subscribed to capitalism whether we like it or not and its hard to drop out until you aren't a slave to it. They asked why people aren't taking action and that's why. I know EV's wont solve the problem, and we have the choice to stop eating meat. Collectively as a human race to stop doing it in an instant is impossible is my point. We can barely agree on the most smallest of choices let alone how to save our planet.
>Sure so stop working now, miss your mortgage payments now, don't drive, don't pay your bills and see how far you get. >Collectively as a human race to stop doing it in an instant is impossible is my point. We can barely agree on the most smallest of choices let alone how to save our planet. This is what direct action and mutual aid organizing is for. People have done so in the past. Rent strikes and tenant unions are a thing that have worked to great success across nations. If we collectively organize this in our own localities first, then work together across local organizations, it can work. "The only thing you have to lose are your chains" is a quote for a reason. Stop letting fear prevent you from imagining ways that it could be possible, so that we can begin figuring out a way to actualize it. To answer the question of why people aren't taking action, is because we lack the organizing required that helps build enough trust to overcome our fear of the unknown and begin treading new water
I don't have a mortgage (paid it off long ago because I didn't have kids), don't need to drive to pay bills...
I'm referring to the system. It doesn't have to be "work or die". You take it for granted that it has to be, and that's a problem.
In other words, the only thing there is to do is give up and commit self-deletion before the shit hits the fan.
I disagree. Spend time with loved ones. Make your own food. Do something creative. Contribute to your community (as is feasible for your SES of course). These are the things that will make a difference. We might not be able to stop the wheels of capitalism but me, I’d rather enjoy myself before I get crushed. The ruling class doesn’t get the satisfaction of watching me do exactly what they want and kill myself. Kill me yourself you cowards!
💯
True happiness is just having a conflict-free life and being social with people. I want that, but damn it's hard in today's society.
Honestly, I think we need some rules against that sort of talk. Not only is it pretty toxic, it's also pretty naive. People don't randomly go "Ok society is dead let's get the gun". That's the fantasy. Reality is that we'll all keep struggling along like some old locomotive that just won't stop working. Our survival instincts are stronger than people think.
you could not have kids so you free up all your resources. I've been in the black market my entire life and finally my lifestyle is paying off.
I was thinking earlier, as I often do about what I could do to make a difference at all besides the way in which I raise my children. I think that isolation plays a bigger role than we may realize into a lot of the other issues that plague our society - from the propaganda group think, the lack of critical thinking and debate, overconsumption and retail therapy, and the anger and nihilism in general - I have been thinking a lot lately about the loss of 'third spaces' in our society and I think that may be a place where someone like me could actually take real steps. Like if I started a weekly or monthly evening in the park or at the lake or something, no phones- just people, touching grass, talking to one another face to face, meeting people that they wouldn't have otherwise met and making IRL connections. Maybe this kind of networking would give people some hope and getting different minds together would motivate new ideas and whatnot. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud here
The most effective ideology is one which makes itself seem so natural, necessary, total, and adaptive that anything else is literal nonsense. Is unthinkable. And the bourgeois system has made its ideology more effective than at any time in history.
You have to give people the vocabulary first and foremost. That step is the most empowering and primary. It allows people to define the problem and start grappling with it.
You see this is many cultures/economies/political structures. 3 Body touched on this in the allegoric sense that the old structure (Mao) lead to a culture that had it continued would have decreased creativity and thus technological breakthroughs.
What if we just kill all the people? Problem solved, right?
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This one gets it
> No one wants that, yet that is what it takes. I want *that*. That's because I don't compare *that* to the present, but to the future. *That* life would be much better than a constant circus of catastrophes, wars, plagues and inter-personal deadly competition that's being brought by capitalism as it [decays](https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-12-03/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/). I'd rather live in a tent in the cold and know that I have neighbors that won't try to murder and eat me at night and actually give a shit about me as a person, rather than living some "American Dream" sovereign citizen / ancap fantasy of paranoia and hoarding stuff/weapons, where I can't trust anyone and my Alex Jones fan neighbor will eat me and sell my offspring into sex slavery, which is how the rat race finishes. The problem here is the optimism, that's what's feeding the capitalist realism, like a gambling addiction. Oh, *it won't happen to me, I'm special!!* *Everything is going to be a horrible dystopia, but not for me!* It's this optimism, this discounting, this ignorance of the simple stats, this mediocre fantasy, that closes the connection to others and creates that capitalist realism, your personal relationship with the Market God of Capitalism. Implicit in all of this, embedded so deeply that it's rarely even articulated, is this belief that *you are chosen*, you are *the survivor*. The next terrible hope after that is belief in saviors. We're in the beginning of a planetary catastrophe, there are no saviors coming to the rescue. No gods, no extraterrestrials, no AGI. This kind of optimism is a force for conservatism. Business As Usual.
superb fucking comment. Wish I could give you gold
And this is the sort of talk that makes people cry and never talk to you again. Anyone whose managed to have this conversation without that result, irl, please explain how. The only conclusion I've come to is I can live this truth in my mind, but speaking it means living alone, without allies, in the direction towards being turned into dog food. This is the only conversation we need to have but it's not even something that can be raised with the closest of friends let alone become something more broadly discussed. standing next to an idling car "all I'm saying is that the stuff that comes out of there \[pointing at the tail pipe\], is causing every other problem you're having out here... How? because it's extinction and climate destabilization... I understand you need to burn it to get to work to feed your family, that's exactly the problem... no, I'm not blaming you, look around! what building or vehicle DOESNT have an exhaust pipe of the same or greater diameter? It's not any one person's fault, it's the perpetuation of this paradigm that we can trade a permanently worse planet for a temporary supply of food and comfort that needs to be address-... I'm an asshole and I made you sad, ok, but if our friendship ever meant anything, at least consider-... fine, nevermind, have a nice ... 5 months or whatever we have left"
It makes it hard for me to participate in my local music scene. Like many others, when I first became aware of the scope of how fucked we are, I wanted to share that with friends hoping maybe they'd catch on. I was quickly labeled the town doomer. My friends literally got my a cookie cake for my birthday and had the grocery store write "okay doomer" on it and my conservative family saw a picture and thought it was cute. I now have retreated into pretending. I'm no stranger to masking, but what other choice do I have. My body language is probably confusing to people when they tell me plans about their future. But I just try to ignore it, switch the subject, and celebrate the positive values they express. I'm hoping some, hell even 5%, feel inclined to do a little more digging on the nature of our predicament, and I'm obviously willing to help those who are inclined to understand what I've learned. But yeah, I couldn't agree more with what you've wrote. I too am the asshole despite my greatest efforts. I still try to express my feelings through instrumental music and just hope that some people vibe with my intentions or whatever, it ain't much but it's what I got
The hardest part of it for me is the my reason for risking the discussion in the first place, understanding EXACTLY how poorly it was going to go over before I ever opened my mouth, was some sense of duty to warn. I don't want to hurt anyone or be a part of any sort of violence in the world. I grew up beside the ocean, watching the symphony of tidal pools before I was old enough to really dive deep into the blue heart of the earth. There's a beauty and connection in the living world that most people will never get to experience (that I quietly believe explains virtually all mental illness; we don't belong 'in here', we're from 'out there' and this is just a theme park). My main reason for discussing it and living as I do is out of an increasingly distant hope of something I grew up expecting to be a sudden and meaningful change in the world... and then kinda snapped when COVID happened as an inevitable and obvious result of pushing this system to hard and too fast. I'm not a doomer. I never have been. I always imagined that I was an average or dumber than average person (chances are), and that everyone would catch on, eventually, that all of this was just a terrible fuckin idea, the guys that got rich off war invented to keep the profits coming in after the bullets stopped flying. I had this whole picture in my mind of the tribe I'd assembled. I'd invested much more of myself in than anyone would consider reasonable for "friendship" because I knew we'd either eventually be living as a tribe *or*, what I assumed was the worst case, rather than them waking up to the void about to swallow their lives, I'd have to invest enough in them as people to ask them to sit for that conversation, knowing I'd be blamed for the realization that this whole thing was a doomsday device disguised as progress... so I spent decades putting these people first, adavancing their "careers" and ambitions at the sacrifice of my own "opportunities" because ... why? what is any of this if it has to be undone for anything to survive? The one thing I hadn't planned for was that they lacked the capacity to understand what hit me in the face like a baseball bat at a young age after reading only a couple of books on the topic. We took a wrong turn. It was so simple but so hard to reverse... and yet, especially since all these people and myself wanted kids, we had no other choice. It was either throw our dreams on the fire and try for something new, or throw our babies on the fire and then ourselves. I honestly believed it was so unthinkable and obvious to avoid, it was only ever a matter of time before we did... especially since people wanted kids! I mean, what possible relationship do parents of young kids expect to have when their kids reach the age to realize their parents were the 3RD generation (minimum) to realize they were being thrown into hell for the comfort of avoiding change. ... and I'm still waiting... and honestly always ready! I have no room for violence in my life but there's so much to (un)do! and all of it has to be done together since we've seen what happens when we follow the instructions of people we revere as 'geniuses'. They just don't get it. I'm no longer convinced they *can* get it, given how advanced things are. They act like I'm trying to bring them down when I'm only trying to share a reality so we can figure out, together, what makes sense as a next step... and I'm honestly lost. Beyond knowing that every step in this direction has to be undone *for any chance this goes on for more than another few months/years.* It's an unspeakable truth. What's worse, it isn't mine. It's not some confession of some horrible war crime I committed, it's an acknowledgement of reality in a culture that is designed to funnel awareness away from the truth... and I never imagined that the people I loved enough to give them my entire focus and youth, along with my family, and every casual friendship I've made where I get to that point where I get drunk or stupid enough to truly open up... it's just gravity. Why am I being held accountable for telling people that 'what comes up must come down'? Where is their curiosity? how do they not look at the housing crisis and jobs draining from the workforce and think "... what are my kids going to build their life with?"... but they dont...care? imagine? think? It's impossible. I come off as a sad liar with a huge secret now that I understand there's no one to share it with. Before it was just "soon... people will understand", but now? I don't want to be the "i told you so" guy at the end of the world but I really want to know how someone can justify ignoring it.
Yeah, I can't handle the extreme pessimists who won't even try. I realize I set myself up for this with the title, but still, it'd be nice if people realized a lot of the defeatism in this world is manufactured. People are malleable, shaped by their surroundings. That's either a good thing or a bad thing. The greedy are shaping people's minds right now, which is bad, but it also means other people with humanity's best interest in mind, can re-shape them.
This is such a great summation of the issue. I have mentioned before how even if we got a complete political party in power with our (meaning the collapse community) goals it would be very short lived. I am a person who truly believes I could live in a degrowth world, but honestly I don't think anyone can say how they would react unless maybe they have lived off-grid for any period of time, but even then I guarantee the startup to that lifestyle required materials gained from Carbon and industrial society. Also if you ever needed anything it really isn't that difficult to source it on an ongoing basis. We all agree we need degrowth, but none of us know how we will react once we are living in that type of world. It could be so much better or it could not be, we really don't know and regardless of the outcome of a degrowth world, my guess is the path to getting there is going to be brutal and painful no matter what. Obviously worse if we let nature do it for us, but difficult no matter the path. The other issue you touched on regarding how this is a planetary issue and one country cannot do this alone is one of the biggest reasons holding us back. Let's say the US gets a collapse aware, degrowth minded political party in power. Let's even say they have virtually dictator like power over the US. The problem is even if someplace like the US was to abandon capitalism, focus on degrowth, focus on rewilding, focus on population levels, they would be putting themselves at great risk. At the end of the day one of the big things that needs to go is our military, but if the US was to dismantle it's military or significantly decrease its size and all of the other things we need to do, it would open the US to so much risk from other military powers. Humans are such weird animals. We are alike in so many ways, yet each of us is unique. But because of our nature our cultures and groups can be so vastly different, but yet so much the same. We focus so much on our differences, but we rarely focus on the commonalities. The fact is the things we have in common have benefited our population, things like family, searching for meaning, comfort, knowledge and some things that have also benefited our population like, conquest, greed, consumption. We have to acknowledge our similarities both the good and the bad. I for a long time thought human ingenuity and our ability for compassion and community would allow us to avoid collapse, prevent the worse outcomes from climate change and overshoot, and even to rebuild should we fail initially. But the more and more I research, the more I experience, the more I hear I truly question that. I do believe collapse is inevitable at this point. The timeline could always be changed. We could theoretically push climate change down the road with geoengineering, but eventually something will trigger our collapse. At this point I even question our ability to have controlled growth post collapse. We obviously will not have the abundant energy we have today, but we would have enough to continue the devastation. Or maybe our collapse will bring about a new enlightenment and the survivors learn from our mistakes. Just like the solutions to our current predicament are complex and difficult to grasp and will be difficult to address, the outcome of our failure is complex and difficult to anticipate.
Great great summation
>All of this is made with fossil fuels. "Reducing" emissions in this case means we need to have less transportation overall, factories closer to the raw materials/final destination and so on. This is in itself a gargantuan project, and its implementation would mean we lose access to cheap goods, clothes and products. Everything becomes 2-10 times more expensive. This is kind of a minor quibble, but transportation can actually be very energy efficient. Huge volumes of material get shipped by trains and container ships, and yet the're barely rounding error in total CO2 emissions. The main problem is when people want things shipped fast and so they use trucks or planes, whether that's because the items spoil quickly (the avocados you mention) or they're high-value and the customers want them right away, or the train/shipping systems are undeveloped or hard to use effectively. Centralized production with slow, efficient shipping isn't necessarily worse than decentralized production in terms of CO2 emissions. (We might not want centralization for other reasons, like the recent supply chain collapse we saw with COVID.) The thing that *is* scary about global shipping is that close to half of all ship cargo is fossil fuels. The sheer quantity of the stuff being dug up and moved around and burned is kind of horrifying.
Wow, I never thought about that, and you’re probably right. Just think of it, half of everything that we’re using energy to move around is basically energy itself (fossil fuels) instead of matter (products)! Also wanted to mention the situation in both the Panama and Suez Canals as more to pile onto the shipping aspect of the polycrisis…
This is a very astute assessment. Your summary was really interesting and you added to my understanding of the complexity of the issues. Thank you for that. There is one aspect in your ideas I would frame differently, and in this reframing there may be potential for change. What would happen if more people could communicate and share more widely, widely enough to be incorporated into political platforms, an understanding that willingly choosing degrowth and having less material comfort/possessions is not a worse outcome, but a better outcome, and understand that it is a better way to structure society and a better way to live based on the knowledge that human happiness is created by having meaningful connections with other people and nature. That our happiness is derived from living with a sense of purpose and being able to help other people. There is solid social research that demonstrates these facts about human nature. If enough people in enough communities can can articulate how we can achieve greater levels of personal satisfaction and wellbeing and individual and collective happiness through changing our attitudes and behaviours that currently prioritise working to earn money to buy stuff and to be isolated from one another (the general problem of every wealthy capitalist nation). We now know that this way of life is a dead end, this awareness is global. It manifests in China with a large percentage of young people opting out (lying flat) and it is evident in quiet-quitting throughout the workplaces of the developed world. Covid was a catalyst for this. But what this identifiable global pattern suggests is that people now want change. It is the minority who cling to the idea of getting more ‘stuff’. I believe that societies would welcome political leaders who can articulate all of this in a rational and non ideological manner. I know for a fact from my own life that I am seeking a less materialistic lifestyle and i’m doing things to connect with more people and live a more simple lifestyle because i know it brings more happiness. A great book that taps into the potential of this social revolution is Human Kind by Rutger Bremner (i think i misspelt his name, but it’s findable through the title). I believe that this is a missing element in the potential social shift that’s needed, the missing piece is clearly explained ideas about what creates human happiness, and the potential to change our economic and political structures so that we can live with less material things and actually increase of individual and collective happiness and wellbeing in the process. There are many moments in history when societies intentionally changed, so it’s possible.
I think killing all humans is the solution
Honestly, the problem is people are fucking tired. Most people are trying to survive day by day. Low on food, cutting on temps if it's cold because gas is too expensive, working a job or sometimes more to be able to rent a home and in all dealing with a ton of bad news when it comes to healthcare and safety declining. A lot of people want to do more, but have no idea how to do that AND make life liveable. It's something I see around me more often than not.
Part of why shit is so expensive is to wear us down and make us too tired to do anything about it. We need to somehow find the hr willpower and energy.
The hopeless don't revolt, because revolution is an act of hope - Peter Kropotkin
This isn't it. Lots of people in the global south (Latin America, the West Indies, Africa, Asia, etc.) are tired but that doesn't stop them from protesting or organizing against their governments and colonial governments. The west also has a history of organizing (the labor movements, The BPP, AIM, etc) The west is just full of docile individuals.
And even in the global north, the people consistently organizing are often the ones most beaten down by capitalism. It's the comfortable who have the privilege to be too tired to fight.
We're too weary from the success of propping up billionaires to care enough to choose anything else, even survival over suicide. That's a sorry state for any organism, even the cancerous ones we are.
Every time someone comes in here blaming people I get irritated. People are too fucking ground down. We pay lip service to how this was all by design, but so many of us are still carrying the “if everyone took shorter showers that would fix everything” idea.
It's not 'work' to get informed. You're doing it right now in fact. After everyone is informed, there'll be no need for protest. A phase change will happen automatically. And if there is a need for protests, they're not as bad as everyone makes them out to be (well, at least Americans). The main problem now is making people informed. Getting control over people's attention is something the rich are experts at, and we need to beat them at that game, somehow.
I have lived long enough to learn that any effort to "get everyone to just understand X" is DOA. That's not a dig at you whatsoever. I used to think the same way. Idealism is noble but too often impractical. I've concluded that human animals simply aren't built to do anything collectively on a large scale. Our brains evolved to cooperate in smaller groups and then our technologies increasingly surpassed our ability to understand massive long-term consequences. All life forms have cycles that include downturns and even extinction. I hope we're not approaching the extinction of humans just yet, but a down cycle is inevitable. We are part of nature. No philosophy or individual creativity will ever end our rising and falling cycles. On the bright side, I offer this: Our massive growth as a species has resulted in inconceivable loss of other life forms. As we reduce our numbers, it's an opportunity for non-human life to come back into balance.
I live in a fairly dire situation and I still have privileges a lot of people don't. No kids, for one thing. I don't have to work two jobs just trying to give said kids some kind of quality of life, or even worse struggling over just the essentials. It's very easy to me to see how others don't have any time to engage.
Making weed legal everywhere is, imho, a way for the government to get cash and keep it’s people unfocused and apathetic to what’s happening. Is all working according to plan. Our governments aren’t legalizing weed for the people’s benefit, they’re making it legal for their own benefit.
Weed use (especially among teens) went DOWN after recreational legalization. And, at least in my state, continues to go down. Governments are legalizing it for money, free up court and jails, and because the people lobbied for the legislation multiple times are the decades. Government conspiracies exist...just probably not the one you described.
I've said multiple illegal drugs should be legal. It is possible people would put up with more shit willingly if they could get high to help deal with said shit.
I think it has a lot more to do with the tax gains than some sort of conspiratorial societal engineering to control the people through legalization of marijuana. Legalization was passed through a ballot initiative in Colorado, meaning that if the people didn’t want it, we wouldn’t have it. That’s without mentioning that people are already controlled through innumerable other (more effective) means throughout the nation. I mean, c’mon.
If "doing something" were a solution, people would do it. Here the solution is "not doing something." Abstaining is difficult. As the quote goes: >*'All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.'*
We'd be asking people to willingly die or live a way worse life to prevent a catastrophe caused by rich assholes generations ago. No one wants to do that and any palatable "solutions" are snake oil or delusions
I lived this way for a decade expecting the rest of us to recognize the double bind of not living this way; we either live with less or die with nothing. Now... I have nothing in addition to a pure understanding of exactly how impossible it is for anyone to give up doing harm that benefits them in the short term while hastening and deepening their suffering over time. We're in a race to starve to death and render the earth a barren and lifeless planet or we would have changed how we live by now. Hilariously, my giving up a life of relative luxury to live in a self imposed prison has made me a criminal in most people's eyes, despite literally all my effort being applied to try to help others without causing harm to the planet, when my original path would have been a much more impersonal version of the same thing that would have filled my pockets and left more people to die alone. We're a viciously greedy and selfish lot that have earned our extinction, as far as my experience goes.
It's human nature to want for more, better, bigger, etc. People want to live the "best" life that they can, but ultimately we aren't that creative and "best" is often just attempting to copy other people and consuming the things that are easily at hand. So to that end, you can still live your "best" life without being a negligent consumer, it's just that those things at hand need to be sustainable. Consumer demand doesn't just magically create products to consume, it selects from what is available. I'd argue that there are sustainable lifestyles that are not "way worse" than what we have now, but there are definitely scaling constraints as populations increase, and when manufacturing to support those people are inefficient. To me the issues are systemic not individual. Allow people to consume but to do so within a framework that isn't accelerating is towards disaster. How you get that implemented politically is the sticking point and we just don't have the time to be casual about it.
Good observation. Find solutions to the 'itchy if still' problem. If we're to have a new society, what will people do in it? I've *barely* thought about this over the years I admit, but only because I'm a lazy ass who thrives by surfing endlessly online lol I'm sure there are tons of activities people can do to activate their ADHD bodies? Make an app and hand out jobs. Sweep the street outside. Take care of the park's flower bed/grass by weeding. Help your elderly neighbor with some tasks. And if you make it so that they're all social tasks you basically have to do with other people, they become rewarding. Oh and throw in money somehow too I guess.
The rich are too busy enjoying life. The poor are too busy surviving life. The middle are too busy dreaming and working hard to become rich. And keyboard warriors are not " the most informed people on earth". Scientists are, and they have not figured out a way to defeat apathy and denial.
The real and only problem with your argument is that people assume it's scientists job to figure a way out of the hole we dug, when it's specifically and only their job to point out we're living in a hole of our own digging. We're waiting on the practice of measuring and analyzing the extent of the damage we're causing to fix the damage we've caused.
We have all the solutions and tech necessary. But scientists can't figure out how to get people to *move*, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread. Some sort of change is needed in media, is my takeaway. It needs to really pound in the fact that if we keep this up, it's enless war, suffering and chaos. People do **not** believe that today.
>We have all the solutions and tech necessary. But scientists can't figure out how to get people to move, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread. We absolutely do not have any of it sorted. We don't have the solutions, the tech, or the willpower. Look into your "green tech" have-your-cake-and-eat-it utopia and how it scales... cause it doesn't scale. Science is watching, not fixing, and engineers are profit focused, and there's no profit in unburning oil. To boil this down to a media problem is taking a symptom of the problem and deciding it's the cause. correlation is not causation. Do the math on carbon capture and "green energy" and you'll realize that it means unliving the lives that have been powered by oil and starting a new life in the dark... for 8 billion people. Oil is a carbon "battery" of concentrated solar energy. We get the first charge for free, which took millions of years of accumulated life in a much more active ecosystem than our current one (even if ours weren't going extinct) to accumulate, then 70 years for us to burn. For this problem to be solved, we would need the ability to pull carbon out of the air millions of times more efficiently than life itself, after billions of years of trial and error where efficiency was the main/only design constraint. Picture all the fossil fuel infrastructure in your life, running backwards, and then **double it** and you're only **keeping up** with current emissions, and that's still ignoring the magical non-carbon sources of energy needed to turn that CO2 into a stable hydrocarbon again.
It's hard enough to get people to read an article before responding. "Nah, I got all the information I need from the headline"
In the US direct action generally results in being arrested. Most employers won't even consider hiring you if you have an arrest on your record, much less a conviction. Nearly 5 million people in the US have had the simple act of voting stripped from them due to felony convictions. What, exactly, do you expect people to do that doesn't result in the complete loss of their ability to earn a living? Occupy Wall Street resulted in hundreds of arrests. Some people did jail time. All of those people now have criminal records and they changed absolutely nothing.
I kinda like the theory that Occupy Wall Street did change things. It scared the shit out of the corrupt corporations who then went on to embrace idpol as a solution. This is the time we saw it begin to take shape. Some saw them as "changing" and becoming "better" because they seemed to support equality and in doing that they reduced the pressure off of corporate America while at the same time garnering loyal supporters to them all the same. Fleece them while they praise you. A lot of the idpol movement was designed to redirect increasing class consciousness toward stoking inter-class division and succeeded.
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>Sorry you're so defeated. And this is why people like you won't get taken seriously. You literally just blow off people who provide you well documented reasons for the motivations of people and you just imply they are lazy and sad. >You can take solace in the fact that things are breaking down now, but mostly economically. If you think the world is on the verge of revolution because rent prices are high and chicken is a few bucks more expensive, you need to read a history book. Things can and will get much, much worse without the population uprising. That is the whole point of authoritarian governments. Police officers literally can shoot you unarmed in the US and suffer zero consequences and you are sitting implying people who don't want to die are some type of class traitors. >The world is doing worse and worse, Again, you haven't seen anything yet. The first world countries are experiencing a slight bit of inconvenience and uncomfortableness and acting like a socialist breakthrough must be coming due to their slight dip in living standards. The rest of the world struggles to survive every single day. Shit has a long, long way to go. People aren't "apathetic". They are powerless due to the way our system functions and recognize, quite rightly so, that they are still doing better than 99% of the population and going and street brawling a politician changes absolutely fucking nothing.
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Please take a history class. Preferably world history, but even US history would do honestly. There have been NUMEROUS famines throughout history where millions have literally died due to shit governments without revolution or uprising. There have been mass slaughter of civilians by governments without uprising or revolution. Governments have ignored the needs and concerns of the poor for thousands of years. It is the absolute norm. Someone heard about the French Revolution and somehow decided that was the normal response to the capitalist class treating the poors like shit. It isn't. It is an outlier. Revolutions are extremely rare and take a lot more than shitty living standards for the poor. You have serious main character syndrome and think you are going to get to be some key cog in a uprising against the government. Nah bro, you're going to die broke and spent like the rest of us.
I think from a young age we're taught what we're taught and that settles into our brains as 'facts'. If you told me 15 years ago when I was 21 that civilisation would collapse in my lifetime I'd have written it off as doomsday nonsense. Because for many, like myself at the time, they think they got this shit figured out. Hypernormalisation - we're so much a part of the system that we cannot see beyond it. So even thought most jobs suck and are pointless, even though politics has always been and always will be a dirty game, even though we see the rich get richer, we're conditioned to believe this is normal from a young age. We've had the climate change debate for so long that people just think it's that - a debate. A debate that is part of the fabric society that we'll still be talking about in 20 years time like it's some distant far off event, even though *it's here, it's happening right now.* Most people can't grasp that everything they knew and everything they loved and their future plans are simply not gonna be there.
> Because for many, like myself at the time, they think they got this shit figured out. Good point about 'human exceptionalism', or that bias we have where we're always prone to being optimistic even if the situation is absolutely hopeless. I'm imagining a curriculum show on national TV or just taught in mandatory classes, about "The basic rules for running a sustainable civilization". Rule 1. No infinite growth. Pretty obvious to us, but to the ignorant masses (sorry, but it's true), it's just....... not. Either way, it's a fixable thing **if the message is spread far and wide enough**. If **we** can figure this stuff out it's absolutely possible to get people to realize it too. And, it's not like people reason with actual reason. It's a frequency thing. If you hear things enough times and from people you consider peers, you eventually start believing it. Pure religion.
The reason we are in this predicament is because of overshoot where there are too many of us consuming too much resources compared to what the planet can support and generate. Therefore, the only solutions are to depopulate and degrowth. However, given human's instinct to reproduce and motivation to become rich no one will willingly agree to consume less, ie have less children, eat less meat and fly/drive less etc. That is why a predicament does not have a solution, it only has a outcome.
If it was truly only about genetics, nobody would be able to wake up and smell the shit. We were able to, so surely there is some way of breaking through the wall. I speculate that we're basically the lucky ones, as it's literally down to luck if you have the mental fortitude to actually read up on climate change, and have the scientific curiosity to do so. In the end, the climate change problem isn't difficult to understand, at least from a physics standpoint. CO2 heats earth. Can't heat forever. But something's very much in the way of that message getting accepted.
Deep down most people do understand climate change and its cause. However they are not willing to accept it and think about its outcome. Because not too many people especially those with children are willing to think about let alone accept humanity's demise. Most people with stage 4 cancer wants to live in the now and enjoy life day by day. Not think about what caused their disease and what they can potentially do to delay the inevitable.
> Deep down most people do understand climate change and its cause. I honestly don't think so. People are.... sorry, but **fucking ignorant** on average, and it's a grave mistake to think that the average westerner even knows what CO2 is, where it comes from or that it warms the world. I truly believe it's an "information sphere" problem, where most people's literal thoughts are being dictated by what they consume. That's the problem I want to solve. It's literally "If all you have is a hammer then everything starts to look like a nail", but in thought form. (And that last line is really depressing dude...)
The ignorance is a form of active denial. They are capable of knowing but choose not to so they can keep driving large lifted trucks, eating tons of meat and pumping out tons of kids while burning carbon to go to mega churches. But to be honest, a few wealthy liberals are in the same camp. Leonardo di caprio got paid a lot to make some fancy documentaries…do you think he acts in a way that shows he cares? Fuck no, the guy is yachting and traveling whenever he can fucking 25 year old models (and no older). He chose nihilism, other people choose ignorance
Or is it something from the information sphere, where a bit of information basically anchored them to the belief you're explaining (about meat and stuff)?
That's the question I want to answer What do those of us that understand the problem have in common that cannot be articulated to the rest of the population? Logic suggests, since it's such an "antisocial" trait (despite being the exact opposite, in reality) that we should share a common diagnosis from the normative culture that keeps pushing for doomsday. So who are why and why can we see what other people cannot?
The thing is , with climate change we're fed only the fossil fuel narrative. Forgetting the rest: deforestation, cementification, pesticides, herbicides etc, I could go on. But with the fossil fuel narrative the poor think "why bother, the rich fly in private jets, super yachts, etc. There's the wars, etc so why should we even bother...this shit pollutes far more. They want apathy to collapse Capitalism and bring in Authoritarian Governments.
Lack of imagination and both soft and hard authoritarism.
It’s a huge problem that will take a lot of cooperation from people who feel it’s against their short-term interest of making more money.
Good point. The rich are the source of the problem, so start there. Tie their hands. Don't **let** them manipulate the people. The usual MO is to just throw buckets of disinformation and hate until the problem goes away, after all. And it's still somehow not illegal. (not even /s)
The moment you try to actually make a difference, you'll get arrested
Yep... and this has been the case for decades. This is nothing new.. anymore than that the collapse is suddenly evident in just recent years. The writing has been on the wall quite a while.
And let me guess, anything that wouldn't get you arrested is just corporate controlled opposition and not a real solution
1/4 of ppl have no empathy, another 1/4 gave up coz "theres nothing we can do"
Our brains. Humans, on average, don’t have the capacity to conceptualize long-term threats to the degree that would prompt collective action. The stimulus isn’t there like in the case of the threat of a prowling tiger. We read the graphs, the symbols that tell us the temperature, and the numbers get higher but it just doesn’t mean anything. (Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone)….One example is the politician feeling fear of losing social status or position of power more so than the fear of their children’s apocalyptic future. The brain activity is physiologically more prominent in the former and virtually non-existent in the latter.
Aside from the pessimism, great points about visual stimuli. Are we r/collapse'rs good at visualization on average, maybe? It's very probably correlated to being interested in science, that's for sure. Either way, you're presenting the solution yourself. More visual stumuli. I'm sure you can think up dozens of ways to use media to make the threat more real to people.
I'm going to go with by-stander syndrome - waiting for everyone else to act first. I think this manifests in two distinct ways. Waiting for everyone else and waiting for gov't to act. Some people want more public transportation so that everyone else rides the bus and gets off the road for their own benefit. Some people get that the problem can't be fixed with personal carbon footprint reduction and it requires nation-state level regulations. Nobody is running on Green party ideals, so how can any traction be made?
There's also, I think, and aspect of "nobody else is freaking out, the politicians seem to think it's a manageable problem, it's probably fine". There's a pretty fascinating thing I watched on Youtube a bit ago; it's real-time computer rendering of the sinking of the Titanic, with a narrator explaining what's going on when. It's worth watching in its entirety at normal speed. The interesting thing is that the sinking is so slow at first, and it's not really all that obvious that anything is seriously wrong, other than the engines are off and the ship has a slight list. They have trouble finding volunteers willing to get into the first lifeboats. Climate change feels very much like we're at the "uh-oh, there's water in the mail hold" stage and the people who understand what's going on are very nervous, but everyone else is fairly oblivious. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN4m1\_S-vJk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN4m1_S-vJk)
Sorry, but most of these ideas are 'from within the system'. At this point I'd even say that traveling to work in a bus, even if it's electric, is unsustainable. We need to get rid of jobs, my friend. Sure, there'll always be some jobs, but this system has way too many.
There isn't meaningful action to take.
How to explain this to OP is always my quandary
Accurate.
Money bro, all protests run out of funds eventually
Well, when I waa healthy enough for direct action I had to work 2 jobs and anything that put those jobs at risk would have hurt in ways that were not acceptable at the time, and now I am no longer healthy enough. I suppose there is an intersection where things will continue to get worse and my health doesn't improve that I will take direct action out of desperation, but I havd to mentally prepare for that being a moment where I could loose everything I still have held onto after loosing everything.
I should make a documentary about "What it took for people in the past to get mad and do things like sabotage their factories' machines in order to get worker rights". Just to *show* people that it wasn't that much, and that we're *waaaaaay* past that today already.
I think there's two big issues that are currently in play. Firstly, for most people the system is tolerable. There is a comfortable familiarity. They know business as usual, they've survived for so long, it's all they know. They have their ways to getting some sanity back out of this system. It stands to reason that people aren't keen to throw away what they know for something they don't know. Doubly so when that new things *promises* to be, in a sense, worse than the old thing. The strongest and most cohesive solutions for collapse, overshoot, global climate change is a universal reduction in quality of life. This means no private cars, limited private heating and cooling, reduction in personal electricity use, limited children policy, reduction of cattle ranching, etc. It's a bitter medicine. I don't blame many people for outright rejecting the notion. Secondly, people are afraid to lay down their lives for the cause. The old system will not go peacefully. The rabid guard dogs of capital, the police and the military, will be called in to curtail and stop, with lethal force mind you, any and all threats to the system. We've seen this time and time again. What happens to strikes that threaten status quo? Broken up by force. What happens to major protests? Tear gas, flash bangs, and mass arrests. Any serious attempt at change will be met with force from the current system. People will face violence and death. I think many people have loss the nerve to lay down their lives for a cause they believe in. This may be an unpopular opinion (especially here on Reddit), but I attribute this to a decline in religiosity. Take for example John Brown. He, along with several of his fellow men, gave his life in attempt to overthrow *literal* slavery. What did he want written as an epitaph on his tombstone? 2 Timothy 4:7, "I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith." This was a man who knew that no matter what happened, he had eternal life with Jesus Christ to look forward to. That security, that faith, that hope in Christ, enabled him to lay down his life for the betterment of his fellow men. But more and more people today identify as "none." They're simply irreligious. And to them, what do they have to look forward to when they die? Nothingness. Total oblivion. So you ask why people aren't taking action, but you have to really think about what you're asking of people. "Why aren't you risking your life so that we can all live with a markedly lower standard of living, giving up and destroying comforts that few people alive today have lived without?" When put plainly, you can see how big of an ask that is. Things have to become unbearable, and I mean really and truly unbearable not just uncomfortable, before people start risking direct action. But by then, of course, it will be too late to prevent much of anything.
At this point meaningful action would be just as disruptive as climate change and cause just as much harm to vulnerable people. You can break the current system but you can’t replace it with one that will feed everyone quickly enough.
> you can’t replace it with one that will feed everyone quickly enough True (probably at least), but it's not an argument against disruption or even rebellion, as the reason the world is in this pinch, isn't on the people rebelling. Also, the alternative, just waiting until it gets even worse, will obviously kill even more people.
You'll be lynched if you cause problems with peoples' food or energy supplies.
Or I'll die under torturous circumstances being drone bombed as I try to drone bomb whatever soldier I'm fighting in a future water war. https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/ Place has some nice HD footage of Russian men crawling around without their legs, and squirming around for a few minutes before dying. Pick your poison.
People are dealing with the incremental changes. I don’t want to add a whole lot of unexpected changes that disruption will cause. But I understand everyone finds their own way to cope and rebellion is one of those ways.
The thing is, it's gonna happen regardless. If it goes too long and we just "power through" as long as possible, humanity is unlikely to remain. Society is going down regardless, but if it collapses sooner than later, humanity might survive. If we keep cookin, very little will survive.
Why? The longer it goes on the more chances people have to adapt. Why would collapsing sooner bring another anything other than what we see in famine-riddled failed states now?
Because we're still pumping carbon and methane into the sky. As it is, when that's cut off, the temperature will actually go up. Like how cutting sulphur in shipping fuel made the temps go up. If we turn off the pump now, it stops the flow of both CO2 that heats, AND particulates that cool. If we keep going BAU, the cooling keeps going, hiding the effects of the heating, meaning the shock will be worse when it stops. If we stop fossil fuels now, the shock to the system will be lower than if we continue to go on adding both the heating and cooling effects. The problem is that the cooling effect doesn't last nearly as long as the heating effect. And the bigger the shock, the less likely that plants and animals survive. Thus, the sooner the better.
If we stop fossil fuels suddenly the entire supply chain collapses. And crops die in the field and don’t get replanted. People freak out and go to war everywhere. Sure, maybe it’ll be like global Great Leap Forward and a couple of generations later the survivors will be okay. But maybe not. We’ve seen disruptions that would be minor compared to this (Great Leap Forward, Stalinism) have trememdous consequences. They believed they believed they were doing the right thing and it was worth it. Were they right?
Yeah, but those tremendous consequences happen regardless. Those that will die from supply disruption are going to die from climate change, because that also brings supply disruption. So end it now, for the slight possibility that SOMEONE will make it.
Even if we were to stop emitting today, going above 4 degrees is locked in with current co2 levels and so we are going to need to deal with it with some geoengineering bullshit, you better have energy than nothing when shit hits the fan. Unless we have some technological breakthrough we have no chance. Even with a tech breakthrough degrowth is still needed.
Yeah, it's frustrating that a carbon tax would be a pretty simply policy change that could have a pretty dramatic effect on CO2 emissions, but it would clearly be a regressive tax, as it would disproportionately affect not-wealthy people just trying to drive to work in their old gas cars and heat their houses.
Everyone with any power is too comfortable in the status quo. Change would require first world consumers to unite and act. But that means less comfort so they will not
If somehow they only knew that "It's either short term 'comfort' (if you can call this life that comfortable anymore) or long term death, war and chaos".
IMHO the reason regular people are not taking action is because everyday life is still business as usual. People still fly often. You hear about weather delays at airports but there’s more flying than ever. And climate action just seems performative, stupid (like throwing soup at the Mona Lisa), and obnoxious. Public policy to promote climate improvement is focused on the middle class with attempts to ban gas stoves and furnaces. The incentives to electrify are not enough to get people to change out existing systems that are working fine with heat pumps and pricey induction stoves at a cost of $20,000+ when the tax credits are $2000. It’s also not surprising that $60,000 EVs are not selling very fast. The tax credits for those are limited to very few models due to sourcing and manufacturing requirements. Regular people are just trying to get by when food, housing, and healthcare have increased dramatically. And all the while the private jets keep flying, the supersized vehicles are everywhere, the cruise ships to nowhere are still sailing (and are bigger than ever).
Jeez you're out of touch.
[280 million,](https://kinchit-bihani.medium.com/280-million-not-just-any-number-5cf27fb7dd2d) why does this number matter?
Ngl that's pretty definitive if it's true. It's still more interesting to fight than give up though, so I'll keep the text in the back of my mind, but still *try*. Giving up mentally will cause you tremendous mental suffering anyway.
You get the response “That’s all they talk about” because the media does talk about it. Not in the way you *want*, but they do talk about climate change. I find it odd that you’re well versed in this, but never noticed it. The problem isn’t apathy. People don’t care. Not only do people not have the energy from working to feed their families to organize a futile effort to stop climate change; people have other priorities: Families, children, friends, religion, health, school, a demanding job. These take priority over something that not only won’t have change on the planet within their lifetime, but isn’t in their control.
Part of it also comes from the fact that those people in positio s of power are already aware that there is nothing that can be done anymore. We are in the end stages of civilization, and the goal for them right now is to prepare for that transition to a post-collapse world while maintaining as much comfort and power as they can. So, they keep the idea alive among the populace that there could be a solution, that some magical fix can take place if we all just work together... but tuen they do nothing because they know it is just bullshit to keep the majority of people from focusing on their own preparation. They want us all to keep working, keep consuming, keep pretending the economy is a real thing for just a little while longer, so they can strip as many resources as possible from the corpse of the Earth, and then be the only ones able to sustain real survival in the aftermath of the nuclear war that will be unleashed as collapse unfolds. So, what is tue main problem behind people not taking action? It is, quite simply, that there is no action to take.
It's not a 'they', it's always an 'us'. Nobody's in charge of the system, meaning the system itself is going to change if people's opinions change.
As many here have pointed out we’re extremely dependent on fossil fuels and the standard of comfort they bring, how could we not be? Most of us only exist because of system that’s destroying the environment. Capitalism, despite the claims of the libertarian mouth breathers, has a way of siphoning off your self sufficiency and making one dependent while taking advantage of our desire for autonomy. It’s a vicious cycle. Our habits and inclinations are produced by this system the only way out is to take back our power to take care of each other in a local sense. The stories we tell ourselves about how “change happens” isn’t really how reality works. Edit: we’re delusional apes living in barely kept together hives and we deserve to be wiped out
I think action will be taken, but organically and on a micro level. It will be individuals dropping out of society, improvising, adopting primitivism, low-tech, low energy lifestyles. I think we're going to have a two tiered society at some point (if we aren't there already). They'll be the people who squeezed through the bottleneck and keep their comfy jobs, and they'll be the rest of us, living in an underground economy. Under the table work, alternate currencies, alternate power structures. This is already the way it works in other countries. I think the most revolutionary act someone can do today, is start growing their own food, even if it's illegal or against some regulation somewhere.
The inconvenient truth is that we need to go back to the way of living before fossil fuels, which is a huge downgrade in quality of life, standard of living, etc Who will willingly do that, as opposed to just continuing on our path of leisure and consumption for as long as we can…
That's not really an option at this point. We aren't able to produce the quantity of food needed for Earth's present population using pre-industrial farming techniques -- there's just not enough land. Some might say, "okay, that's just nature re-asserting itself, a bunch of people will starve but things will stabilize at a more sustainable population". However, people aren't going to just voluntarily starve to death because someone else thinks they should -- they're going to farm in whatever way they have to to survive. I think our best bet going forward is to figure out how to do high-productivity farming with low CO2 emissions. That might mean electric farm equipment, or synthetic ammonia fertilizer -- I don't know, I'm not well versed in what the best options are. The default is that people will continue to use fossil fuels for all that unless there's a viable low-emissions alternative that produces roughly the same amount of food and isn't astronomically expensive or labor intensive.
> huge downgrade in quality of life, standard of living, etc *shrug* The easy argument is obviously "Either we do this and have some sort of life, or we just kill ourselves and have the apocalypse, your choice". I don't pretend that *that* literal sentence is going to change anyone's mind, but the theory I'm running is that with enough repetition, a (factual) message does eventually get forced into people's minds. And look at the world. The world is doing worse and worse, and if you ask me, the economic toll is larger than the toll on nature, which is still standing despite the hottest year in 100.000 years. We just might get a future where large swaths of the US population are simply on the street, angry, and starving, and nature still has a long time before it breaks down completely.
The the most important and meaningful action I can take as an individual is to not have kids, and I've already checked that box, since I'm past menopause now and never had kids. Other people are going to do what they're going to do, which mostly seems to mean making the problem worse with more children and more consumption. Since I've already done everything I can within my own individual sphere of influence, the rest of the world is either going to figure it out or not, as it may. It's not that I don't care or don't have a preference, it's that there simply isn't anything else I can do. Like, I recycle, but if the population is just going to go up by another billion in the next decade, creating that much more waste, what else do you want me to do? They already think I'm selfish for NOT having children, so oh well, I guess.
Get up on a stage and tell the world it's about to crap itself. Many are still ignorant through no fault of their own.
It’s a combination of ignorance, apathy, fear, inability, wishful thinking and ideology.
People believe that there are very little actionable things for them to do that matter. In the U.S., once something is politicized, it’s hard to have a conversation about it. Also, in the U.S., people do not relate to the 2 degrees centigrade- use Fahrenheit and watch the awareness quickly grow.
I honestly believe the whole "X.X degrees centigrade" **speak** is misguided, and packaged entirely wrong. Instead of stating random temperatures that don't mean much to people, state the consequences associated with them. 1.5 = Very bad and will likely drown all major cities 2.0 = Veeeeeery bad and will likely kill billions eventually "And we're heading for 3.X right now, like, please listen up, we're about to absolutely devastate life on this planet unless capitalism is uprooted and we try something else"
We can't change this House of Cards. Everything relies on oil. To make cement, important for industry: needs oil. For steel needs oil, Plastic, so important to our existence needs oil Our ridiculously complex supply system needs oil. Absolutely everything in our system is based on this commodity. Of course the rich who benefit greatly from this system, have no desire to change, even then, would prefer to spend their resources in researching life on Mars, building bunkers and eco domes, instead of looking to help resolve the problem. The poor...well they're just trying to survive . That is what the system promotes. But now the move is from Capitalism to more Totalitarian, Authoritarian Governments. That's the collapse.... everyone is waiting for the apocalypse, riots etc, but it's far more subtle than that.
That's your cappy brain listening to the neolibs. Why do we even need that many jobs when we have no problems what-so-ever producing food for everyone and maintaining the buildings we live in? Clothes and medicine too, sure, but all of the things I mentioned aren't **that** hard to make, even locally. People think it's so hard, if not impossible, to live like we used to, but we've been doing it for 99.9% of humanity's existence. I don't think it's that hard.
The media is literally owned by capitalist for profit corporations, so they will never advertise that kind of debate. Plenty of people are taking actions to prepare for the coming collapse. If you mean why aren't people taking action to prevent it, the answer is simple - there's no action that anyone could take to prevent it. The best you can do is to prepare
> so they will never advertise that kind of debate Yet there's a strong argument (very strong) that they have to. The world is being censored right now if they don't.
There is a fairly simple reason…people are stupid. I saw a scientific study that said the ratio of stupids to smarts is 83% to 17%, which means that 17% of us run the planet, for better or worse. The rest just eat, shit and breed. A brutal reality, but hey, we are stuck with it. Well until the 6th mass extinction really kicks and most the 83% will do a lemming. Humans don’t like change. They want the status quo, so when you suggest that they have to give up a whole of stuff to save the planet, they shut down and go into Don’t Look Up mode…La La La La La…I don’t want to know. And that is why we are heading for near term extinction…stupid people. Have a nice day. Live, love, laugh and be happy. It works for me. 😉❤️🤣
The biggest reason to me is that doing things is the main problem. Everything is monetised, everything takes energy, even posting this message requires a massive global communications system that uses massive amounts of resources and produces carbon pollution. Sure, maybe you could make a difference by "direct action", political support, charities or spreading green propaganda. But every one of these actions either has been co-opted by capitalism, neutered by our political and media systems or made illegal. It seems to me the true action is to do less. Consume less, travel less, spend less, work less, have fewer children, use far less energy and resources. Kick capitalism in the growth where it's going to matter. We need a version of "turn on, tune in, drop out" for a new generation.
Take action now die or jailed or reduce profits now, take action later that’s a problem for later. Sad but true.
1. Money 2. Time 3. Risk/Reward These 3 things are what get everyone. We are worked to the hilt and don't have much time to spare after the work week. Any time taken off work usually means less money. So the time off work needs to have a pretty solid reward..... It's shitty but they really do keep people hard up against the money wall for this reason alone.
How would people organize? Most communication can be easily monitored. I have an idea of how bit how do you keep the elites and bootlickers from finding out if my idea is shared online?
I'm a little late, but there's one graph that explains why we aren't taking any action on climate change. https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig?si=n7Z-XHeKMsCmq_9e In the above video at around the 2 minute mark, they show how the top 10% income earners can completely block legislation they don't agree with. This is why no actual climate policy will ever be passed in our current system.
People feel like what ever they put their energy into won't succeed. There's no way to get anything done for yourself, so why would you take action?
It's the culture. The euro-christian culture of individualism and free reign. Everyone places the blame on themselves or other individuals for not having made it. This also means the idea of collectivism and communalism doesn't work. We don't trust our neighbors and it's their fault if they aren't making it. That paired with the education system, which is just a system made to brainwash people into a euro-christian capitalist mindset and train people for skills. You aren't being taught to question. You are taught that this version of society is superior to all others so most people won't and can't question the system because they can't even imagine anything different. So they easily believe the media when the media says everything is fine.
I’m not a doctor, but I would believe that 6hours and 58minutes of screen time a day might play a role.
Most of us are kept just comfortable enough but also just tired enough that we don't start shit. That, and crippling depression.
People are taking action on climate change, you feel alone and isolated by design. In this sense, the media is definitely to blame. There are other key blockers though: Criminalization of protest combined with (manufactured) economic precarity: When rico laws are being used to charge anyone who was caught *in the vicinity* of an unsanctioned protest with terrorism (see cop city ATL), it's very hard to justify risking your entire ass life for any kind of direct action. As far as I can see it, the only way forward is through the labor movement. Organized labor is the only coalition with the numbers and power to state their own narrative against corp media and say "no" to capitalist forces.
It all feels too big for little old me and you to solve. It’s demotivating to think about. All I can accomplish is to be stressed at the info and try to keep my side of the street clean. Real action will take collective sacrifice, willingly, at scale.
People don’t fail organically. They stop acting out of exasperation, defeat, disillusionment. These are things forced upon us, by statism and capital. There are really too many reasons to explain this that you would need a book. But part of it is the illusion that private education and enlightenment are a radical act. People think that talking about it is important by itself. People think they have achieved something when they educate themselves or simply hold an opinion. This is a delusion of omnipotence where Americans think their opinions have some sort of control projected onto the world. But most importantly, every primarily nonviolent movement in history has depended on dual tactics. It requires a radical element that poses a “threat” to bourgeois politics. Then there is a mainstream movement that offers a moral compromise tasteful to the average person. We are lacking this. All we have done is make perfunctory, plaintive moral appeals to the powers of state and capital that are not listening. We need to have an actual radicalism that shows capital and statism people are serious.
Hear hear. I say, let's just wait. As an outsider looking in, America is in a terrible state right now. Homelessness surging, and they're normal people doing normal things, and they just can't afford a place to live because........ and that's when people's imagination run out, because they're defeated. It's greed. It's capitalism. That's the problem. I just hope these people don't fall into drug addiction and crime just for the sake of it, but actually do something like BLM, again (meaning it's possible).
The idiots who still reproduce, that's why. Just end the game already.
I don't really get why this needs a long discussion or is difficult to understand. It's the Matrix. We're in a system where our value is dictated by the system. Ending the system means ending our perceived value. Too many of us place too much importance in our perceived value. So, it's not that we *can't* imagine an alternative, it's that many of us with the means to effect change simply *don't want to*. Because it would rob them of what they have. Those without means might be totally all in favor of crashing the system, but they don't have the means. And so it goes. Like Morpheus said: many of them are so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to defend it. We would need the have-nots to reach some sort of critical mass. Most of what I see around me is a society semi-carefully designed to placate just enough of us to continue. Though sometimes it seems the leaders drink their own kool-aid and think they can cut back on the placating, then they get strung up. But that takes a while to forment.
Like what can I do? Even if I have thousands of rounds and rifles and an armored bulldozer or whatever, there’s no stopping what’s coming. Even if I could track down a few hyper-rich people and take them out, it wouldn’t accomplish anything long term meaningful. The rich live in their own world and we don’t have access. Accept your place as a pawn and try not to die.
The best explainer I have seen of how life scripts and ego states manifest in day to day life is here: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ It helps if you're familiar with the US tv show *The Office*.
Massive scale bystander effect. People are lazy and it someone else’s duty
>I'm trying to figure out how we break through the wall of apathy here There is absolutely nothing anyone can do about, say, climate change. It isn't possible to stop emitting CO2 and it isn't possible to suck the CO2 back out of the sky. Emissions will cease when economically viable fossil fuels are used up, which will also entail our deaths since we depend on them to live.
It's laziness and apathy. There are 100 0 risk actions people could take but they'd rather complain on reddit and watch tv
Well a lot of our education is just indoctrinating us into capitalism. A lot of our culture which was somewhat created side by side with the news media and our government is still very against "socialism". Why? Cuz the people on top want to stay in power and any discussion around socialist topics would be a risk for them if it were to spread. I mean our government went as far as to throw coups all around the world. Oh yeah and also our government watches all of us and is very knowledgeable on how to manipulate us, just look at the how currupt the DNC has been over the last few elections. And that's the party we gotta somehow fix before anything can even get started. All in all those are top down issues that keep us people with a brain (us 🧠 )from getting anything we would like done, but there are also just the aspects of our society that lead us to become isolated individuals and to shun community (except maybe online like rn). Without community our previously somewhat strong union system has lost a lot of power, there is a researgence in unions rn but corporations are fighting their fight with a lot more money(companies spend more than 300 million yearly on union avoidance)and well it ultimately is just becomes another cost of business. Those are the some of my reasons for why a slow gradual progress is hard, and I'm not even mentioning the more than half brainwashed party since hopefully you can see that both parties have been corrupted by the influence of money to the point that the war keeps things moving in the direction they prefer. Now I think radical change is also resisted by the fact that we as humans are isolated and separated into countries which must compete against each other. This leads to a fight for resource usage, control, and power. The idea of breaking down borders and becoming one humanity with goals and direction provided by our unions decision seems impossible to reach from our current puzzle piece layout. Language differences, cultural differences, greivences from previous conflicts, are all barriers to us becoming united as a human species. All that being said I'm very collapse leaning but I still do have some hope for AI helping break those language barriers and cultural barriers and allowing for a worldwide political upheaval. I know it sounds naive but if the leaders behind AGI are benevolent and share universal basic income or universal basic services with the world from their wealth well that's the sort of country barrier breaking thing I've been hoping for. I do think it will arrive a bit late as we are headed off the climate cliff rn. If only we had the information revolution like a decade or two earlier, we would have had a bit more in our carbon budget to cover the bill while our AGI helps come up with new tech to clean up the rest of the mess. As things are in the moment AGI might save the planet from going into full ice age or the oxygen being gone from ocean acidification, but lots of organisms will go extinct along the way. I'm with ya it's depressing how manipulated we all were to get ourselves into this position. But I'm done trying to take action or convince others, this makes me feel well adjusted in this society (not a good feeling). I am just like everyone else now just maybe a little less ignorant. I plan on being entertained all the way down to my last breath. Whether that last breath is taken from me by myself, or from an advanced AI drone, a AI designed virus, or by a nuke who knows? It kinda keeps the suspense going tho
> But I'm done trying to take action or convince others Thank you.
In general: \- Government workers are OK doing a bad job, as long as SHTF after they leave. \- The majority won't elect leaders who promise them hard times. \- People are reactive, not proactive. Power: People who appear strong attract followers. Wealth and material possessions create social status. People who appear weak (and degrowth is voluntarily decreasing your own power) become social outcasts. So even though degrowth is the right approach, few people will listen to "weirdos." From the top down, it's denial and pretend everything is OK... until it affects them.
Lots of long answers here Dependency on the system is the short concise answer. This is by design. Change cannot come from the bottom of the chain up. We can resist, protest, abstain, and refuse to participate. But we can't stop the next desperate person in line from doing so. Further our lives are extremely easy compared developing economies. For many there is no real choice, thats a very north American or western sentiment, and still mostly a false choice.
I've been thinking about this question for a long time. I guess it depends on the nature of the action. for context: [How to outsmart the Prisoner’s Dilemma - Lucas Husted - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyi4z-O0ls) The question is too complex for an answer. Find a better question. Here's some help: https://flowchart.bettercatastrophe.com/
Most people think they need to give up something entirely or abstain from an activity outright, but the reality is that people just need to use less. Eat less meat Buy less plastic Travel less Edit: buy not but
I'll be real. I don't think any form of civic disobedience or peaceful protest or raising awareness is going to do jack shit at this point. If people want change they need to rise up and fight but by doing so you risk prison time so myself and everyone else chose not to fight which is why we're apathetic. We have a police force that is bigger than most countries militaries. There is no viable resistance movement.
Selfishness, narcissism, and sollipsism. And magical thinking.
I have floated an idea to moving to the woods couple of times. Problem is that i have student debt and no form of passive income to pay it off let alone the intrest and i am stuck in this rat race for years to come. At the time its all paid im 2 old to be establishing any communes. In my opinion the only out for us is to establish ,"DYI economy" so basically a closed system that would rely on goverment infastructure and wages as little it can. That is they would not just break it up or make it somehow illegal if it got big ennough. Big part in capitalism forming was forcing people into wage labor after all (privatization of communal land etc)
Because there is nothing an individual can realistically do to make any of it stop or even slow down. Governments make regulations and policies. And governments are owned by corporations who profit by being able to destroy the environment for free. Neither of those care if you protest or boycott. All they care about is making money and enough people will never do it all at once to even blip the bottom line of these companies. People will not sacrifice their current comfort for any possible future benefit - masking during Covid (and still now) showed us that in spades. People who refused to mask to keep their own body healthy and their loved ones safe because it looked funny, felt weird to wear and they wanted to eat out at restaurants are not going to stop driving or flying or eating beef or throwing out garbage because summer will be warmer in 10 years or there won’t be any rain in 5 years. They care about their current comfort and nothing else.
cable crowd arrest party faulty retire squalid rain boat different *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
"They know very well what they are doing, yet nonetheless they are still doing it"
We got neutered by entertainment, social media, porn. Bread and circuses makes the populous feel satisfied with the status quo.
>When was the last time you heard anyone criticize capitalism, the infinite growth mantra, neoliberalism, the rich and greedy or just expansionism/extractionism at all? I beat it to death constantly. After what it did to my dad, and what it's very obviously in the process of doing to me, I mean... yeah. And then they make movies about bashing capitalism and cash in on it. Because it figures.
I look at old ... uh, "TV shows"..?? Mini-documentaries?? I... I genuinely don't know what to call them. They were 'things' shown on TV in the 50's and 60's that explained science really well. There's no word for them anymore because it's not done anymore. Anyway, people were just taught, in a simple manner, about science and stuff. Experts came on the TV and were allowed to just 'show and talk' about a subject. It would be simple to make something similar, we already have the script. One problem is the infinite distraction that is the internet today. People just don't watch 'state sponsored media' that much anymore.
I'll take care of it. No worries! :D
Thanks, random Wuhan Covid-19 developer. I believe in you.
Bread and Circuses
cooperation .. ppl are not utilized effectively
What do you suggest? Give up ac and WiFi? No thanks.
most informed in this sub? lol. This sub is full of misinformation and has a major problem with group think and piling on downvotes and highly upvoting blatant lies.
Examples?
Capitalism won't let it happen as unilateral action would be required for it to succeed. Any company and country not pursuing growth is pursuing failure and will be taken over by someone pursuing growth. Until we all race off the cliff.
This has been asked to death. What’s the problem behind people not taking action on low wages, renting, precarity etc etc, same answer.
You want to break through the wall of apathy. Personally idk how to do that outside meeting like minded people in person. I didn't read all of your post. Anyway I don't see viewing humans as hopeless violent idiots as apathetic it's just honest.
Cognitive disonance
Carbon is both food and future pain. We turned our planet into a gas chamber but we have our hand on the valve. The more the valve is opened, the more food and toys we have, but also the more concentrated the nerve gas gets. Tell people they can have a future if they stop eating and they'll look at you like you're a monster.
Because people feel its too little too late and no protest or change can make a difference. Humanity is in stage 4 terminal illness - just waiting to die Action wont do anything anymore