Submitted by zoom_zip in collapse

there is an image in pop culture, usually hollywood films, but also comics, of this crazy guy standing on the street with a big sign that says the end is nigh.

it’s usually played as like, hey, look at this crazy dude preaching the end of the world, just like those crazy doomsaying mayan astrologers, or martin luther, or charlie manson, or marshall applewhite and his heaven’s gate adherents. because the world never ends. people have been predicting the end of civilisation since the day it started. they’re all crazy!

except slowly people are coming around to seeing the end of the rail tracks. we’re in that scene where the train is hurtling towards the bridge but the bridge hasn’t been built yet. and the dudes in control of the brakes are still selling tickets for the ride.

so more and more of these people holding the end is nigh signs are popping up, and more and more they’re starting to look not crazy. like the x/y axis of crazy to distance from the end actually has a correlation, and we’re getting closer and closer so the sign wavers are starting to look like they’re making sense, and the crazy ones are the people who aren’t holding signs. the script has flipped so to speak.

the problem now is not that nobody is paying attention to the dudes with the signs. it’s that they know the signs are true but they are paralysed or powerless to do anything about it. the people with power to impact change are building noah’s arks for themselves to blast off into space and abandon the flooded world, while continuing to siphon as much from the planet as they can, and everyone else is in a stasis bubble of not knowing how or what to do to hit the brakes on the whole thing, or if it’s even too late and that hitting the brakes wouldn’t still send us screeching off the edge.

so here’s the question. how resigned are you to the collapse? do you accept it? have you given up? do you feel powerless to enact change? are you paralysed? are you still fighting? do you still have hope? where are you on the scale of acceptance of the ongoing collapse? i don’t mean acceptance in the context of accepting the reality of it, but more the embracing of it as a certainty versus feeling that it could still be stopped and that your actions can impact that.

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ziq wrote (edited )

I'm a green nihilist so the futility of it all doesn't faze me. Yes, we're deeply entrenched in a collapsing world, yes we have no ability to change the trajectory of human society, and no that's not a reason to stop doing anarchy. Carving out little pockets of resistance and all that.

We can't save the future but we still have to live in this world today.

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rot wrote

it's not a hollywood doomsday. its more the decline of rome or the mayans. life will have to change to accommodate the changing climate. economies will fail, people will die and so on. Just go with it and try to minimize your environmental damage.

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ruin wrote

...feeling that it could still be stopped and that your actions can impact that.

To frame this position as anything but absurdly arrogant is beyond me. That humans can look at the world around us and still hold such self aggrandizing beliefs...

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CivilizationsEnd wrote

I have been studying this for over a decade, and my current feelings are that there are many possible futures, of varying likelihoods. The ones in which western civ does not collapse and be replaced are not very likely. But what does that mean?

It appears that the financial system has avoided another global financial crisis via unlimited money printing by sacrificing the integrity of the usd. This will lead to the end of the Bretton Woods/Petrodollar system, which is why you are starting to see geopolitics and conflict heat up again; the global order is falling apart.

We are years away from a serious energy crisis that will dwarf the 1973 oil embargo, and it will be permanent. I can go into this in more detail but it is based in physics and is completely unavoidable.

We are a decade away from widespread permanent water shortages that will cause mass migration out of areas without water.

And of course, climate change will cause massive, overlapping famines.

Any one of these might be survivable for a civilization. All of them at once won’t be.

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wanderingghost wrote

I'm interested in hearing more about the energy crisis if you have a minute to elaborate.

And yeah. I pretty generally agree. I think things will stay stable-ish until the 2040s. Then all hell will break loose as the systems that were staying together by a thread completely unravel. We're not there yet, but we're close, and getting closer each day.

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Tequilx_Wolf wrote

Collapse has been globalised for a long time already, and I am against authority every day because I prefer to be.

That pretty much answers all of your questions.

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86944 wrote

It's going to happen, no use denying it.

Only thing to do it plan for it.

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Exlurker wrote (edited )

I'm proudly going mad.

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