Schönen Tach noch
NBK aka NaturalBornKieler
"The sad fact is we don't want to go where history wants to take us: to a smaller human imprint on the planet, with all that implies. This is true especially of the intellectual avant-garde, who can't imagine a world without the joys of perpetual techno-narcissistic novelty, of levitating skyscraper cities with hanging gardens and flying cars, full of girls with green nail-polish in get-ups so fantastic mere mortals could never have dreamed them up, flaunting hand-held gadgets so miraculous that life itself seems besides the point. Oh, shimmering future! Oh Ray Kurzweil and your nano-ladder to the worm-holes of forever"
http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/06/a-distant-sound-of-churning-1.html
The task we face is reorganizing the systems we depend on for daily life in a way that is consistent with the realities coming down at us. We have to grow our food differently because industrial farming will soon end. That means growing more food locally on smaller farms with more human attention. We have to do commerce differently because the WalMart system of big box chain retail will soon die. This means rebuilding local main street economies (networks of local economic interdependency). We have to make some things for ourselves because the conveyer belt from China is doomed (this process is known as import replacement). We have to do transportation differently, because mass motoring and even commercial aviation will soon be over. We have to inhabit the landscape differently because both suburbia and the metroplex mega-city will be obsolete, so we will have to return to a more traditional disposition of things in smaller urbanisms associated with productive agricultural h!
interlands. Now, it’s arguable how much you can legislate or even autocratically direct these changes. But you can prepare for them, both psychologically and practically. And we are doing nothing. For instance, we’re still promoting stupid wasteful behavior in agribusiness—everything from ethanol production for cars to genetically modified crops. In commerce just about everything we do politically is in the service of WalMart and the systems tied to it. In transportation, we could, for instance, have compelled General Motors to produce railroad rolling stock as a condition of their bail-out, but we didn’t do that. Instead, we’re chasing the phantom of electric cars—and, believe me, we are going to be mortally disappointed how that works out. Most likely the changes that I’m outlining will happen emergently, with a great deal of “noise,” conflict, and suffering. In the meantime, government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campai!
gn to sustain the unsustainable. We’re determined to run Wal!
Mart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We’ll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process.
To put a finer point on it, industrialism (and all its digital offshoots) may not be a permanent feature of the human condition, but an anomalous congruence of some historical events that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.
I happen to think we're at the end of this anomalous era because we've run through the material resource base. I know a lot of people eagerly await the nano-dawn of self-replicating bot Satori, where everything we need is literally conjured out of thin air. The Viziers would really love that because, at last, their models would work! Personally, I do not hold my breath waiting for Kurzweilian "Singularity." We'll be disappointed enough when Walmart fails to run on wind turbines. We're out of cheap oil, cheap and good ores, ocean fish, good timber, and lots of other things. All the stuff we erected to live our lives in - the stupendous armature of highways, strip malls, suburban houses, skyscraper condos, sewer systems, electric grids - is beyond our power to repair now. We can only patch it, and that can only work for so long before things go dark. (Can you sharpen a saw blade?)
und
Ja was nuetzt dieser "Optimismus"? Optimistisch ins Ende der Menschheit rasen sowie die Lemminge ueber die Klippe? Besonders pessimistisch sehe ich die vielen "Optimisten", die glauben, dass es ohne gravierende gesellschaftliche Aenderungenen und mit ein paar technologischen Erfindungen endlos weiter gehen kann. Wer wirklich so denkt, hat ein gravierendes intelektuelles Defizit, welches er durch seinen blinden Optimismus nicht mal mehr wahrnimmt. Der Pessimist erkennt hingegen Probleme und fordert eine nachhaltige Loesung, keine selbstbetruegerische Umgehung. Er tut es, weil er den groesseren Ueberlebenswillen hat und sich und seiner Nachwelt langfristige Perspektiven schaffen will. Das macht ihn letztendlich zum besseren Optimisten.
oder
Der Optimist sagt:
Dieses ist die Beste aller Welten.Der Pessimist befürchtet, dass das stimmt.
und
Der Pessimist sagt: "schlimmer kann es nicht werden."
Der Optimist sagt: "doch, doch."
und dann noch
die Techniker unter uns - und das ging mir vor wenigen Jahren ganz genau so - interessieren sich nicht für die absolut unsichtbaren Zwänge unseres Wirtschaftssystems. Diese werden selbst von den meisten Wirtschaftsfachleuten nicht gesehen, geschweige denn verstanden. Und die sogenannten Experten verstehen gleich gar nichts.
Ich finde es immer wieder niedlich, wenn die Leute von "Schrumpfen oder Verzichten zu Gunsten von Nachhaltigkeit" faseln und dabei geflissentlich übersehen, dass der Staat nun mal seine ständig steigenden Tributzahlungen braucht.
Diese Zwangsabgaben fallen dann irgendwie vom Himmel oder werden von den Robotern gezahlt.
Optimist ist der, der sich vornimmt, diese Krise zu überleben und sich entsprechend vorbereitet. Wer so tut, als würde nichts kommen, den kann ich nur als träumenden Idealisten bezeichnen.
Grüße Morpheus
Oscar Wilde: "The basis of optimism is sheer terror"
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