Thanks for the mention Dave. As I said in our conversation though, I actually did read one of the books you wrote. As I said, I found it interesting but believe that ultimately it wouldn't work for several reasons, one of which I mentioned.
It took me a little over 2 hours to read and I think I spent about a week mulling it over and thinking it through off and on.
You were one of the first writers to hit my feed when I first joined Medium. I think you made my feed because I had stumbled across Argumentative Penguin in the comments of another article and went and read their work. You read and comment a fair amount with them, so voila.
As I said, it was some intriguing ideas but it would have to be worldwide in regards to climate change and that's not going to be possible in the time left. The upheaval to implement would be disruptive and cause a lot of problems.
I'm disappointed here that you're also still banging on about how Jessica Wildfire and Umair Haque offer no solutions.
NOT TRUE.
You and others not liking their solutions or not wanting to hear their solutions is not the same as saying they offer no solutions. They do. Constantly.
Jessica's last article's solution: do what you can in your own lives to reduce plastic use and recycle. The "hair on fire" part of the article was about the fossil fuel industry's recent investment in expanding the plastic industry and that there would be more propaganda promoting plastic use. The implicit solution there is one she enacted as an individual: show/educate as many people as you can that they are being or are about to be propagandized in a specific way. An informed mind is a wary and hard to manipulate mind. Solution enacted. It's one thing she could do.
One of Umair's recent solutions: don't complain about democracy when you're not doing democracy right. Go vote. Do it right for once and give democracy a fighting chance to thrive and work for you in turn.
You and people like you fail to see these things as solutions because they are a small drop of water. A drop in the bucket, so to speak. You will only ever recognize huge systemic things that are problematic and never fully or clearly thought out because they're dramatic. A drop in the bucket is not dramatic. Also, the drop in the bucket approach requires you to rely on your fellow man to also be a drop in the bucket. To care enough about you, the planet, and the greatest widespread well being possible to do the tiny tiny task of being another drop in the bucket. And you can't get there, mentally and emotionally. That's how little you think of your fellow man. Don't worry, I'm not pointing fingers. Me too. Totally. Me too.
The difference is, I also know that their way is the only way forward. Anything less than that mental shift in awareness across the breadth of humanity, the collective conscious, is not going to be good enough and we fail. Anything more without that mental shift there in the scaffolding FIRST and we also fail. Everything collapses. We may even go extinct.
It kills me that there's this willing mob so eager to try to silence them. It's really prods at me in the place where nihilism lives in my brain (I'm not inherently nihilist, we all have dark corners of our own minds that we keep under control-- I'm saying that all this "doomer" bullshit pokes at an aspect of myself that is normally in torpor and under control). I laugh at the "doomer" label. You have to, it's so ironically funny. People are ridiculous. I WISH I had the level of hope and faith in humanity that Jessica and Umair do.
But I don't. I don't believe in humanity any more than people like you and the other critics of Jessica and Umair. Not really. That makes us the real "doomers".
