Stupid, Crazy, Greedy, Evil, and Innocent?!

by the virgin terry

i think doomers generally have a compulsion to try to understand certain things which simply can’t be understood. a good example asks why are sheeple in general so irrational and badly misinformed/misopinionated re. crucial scientific matters like agw (i prefer the old nomenclature, global warming, to newer terms like climate chaos), peak resources, pop. overshoot, the unsustainability of exponential growth, etc. etc.. are they stupid? are they crazy? can they simply not face unpleasant surrealities (denial being a form of insanity, i would argue)? these 3 positions, which i’d cut to just 2, the stupid-crazy options, pretty much sum up the conjecture here, essentially. i think there’s no way of surreally distinguishing between the 2. i mean, stupid sheeple do crazy things, and crazy sheeple do stupid things. in the end, i don’t think it matters which derogatory label is applied, the result ends up the same: a hopelessly, tragically fucked up world.

a lot of doomers seem to like to lay blame on some minority who they call greedy, sociopathic, etc. they think if it wasn’t for these greedy assholes, we might have a chance. i disagree, offering this thought experiment:

imagine being part of a group whose numbers exceed the necessary resources to maintain those numbers. obviously some are going to have to die so that others may live. imagine that this imbalance is severe enough so that a large majority, say 90%, must die just so that the remaining 10% can eke out a bare bones survival with absolutely no ‘luxuries’, no physical comforts or sense of security. do any of u think that at least 90% of a group, which by necessity would have to include many that are quite young and healthy, are going to voluntarily sacrifice themselves? no, a large majority are going to compete, do whatever it takes, to survive. in fact, it’s a very safe bet that they’ll want to have more than bare bones, insecure, comfortless survival. they’re going to want comforts, securities. in other words, they’re going to want more than what others might consider a ‘fair share’.

i’m a ‘privileged’ (materially/ecomically) amerikan. by global standards, i’m very wealthy. i think it’s a safe bet a large majority of nbl readers are in the same boat. we may be relatively poor by our social/cultural standards, but fabulously wealthy compared to the billions of sheeple trying to survive on less than $2/day. one could easily argue that all of us are greedy, part of the problem of immense inequality. we could all give away all of our possessions and income until we meet the standard of the average wealth/income of a global sherson, which i think was fairly recently calculated to be about $8/day (income, i don’t know about ‘net worth’, but i’m pretty sure that would be very ‘modest’, also). we could, but few if any of us do, or plan on ever doing so. this is because we all love our pet comforts and the security that possessing a little ‘nest egg’ provides, don’t we? any exceptions to this i expect are rare, indeed.

do all these flaws make us, individually and/or collectively ‘evil’. evil, like good, ugly, and beautiful, is in the eye of the beholder. i see it in me, u, the mailman, the milkmaid, the saint and the sinner. i see a little or a lot of evil in everyone.

lastly, i like to argue that all sheeple, even the greediest, sickest, and most diabolically ‘evil’ ones are innocent. i say this because i don’t believe in free will or laying blame on anyone. i think we’re all flawed, some arguably more so than others, but the crucial point being that none of us can help being flawed, no one chose to be flawed. sheeple don’t choose to be stupid, they’re either born that way or trained to be so. ditto for insanity, and of course, ditto for greed. everyone struggles to be ‘good’ in their own eyes, which generally entails surviving and thriving while helping some usually small minority of others they know and love to do likewise. it’s the nature of our world, of biological life, that not everyone can survive, or thrive, or be ‘good’. so if any ‘one’ or thing is to be blamed, it is mother nature, or perhaps some hypothetical ‘god’ that created mother nature and it’s wayward child, human nature.