Incorrigible Doomseekers Profit from Your Fears

In the late 1990s author James Howard Kunstler argued that Y2K would bring civilization to its knees. That didn’t happen, but that didn’t lead Kunstler to rethink his views on the end, just the means....Stanford biology professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne, who in their 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted massive global starvation due to overpopulation in the 1970s and ’80s. Was there starvation in those decades? Yes [There always is _ed.]. Was it massive and global? No. Were the Ehrlichs chastened? Not so much. While they concede their scariest doomsday scenarios were “way off,” on the larger question of looming disaster they say they were “too optimistic.” _Cecil Adams @ CityPaper

Incorrigible doomers glom onto doom-causes du jour such as carbon hysteria, Y2K, overpopulation, peak oil, etc. The cause is not important, it is the hovering doom that counts.

A couple decades ago climatology consultant Iben Browning predicted a huge earthquake centered on New Madrid, Mo., a well-known earthquake zone where seismologists have long predicted a future cataclysm. However, they’ve never given an exact date, because to do so is beyond the grasp of current science. Public reaction to these open-ended prognostications: yawn. Browning’s innovation was to assert flat out that the earthquake would happen on Dec. 3, 1990, backing up his claim with a convincing pseudoscientific spiel. Result: a media frenzy, but no quake.

...How do doomsayers cope when their predictions go south? There’s a common thread regardless of how delusional they are. In When Prophecy Fails, a landmark 1956 study of cultists awaiting a world-ending flood, psychologist Leon Festinger proposed his theory of cognitive dissonance, which describes how people rationalize their continued adherence to disproven claims.

The shrewder doomsayers do this too, but their rationalizing is often something like: all in the service of the greater good. You can’t blame them, really. They’re just making practical use of the paradox known to every politician who ever walked the earth: people will listen when you lie to them, and ignore you when you tell the truth. _Cecil Adams

The hucksters of doom have learned how to profit from your fears and your gullibility. They always have a book, a seminar, a newsletter, or other means by which to transfer your wealth into their pockets.

But don't be too complacent. When your government is run by fools who disregard the well-known hazards of excessive debt and demographic decline, hard times are waiting right around the corner.

The pseudo-intellectual fools who currently run governments, academia, the media -- the parasitic classes -- have over the decades bred and trained a large following of drones unable to think or act for themselves. When the true catastrophes eventually come around, there will be fewer competent persons to deal with them than there should have been. Thanks to trumped up worries over fantasies, combined with the studious obfuscation of potential problems that have been steadily building in seriousness within populations of the advanced world, there is a real danger.

But you will have to face it alone, or with small groups of like-minded persons who took the trouble to prepare. Most important of all, you will need to learn to conceal your preparations from the parasitic classes while at the same time recruiting as many persons from among your friends and family as you can.

The pseudo-panics caused by grifting doomseekers are just part of the rampant parasitism that thrives under corrupt governments and decayed cultures. We must take them in stride along with the rest, while stocking up appropriately for what may truly come.

Would the World End if We Became More Optimistic?

We are living in an apocalyptic age. We have been living in the apocalyptic age for many decades -- even centuries and more. Humans are strangely attracted to the apocalyptic mindset. Perhaps the doomer mentality is an intentional but subconscious talisman, meant to protect against genuine doom. But what would happen if the media, academia, politicians, big environmental lobbies, NGOs, and the rest of the doom industry were to take a break every now and then? At least on topics such as carbon hysteria, peak oil doom, overpopulation apocalypse, and the other faux dooms that line so many pocketbooks?

Indur M. Goklany has taken a look at the state of the world, and has come to the conclusion that, overall, things are improving.

**Key points from the book** * The rates at which hunger and malnutrition have been decreasing in India since 1950 and in China since 1961 are striking. By 2002 China’s food supply had gone up 80%, and India’s increased by 50%.

Overall, these types of increases in the food supply have reduced chronic undernourishment in developing countries from 37 to 17%, despite an overall 83% growth in their populations. * Economic freedom has increased in 102 of the 113 countries for which data is available for both 1990 and 2000. * Disability in the older population of such developed countries as the U.S., Canada, France, are in decline. In the U.S. for example, the disability rate dropped 1.3 % each year between 1982 and 1994 for persons aged 65 and over. * Between 1970 and the early 2000s, the global illiteracy rated dropped from 46 to 18 percent. * Much of the improvements in the United States for the air and water quality indicators preceded the enactment of stringent national environmental laws as the Clean Air Act of 1970, Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. * Between 1897-1902 and 1992-1994, the U.S. retail prices of flour, bacon and potatoes relative to per capita income, dropped by 92, 85, and 82 percent respectively. And, the real global price of food commodities has declined 75% since 1950. _WUWT

Matt Ridley's recent book, The Rational Optimist, dares to contradict most of the modern "dooms du jour" of modern media, academia, faux environmentalism, and popular culture.

Julian Simon was the ultimate optimist, and his most famous book -- Ultimate Resource II -- is available to read free online.

Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, was far too optimistic for the taste of faux environmentalists and the corrupt scientific : faux environmental industrial complex. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the popular and mythical dooms favoured by the media, academia, and politicians, Lomborg calmly and rationally looked at the real problems of the environment -- and finds them soluble.

Stewart Brand is the grand old man of 60s environmentalism, whose basic wisdom and honesty have led him to reject the doomerism of the faux environmentalists and the modern media. Brand has not escaped the dogmas of faux environmentalism entirely -- he lives in the San Francisco bay area -- but he promotes nuclear energy and other scientific and technological solutions to the problems that do exist.

Full disclosure: Genuine dooms exist. The Earth has suffered through several extinction episodes where life was nearly wiped out -- and perhaps events where life actually was wiped out and had to re-start from scratch.

But we need to focus on the real problems which need solutions, and do it in a systematic and dispassionate manner.

Doomers, with their constant full-volume blare of apocalypse, do not deserve to monopolize our time.