A woman once left a book of prophecies in my house. Every prediction in them - and they ran back before the birth of Jesus - was wrong.
There is something in people that always believes catastrophe is around the corner. Why, I don't know, but it's why newspapers have so much bad news. Good news doesn't sell.
There is a saying among the media: "If it bleeds it leads." It's why we've got movies such as Terminator and Alien and why authors such as Stephen King are so popular.
And who has not heard of the Book of Revelation and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?
There is a man named Paul Erlich, who back in the '70 said, "The battle is feed humanity is over!" He predicted hundreds of millions starving to death.
He was wrong. He was and is a false prophet. He's never been right. Not once. He's still famous. Still some tell me, "You just wait!" (the way people tell me,"You just wait for the Rapture!). I'm not losing any sleep over it.
Carl Sagan, another fraud (and a pothead), once "mathematically" figured the results of "nuclear winter." Wrong again. He was so bad at what he did he was denied tenure at Princeton. Yet everyone knows who he was.
I consistently get people telling me, "We can't do this because of this." But they're always wrong.
There is no such thing as an "expert" (reminds me of a joke I heard years ago: "ex" means "has-been" and "spurt"means "drip under pressure. So an "expert" is a "has-been drip under pressure").
Recently there has been hysteria about "global warming." Twenty years ago it was "global cooling," and if you look at headlines starting from the early 1900s, every 20 years it was cooling, warming, cooling. And some people always fall for it.
People aren't that rational, and the masses of people, never. Our perception goes through the emotional brain first. That's how propaganda works. Convince people they're rational when you're targeting the emotional brain, and people will fall for it every time.
We have problems, yes. We always have and always will. But we're not looking at a Mad Max scenario where society collapses. A slow government collapse, yes, but every government in history has collapsed (that is an accurate prophecy, based on thousands of years of history).
If people believed the nay-sayers, we'd never advance at all, in any way.
8 comments:
The only disaster scenario that ever seemed credible to me was the debt collapse of the U.S. government, which I expected around 2030 or so. However, I don't even believe in this one, at least for now.
The fracking energy revolution, combined with the automation-driven manufacturing renaissance and the fission/fusion energy revolution starting in the next decade will kick that can down the road another 20-30 years. When the debt apocalypse finally does occur, around 2050 or so, we will have 3-D printing, radical life extension, and perhaps some form of molecular nanotechnology that will help us to keep everything going through the transition.
Besides, we know from the experience of Weimar Germany what a debt/hyperinflation collapse looks like. A lot of people suffer. But the lights stay on and industrial/technological civilization continues unabated.
BTW, by far the best conservative blogger on the net about such things is "AlFin" and his "dangerous childhood" ideas.
https://alfinnextlevel.wordpress.com/
How can there be experts when not a single person on Earth can make a pencil.
And even if you can work up a plausible scenario...to yourself, I keep in mind the words of Bruce Schneier that anyone can build an encryption system they can't break. Generalized, anyone can come up with a disaster they can see a way out of. But neither means that someone else won't see a trivial solution.
"The fracking energy revolution, combined with the automation-driven manufacturing renaissance and the fission/fusion energy revolution starting in the next decade will kick that can down the road another 20-30 years. When the debt apocalypse finally does occur, around 2050 or so, we will have 3-D printing, radical life extension, and perhaps some form of molecular nanotechnology that will help us to keep everything going through the transition."
Even in the so-called Dark Ages there were a lot of inventions. And these days, science and technology is exploding. We're not going to have another Dark Ages and we're sure not heading toward Mad Max either.
You may have read/studied Sagan and Ehrlich carefully, but I know you did not study the Bible carefully, as it shows in your commentary. It takes many years to grow understanding of that Book.
Scriptural prophecy has a one hundred percent accuracy rate. So far. Mixing it in with the 'prophecies' of Sagan or Ehrlich or any of the other pseudo-prognosticators is like saying that Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Steinem, and Uncle Bob are all in the same basket because they're 'gender commentators'. Then leaving any distinctions unacknowledged.
Prompting the question: why toss something truthful, and even holy, into a pile containing the populist dreck of modern salesmen like Ehrlich? Why this need to degrade the Bible? Could it be because the holy Scriptures of Christ and his (real) prophets detract from Uncle Bob pontificating on what'll happen in the world? Or maybe, like the conspiracy-theory-debunkers, you're just too lazy to do the due diligence of studying and grokking the Bible, and then measuring it against the world to see if, in fact, it is either truth, or false prophecy?
I think your right , everything is Awesome!
I used to pay attention to some of the supermarket tabloids when I was a kid, about how the world was going to end, bat-people, and the like. The I realized all their stories repeated on a 3 month loop, and I saw them for what they really are: cheap entertainment. Carl Sagan is entertainment. "Hey, look at how the world will end THIS week!"
You don't understand. I know what I am talking about. The sky is falling. I should know it hit me on the head.
Simple, all-purpose prediction: Things will get worse for a while, and then they'll get better again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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