Recent experience tells me that writing DOTE has been a largely pointless exercise, a truly sad fact which actually follows from my own views on how humans work. That's depressing to me, but there it is.
For the record, this blog, especially since early 2012, two full years ago, has taken Human Nature as its subject. This is not a Doomer blog. How many times do I have to say that? Apparently, there are those to whom I could say it a million times, and explain it a million times, and never would that message be received.
In so far as a "good-enough" perspective on Human Nature yields certain unfortunate results about the longer-term future of humanity, I write about those things. And they are coming true, gradually on the human time scale, but in less than the-blink-of-an-eye on the geological time scale.
Thus I am not engaged in baseless Doomer Prophecy, as I said in The Argument From Ignorance. I am not some version of Nostradamus, although I see that quite a few of my readers are mindless adherents of his modern-day equivalents, who shall remain nameless here. But I know who they are, and so do my more perceptive readers. Those people live in Flatland; there is nothing special about them as human beings, although they think otherwise, which itself is not surprising.
That said, the difference between trying to get closer to the truth about ourselves and clinging to typical human delusions is the pivot on which the world turns. That is impossible to explain to Flatlanders who don't have the psychological wherewithal to see the difference, but let me try for the 253rd time.
If humans could understand themselves sufficiently to get a clearer perspective on the destructive things they do, and if they could use that improved understanding to consciously change their own behavior, they might have a chance of getting to the 23rd century with some semblance of their global civilization still intact.
Regardless of the probability that such an understanding will miraculously spring forth, and thus Homo sapiens will be reborn, it is always true that those trying to achieve such an understanding reside on the side of the angels, while those who remain mired in ignorance and delusion are merely bit players in the ongoing Human Tragedy.
So it doesn't matter when some of the more tragic consequences of Human Nature play out. It may matter to you personally, but in the greater scheme of things, that's of no significance. That's beside the point. Predictions about timing are merely Doomer Prophecy. Nobody has a crystal ball. And blind optimists are even worse.
Regarding the timing and consequences of future events, science exists. Truths can be approximated, trends identified. We don't need any more false prophets. Optimists or pessimists, we've got too many of those as it is. That's just more human blindness, more of the same ignorance and delusion which got us into this 21st century mess in the first place.
The greater undertaking attempts to answer Gauguin's Questions.
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Maybe you won't like the answers, but there won't be any authentic answers unless you look for them.
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