[eltoxo]

The truth is that we are very limited apes that are highly prone to self delusion and believing nonsense, trying to understand an impossibly complex world.

At the aggregate we seem to be making progress while at the individual level humanity always seems doomed. It seems a constant that the individual wants to pretend they live in the end times because at least then your time on this rock was a little bit special.

[silverquiet]

I’m more of what might be called “The Last Man” (as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not really enough of a Nietzsche reader to really throw out his terms but sometimes they do seem apropos). I’ve never wanted to be special; quite the opposite, I just want to be left alone to my TV, video games, and garden. Safety and comfort are what little condolence I take against the nihilism of existence. And it has become quite clear to me that climate change threatens that. What is strange to me is how many people believe that perturbing the Earth’s carbon cycle could not possibly have dire consequences for the Earth when not only has it happened before in the Earth’s history, we have models showing how bad it could possibly be and are already seeing the effects unfold. My suspicion is that I lack a lot of the denial mechanisms that get most people through the day and that they also prevent people from thinking that things can actually go wrong. Take it from someone who has seen quite a lot go wrong - they can.