Alex Steffens anti-TT article and its reverberations

This is turning into a pattern, of picking apart Transition.

I think the reason I have trouble fitting into Transition is I am a pessimist by nature, so any attempt to step up to the plate and lead people is going to come from a vantage point of doom and gloom, whereas Transition tries to take lemons and turn them into lemonade. But to do that, there needs to be some agreement that the lemons in fact exist, which I don't see in my town.

Assuming there is agreement, though, the image I always think of is Robin Williams in Jacob the Liar.



The concept is yes, the future will suck compared to what came before, but rather than focusing on what's lost, and getting trapped in a tunnel of despair, to try to emphasize the positive, which I guess is the bonding that tends to happen during a crisis, or getting off the sofa like the blobs in Wall-E. But let's face it, they got off the sofa to clean up a hell of a mess.



So I can totally understand how people would not be able to process the dichotomy between a pessimistic future scenario in which all attempts to technofix our way back to happy days again are doomed to fail, but we're supposed to ride down energy descent as if it's Splash Mountain in Disneyland.



This is what leads to terms like sacred demise. It becomes in essence an eschatology, infused with religiosity. In order to deal with grief, we need to impose meaning. Why must we suffer? To bring balance to Gaia. So this is kind of the Peter Schiff approach towards ecology whereas technofix would be the bailout approach.

Which future scenario we track through and at which pace it occurs, time will tell. Until then, the battle will rage on between the various factions. The cornies, the technofixers, the earth stewards, and the lone survivalists.

Each faction will feel justified in pointing fingers at the other.

Oh, those silly TTers, that they thought they could ward off zombies and warlords by holding hands and planting nut trees in public places.

Oh, those silly survivalists, who only think of themselves, misanthropes all of them.

Oh, those silly technofixers who won't let go of BAU, who think innovation is a form of energy.

Oh, those silly cornies who think we can drill-baby-drill our way into infinite paradise.

And so it goes.

I find myself somewhere inbetween the survivalist camp and the TT camp. I'm not survivalist enough to write off the rest of humanity, and I'm not optimistic enough about what TT can accomplish given what evil lurks in the hearts of men, especially desperate men. So it's hard for me to step up, start shaking hands, smiling, and spreading the gospel of Transition as the answer to our troubles. I just don't know of anything better so by default I must endorse it.