Reading about existentialism, I’m once again made highly conscious of the absurdity of most theories and philosophies about life, what it means, and how to live it. I’m glad there are philosophers to question these things, although that emotion—gladness—is probably unrelated to philosophy or even thought.

Being pleased that there are people treating something important that I also think might be important is just the recognition of other people being like what I think people should be like: me. It’s disingenuous. It hinges on a doubt: as if there was a possibility that there aren’t people like me in the world, that there is a chance that I am unique and alone. A stupid fear that, like the essence of paranoia, is a disguise for the fact that I want to be unique.

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I wish I had the time to write an article which lived up to the promise of that title. But all I have is a moment and a few ideas.

If there is one thing you can say about normal people—perhaps because it’s the one thing that most defines normality—it’s that they seem to intuitively understand the value of civil interaction. Normal people are polite. Normal people refrain from offending others unnecessarily. Normal people speak in moderate tones using ordinary language. Normal people try to be friendly. Normal people are a dying breed.

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One. Down here on planet Earth, we are running out. Space. Energy. Food. Materials. Money. Patience. Purpose. Creativity. Challenges. You name it, the supply is dwindling.

One planet is too little room.

I hate listening to people who think space exploration is a waste of time and money. The people who think that investing in space vehicles, exploration and colonization is a waste are smoking crack. It’s all there is! It’s not the wrong choice–it’s the only choice. If I could fool myself, like these activist idiots, that human nature could ever be satisfied with what it had, I’d be happy to put all my energy into seeing to the needs of of people here and now, into creative solutions, into doing more with less. You name it. Because, ironically, I can be satisfied. I’m a socialist and a minimalist anti-materialist. Things–objects, possessions–annoy me. I like ideas. Knowledge. But only good ideas. Only true knowledge. No fairy tale delusions posing as good ideas. No wishes posing as truth.

Societies, like all things organic, do either of two things: grow or die. There is nowhere else to grow down here. Earth is full. Past full. Overloaded. If we keep on this course–wasting what little is left on toys and lawn furniture, watching TV, trusting the market to solve our problems–we are screwed five ways from Sunday.

I don’t think it’s going to come to that. We will figure it out. By which I mean, someone in charge will figure it out and make it happen. The question is only how long we sit around with our thumbs up our collective asses worrying about interest rates and unemployment statistics, research polls and retirement plans.

There is no future here. Not worth having. We have no frontiers. We have no challenges. Social justice is not on the agenda. People are greedy and selfish. The only way to get them to stop stealing from each other is to point out to them a bigger, shinier thing that they can covet.

If we don’t get in gear, pretty soon people will have to resort to eating each other. Figuratively, of course.

Two. What else is there?

Exactly what do you have to hope for in your life? And who are you? Maybe you’re satisfied with a few short steps up the ladder. Or maybe you like it just where you are. There are six and a half billion people on this planet. Do you think that they’re satisfied with where they are? I mean, people have needs, and much more than just material. More than social, too. They need to feel purpose, and for some, that means more than just making a living. They might not know it. Although, from what I hear, they do know it. People are listless. Depressed. Detached. And these are people in the “developed” world. The “rich” countries.

Some people will tell you that these people need God. Lies. They need God like they need mercury poisoning. Like they need a dose of methadone. Like they need a pat on the back and a hole in the head.

People need a challenge! They need a purpose. A direction. A reason. A goal. If they can’t find a challenge in their environment, they will, mostly, look for it in competing with other people. They’ll gamble. In casinos or on the stock market. Or they’ll find pointless games to play and meaningless risks to take. They will, in short, waste their lives for lack of a sense of where their horizons are. Because, since the Earth is a sphere, and has few secrets left, every horizon leads right back to where you started.

The only other direction to go now is…

UP.

Why can’t you idiots admit it? By which I mean, you smart people.

This is the responsibility of the smart. Smart people have given the rest of humanity fire, the wheel, moveable type, air conditioning, electric toothbrushes and the Internet. Probably a tenth of one percent of human beings are responsible for the ideas, the science and the technology that drives the world forward. The rest just get their paycheque, spend it on stuff, and eat it up. I’m just talking in terms of the economics, here. Their appetite just keeps growing. Every day they want more, but every day, we get closer to running out.

And when it finally dawns of Joe Average, when he gets laid off from his job bolting tires on Priuses or digging turnips out of some exhausted field, he’s going to look at all the stupid crap we wasted our time on, and he’s going to blame the smart idiots who invented all of it and ignored everything important. What does Joe Average know? He knows what’s in front of him. He’s got his everyday wisdom. It’s not his place to figure it all out. It’s the smart people who are letting us down. Who only know just enough to make their Googles and their Enrons and their Mortgage Trusts.

Well, you smug bastards, eventually you’re going to wake up and realize what a bunch of idiots you’ve been, when you have to face all of time you’ve been wasting, and it will be too late… for you, and Joe, and everyone else who’s going to get screwed.

Time is running out. And knowing we got the kerning just right on the signs that point to Hell is not going to make it OK when we get there.

The problem with the act of writing, these days, for me, is of listening to my thoughts and determining which, if any, is clearly more emphatic and distinct than the rest. And isn’t about what I’m doing at work, since I can’t talk about that. (Unlike some Cocoa software developers, but like many other software developers, we keep our cards close to our chest. We emulate Apple in that regard.)

Outside of programming, the pre-eminent question in my mind is rather vague and abstract. How do we organize people to get them to do what’s best for everyone in the long run, instead of everyone doing what they think is best for them in the short term? How do we convince people that what they think is in their best interests probably isn’t? And who are “we”?

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Not a new observation, but gaining traction, though most people are still resolutely ignoring the reality of it: Peak Oil. Also see Life after the oil crash for the most succinct and convincing arguments about the looming energy crisis.

In brief, oil is finite, in fact, it’s running out. However, the world’s appetite for it is still growing—exponentially. The oil wells aren’t literally drying out, but their are emptying. The less they have in them, the harder it is to get it out. No major new oil finds have happened in decades, and the smaller finds are more expensive to tap.

Alternative energy sources combined can probably only provide between 10 and 25 per cent of the energy we currently derive from oil, but most of them will not even work for transportation, which is the leading consumer of energy. Even if we could convert our infrastructure and manufacturing and transportation to other forms of energy, there will still be other shortages: plastics and fertilizer, which come from petroleum, and minerals and metals used in alternative energy technology, and, finally, land. Many alternative technologies (wind, solar, bio-fuels) are land-use intensive. And then there’s coal.

Some people believe that the oil production peak has already happened. Others that it is as close as three years or as far as twenty-five. But it’s within your lifetime, probably, and your children’s, definitely. The world’s standard of living is going to drop (if you use contemporary industrial lifestyle as your measure of standard of living).

Personally, the great, sad realization is not the loss of refrigerators, the Internet, cheap holidays or the like, but the certain end of space exploration and the relegation of the human race to stagnation and decline on this single lump of rock to which we cling precariously. Knowledge and discovery will slow and finally stop, and we will enter a new “dark” age. The window hasn’t completely closed, but it’s closing fast. Only the most outrageous science fiction ideas can possibly save us: self-replicating robots loosed into the solar system that can assemble factories and equipment from the asteroid belt, slowly, and return raw materials back to earth orbit, coupled with draconian measures of resource conservation and a complete restructuring of the human economy: replacing our current free market, growth-based system with one that is static and heavily planned and controlled.

Personally, I’m happy to go back to reading books, limited rail travel, buying locally: in effect, a return to the eighteenth century, technologically speaking, for the bulk of daily life and work. It would be better than another world war being fought over oil and the freedom to waste it on Karaoke and Dodge Vipers.

Addendum: The one beacon of hope that I’ve found goes by a number of names, and is in fact a very old idea: concentrated solar power (CSP). Here is an article at The Oil Drum. Another nice thing about CSP is that it can counteract the greenhouse effect by capturing solar energy that would otherwise be absorbed by the ground and then radiate as infrared (heat), which is what is principally absorbed by the CO2 in the atmosphere. It could also possibly offset the loss of reflectivity due to melting polar ice (though there’s still the problem of the polar oceans absorbing heat directly).

However, the economy shake-up cannot be avoided by CSP alone; even if CSP could satisfy our energy hunger, it can’t give us the fuel we depend on for transportation, which gobbles up 70% of oil production. You can’t fly jets with batteries! If CSP can be utilized to produce hydrogen, we may be able to use that as a portable fuel, but there are still concerns, such as volatility and evaporation. Possibly we can forgo most jet travel and switch to dirigibles (blimps) and electric trains.

Yes, the world is going to change dramatically, but it will only turn out good if we actually make the decisions and follow up with effort. Don’t just wait for the scientists, corporations and governments to solve the problems that YOU helped to create. Demand that your governments fund alternative technology and plan for the long term, not just the next election. Make the next election depend upon the long term.

According to a Globe and Mail story:

New polls show that a larger share of Americans - 53 per cent - believe in evolution than do Ontario residents, only 51 per cent of whom believe that “human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years.”

Over all, 59 per cent of Canadians said they believe in evolution, according to the Angus Reid poll of 1,088 adults conducted June 12-13. Twenty-two per cent agreed that “God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years,” and 19 per cent told pollsters they weren’t sure.

Even those who say they believe in evolution may be confused about what that means exactly. The poll found 42 per cent of Canadians agree that dinosaurs and humans co-existed on earth - but evolutionary theory says non-avian dinosaurs died out about 60 million years before humans evolved in their current form.

And we used to push our cars around with our feet, too.

This is really basic stuff. Do people simply hate to know anything? Do they despise learning? I almost blame the sheep less than I do their opportunistic and expediency-dependent shepherds. Is it human nature to simply believe everything you’re told? Are people so naive, so hopelessly illogical, so desperate that they’ll trust anyone who gives them a smile? Is the average person simply incapable of basic reasoning? Or does he simply not care? Satisfy his appetites, make him feel safe and secure with a job and a warm place to live; who could ask for more? Isn’t humble, honest living enough?

It would be, if it were remotely honest. In actual fact, it’s a numbers game. People gamble that their world will be reliable, dependable and safe for long enough for them to reproduce and see their progeny meet or exceed their own material comfort level. Never mind that such docility and passiveness leaves the unscrupulous the freedom to plan their wars and conquests, using the rest of us as disposable appliances of productivity. Repent and educate yourself. Stop whoring yourself for false confidence and imaginary security. Consume and be consumed. You live and die by your ignorance.

Checked out Blamblog (I know I don’t keep up very much with anyone anymore … I’m possibly antisocial. He linked to some dude’s video on YouTube.

Whoever that atheist was, whatever point he was trying to make—something about “Atheists are people, too”—was lost on me. I was just appalled by his abuse of the word “believe”. It’s not atypical, unfortunately. Nor is it isolated in its clear ignorance of language and how to use it to communicate.

Have you never noticed that one of the first things that surfaces in any kind of debate is the underlying disagreement on the meanings of words? How many arguments descend quickly into a need to ensure coherent and compatible definitions? Only those had between intelligent people whose goal is to communicate ideas. What you find, however, is that most people trying to argue something are simply not interested in ideas, be they facts, interpretations, analyses or even their worthless opinions. They just want attention. The need for attention is the driver in so many cases.

I like some attention. But not too much. What I like is a good argument, whereby “good” I mean well thought out: clear, concise, well supported with factual information, and including honest admission of bias and subjective opinion where it exists and isn’t already obvious. And ultimately, with a point. All communication really ought to have a point.

The point of this communication is that I’m tired of people trying to get attention without earning it through hard work. Mr. Atheist is using a common device: be provocative (versus original) and incite-ful (versus insightful). To even begin to say anything truly meaningful, you have to start with a shared body of concepts. Those concepts are built, by and large, out of language. You cannot communicate if you do not speak the same language. The irony is that I’m not using “language” very clearly, since there seems not to be a good word for what I’m attempting to elucidate. Perhaps a better word is “dialect”. Then again, it’s not even about having a compatible meaning for the same words. It’s about one person using the same word consistently to mean the same thing, instead of numerous different, even contradictory things.

It’s a fact that most people are lazy, especially intellectually. They would rather say that they’re just not that smart, but most supposedly smart people distinguish themselves not by being gifted (though they may be), but by being disciplined and thorough. Intelligence is significant, but intelligence, like belief, means many different things, many of them, if not strictly contradictory, are what mathematicians would call “orthogonal”. They have nothing to do with one another (conceptually—it may be that the biological root of intelligence is shared amongst various different types of intelligence or intellectual ability). You can be exceptionally good at memorizing things and still extremely poor at logical argument, for example. Intelligence is generally much less important in most areas of thinking than honesty and conscientiousness.

But as to the word “belief”: what do people mean when they use it, or particularly the form “I believe in”? There are two major forms. One is the belief in something’s existence, despite lack of evidence or perhaps evidence to the contrary—”I believe in God,” or, “I believe in flying saucers.” At other times, they mean, “I think something has merit”—”I believe in capital punishment.”

They might also use “belief” when they mean “like”. “I believe in tolerance.” There’s a hint of the second form above (merit), but it’s usually subsumed by a general warm fuzziness. The subtle difference is that one thing might require some kind of argument, by social convention, usually because there’s wide disagreement. But the fuzzy stuff no one (aside from shit disturbers like me) will be likely to question. So it just kind of festers as a general indication of sympathy with some person, group, or attitude.

And that brings me to “I believe in love.” This is one of the most empty, pointless sentences a person can utter. Partly because the word “love” suffers from the same kind of abuse as “believe” and “intelligence”. “I believe in love” is one of countless such vacuous statements that one encounters every day if one is paying any kind of attention, but it is by far the most egregiously cloying and meaningless. Second, and closely related, might be “I love love”. That one reveals for all to see the abuse of the word “love” twice: “love” meaning once to “really, really like” something, and second, nothing much at all, except maybe “love other people have for me” where the recursive definition there might be “show that they like me”, usually by generosity or sympathy or something. Which means they are probably just stating the obvious, which is, “I like me, and, by association, people who like me.” And I’m a self-hating misanthropist. I believe it was lovely to meet you.

Overall, I’m pointing out a general tendency in English usage to deviate from specific meanings towards very general, even vague, meanings for words. Perhaps this is not a new thing, but I’m specifically hearing it from people who consider themselves generally “intelligent” and probably well educated. (Another example of this tendency is the technique of saying something twice in an effort to be more specific. The classic case is to say “car car” to differentiate from a truck, but it happens constantly, and in more and more cases, it does not, in fact, reduce the ambiguity of what is being said.)

All this notwithstanding, I am not simply making an argument for people to use a greater variety of words. Expanding your vocabulary is the worst thing you can do if you can’t even master the words that you already know. Compulsive vocabulary enhancers sound desperate as well as lazy. It just exaggerates the impression of ignorance by attempting to cover it up.

No, my only point here is: say what you mean, by which I mean, be specific in what you say, and if you can’t, then don’t speak, because it’s likely that you aren’t saying what you think you’re saying, and you may not be saying much of anything at all.

Actually, I do have a secondary point, which I will make explicit. If all you want is attention, find a more appropriate way to attract it. Tell a joke. Sing a song. Draw a picture. Dance. Don’t speak nonsense. It’s harmful to everyone because it increases the amount of noise, from which it becomes that much harder to find anything worth listening to. If you really have little or nothing to say (and expressing your opinions, let alone your completely uninteresting emotions and feelings, does not count), then do everyone a favour and shut up.