Chris Martenson yesterday unveiled what has been going on behind the scenes at Peak Prosperity.
I salute Martenson’s honesty for explaining how difficult it has been to make a living from overshoot education.
As an aside, I don’t think he’s aware of it, but the reason it’s so hard to teach overshoot is explained by Varki’s MORT theory.
It seems there were 3 key problems at Peak Prosperity:
- insufficient revenue from selling overshoot education;
- one partner who wanted to focus on science based journalism, and one partner who wanted to focus on how to profit from the coming economic collapse;
- a threat to revenue from YouTube’s censorship of Martenson’s excellent science based COVID-19 journalism.
Martenson shared something that troubles me (even more than I already was) about out future:
I created the Crash Course in 2008 because it didn’t exist. I’m proud of all that the Crash Course has accomplished – without it Peak Prosperity would never have come into being – and while it represents some of the best work of my life (so far), if it didn’t already exist I would not invest the time to create the Crash Course today.
Why not? Because the world has changed and I don’t think it would be even slightly receptive to that material now. The Crash Course had a huge impact in 2008. My assessment is that today it would fall flat and gain little traction. The programming against critical thinking and independent thought is too pervasive and successful. In brief, from my perspective, the world has gone a bit mad. It’s lost its grip on reality.
In case you aren’t aware of it, Martenson’s Crash Course is the best introduction to our overshoot predicament available anywhere. It was instrumental on my personal journey to awareness, and I thank Martenson for his excellent work.
There are two dimensions to his statement that trouble me.
First, Martenson is saying that citizens today are less interested in understanding reality than they were 10 years ago. It’s a concern because to reduce future suffering we need the overshoot awareness trend to be increasing rather than decreasing. The more we grow our population, deplete critical resources, degrade ecosystems, and inflate our debt bubble, the greater the eventual suffering we will experience. By denying an unpleasant reality we are making the eventual reality more unpleasant.
Although I think I understand the underlying reason for this trend, which is that our genetic tendency to deny reality is proportional to the unpleasantness of the reality, and our predicament today is much much worse than it was 10 years ago, it still deeply troubles me.
Second, Martenson is saying that if he were to start Peak Prosperity today he would not invest the time to create the Crash Course because insufficient people would pay for it.
Martenson is one of only two individuals out of eight billion (the other being Nate Hagens) that has taken the time to create a high quality video course on everything every citizen should understand to be a good citizen.
And he says he wouldn’t do it again because no one would watch it.
What else is there to say than WASF.
Turkey has high inflation. Today it banned the use of cryptocurrencies for payment of goods and services.
h/t Michael L’Merchant
https://brownfieldagnews.com/news/supply-chain-problems-impacting-inputs-parts/
You know you are in trouble when an expert has an epiphany that explains the market insanity and you can’t understand a word of his explanation.
https://zensecondlife.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-madoff-moment.html
If only this video had been available for my parents to rent 60 years ago, I wouldn’t be wasting my time on un-Denial.com.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12981810/
The reviews at imdb were fun. One also wonders why they used a Harry Potter reference for the name of the fish………….
Do We Have Free Will? Maybe It Doesn’t Matter
You could also say that no such thing exists, a view which seems increasingly fashionable. “Cognitive neuroscience and popular media,” a new meta-analysis notes, “have been putting forward the idea that free will is an illusion, raising the question of what would happen if people stopped believing in free will altogether.” The paper, a preprint posted on PsyArXiv by University of Cologne social psychologist Oliver Genschow and his colleagues, delves into almost 150 studies, with over 26,000 participants, that sought to manipulate people’s belief in free will in order to tell whether believing, or disbelieving, in free will affects their morality.
This isn’t an idle theoretical or academic question—beliefs about free will, Genschow says, seem to affect many “societally relevant” behaviors, like cheating. They also lie at the foundation of our criminal justice system, helping to justify retributive forms of punishment (the idea that people deserve to be locked up, for example, for committing certain crimes) as opposed to rehabilitative ones (confining and reforming people until they can safely re-enter society). Some philosophers, like Saul Smilansky, have argued that if we were to give up on free will, the consequences would be catastrophic.
https://nautil.us/blog/do-we-have-free-will-maybe-it-doesnt-matter
Sometimes, there is just too much navel gazing. I don’t think it matters. We don’t know, and probably will never know, so in the mean time, act like you have free will and do the right thing. Free will or not, denial and our other dysfunctional attributes are worth effort to understand and deal with.
My first baby step out of the closet.
I’ve signed up to do a Reddit AMA this Saturday April 17 at 9:00am PST.
I predict few participants because telling brains that they evolved to deny unpleasant realities tends to repel brains.
Good luck with this, Rob. Please let us know how it goes.
Not being that familiar with Reddit I googled AMA and found it stands for Ask Me Anything. What sort format does this take Rob? Is it a video steam or do people just type in their questions?
Text questions and answers only. They asked me to also use some new fangled audio thingy called discord but I said maybe next time.
Rob-lure them in gently to the wonderful world of un-denial. Don’t go full un-denial to quickly- remember the woman on the beach. People spook easily.
This thread has popped up on Peak Oil ( I know it’s gone very weird but I can’t stop checking in to see what the few sane commentators have to say). I don’t think it’s them but IMO it’s sort of James or JC Roberts standard-lots of good points that I hadn’t come across. Haven’t seen anyone on the usual sites using this name.
https://peakoil.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1470355#p1470355
Hold on-he may have gone overboard on another thread about the stock market crash – WW3 soon. Potentially ignore the above except about The Reddit AMAm
It’s rare to find someone that understands a piece of the puzzle and doesn’t then veer off into crazy land.
For example, because pharmaceutical companies are motivated to make a profit, and governments have decided to accept the risks of reduced duration testing, doesn’t mean there is a conspiracy to exterminate billions.
The history of the pharmaceutical industry is riddled with conspiracies. Real ones/proven. Ones that have resulted in deaths & serious physical & psychological trauma of their customers, AKA fellow humans, & in many instances they knew, but kept selling their toxic drug anyway. Criminal behaviour in the pharmaceutical industry is as old as the pharmaceutical industry.
They knew & kept it to themselves.
&f=1&nofb=1
Thalidomide: how men who blighted lives of thousands evaded justice
Newly exposed files show how victims were betrayed by political interference in trial – and how the pill has remained on sale
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/14/-sp-thalidomide-pill-how-evaded-justice
How A Groundbreaking Drug Birthed A Generation Of Thalidomide Babies
Born with severe deformations, Thalidomide babies were the result of one pharmaceutical company’s coverups and dark past.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/thalidomide-babies
Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America – 2020
Award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Gerald Posner traces the heroes and villains of the trillion-dollar-a-year pharmaceutical industry and uncovers how those once entrusted with improving life have often betrayed that ideal to corruption and reckless profiteering—with deadly consequences.
Pharmaceutical breakthroughs such as antibiotics and vaccines rank among some of the greatest advancements in human history. Yet exorbitant prices for life-saving drugs, safety recalls affecting tens of millions of Americans, and soaring rates of addiction and overdose on prescription opioids have caused many to lose faith in drug companies. Now, Americans are demanding a national reckoning with a monolithic industry.
Pharma introduces brilliant scientists, in-corruptible government regulators, and brave whistleblowers facing off against company executives often blinded by greed. A business that profits from treating ills can create far deadlier problems than it cures. Addictive products are part of the industry’s DNA, from the days when corner drugstores sold morphine, heroin, and cocaine, to the past two decades of dangerously overprescribed opioids.
Pharma also uncovers the real story of the Sacklers, the family that became one of America’s wealthiest from the success of OxyContin, their blockbuster narcotic painkiller at the center of the opioid crisis. Relying on thousands of pages of government and corporate archives, dozens of hours of interviews with insiders, and previously classified FBI files, Posner exposes the secrets of the Sacklers’ rise to power—revelations that have long been buried under a byzantine web of interlocking companies with ever-changing names and hidden owners. The unexpected twists and turns of the Sackler family saga are told against the startling chronicle of a powerful industry that sits at the intersection of public health and profits. Pharma reveals how and why American drug companies have put earnings ahead of patients.
https://b-ok.cc/book/5460340/a7d44d
http://audiobookbay.nl/audio-books/pharma-greed-lies-and-the-poisoning-of-america-gerald-posner/
You’re right and those are good examples.
Do you think they explain the belief that COVID vaccines are designed to kill billions?
I suspect we’d see the conspiracy theories without the sordid history.
Your suspicions are confirmed. The “Health Ranger”, Alex Jones & thousands of others in the American conspiracy industrial complex have been putting out depopulation conspiracy scare stories on a weekly basis since the early days of home internet & before that they were doing it on the radio & in monthly ‘snail mail’ news letters & books.
Their depopulation fear mongering goes back to The Limits to Growth (1972).
World population.
1972 3,851,650,245
2021 7,874,965,825
Any day now.
Haha. I’m a man of few words and like to skip the foreplay, but I’ll try.
My denial schtick usually goes something like:
1) People usually ask why humans evolved superior intelligence. It’s the wrong question. The correct question is why didn’t other intelligent social mammals evolve similar intelligence to humans?
2) Why has every tribe everywhere for all time had a religion, and why is a belief in life after death the only thing in common to the thousands of religions?
You might get trolled Rob. I’d just completely ignore those ones & put your efforts into the truly curious & appreciative.
I was shadow banned (MAC address) on reddit a couple years back (ME?? I can’t believe it!!), so I have a ‘read only’ account. No commenting for me otherwise I’d show up as your bouncer – keep the hooligans in line.
r/collapse has reached 275k subscribers. There are a ton of rightfully scared young men & teen subscribers who are just beginning to learn collapse fundamentals.
Go easy on them professor Mielcarski.
Thanks kindly for the advice. I’m glad you said ignore and don’t reply to trolls.
Despite the dark clouds I think we have a lot to be grateful for and will try to mention some of that.