2030 is the New 2012 | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

Jan. 8, 2014 (Archdruid Report) -- Last week’s discussion of failed predictions in the peak oil movement inevitably touched on the latest round of claims that the world as we know it is going to come to a full stop sometime very soon.

That was inevitable partly because these claims account for a fairly large fraction of the predictions made by peak oil writers each year, and partly because those same claims flop so reliably. Still, there’s another factor, which is that this sort of apocalypse fandom has become increasingly popular of late -- as well as increasingly detached from the world the rest of us inhabit.

Late last year, for example, I was contacted by a person who claimed to be a media professional and wanted to consult with me about an apocalypse-themed video he was preparing to make. As I think most of my readers know, I make my living as a writer, editor, and occasional consultant, and so -- as one professional to another -- my wife, who is also my business manager, sent him back a polite note asking what sort of time commitment he was interested in and how much he was offering to pay. We got back a tirade accusing me of being too cheap to save the world, followed not long thereafter by another email in which he insisted that he couldn’t afford to pay anyone because his project would inevitably be the least popular video in history; after all, he claimed, nobody wants to hear about how the world as we know it is about to crash into ruin.

That was when I sat back on the couch and very nearly laughed myself into hiccups, because there’s nothing Americans like better than a good loud prediction of imminent doom. From Jonathan Edwards’ famous 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” right through to today’s zombie apocalypse craze, a good number of the biggest pop-culture phenomena in American history have focused on the end of the world in one way or another. A first-rate example is the 2012 furore, which turned a nonexistent Mayan prophecy of doom into one of the most successful media cash cows in recent times. I can testify from personal experience that toward the end of the last decade, every publisher I know of with a presence in the New Age market was soliciting 2012-themed books from all their regular authors because that was the hottest market going.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/2030-is-the-new-2012-john-michael-greer

[AverageJoe90]

1. Mixed feelings about this.....

There is quite a bit of good stuff that practically skewers the Imminent Doomsday Chicken Little crowd, and he deserves some credit for that.....but unfortunately, the message ends up being rather deeply lost in translation when he ends up basically doing an unintentional 180(basically, he ends up agreeing with some of the talking points of the very same crowd he just criticized):

"Imagine a future in which all the trends I’ve just sketched out just keep on getting worse, a tunnel growing slowly darker without any light at the far end -- not even the lamp of an oncoming train. More to the point, imagine that this is your future: that you, personally, will have to meet ever-increasing costs with an income that has less purchasing power each year; that you will spend each year you still have left as an employee hoping that it won’t be your job’s turn to go away forever, until that finally happens; that you will have to figure out how to cope as health care and dozens of other basic goods and services stop being available at a price you can afford, or at any price at all; that you will spend the rest of your life in the conditions I’ve just sketched out, and know as you die that the challenges waiting for your grandchildren will be quite a bit worse than the ones you faced.

I’ve found that most people these days, asked to imagine such a future, will flatly refuse to do it, and get furiously angry if pressed on the topic. I want to encourage my readers to push past that reaction, though, and take a few minutes to imagine themselves, in detail, spending the rest of their lives in the conditions I’ve just outlined. Those who do that will realize something about apocalyptic fantasies that most believers in such fantasies never mention: even the gaudiest earth-splattering cataclysm is less frightening than the future I’ve described -- and the future I’ve described, or one very like it, is where current trends driven by current choices are taking us at their own implacable pace.

My guess is that that’s the most important factor behind the popularity of apocalyptic thinking these days. After so many promised breakthroughs have failed to materialize, cataclysmic mass death is the one option many people can still believe in that’s less frightening than the future toward which we’re actually headed, and which our choices and actions are helping to create. I suggest that this, more than anything else, is why 2030 is going to be the next 2012, why promoters of the it’s-all-over-in-2030 fad will find huge and eager audiences for their sales pitches, and why some other date will take 2030’s place in short order once the promised catastrophes fail to appear on schedule and the future nobody wants to think about continues to take shape around them."

"Mind you, there are less delusional and less self-defeating ways to face the challenging times ahead -- ways that might actually accomplish something positive in a harsh future. We’ll talk about one of those next week."

Oh, man, if only he'd just omitted those three prior paragraphs.....this would have been a great piece.

Long story made short, the future isn't liable to be a utopia, but looking at things from a realistic perspective, things are not at all likely to keep perpetually going down the same road we have been(and in fact, to insist otherwise is irrational). There will be a backlash at some point; there will be a turnaround. It's how it's always been, and there's no reason to logically assume that this era will be different than any others in this particular regard. The only question is, when, and how?