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- The incredulous: Those who either know so little or haven’t had the opportunity to think about what they know, that they find the idea of collapse preposterous, unimaginable, and/or unthinkable.
- The hopeful: Those who believe that collapse is not inevitable or can be significantly mitigated, or believe that even if it is inevitable and can’t be significantly mitigated, we should try anyway.
- The deniers: Those who are intimidated or offended by, or overwhelmed with anger and/or guilt at, the very idea of collapse.
There are three (very large) groups to whom one cannot usefully or comfortably (or sometimes even safely) tell these truths:
I have always found that, when in a crowd that I know contains members of one or more of these groups, or whose members I don’t know well, it’s usually unwise to talk about what’s really going on in our world. For the first group it’s a conversation-stopper, for the second it’s either disappointing or annoying, and for the third it’s an invitation to a hostile debate or a fight, neither of which serves any purpose.
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As I write this there are a dozen violet-green swallows flitting outside my window, soaring over my hilltop home and down into the valleys all around. Swallows are very adept at turning in mid-air, in a way that looks a bit clumsy but is actually ideally suited to catching insects in mid-air. They will also fly near larger birds in the hope of catching their moulting feathers in mid-air. The two pictures above depict this.
But I also know that swallows will perform these acrobatic feats, including catching and releasing feathers blowing in the wind over and over again, for no apparent reason. Just for fun. The fact that doing this is good practice for more serious pursuits is not the point — most wild creatures play as their principal means of learning new skills, but clearly take great pleasure in doing so for its own sake, just because it’s fun. [If you're a skeptic, look at this bird behaviour, or this one, and tell me this isn't pure, calculated, play].
Maybe the birds are telling us something. Their story, their way of coping with reality, is to play, to take joy in every moment. Maybe that is the story of all wild creatures: That life is play, delight, pleasure, laughter, living in Now Time. Maybe that should be our story, too, those of us who can no longer believe the invented stories of our culture, and who can no longer bear the story of grief and shame and anger and sadness and fear for our future that we have told ourselves about this terrible, real world.
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"So uncomfortable is it for us if something doesn’t have a cause that we strive to determine one, one way or the other, even absent the necessary evidence. In other words, no one even needs to suggest that Turing may have inspired the Apple logo for us to come up with that explanation—or another one, for that matter, should our brain decide something else works best at the moment—spontaneously. As philosopher David Hume observed in 1740, “Causality is the cement of the universe.”"
"One of the central problems with narrative nonfiction is that the best narratives aren’t messy and complicated, while nonfiction nearly always is. Daisey stepped way too far over the line when he started outright lying to his audience and to the producers of This American Life. But all of us in the narrative-nonfiction business (I’ve written such stuff myself) are faced at some point with a choice between telling the story and telling the whole truth, or the whole truth as best we understand it. Someone like Michael Lewis will concentrate with a laser focus on the story: what he writes is the truth, but it isn’t the whole truth. And when you have a storyteller like Mike Daisey who considers himself a monologist rather than a journalist, even outright lies can find their way in to the story very easily."
"Stories need conflict. For stories about soldiers, detectives, politicians, artists, doctors, lawyers, and teachers, we know of socially acceptable types of conflict, which do not challenge key ideals. But stories about conflicts in ordinary jobs more easily violate key ideals, and trigger moral outrage."
"It’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously. Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve. It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other."
Discusses spoilers for movies and the viewing practices of the 1920s to 1950s when people often went to the movies without a specific showtime.
.In this collection of essays, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, narrative power is examined from sixteen different perspectives. The volume's subtitle—Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles—explains why its essays linger in the mind. Its writers have skin in the game. Many of their insights have that bittersweet flavor peculiar to autobiographical accounts.
A dialog about being a generalist or being an expert.
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