Projective Displacement

Projective displacement is the mental process (generally unconscious) of transferring 'bad' feelings out into the world. Also referred to as 'toilet object behavior', as in, dumping one's emotional shit onto undeserving targets. It's one thing to vent anger, for instance, at that which has provoked the anger, but it's projective displacement when the anger is aimed at anything or anyone but the provoking agent.

Apocalypticism & Suicidal Ideation

There are doom-seekers in plenitude. This post is intended to help the reader notice the connection between doom-mongering & depression.

I have struggled with massive depression & suicidal feelings for over 30 years. It was only in the last couple of decades that I noticed the suicidal ideation buried in the apocalyptic fantasies of supposedly non-suicidal & ostensibly 'happy' people around me.

The next time someone starts predicting the crumbling of modern society, the destruction of everything around us, the end of it all, I want to encourage you to hear the excitement that can be found in the doomcriers voice, to hear the hope for catastrophic extinction that fuels these dreams of endtimes. This is the suppressed voice of depression seeking the catharsis of suicide so enormous, they'd take all the world along. Thru projective displacement the repressed depressed seek to throw out their bad feelings, their fears & anxieties & stresses, onto the world around them. Blameless for their suicidal feelings, guilt free, without the taint of mental illness, the doomcrier projects out their own desire to kill themselves onto the evil world. Ritual emotional purification of the wrong of intense self-harm.

My Peak Oil Prognostications

If you don't know what 'peak oil' is, I'd suggest you start researching it right away. I've been talking about peak oil for about a decade now; when I first started sharing this information most 'ordinary' Americans brushed me off, dismissed my researches out of hand. Even now there is tremendous allegiance to some notion that Americans have a right to unlimited cheap oil to fuel their vast appetite for driving.

However, this post is about my peak oil predictions for the next couple of years. (All prices are given in 2008 dollars; inflation is going to get spectacularly tough if I'm correct about these gas prices, & thus the nominal prices in 2009, 2010, 2011, & 2012 dollars may be even higher.)

I foresee $4.00 a gallon gasoline (nationwide average) by the time the election rolls around in November 2008.

My conservative estimate for 2009 average national gas price is a mere $5.00 per gallon; but my more realistic expectation is that gasoline will have a nationwide price of $7.00 per gallon by the end of 2009.

By the end of 2010, I fully expect to see at least $10 per gallon gasoline across the country.

By the end of 2012 I'm betting that America (& virtually every other country on the planet) will be dealing with $20.00 per gallon gasoline, possibly even $30 or more per gallon.

There it is. I'm on the record.

Embracing The Future

The following rant was provoked by someone somewhere blaming the fashion industry for the 'end of fat-as-beautiful', which gets the causality arrow all tangled up. (But that's another post for another time.)

I know it's oh-so-fashionable to be doom-and-gloom about modernity and industrialization and all that, but frankly it's boring, totally old-skool (in a not good way), and it makes people sound like their parents, grandparents (again, not in a good way), or religious whackos.

I'm all for preserving traditions that work in modern contexts, but knee-jerk allegiance to nostalgia can leave the knee-jerker looking out of touch and, honestly? -- hostile, desperate, and somewhat pathetic.

I usually keep this opinion to myself, but I'm getting so tired of hearing people's inner fears about the future projected out as 'objective factual info'.

I like modernity; I like progress; I like electricity and computers and space travel and technology and modern notions of human rights (and clothing) and most especially I like public sanitation and modern plumbing.

I know too much history to ever want to go back.

And don't even get me started on how lacking it is in personal responsibility to blame things on the fashion industry. (Or the media, or government, or whatever . . . . . . Enough with the blame games.)

Data Analysis & Zero Data

The absence of data is frequently mistaken for data of absence . . . .. . .

This is one of the most crucial argumentative errors around . . . . . . .

We see it in criminological discussions all the time; for all intents & purposes there is no data about criminology prior to about 1950-1975 . . . . . Which is then mistaken for being data showing that crime was not really an issue prior to the modern collection of high-quality data about criminal activities . . . . .. .

The lack of information does not prove something does not exist, just that there is no data . . . . . . . .

Let's Talk About Abortion, Contraception, & Population Control

First let me share with you this bit of happy news, with which you may not be familiar: industrialization, & especially the resultant urbanization, is the best population control humans have come up with yet. Fully industrialized & heavily urbanized countries are not replacing themselves, despite most having laws & customs that are generally pro-natalist. (Pronatalism is the promotion of child-bearing.)

There's a myth out there that humans will breed like rabbits, or bacteria, under most any circumstances, & that they must be stopped from this by specific actions to enable zero population growth, or even depopulation. This myth ignores the underlying realities of economics & demographics: agriculture-based societies reward high rates of childbearing, & industrial societies penalize high rates of childbearing. The whole of the planet is in demographic transition from being primarily agricultural to being primarily industrial, with the result being that we will face an issue of depopulation. (Most likely sometime around 2050.)

Another myth relating to this 'breeding like bacteria' trope is that humans have not controlled their population except for inefficiently thru primitive contraception & abortion, ignoring the reality that evidence shows humans have controlled population thru infanticide back into the far reaches of pre-history. Unsavory, but there it is. Given that, abortion is a vast improvement over the infanticide it replaces.

I'm looking forward to the future when we finally realize we must realistically control population & accelerate the depopulation curve, primarily thru beginning comprehensive sex education in grade school (a la Sweden), & making contraception an ubiquitous part of ordinary lives. This will eventually include 'handing out contraception on street corners', & pornographers eroticizing the use of contraceptives, particularly condoms & other barrier devices.

& this will be a good thing. If we want everyone on the planet to live lifestyles even approximately as luxurious as early 21st century American ones, there will have to be a lot fewer people, & the only morally acceptable way to get there is thru contraceptive-enabled attrition . . . . . .. .

Ordinary Miracles, Playing God, & the New Jesuses

Some years ago I was having one of those annoyingly frustrating conversations with someone about cultural evolution. The other's pessimistic argument was of the we're-evil-&-doomed-to-hell-in-a-handbasket variety.

I think I started it with commentary about my belief that Jesus & Buddha were probably the result of more advanced child-rearing, resulting in greater levels of empathy, & a clearer ability to see the 'true nature of reality' about them, rather than the prevalent hallucinatory projectiveness typical of those coming from the severely abusive childhoods 'normal' to those times. (Please see http://www.psychohistory.com/ for additional information about these theories about childhood & cultural evolution.)

The response of the other was to say, 'So where are all the Jesuses now? Why aren't there thousands of Jesuses running around performing miracles?' At that moment I was stumped. I can be very slow, & frequently think of the best rejoinders much later.

Some months pass & it came to me: we are surrounded by ordinary miracles, so ubiquitous that we don't even notice their specialness. Indeed, we expect miracles, & denigrate them for not being perfect. The examples that specifically came to my mind were the ordinary (& daily) miracles of modern medicine, particularly the surgeon's ability to 'kill' their patients in pursuit of healing.

Any time a patient undergoes major surgery they are, in effect, 'killed' on the operating table. Wounds so grievous that they would surely die if it were not for the miracles of modern medicine. & then they are brought back to life. Resurrected. Mostly better than they'd been before.

Ordinary miracles so often unappreciated are all around us, if we allow ourselves the optimism to see them.

Death, Jealousy, & the Future

It is completely normal, even expected, for any given mortal to be jealous of those who come after given the reality that things are getting better all the time. Just as it's an ordinary part of human experience for parents to be jealous of the better lives they've worked so hard to give their children. Hard, but true.

I've recognized for some time that a fundamental truth of life is that we get to have sex until we die, & then the future happens. (All too often the sex was the best part.) & I recognize my own jealousy at all the good stuff that will happen after I die. I was hoping for a lunar colony in my lifetime; at 43 this is not looking like it's gonna be.

So. The point of this is that this systemic jealousy, however unconscious, can result in a cynicism about the future which is unjustified by the evidence. In combination with the saturation of depressive suicidal ideation found in the extremist apocalypsism so prevalent in all manner of folk, optimism can feel like an uphill slog in high gravity. But if we can get past our excessive & unfounded sadness & pessimism, the future's so bright I gotta wear shades.

Finite Mineral Fuels

I'd like to offer some reframing on the issues of global energy production. This blog will simply define & offer some small discussion of the concept of 'finite mineral fuels'.

I tend to think it's more useful to think of petroleum, coal, uranium, & even natural gas as finite mineral fuels. (While realizing that natural gas is not technically a mineral.)

These finite mineral fuels are just that -- finite. Limited. Non-renewable. Once dug out of the ground & burned, they are gone. & those that are biogenically sourced (coal, petroleum, & natural gas) are never to be replaced in our lifetimes.

But even uranium is a finite mineral fuel. While we can, theoretically, continue to mine uranium from other parts of our solar system, we are many decades from that being a practical solution to our appetite for energy.

Many people (& more every day) are familiarizing themselves with the concept of peak oil, the idea that petroleum products are a finite resource with a rather predictable pattern of extraction. We might want to start thinking of 'peak natural gas', 'peak uranium', yes, even 'peak coal'. Or we might want to think of them all as simply finite mineral fuels.

Oppositional Differentiation

There's this process I've observed, which I'm tentatively naming 'oppositional differentiation'. It's a crucial player in the psychology of toddlers & adolescents. It is the act of defining differences between self & others by opposing the other. A constitutional commitment to being in opposition, most especially to authority figures. It is most evoked when authority figures attempt to impose upon the oppositional differentiator, & the very act of imposing may indeed be the evocateur of this personality mechanism. Certainly it seems that in escalating the imposition, escalation of the oppositional differentiation occurs.

This behavior is not the exclusive province of teens & toddlers, rather that is where it initially exhibits in the individual. I would suggest many of us have experience with individuals whose commitment to being argumentative exceeds the norm, most especially we notice those in whom the debating instinct has run amok. I would say that such individuals have gotten stuck in those phases of childhood where such argument skills were necessary to survive the muddled impingings of authority figures.

& of course, we see this tendency whenever we read thru the postings of commentary, whether email discussion groups, or the sections following most articles, blogs, news reports, & other media content online. Frequently the expression of oppositional difference is connected to anger & fear, just as often masking the motive provided by the anger & fear in the guise of 'rational argumentation'.

The Life Trip versus the Death Trip

So, now that you've experienced my perspective on duality, I'd like to focus in on a particular aspect of duality: the Life Trip versus the Death Trip.

I believe in very few dualities, but the tendency to frame life in terms of it's dueling livability versus deathliness attributes is pervasive & hard to escape . . . . . . . . . This is a dichotomous space where I've made a choice. I choose life. Not in some lame anti-abortion way, ignoring the necessity of controlling our fertility & being happy that abortion is so much better than the infanticide it replaces. (Humans have always controlled their fertility, we just don't want to look at how that worked in pre-industrial culture.) I choose life in the sense that I prefer love over hate, positivity over negativity, peace over war, compassion over distance, empathy over indifference. I align with victims regularly, if the alternative is to ally with aggressors & abusers.

Duality

There is an implicit assumption that needs examining, and I'm just the woman to do the job. The fundamental operating assumption I'm interested in is that duality is some basic and pervasive characteristic of the universe.

By duality I mean that tendency to see things as existing as an either-or paradigm, a kind of binary form of dualism, or the more nuanced propensity to see things in terms of a continuum, from one end to the other, polar opposites, ostensibly. Dualisms placed in opposition to each other in an effort, all too often, to expand knowledge.

Here's some examples of commonly perceived inherent dualisms: homosexual versus heterosexual, male vs female, dominant vs submissive, strength vs weakness, power vs vulnerability . . . . once you start looking, you'll see them all over the place.

The problem is this. Humans are bilateral, it's an important tho' less-than-perceptible part of day-to-day cognition, and our brains are thus essentially bilateral. Bilaterality plays an important role in how cognition happens, and the fact that what comes out of our minds (the product of our brains) is heavily tinged by a dualistic bias should not be terribly surprising, nor ascribed much meaning beyond this obviousness.

As a happy little lay-student-acolyte of science I can tell you that while duality happens, it is not some special pattern of the universe, not some particularly-to-be-enshrined aspect of the 'true nature of reality.' & an assumption that somehow in holding some dualism whole in one's hands a truth is revealed can hide so much.

There's a handy-dandy way of visualizing this: The hard-core, black-vs-white dualism can be envisioned as a toggle-switch, like a light switch. On. Off. Those are the only choices. Oh so very binary and simple. The more nuanced dualism of a continuum is a needle-gauge tracing it's hesitant arc. I like to then blow this out to say we'd all be better served to think of our quantification choices as looking more like a rainbow orb, dark in the center, light on the outside, with all the colors of the light spectrum corresponding to a polar-coordinated spot . . . . . . . My modest attempt to push the conversation to a more complicated perspective . . . . .

Who is this demon, Kia?

Born in 1965, I have been writing with intent & purpose since 1977. An excessively conscientious intellectual child blooms into adult, always with that desire to save the world. To make it a better place for my being here.

Gad, what a heavy burden to assume. & so many of us do it. It builds strength in us, tho', this tilting at windmills.

We all need day jobs to keep us moving forward; I raised children for a coupla decades, & in a century or so, this will be seen as the day job it was. All the while I read, & even occasionally I wrote.

I attended college, studying math. I nearly completed degrees in statistics & sociology before coming to my senses & dropping out. I was in it for the beauty of learning, not the vo-tec necessities. Plus, I want to be a sci-fi writer when I grow up. (A sci-fi writing, pajama-wearing pornographer, technically, but that's another story.) & sci-fi writers study sciences. I have a passionate love / hate thing going on for humanity, so studying people is what I do alongside breathing . . . . . .

In 1996 the passel of chilluns & I quit driving a car to get around our northern California sprawlburbia. Bicycling took the place of the automobile for the betterment of us all. That's right, I raised a rabid nest of alternative-thinking, environmentally-minded, authority-questioning progressives. They vote. They think with their own little heads. It's marvelous. Children & young people restore my faith in humanity all on their own, on an ongoing basis.

Finally, for the moment, I'm gonna share something way-not-politically-correct in our puritanical time & place: I'm a sex freak. & it feels like an act of revolution to pursue my pleasures in the face of entrenched human culture that fears excess pleasure.

These are some of the themes that dominate my life. There are others, but hopefully, universe willing, there will be other posts.

Courage.

A long time in the making . . . . . . .

Those who know me will say, it's about frickin' time . . . . . . . .

This blog is meant to be as much my journal as anything else. The title comes out of my belief that it's gettin' better all the time, that we journey into a glorious future, & that our best & brightest dreams can, & probably will, come true.

I started life pessimistic. Cynical. Bitter. I'm a woman, daughter of a hard-core feminist, & a passionate student of history. It was hard to be anything but negative as an adolescent; I sought after heroes of my own gender & found such pain & hardship, & the harshest of judgement passed down on women again & again . . . . . . . .

I've spent a lot of time being depressed in my life, & darkly angry. But, frankly, what a waste of time. It was presumably a necessary phase, but for some years now I've practiced at strengthening my inner pollyanna. I consider myself to be professionally optimistic. Anger is so boring, so old, so yesterday, so been-there-done-that.

Rather, what's interesting & new is positivity. Belief & hope in mankind, in our place on this planet, in this universe, of our possibilities & nobilities, even in the voluminous evidence of our perfidy . . . . . . . . . That's what I hope to draw on even when I'm in my most pessimistic of spaces . . .. . . .

Welcome to Radical Progress, a blog about stepping into our happy future . . . . . . .