Whatever you are doing, there is a 99.999% chance it's not going to have any effect on anybody beyond yourself and perhaps a handful of people close to you

I know, as a fact, that actions I have taken in the past, unrelated to Peak Oil, have changed people's lives for the better and that these changes have rippled beyond that.

However, my focus is not so much on "I" but on other people and our mutual relationships (a cultural focus I find stronger in New Orleans).

I have learned in my years to seek leverage points, and my presence here on TOD is a deliberate choice after surveying other Peak Oil sites. This has lead to other opportunities and the ability to start a meme.

Last week was a breakthrough on a related front. The Millennium Institute ran my scenario on their T21 model and came up with very positive results, which will be presented Wednesday at ASPO-Houston.

I am VERY well aware that "I" can do almost nothing, but my relationships and joint efforts can affect change.

At the Millennium Institute I meet Hans Herren, who now works there. Read the link below and tell me that no one can make a difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Herren

Best Hopes,

Alan

Its funny how all those mighty combustion engine cars need a little electric motor to start them :)

What's wrong with acknowledging this reality is that the reality is wrong.

We all have an effect. There is a 100% chance that what we're doing is having an effect on the system. Just not the effect we want when we want it.

"There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view." -- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A large effect you can have is lack of response to system stimulus.

It is only from one perspective that the researchers control the experiment. From another perspective, the mice are in control, as they are holding the researchers in the experiment.

So what happens when the mice (that's us) ignore the stimulus? The stimulus is repeated, causing other mice to become over-stimulated, and again failing to respond.

Fighting or attacking the stimulus is a well-understood response, for which there are other stimuli to try to get you back into the maze searching for your piece of cheese.

Most people have no idea what to do when there is no response. Think, Matt, how frustrated you get when you tell someone, "hey, HFCS is killing you", and you get back a blank stare. No response. And what does that do to you? You go home and fervently post about it. The guy at the store has already forgotten you.

Who was stimulated, and who responded?

His small, insignificant, little nothing action changed the course of your life for the next several hours, didn't it?

Just because you didn't notice the effect, didn't mean it didn't happen. This isn't quantum mechanics. This is the real world.

Good points, Bob.

And while I don't disagree with the Chimp, I guess the notion of smallness and significance can get confused in odd ways.

The best way for me to understand significance remains mysterious. It has to do with living in a good way, or living authentically in the best way one can, without too much despair over outcomes I cannot control in any rationalistic way.

I just forget that sometimes, what with all the angst and anxiety over peak oil, climate change, intentional ignorance, war, and other violence going on.

I agree with Chimp that our experience of life with cars has affected our sense of self-importance in the same way that perhaps some royalty, emperors, CEO's, and other "Big Players" were/are given to an outrageous sense of self importance.

Living authentically matters a great deal to me. I fall short of my own sense of ideals, but love, peace, joy, sharing with a small group of loved ones, and positive engagement in the larger community matter to me even if we go out with a poof and a sputter shortly.

Escape from Suburbia may have its shortcomings, but it may also serve as just the right existential provocation to help some people rediscover humane living, which involves survival, but a whole lot more as well.

Survival is not forever anyway...we all gotta go sometime, and so do all species, it seems.

Mere survival is not all it might be cracked up to be. Even so, I do want to keep on surviving so that I can have more opportunities to really live.

Not discounting even more mystical possibilities that may or may not helpfully inform the discussion of the significance of the human being as highlighted by the Long Emergency as we know it.

Significance, leaving a mark, is a human ego delusion.

How many wrong ideas are packed into that statement? Who are the people who have left as their mark this terrible meme?

The people that I emulate most aren't concerned with how they appear to others

So for you significance and appearance are the same thing? Why are you emulating people? Certainly because they left their mark! They were significant! Why were they significant? Often because they were less deluded than their contemporaries. Does being less deluded mean they didn't have "egos"? Not that likely, since the very concept of "ego" is of recent vintage - a mistranslation of Freud, actually, who just used the German word for "I." So when you say "The people I emulate" that's all Freud ever meant by "ego" - what we mean when we say "I." And frankly, if you think you don't mean anything when you say "I," that's delusional, schizophrenic even.

What we need - urgently - is different styles of living. Popular styles can transform at mercurial rates. There's been a noted lack of significant stylistic leadership since the sixties ended. Part of what's holding us back from style is the "anti-style" movement based in the meme of "having no ego." Almost all significant public style leaders have strong senses of self. That coming through is in large part what makes their styles so attractive and emulable. The source of successful style is in part in emulation, but in equally important part in centering in the originality of your own self. In that way the self, the "I," is the key to real social progress.

The widespread belief that it's not is the reason there's been so little social progress over the last few decades.