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45 comments on Movie review: Escape from Suburbia-Beyond the American Dream

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The Chimp Who Can Drive on October 8, 2007 - 1:05am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

You are small and insignificant. 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 handfull of people close to you. This is true for you, for me, for Bob, and probably just about everybody reading this.

What's so wrong with acknowledging this reality?

FWIW, I think Americans' (almost) universal access to personal use of the car has conveyed upon them an inflated sense of their own power and ability to affect change. This goes as much for activsts and other people trying to "make things better" as it does for those with less noble intentions.

I haven't come up with an elegant way to explain this so here goes: when you spend the bulk of your life able to get in a big machine and go pretty much wherever you want, whenever you want, something occurs in the primal part(s) of the brain that conveys up upon the person a belief that they are able to affect events much more than they really are.

Call it a psychological effect of the car culture. What's funny is even people who are working to end/reform the car culture seem to have been affeced by this. Like just about everybody else in NA, they generally spent plenty of time during their formative years (ages 16-to-25) in a car by themselves. Even if they are carless now, all those years with personal use of a car imprinted the primal part(s) of the brain with certain beliefs about oneself. It's at a primal level so it's likely to go unnotcied.

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AlanfromBigEasy on October 8, 2007 - 7:22am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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

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GreyZone on October 8, 2007 - 11:39am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Remarkably, what Alan appears to be doing is old fashioned campaigning - reaching out to people and building working networks of individuals who have an interest in the solution he is presenting. Modern campaigning does not do this. Instead it relies on Madison Avenue and the mechanics of advertising rather than the mechanics of engagement. Engagement amongst politicians today is solely reserved for those who are peers to the politician and thus "deserving" of engagement. The rest of us get hucksterism with Madison Avenue glitz. This is partly due purely to population - Hillary Clinton cannot effectively engage 300 million people so she has to use the advertising route (as do all the rest of them as well). So a modern politician prioritizes time and reserves "engagement" for those that the politician believes deserve it. Interestingly, this also is most frequently either those who can get that politician re-elected or another politician of the same rank or higher, so the entire scenario becomes a closed loop, largely immune to external thinking.

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone

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OMGlikeWTF on October 8, 2007 - 2:52pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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

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710 on October 8, 2007 - 7:01pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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.

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45 comments on Movie review: Escape from Suburbia-Beyond the American Dream

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