What is Hopium?

 

How often do you catch yourself saying, "I hope [fill in the blank] happens," or some variation of that sentence? What exactly is hope? The dictionary describes hope as a noun, quote:

"A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen."

It also describes it as a verb, quote:

"Want something to happen or be the case."

So hope is an emotion or a desire. Whether one is hopeful or hopeless means still being bound to hope. One of the things I see most often talked about is the idea of hope. So many people claim that they need hope to survive. But is this really true? No, of course not. Why? Because the present is generous; you don't need to turn away from it. This is the ethos of Live Now. Hope, on the other hand, obliges you to abandon the present for the sake of a possible future.

Herein lay the fault of logic - why trade today for a "possible" future? What if that future never arrives? One is literally trading reality for fantasy - a fantasy that may never arrive. This is what Chris Hedges talks about in this video where mass delusions accompany collapse. One of the most poignant quotes is this: 

"Optimism must be based in reality. If hope becomes something that you express through illusion, then it isn't hope; it's fantasy."

Being hopeful or hopeless are still bound to hope - they're flip sides of the same coin. This is the message that Stephen Jenkinson delivers.

Being that hope keeps a person chained to an ideal that may never be realized, and he or she is therefore obliged to give up now in return for this possible future, Is this a good tradeoff? This depends upon many factors. Some futures are more likely than others. But giving up today for something that may never occur is risky at best. Overwhelmingly, many people are buying into what amounts to BELIEFS rather than FACTS in many cases. I have pointed out the facts repeatedly about technology use being unsustainable, and I have clarified my statements in recent articles to delineate unsustainable versus sustainable technology use. Suffice it to say, sustainable technology consists of types of technology mostly developed prior to 10,000 BCE. Arguments can be made for some types of technology use based upon considerably smaller population sizes, but there are dependencies on certain criteria which cannot be predicted today for future use, as conditions have a way of changing wildly from expectations. 

Much of the environmental movements I see today utterly depend upon a unified human approach, something which increasingly looks untenable. Noticing the increasing split between nations, especially the USA, most of Europe, Russia, and China, a unified approach to ecological overshoot and/or any of its symptom predicaments such as climate change looks out of reach. The evidence of the idea of global unity being out of reach is everywhere if one chooses to see it. It's (unity) a noble goal, but how practical and realistic is it? I've heard this goal all my life, being born during the Vietnam War, with a popular song by John Lennon. Give Peace a Chance was that song. However, another song by John Lennon actually made a larger impact on me - Imagine was a hugely popular song in the early 1980s. I always have admired the idealism and desire behind the song, but are we any closer to the world being one today? I think the facts and links in my article False Beliefs and Denial, Part Two actually point to a different story altogether. 

So, now that I've described what hope is, what is hopium? Hopium is the addiction to hope, and unfortunately, just like all other addictions, it is unhealthy. It really isn't much different to our addiction to technology use or our addiction to energy use. But hopium has more to do with false hopes than it does with reality. For instance, I see a constant stream of articles promoting non-renewable "renewable" energy harvesting devices and the so-called "energy transition," while all the available evidence points to this being pure hopium along with the concomitant electrification. Both of these issues have to do with the unsuitability of electricity to replace fossil fuels in transportation networks, primarily due to the electrical grid itself and the differences between oil's portability and energy density. Despite all the proof that is available today just by doing some simple research from qualified sources, many people are buying into ideas that simply don't really have a future because those ideas are based upon requirements that cannot be met or are impractical and/or unrealistic. 

I asked one promoter of degrowth what his timeline for the goals to be met were and he replied that they would require 40 years. To be honest, that goal sounded very realistic in terms of a timeline for what he was proposing. The trouble is that we probably have about 7 years tops before tipping points (see this and this and this and this) take the systems we depend upon into a new paradigm, one that can be guaranteed to be less reliable and dependable than what we currently have now (which is already increasingly becoming unpredictable and unreliable!). Likewise, many other ideas and plans all have timelines that would require far more than 7 years to implement. Even the popular "net zero" campaigns all rely on timelines far into the future along with fantasy technology which doesn't exist at scale today, and the likelihood that the conditions of today and the countries and/or borders that exist today will still exist by 2050 are remote at best. Most of us cannot imagine how different the landscape and conditions will be by 2050, and even that is if our species still exists. A nuclear winter could decimate our species and cause functional extinction, rendering us members of the walking dead. 

But even if degrowth didn't have the timeline or other issues, opponents whose livelihoods would be at risk (even though they are anyway due to energy and resource decline) will fight these possibilities with everything they have - and they have a lot of forces on their side, unfortunately. In this video, it is shown how different groups and foundations work with corporations to insert legislation and bills which are friendly to their causes. The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council are just two of many different organizations known to be able to sway government to what corporations want over the people the governments supposedly serve. Once in a while the people win, but overwhelmingly it is the corporations and money which are focused on. Doing things which are actually good for the environment tend to be bad for business or don't make any money, so very rarely do options like degrowth even get a mention by politicians. Most people don't appear to understand these angles of how governments work or they downplay how powerful these lobbying groups really are. If getting good environmental policies were easy to accomplish, by now wouldn't ALL governments get in on the bandwagon? Good intentions are everywhere; but as I have pointed out many times before, the Great Acceleration is continuing unfazed by hype and talk of progress.

Some people have accused me of "looking for perfection" or "wanting to live like a caveman" which are both false. I simply accept that our predicament requires us to live for today and not make plans far into the future, for that future is likely to be far different than anyone expects. Understanding and accepting predicaments necessarily requires an adjustment of our expectations. Setting lofty goals is all fine and dandy, but comprehending the scale of said goals' requirements should also be part of determining how realistic (or not) they are. Some goals, such as degrowth, are going to happen whether they are planned on or not. So, goals that work in that direction are all fine as far as I'm concerned. But a word of caution must be applied here - the Aerosol Masking Effect (aka global dimming) will be reduced by these efforts and will probably cause tipping points to be reached earlier than expected if a majority of society decides to embark on this strategy. This will bring civilization down faster and bring mass chaos to streets in your own neighborhood faster than expected as well. The magic is in knowing that this will all happen. Once one reaches acceptance of these facts, he or she can remain calm when reading about them or hearing about the latest fiasco in the news. Those experiences still won't be pleasant at all, but at least they won't be as shocking as they will be to those who never knew or who deny the truth.

I've used the word hopium in this blog many times, but realized as I was looking through the titles of my articles that I didn't have one specifically for it. Why do people get chained to hope? Because they fear the unknown. Many of the topics I bring up here are indeed scary to think about, and as a defense mechanism, many people simply "hope" for the danger to go away. Others decide that the way to tackle the predicaments we face is to "take action" but often fail to understand that the action needed is hard work - buying solar panels, or different food, or an EV, or any other product doesn't actually change anything in the overall scheme of things. Growing your own food and walking or bicycling instead of driving the car or cutting your own firewood instead of using the furnace requires far more effort. Those who don't have the same ethics won't have a problem using the energy and resources that you worked hard to conserve, making any real progress illusory.

Overwhelmingly, what most people fail to realize is that technology use reduction is required if reducing ecological overshoot is desired, and it is overshoot reduction that is necessary if one wants to reduce emissions to tackle climate change. Technology use reduction can be met by fewer people using existing technology or the same people using less technology, but this once again requires unity that I discussed above. This is where the lack of agency through the illusion of control comes into play. There is no singular person or entity that controls civilization. It is a self-organizing system, so when something disrupts a portion of the system, it seeks to correct the issue to resume operations. Over the past year, for instance, since Russian natural gas flows have been interrupted due to the Ukrainian war, more Europeans have been burning wood to stay warm. This same type of scenario shows itself for other types of energy and resource uses as well, and this same destruction will play out throughout a large portion of the rest of the world as time moves forward as a means of bargaining to maintain civilization.

What happens most frequently with hope is a vision of something good happening. More often than not, potential negative occurrences or outcomes are denied or ignored. In other words, optimism bias is typically part of the program with hope. I see this unfolding with AI (Artificial Intelligence) as I type this. An article in Time Magazine appeared recently that gave me pause on my thoughts regarding it. It definitely has the potential to dramatically raise electrical carbon emissions through increased energy use to power it, but there are many other considerations to think about as well. The linked video there is just flat-out scary. This is the exponential function cubed. If the greatest shortcoming of the human race is the inability to understand the exponential function, what does AI accomplish when that exponential curve is multiplied onto itself? Some people hope that AI can "solve" climate change. Certainly AI would see that we are the cause of overshoot through our behavior of technology use. How might AI choose to go about "solving" climate change knowing that it is caused by overshoot and that our collective behavioral choices are what propels it? Using the precautionary principle, the developers of AI should prove that AI is not dangerous before interfacing it with human society. Is this hopium?

I've left some pretty serious questions, moral and otherwise, in this entry. This particular entry should make it more than obvious how technology use has driven us to the precipice with an emerging technology about to once again supercharge this process. Will humans finally say "enough is enough" and pull the plug on this technology or unleash it like other technologies to create a brand new danger never before experienced? I'd certainly like to believe that we could rein in our addiction to technology use. I guess I'll have to hope that this isn't hopium. Until next time, Live Now!