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RobleViejo OP t1_j1ijwxt wrote

Reply to comment by Pure_Internet_ in This is an excerpt from Cixin Liu's book "The Dark Forest", describing what happens to people when they lose all hope in Humanity by RobleViejo

"Doomerism" cant be immoral because its not an ideology, its a psychological symptom of an apathic society.

And its not entirely irrational because lead experts of several scientific fields are saying that half of the animal species will be gone in the next century and billions of people will be displaced by rising sea levels and extreme weather.

All the meanwhile popular media like The New York Times publish articles such as "A small nuclear war could delay climate change by 20 years"

Im not trying to defend my "doomerism" (actually I would love to get rid of it completely) but you gotta understand that Im not crazy, the world is.

There are subs like r/Futurology where "doomerism" is a serious topic discussed by professionals. Again, Im not trying to justify it, Im just saying that disregarding this problem as "edgy teen ideology" is counter productive.

I think Cixian Liu was unto something here. He made an analogy of our own very real paradigm between the Human Condition and the Earth as the outmost important thing that we know of.

You are right anyways, what its wrong with our world shouldn't prevent us from making it better.

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keestie t1_j1jm64x wrote

Doomerism is a perspective and a set of ideas. Those ideas may well be a response to predictions about the future, but to pretend that they are the only possible response is very silly. You have control over your response, and you are responsible for it. It's not just something unavoidable that happens to you, and it isn't without consequence either.

Yes, the world is indeed on a dark path, one that is unique in our history. No, that path's end is not absolutely determined yet.

Imagine living thru the fall of Rome, the ravages of the Bubonic Plague, or the colonization of the Americas. Absolute apocalypse wherever you turned. Yet some people managed to maintain their sanity and ethics. That is our job right now.

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