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Sam's avatar

I do enjoy your critiques of the doomsayers, which does not undermine them entirely, but just likes to point at the often missing limb. Perhaps they need the word "polycrisis," because looking at the world we see every day, much doesn't seem immediately so bad, and the individual crises alone are not able to summon enough fear for these prophets.

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DH's avatar

I sometimes think that what makes these times unique is the prevalence of unchallenged wild irrationality across all sectors of society -- including supposedly objective ones such as science. Forceful assertions are routinely made and policies put into place with minuscule supporting evidence and sometimes massive contradictory evidence.

There's also a tendency to label every single problem a "crisis". The notion of a "polycrisis" is just the same idea with grade inflation: it's not just a crisis or two; it's a crisis crisis!

But then I think back to the late 1960s and how wildly irrational those times were as well. Somehow we survived as a culture and more-or-less regained our sanity. I hope history repeats itself in that regard.

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