As of right now, I have all but stopped blogging. I am in the middle of the process of writing a novel, making use of my own language, Norwegian: my mother tongue. My novel will be confronting issues of both a political, an economical, and an ecological kind, and is, therefore, never going to make its way past the large, guarded gates of the cultural elites; ie. I do not expect this manuscript to make it’s way past the scrutiny of the editors of publishers of the old and respected kind. It’ll be too political, and all too truthful, to even be considered publishable. This is the way of the world, I dare say: The truth is a lie and a pack of lies are considered truthful. It’s politically and economically convenient that it stays that way.

My novel will be published on the internet as a PDF-file. Knowing that I am not going to make a single little dollar here, I feel like an idealist of a very stupid kind. But hell, the truth is: I am leading the life of a clientified and institutionalized loser here, and I very often catch myself thinking: “… so why don’t you kill me?”

My therapists have made it perfectly clear to me, that I am not going to be an empoyee of any kind, ever, in my life. You see: the point is: here in little Norway, I am officially classified as a hopeless person; a case of my own; a man who thinks too much. Someone who is going to prove very difficult to ever take seriously. Someone who is not as ignorant and indifferent as we’re all supposed to be, these days. And forever and ever again. Until the end of time?

I don’t know what to think about this fascism.

Cheers.

More voices…….we need many more voices speaking out loudly and often. Time is being wasted by those with wealth and power who adamantly defend unsustainable status quo overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species that are overwhelming and threatening to ravage the Earth in our time. Because these distinctly human activities could soon become patently unsustainable, necessary behavior change has to occur fast. If more members of the human family do not speak out to vigorously resist what the leaders of the human community are demanding all of us do now as we strive to ravenously overconsume Earth’s resources; to relentlessly hoard wealth; and to overproduce unnecessary stuff, then the planetary home we are inhabiting and overpopulating could be made uninhabitable for our children and life as we know it by 2012.

People are beginning to view the world as you do.

Thanks for all your morally courageous and intellectually honest efforts, even though approaching threats to human wellbeing and environmental health loom ominously before us. Imagine what would immediately occur if everyone followed your good example. In the face of such daunting global challenges as humanity confronts in our time, it is so easy to curse the darkness and, by so doing, choose NOT to light candles, as you are doing. Keep lighting candles, Magne.

Always,

Steve

http://www.envirolink.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=10741

Dear Magne and Friends,

I want to at least try to gain your quick help. I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but yesterday the “AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population” submitted an idea for how we think the Obama Administration could change America. It’s called “Ideas for Change in America.”

I’ve submitted an idea and wanted to see if you could vote for it. The title is: Accepting human limits and Earth’s limitations. You can read and vote for the idea by clicking on the following link:

http://www.change.org/ideas/view/accepting_human_limits_and_earths_limitations

The top 10 ideas are going to be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day and will be supported by a national lobbying campaign run by Change.org, MySpace, and more than a dozen leading nonprofits after the Inauguration. So each idea has a real chance at becoming policy.

Thanks.

Sincerely yours,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

Now, it is true what you are saying: the message from science that I and such a other people bring us is “apparently unforeseen, distinctly discomforting and most unwelcome.” I realize this, but I do think that going into hiding somewhere between the cause and the effect is too pathetic. We’ve got this reality of manmade climate, we’ve got the reality of all these other forms of environmental devastation of every conceivable kind, and we’ve got the reality of the population explosion, especially in the developing world, where quite countries can expect the population to increase by more than a 120% i the next forty years. And this is real. Now, we need to look at this reality as real, so to speak; and not just treat these issues as concerns the natural environments of this planet as interesting, at best, but impossible to do anything about. Such a defeatist attitude simply cannot be tolerated, now can it?

I am terribly afraid of a situation in which all inconvenient truths are deliberately ignored. I think it is very possible that a situation like that is developing around here. A situation in which the winners will be those who are best at lying both to themselves and others, and the losers will be those who seem to know too much about the reality of ecological degradation, the reality of the sixth extinction of species, the reality of overpopulation, the reality of war, poverty, hunger and thirst, and the reality of lies, damned lies, and bloody deceit. It’s a grim worldview, I know. But I’ve got every reason to suspect that this shameful situation is our everyday reality now, and that it is based on something much bigger than simple greed. I think it is, like you say, politically expedient, religiously tolerated, and consensually validated: I’m especially thinking of the popular notion that nature will somehow take care of itself, and that there is nothing humanity as a whole or any human in person can do about that. Just ask around. You’ll probably not be amazed at finding out that most people, in tesy, will say that nature will take care of itself quite nicely. Not to make any manipulative inquiries about what that might actually mean, in the long run. -

You are an honorable fellow. You neither hide nor are you willing to hide from empirical evidence. We need your example displayed in the actions of many other leaders who presently seem to be unwilling to communicate openly certain understandings about what is real and true to them. The science of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth is a case in point.

So far as I can tell, your work is helping people to see more clearly as it is the wondrous world we inhabit and to more deeply appreciate the miraculous beings that humans are.

Of course, your reporting is occasionally off-putting precisely because the message from science that you bring us is apparently unforeseen, distinctly discomforting and most unwelcome.

Reports of good science, when that science is new, is routinely difficult to acknowledge, much less address. But that is what we are called upon to do. Grasping good science and adjusting to whatsoever could be real is required of us, I suppose. If today’s leaders intend to provide a good enough future for our children, then nothing other than productive adaptation to the requirements of reality will do. It appears that the human community could soon have genuine, human-driven, global challenges to overcome.

Despite all the efforts of denialists and naysayers, leadership has responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, just as you are doing, by urging the family of humanity to open our eyes and see what looms ominously before us on the far horizon. By willfully avoiding scientific evidence, we are losing the exquisite value found in one of God’s gifts to humanity as well as threatening the wellbeing of our children, life as we know it and Earth.

Remaining electively mute in the face of good science related to the human overpopulation of Earth, the reckless dissipation of natural resources and the wanton degradation of the environment cannot be allowed to prevail. Even though reasonable and sensible scientific evidence comes into conflict with what our culture validates as real and true, still the evidence has to be carefully examined…. and not ignored. Is it possible that the standard for determining what is real and true in our culture is too often this: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be economically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable is true and real? In that case, much of the scientific evidence found in the Mulig Blog presents many too many leaders and opinion makers in our culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.

Each culture presents its membership with much that is real and also much less that is illusory. From the standpoint of a psychologist, because humans are shaped early and pervasively by cultural transmissions in our perception of reality, it looks like an evolutionary challenge for humankind to see the world as it is.

It appears that cultural transmissions or memes generated within a culture may at times mesmerize human beings in that widely shared and closely held memes occasionally “produce” illusions of the world as it is. Some research seems to disturb us in basic ways because this scientific evidence comes into conflict with certain ideologically/culturally derived notions that are adamantly held by leaders about what it means to be human and about the “placement” of humankind within the natural order of living things. Unexpected scientific evidence of this particular kind is uniformly difficult for people to see, I suppose, because such evidence undercuts the ‘pedestal’ from which human beings prefer to hubristically look upon other living creatures and nature. We humans may introject biased and empiricially unsupportable cultural transmissions that confuse human reasoning and promote a certain cortical conceitedness which is not helpful when trying to see what is real. For a long time certain illusory memes appear to have been passed from generation to generation, distorting human perceptions and making it difficult for the human family to see scientific evidence for what is real about it.

With your leadership and assistance, perhaps we will come to more fully appreciate the difference between specious illusions borne of ideological/cultural bias and evidence derived from the careful, skillful and rigorous deployment of science.

Yes. I do have a blog. But as you can see from looking at the archives, I only posted here for what turned out to be a matter of three months. The thing is: I got disgusted here. Both of the things I wrote about myself, and of the general philosophical line I chose to adopt here. Mind you, though, I still believe the year is 1984, and that all policy making of our times can be properly understood in terms of the ideal dystopian settings of George Orwell’s.