‘Doomer porn’

I’ve written a few pieces about the ‘doom and gloom’ phenomenon that infects our media (for example, here), and I go on puzzling about why it is so. No answers this time. But my eye was caught by a reference to ‘doomer porn’ on the Fabius Maximus website. And I thought I’d read on. That meant I learned of another term — ‘collapsitarian’ — which I had not heard of before. Collapsitarians are those who prophesy ‘the end of the world as we know it’, or even just the end of the world.

You’ll learn about them in this long and interesting piece, by K. L. Cooke, which is worth reading. My following exploration of doomer porn on the Internet allows me to make my own comments about The Doomsters (also the title of one of Ross Macdonald’s excellent crime thrillers).

Collapsitarians, says Cooke, have a theory that industrial civilization is about to tumble into a new Dark Age, precipitated by overpopulation, fossil fuel depletion and climate change, which will bring about global conflict, famine and epidemic disease. The more optimistic proponents foresee a near term population reduction to ten percent of the current load. The less sanguine envision mass species extinction to include Homo sapiens.

I’ve certainly come across that sort of stuff, though more in the USA than in Australia. And it makes fascinating reading. Start with ‘doomer porn’ and see where it gets you. Here’s an explicit statement: I believe that the turbocharged, energy-intensive, consumer-oriented lifestyle of contemporary society is doomed. This writer is a peak-oil catastrophist, and there are quite a few of them. It was written in 2011, or at least not later.

Here’s another: We have between now and July to get ourselves as ready as possible to feed ourselves, to protect ourselves, to keep ourselves warm, to stay out of the way … as much as possible until things settle down. I really do not think we will be living in anything like the society we have known, the civilization we have known, by this fall. I’m as confident about this as I’ve ever been. That was a few years ago, too.

Yet another, though from the same source as the one above: starting with bad corporate earnings reports due to the effects of the earthquake on Japan’s multinational corporations, the stock market is going to crash. And after the stock market crashes, the world economy is going to crash. And high oil prices are a major cause of this collapse. Apparently, farmers and fishers all over the world are not planting seeds or catching fish because they can’t afford the oil. Again, written in 2011.

This is stock-market-collapse doomsterism. You will know that high oil prices ceased  some time ago — but they could come back, say the doomsters, and look out then! There is God’s wrath, overpopulation, exotic bugs, a new ebola, Muslim triumph, Satan victorious, aliens from outer space (they are circling the planet as you read) — the threats are almost infinite. But they all lead to quick and total collapse of the existing order. There is ‘collapse fiction’, and handbooks about ‘wilderness survival’.

There seem to be a lot of websites devoted to the collapsitarian cause, and they compete with one another — as this one says, after making its own claim: We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can’t possibly happen again. Albert Bates, author of The Financial Collapse Survival Guide and Cookbook, brings you along on his personal journey… Global population, limits to growth, peak oil and climate change activists have been coming up with such similar contraction scenarios that they are beginning to echo each other.

Dr Kathy McMahon, who claims to be ‘the Peak Shrink’, has issued ‘Ten Dos and Don’ts for New Doomers’, one of which is not to spend endless hours on the Internet researching new dooms.

Yes, it’s bizarre, at least to me. Why is ‘doomer’ stuff  ‘porn? I guess because it excites doomsters, and they need it to feel that they are alive. A woman who went in for doomsterism, and then weaned herself off it, defined doomer porn like this: In brief, it means overwrought or unrealistic forecasts and predictions of shit hitting fan. More narrowly, it involves wrenching stories of global disasters that threaten the extinction of the human race; all is assumed to be lost except for a scant remnant of humanity. Obsessive dwelling on and morbid fascination with the mind-boggling, terrifying and plausible images of coming destruction brings on satisfying feelings of grim exhilaration.

Fantasies abound of outwiting the Four Horsemen, surviving all the desperate zombies and marauding hordes and entering a cleansed world. Doomer porn plays on base emotions and thrills — anxiety, fear, and fright and the urgent need for sudden climax — all for the furthering of someone’s agenda.

What happens then, she says, is that the sensationalist, distracting, time-wasting blight induces an urgency to DO SOMETHING, usually translated into buying someone’s books or reports, although the purveying of lecture gigs, precious metals and survival paraphernalia plays a role as well.

Cooke writes that the purveyors seem to do well out of it, writing and selling books that tell you how to survive, running websites that are the source for buyers, and asking for donations to support their virtuous work. One will use Spengler’s theory about the rise and fall of civilisation, another will criticise anything and everything to do with (in this case) American government; a third simply assumes catastrophe is coming, and has technical help for how to survive it.

How and why do they succeed? Cooke says these people are simply exploiting a demand, a need. What causes it? The doomer readers, he says, are outsiders, who feel they don’t belong. I want to know what causes that feeling. I have a feeling that the loss of the strong community feeling of the 1940s and 1950s, the decline of organised Christianity (though not obviously in the USA), and the rise of individualism, has meant a growth in the number of people who feel rootless and perhaps unwanted. From my reading, I think they include a lot of people who find large cities and their infrastructure (freeways, high-rise) quite frightening. I don’t know, but while Australia does not seem to be infected by the doomer virus, at least so far, you can see examples of it by looking up ‘doomer porn australia’.

And the most obvious example are those who keep saying that we are doomed unless we control greenhouse gas emissions.. They are supported, not so much by doomers, but by those who feel that we ought to ‘do something’, but haven’t looked at all hard as to why, or as to whether or not the ‘something’ will actually have any effect.

Searching for articles: If you have, like me, used Google and Google scholar to find papers you will have noticed that there is an awful amount of dross that you have to go past in order to find something that doesn’t start with the assumption that AGW is here and frightening. Someone else felt the same, and has done something about it. Go to

http://www.defyccc.com/search/#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=climate%20sensitivity&gsc.sort=

and enter in the field you are interested in, and you’ll find references to the sceptical side of whatever it is (climate sensitivity, for example). You’ll still need to know what the orthodox people are pinning their hopes to, and the current Bible is of course the IPCC’s AR5. While the orthodox blogs are publishing much less than they used to, RealClimate is worth going to for defences of the orthodoxy. SkepticalScience is, in my view, not worth going to for anything.