by Reverse Engineer, Doomstead Diner
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This was one of the more interesting (and colorful!) Doughnut charts on the survey. The Political Spectrum from which Kollapsniks come is quite diverse, that’s why the chart is filled with so many colors.
Of interest first is how few Doomers identify themselves as either traditional Demodopes or Repugnants. The overwhelming majority of Kollapsniks are fed up with BAU in Washington (and their more local legislatures) and are abandoning these parties in droves, although on both sides of this artificial divide they mostly still do vote for one candidate or the other, because in the FSoA 3rd Party candidates simply can’t win and just end up being spoilers for one side or the other.
Where most of them have migrated to in their thinking though is either to the Democratic-Socialists (best exemplafied in the FSoA so far by Bernie Sanders) or the Libertarians (best exmplified in the FSoA so far by Ron Paul and his Heir-Apparent Rand Paul).
More interesting to me than this were the number of respondents who identified themselves as either outright Fascist or Communist. 7% in total in this snapshot, holding fairly steady with the combined total now at 8%. Communists lead Fascists 5%-3%. I am fairly astounded though that this large a segment of the population will identify themselves outright with either political system. Both have received tons of bad press over the years since WWII, and in Amerika most people would rather be “Better Dead than Red”. Kollapsniks take on these beliefs I think because they are so thoroughly disgusted with BAU and only see a major revolution as having any chance at actually changing things.
A pretty much expected result here, but quite different I think from the general public. My sense there is they get most of their newz and political beliefs from the TV and from Talk Radio shows. Every time I jump in a cab the driver has Rush Limbaugh squawking away and I have to sit through that shit for an hour long ride to Anchorage for my latest MRI or CAT Scan. I gotta start carrying my noise-cancelling Bose Headphones.
About nobody gets their newz at the Barber Shop or Bar anymore, but go back to the days before Radio & TV, this is where people got together to discuss the newz of the day. I think people were a little more politically savvy back then, although that is just a feeling, no numbers to back that up.
This is an EXTREMELY common topic on r/collapse, with quite vehement opinions exressed quite often when the topic comes up. There is a large cohort of people who think NOBODY should have kids, it’s “wrong to bring children into a World in Collapse”. Why bring a new life into the world just to condemn it to a life of pain & suffering? Also, the clear problems we have with Population Overshoot say we gotta reduce the total population of Homo Saps if we expect the planet to remain Habitable and ourselves not to go Extinct in the Near Term. However, how is the population of Homo Saps not go Extinct unless SOMEBODY has children?
Here is where the plurality of respondents believe your financial means should determine whether you can have children or not. That is essentially the viewpoint of the Eugenics believers of the early 20th Century, followers of Margaret Sanger who felt poor people should be Sterilized. This of course was taken up by the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitller in Germany as well. Why should reproduction be only for the rich? How many very successful people came from poverty, raised on rural farms to bootstrap themselves up to wealth and success? Should their parents not have been allowed to breed them?
Roughly half of the Kollapsniks are Married, but if you add in those who have a Life Partner or many Sexual Partners to this, that is the clear majority. If you parse out this data by age group though, you will see that this also represents the older demographic. Younger Kollapsniks are not so often coupled up. Many reasons for this, often discussed in the Sociological trends discussions Inside the Diner.
Similar to the Marriage question, it is mostly older Kollapsniks who have children. The number with replacement level or below is the majority, which does match with statistics showing that Industrialized Nations are shrinking in self-procreated population (although immigration still makes up for that deficit in many if not most of those countries). You could parse this one out by Income distribution, but I haven’t done that as of yet. I suspect the people who have larger numbers of children also have larger incomes, but that might not be true.
I was surprised that roughly 1/4 of Kollapsniks consider themselves “Optimistic” about the future, considering all the incoming evidence that things will just be going from Bad to Worse over time here. This attitude is what I labelled as “Doom Lite” a few years back, and IMHO it’s the result of Normalcy Bias. We’ve always bounced back from crashes before, right? We came back from the Great Depression bigger and stronger than ever! After Rome Collapsed it took a few hundred years of Dark Ages, but we got the Reformation and Scientific Revolution! I personally think “this time is different”. I don’t think we’re going to rebound, at least not in the forseeable future anyhow. Perhaps some Plateaus and Dead Cat Bounces along the way down, but this is basically one long downhill slide we are on now. Apologies to John Michael Greer, but it’s not “slow & catabolic”. It’s moving along quite rapidly now, and getting faster all the time. So I dropped myself in the “Pessimist” category.
The Nihilist category is a whole other ballgame, and while still relatively small it grows all the time and is quite vocal on Collapse websites as well. This cohort of people is absolutely mired in Hopelessness and in many cases actually HOPES for the Extinction of Homo Saps, the sooner the better. Don’t bother arguing with these folks, it’s a complete waste of time.
Here is a result I REALLY did not expect, and it took me some time looking at the data to figure out why the Diner came out #1 on the Hit Parade of Collapse Websites. The reason is the algorithm the software uses to determine rankings. It’s not just how many Doomers rank you first, it’s how many 2nds, 3rds etc you get from them. Really low rankings from someone bring your totals down. So many of these websites cancel each other out, Doomers who read The Burning Platform don’t read r/collapse, and vica-versa. The Diner gets high rankings from its own readership, and middle level rankings from everyone else. In the totals, it comes out on top!
DOOMSTEAD DINER. #1 FOR DOOM ON THE NET!
Unsurprisingly since BY FAR r/collapse has the widest circulation, they turned in the most submissions. Of course, I do participate there myself and plugged the living shit out of the survey over there, which didn’t hurt either. lol. TBP was in 2nd for a while, but the cohort of Acaademics from Cassandra’s Legacy ended up trouncing them when Ugo put up the survey on his blog also. The Diner rolled in in 4th place, out of the money. lol. Significantly, without being listed in the main choices, Steve Ludlum’s Blog of Economic Undertow came in 5th with 16 write-in ballots.
This split actually has moved up some, now with 14% of Internet Kollapsniks registering their gender as Female. Either way though this matches earlier surveys we have done where the number always comes in between 10-15%, regardless of the Collapse Website you look at. Why this is so isn’t certain, and I asked this question in an earlier article on this topic. It’s not like wimmen are scarce on the net overall, you find them all over the place on the Cooking websites and the Homesteading sites as well with Gardening tips and so forth. They seem to avoid the real heavy duty Doomer websites though.
Another very colorful Doughnut chart here, with Kollapsniks quite widely distributed around the FSoA, and throughout the rest of the World as well. 15% of responses came from non-FSoA citizens living elsewhere in the world. Some of the other countries and regions represented are:
Australasia |
Australia |
Belgium |
Canada |
Central America |
Egypt |
EU |
France |
Germany |
Italy |
United Kingdom |
New Zealand |
Oceania |
Spain |
Sweden |
Turkey |
Mongolia |
Some folks here identified themselves as coming from a given region such as Oceania rather than a specific country. Particularly true of people living in the EU. Regardless, it was a fairly wide distribution from around the Globe.
Like the Gender issue, I wrote previously about the Religion issue, specifically how few Muslims particpated in the survey given there are over 1B followers of Islam on the planet. Many of course do not have internet access as their countries get Bombed Back to the Stone Age by the FSoA. However, many have migrated over the years to the FSoA and Europe, so you would figure a few more would show up. Their numbers still hover around 1% though, and are actually below Pantheists, Panentheists and Unitarian-Universalists, all spectacularly tiny religions.
Far as Kollapsniks go, the majority identify themselves as either Atheist or none, as in no religion at all. I find it hard to imagine how anyone can have no belief system at all, everybody believes something. Even if you believe you can’t believe anything, you believe something. lol. Christians are the other really large category, no surprise there since Christianity is the major religion of Western Industrialized nations, and they did a pretty good job of converting a lot of Chinese to this religion too. However, nobody from China listed themselves as from there in the locations question.
This is one of the more astounding results from the survey, since it is so far above the level of education in the population at large. 3/4ths of Kollapsniks have a Bachelors Degree or higher, with 13% at the Doctoral Level. In the general population, less than 1/3rd of people have a Bachelor’s Degree, and less than 2% Doctoral level. Generally speaking, Kollapsniks are very well educated people. An interesting data parsing here would be to see if attitudes about energy or extinction vary significantly by education level? I haven’t done that depth of analysis yet though so I can’t tell you. It’s rather time consuming work, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get to it. Just getting out the basic data is taking me a month of time here. If anybody else wants to parse the numbers, CONTACT me on the Diner and we can discuss it.
Another fairly colorful chart, since Kollapsniks seem to be quite well distributed across the economic spectrum, with the majority between $20,000-$200,000, the working poor to the high Upper Middle Class in the FSoA. The Survey did pull in 3 1%ers earning between $500,000-$1,000,000 and 2 0.1%ers with an income >$1,000,000. Who are these folks? How about making a TAX DEDUCTABLE Donation to the Sustaining Universal Needs Foundation (a 501c3 nonprofit Charitable Organization) to help us expand our work educating people about Collapse and building Sustainable Communities? CONTACT me on the Diner if you can help us financially.
Somewhat surprisingly to me ZERO respondents to the survey identified themselves as Homeless. It’s surprising because I know there are several Redditors on r/collapse living and working in some of the more expensive cties like Seattle and San Francisco living in their Stealth Vans. So these folks either didn’t respond to the survey or they don’t consider themselves Homeless, their Vans are their homes. I’m not surprised there are no respondents from people who are so far down now already they are sleeping rough. They don’t generally spend much time on the internet and aren’t real concerned with the greater scope of Collapse. They have their own personal collapse to deal with.
It was brought up Inside the Diner that how much money you have around to pay your monthly bills isn’t really a great measure of Net Worth, and that is somewhat true. However, in order to have months or years of cash around or assets to liquidate, your net worth has to be pretty good, and/or your expenses very low. I had to manage for 7 months with no income whatsoever when I first became a Cripple. A combination of low monthly expenses, no debt and a good sized nest egg I put together over the years enabled me to do this. Here in the FSoA, 60% of people don’t even have 1 month of savings to handle emergencies or loss of income. Kollapsniks do substantially better than this typical percentage, both because they have higher incomes in general than average and because, well they are Preppers & Doomers expecting things to crash any day now. lol. Part of Prepping Up for Collapse is having a Stash of Cash for SHTF Day and getting out of debt. Trimming your expenses to the bone and living a low consumption lifestyle also are important aspects of being ready for Collapse to arrive at your doorstep, which it will at some point. Collapse is…
…Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You.
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