FinnThe Six Stages of Awareness
Wednesday, October 8, 2008, 3:04 PM The text below is from a past Crash Course seminar. It is a very loose adaptation of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' "Five Stages of Grief." Often a broad new awareness results in a series of emotional responses that mimic the grief associated with loss. I call these the Six Stages of Awareness. Each of us here is somewhere along this progression. Most of us will inevitably pass through all six stages, each at a different speed, not always in order, and some will skip stages. While we read or hear each others' comments at this site and elsewhere, my hope is that we can find acceptance and understanding of the fact that each person is naturally at a different stage of acceptance and awareness. Each person needs to process the stage they are currently in (within normal bounds of civility and appropriateness, of course) and deserves the support of others as they progress at their own pace. (The following was spoken at a seminar:) Today is about examining data in a whole new way. I am going to provide you with a new framework for viewing this data, a scaffolding on which to drape this data, that is probably built a little differently than the framework you already have. The information is absolutely vital and critical to your future, but it will be worthless if we examine it in the same way that it has been presented to us by what I’ll term ‘our popular culture.’ So your first opportunity today will be the opportunity to change your thinking. I must warn you, this will not be easy for some. I know this from experience. You may well find yourself progressing through something akin to the five stages of grief throughout the day and throughout the next few months. Awareness can be troubling enough to mirror the process of grief, and knowing this can be important in grounding oneself. So let's now progress through some examples of what you might experience at each of the six stages.The Six Stages of Awareness
STAGE 1: You might begin with a series of statements to yourself, such as, “No way can this be true. There must be alternative explanations. This simply can’t be; I would have heard about it.” To help speed you through this stage of denial, I offer you access to the source data so that you can check it for yourself. Further, I only draw upon sources that I believe most reasonable people would consider to be highly credible. If you can view all of the data that I will present and find some alternative set of explanations as to why and how all of these things will not matter, I need you to share this with me, pronto. STAGE 2: Next, you might find yourself full of anger, saying to yourself (and possibly your loved ones and anybody else who will listen), “Aaaaarghh!!! Those bastards at the Fed, in the government, in media, have been hiding things from me, lying, and serving their own interests at my expense. How dare they!!!" While anger is a perfectly normal and even healthy stage to pass though, it is also counterproductive, in the sense that anger often serves to inhibit action…and as you’ll see later, we don’t really have a lot of time to spend in the non-solution stage. So for everybody’s sake, you need to move through this phase as rapidly as possible. This is also why you will not find me assigning blame and pointing fingers. Blame leads to anger and often a sense of victimization – both of which serve to inhibit taking action. Further, the "blame game" only serves to polarize people into opposing teams - and we’re all on the same team in the end. STAGE 3: The next stage is bargaining. Here you might find yourself thinking such thoughts as, “If I simply change a few things in my life, perhaps that will be sufficient and I won’t have to really change. I’ll use efficient light bulbs, buy a Prius, and save more each year.” You will find yourself bargaining with the data for more time, a different outcome, perhaps for a miracle to emerge. Perhaps some new technology will arise that will give us abundant and limitless energy, or we'll elect a new president capable of speaking the truth and marshaling the considerable talents and energy of this country. This, too, is a stage, and I’ve assembled a framework for understanding in such a way as to help you understand the critical difference between wishful thinking and realistic solutions. Please understand that I am not going to purposely step on your hopes – I am as hopeful as anybody you will ever meet – it’s just that I want our collective hopes to be placed in the right places, where they can do us some good. My hopes center on the tremendous reservoirs of talent, energy, and problem-solving that reside in this country, this community, and this room. I am confident that we will pull through all of the problems that we are about to discuss and that we can do it with joy, verve, and excitement. Misplaced hopes and defective strategies, on the other hand, will only let us down in the future, as they fail to deliver. STAGE 4: The next stage is fear, and it can take many shapes. “I’m going to die broke. People will come out of the cities and eat all my food and harm my family. The future is going to be unbearably bleak. I might die. I might starve. I’m not built for a world that mirrors the dystopian nightmare of Mad Max.” It is important to name these fears and confront them directly. Trying to ignore or stuff them away is simply a recipe to assure that they linger deep down, infecting your dreams and fostering paralysis. Fears are debilitating. They will prevent you from acting and they will ultimately erode your physical well-being. Most of these fears are grounded in the knowledge that our social, energy, and food networks are, for the most part, unnecessarily complicated and often wafer-thin. How will they operate in a more challenging environment? We don’t really know, and it’s that uncertainty which creates a deep sense of unease. Our food supply is both robust and fragile. If the continuous parade of trucks ever stopped rolling, for any reason, nearly all communities would find their store shelves stripped bare within 2-3 days. In fact, when we peel back the covers and examine each aspect of our various support systems, we find that they are nearly all built upon the implicit assumption that the future will be pretty much exactly like today. But what if it’s not? For myself, the only answer was to actively take steps to address each of my most basic fears. Imagine that you live in a maze made out of some flammable material and you have a fear of being caught in a fire in the maze. How could you reduce your fear? One way would be to familiarize yourself with the way out. Another might be to leave the maze and live somewhere else. Attempting to ignore the fear is not a strategy, because you would still know, on some level, that even though you are ignoring the fear, the risk remains…and so will the fear. The easiest way to reduce fear is to take concrete actions to reduce risk. STAGE 5: The most critical stage to navigate is depression. With a realistic assessment of our predicament, it is extremely common for people to begin to harbor such thoughts as, “Crap, we’re screwed. What’s the point? I am powerless to do anything about this. There’s nothing that any of us can do, anyway.” At this stage, dark fantasies of the future begin to creep into our thoughts, and fear paralyzes our ability to think, let alone act. It is my goal to help you limit this stage to the absolute shortest possible time – perhaps we can find a way to bypass it altogether. STAGE 6: The final stage is acceptance. You will know you are here when you begin to think, “However we got here is unimportant – it is what it is. Let’s figure out how to navigate the future with the tools and advantages we’ve got, not what we wish we had.” With acceptance comes peace, a sense of calm, and the ability to think clearly and take actions. However, acceptance and urgency can co-exist, and I do not mean to imply otherwise. Working through these stages is not a one-way trip. I, myself, cycle through stages #4 (fear) and #6 (acceptance) pretty routinely, but spend less and less time in #4 with every pass. What I hope you take away from this is that wherever you happen to be in these six stages will almost certainly shift over time. If you are uncomfortable with where you are in this process, know that it is temporary. My audacious, gigantic goal is to enable you to move through each of the six stages faster and more smoothly than I did. Lastly, please remember that everybody is somewhere along this curve, and my experience is that the people who are further along tend to catch grief from the people who are not. I ask that you be as respectful as possible of those who are in a slightly different place with all this. Know that where they are is right where they need to be at this moment. We can all benefit tremendously from supporting each other through this process.
The definition of wealth
Wealth is the abundance of valuable resources or valuable material possessions. This includes the core meaning as held in the originating old English word weal, which is from an Indo-European word stem.[1] An individual, community, region or country that possesses an abundance of such possessions or resources to the benefit of the common good is known as wealthy.
"But “means of production” is definitely still wealth, so my point is valid - even if it is unsatisfying. You can’t say “hey, that’s not wealth because the rich get richer.”
Ah but I can indeed say that because slave labor does not make the rich wealthy, just rich.
. “Military effectiveness is most definitely wealth, a…”
Nope, assets yes, currency, riches but not wealth.
Here is the disconnect in our discussion.
"The difference between being rich and being wealthy is knowledge. Wealthy people know how to make money while rich people only have money. Rich people are motivated by money but wealthy people are motivated by their dreams, purpose and passion. "
As stated in the definition "an abundance … to the benefit of the common good. Wealth is positive, and good and honorable. Riches No. Dictators are rich but not wealthy.
Perhaps military conquest, slavery, means or production regardless of ill-be-gotten gains, murder, coercion and all manner of despicable methods of acquiring assets can be mistakenly called wealth, but it’s not, it’s assets, riches and plunder. Wealth is honorable! There is nothing honorable in using others or killing to acquire plunder.
And so we disagree on the definition. Consider, an honest man with integrity, joy and purpose, though he be poor can be wealthy beyond description because he has abundance of valuable resources.
AKGrannyWGrit
From the movie Fiddler on The Roof. Spoiler alert, the family was wealthy but poor. The Dictator who banished them from their land was rich but not wealthy. Regardless, the two are used interchangeably. Enjoy
Sure, I can see by one of your definitions, for you to consider something to be “wealth” it must also drop into the “good” category.
But your last sentence confuses me, because it appears to stray a bit from this. Vis:
And so we disagree on the definition. Consider, an honest man with integrity, joy and purpose, though he be poor can be wealthy beyond description because he has abundance of valuable resources.I'm all for the meaning of what you say. Happiness is definitely wealth, because it is elusive, it is something everyone wants - and people are quite clearly willing to do all sorts of things to achieve it. "Most everything you want, you want it because you believe that by getting it, it will make you happy." I also think that the definition of "valuable" is situational. If you are hungry, food takes on a much higher value for you than it does when you are not hungry. Generally speaking. So, a good general statement might be, a "valuable resource" is something that meets a need that you have now, or might have in the future. It might be scarce, or powerful, or beautiful, or nourishing, it might keep you warm, or power your car, or it could be tasty, it might keep you afloat in the open water after the plane crash, or it might dispatch your enemies into oblivion. It could be knowing just the right person at the local precinct, or it might just be something that reminds you of your mom, long after she has passed away. And that brings us back to laser guided bombs. A laser guided bomb could easily qualify as a valuable resource, if you had someone you really needed to blow up. In the right set of circumstances, there's just no replacing a laser guided bomb with something else. If you were living in 1944, and you really needed to kill Hitler, that laser-guided bomb would have been just the thing. Wealth = abundance of valuable resources. Valuable = something that meets a need you have. Need = changes with the situation. Great Wealth = the ability to meet your needs easily, almost regardless of situation. Note: this definition easily encompasses happiness, inner peace, and so on. A person's "ability to be happy" mostly independently of circumstance is also a measure of wealth, at least by my definition of meeting needs.
Dave, You have done a good job of breaking down each word and defining them.
“Wealth = an abundance of valuable resources”. Concrete, specific and simple. Slavery could be considered a natural resource. Slaughter bots, drones and laser guided bombs, heroine, meth, and all manner of black market goods like rhino horns. Valuable resources indeed.
I “believe” that true wealth is acquired from, as I referenced previously, from dreams, purpose and passion. It’s black and white for me, real wealth only comes from that which is good, and positive. Riches, assets, and plunder are not wealth. Yes, I get it they are all interchangeable to most people. It’s like James Howard Kuntsler says " anything goes and nothing matters." No distinction need be made.
I disagree, I liked the world better when there was a distinction. Honor and integrity were words that used to be important as well.
AKG
Mememonkey, you nailed it on the head regarding MK1. If he would actually use data, source it so that others could also see it, and quit it with the fluffy anecdotal statements, his views would be given credence. Having been warned of this several times by me and others, he persists still, so I can only assume he doesn’t have the ability to do so. MK1 could learn a lot from the civil and intellectual discourse going on between Dave, Granny, and Mark.
As you know I believe that wealth is non-aligned. It simply meets needs. Intent has good & evil deeply embedded within it, but wealth itself is nonaligned. As I defined it, wealth is the ability to meet your needs. Great wealth allows you to meet your need easily. And if what you ‘need’ is something basically evil…wealth will dutifully provide it for you. Harvey Weinstein is one recent example.
You said:
I "believe" that true wealth is acquired from, as I referenced previously, from dreams, purpose and passion.I agree with you. But like wealth, I believe that dreams, purpose, passion are also neutral words. [I know, I cut off your subsequent explanation.] Humans have free will. They are allowed to have evil dreams, fell purposes, and angry passions. Can those very real dreams, purposes, and passions lead to "true wealth"? I'm only being pedantic here to help clarify things for myself. What is wealth? What should I put my effort into doing? And why would I do it? Does my AI that watches the market - is it wealth? Or plunder? Why do any of us do what we do? What about the creators of bitcoin? They clearly had a dream, passion, and purpose. Is bitcoin wealth, then? Does all purpose and passion that leads to a result emit true wealth? Or is passion necessary, but not sufficient? For me it all boils down to happiness & survival. I want enough physical (and skill, and informational) wealth to meet my survival needs. (And the odd glass of wine can't hurt either). Happiness I sort out in other ways. Marketing wants my happiness to come from externalities (preferably bought from them). I try not to get sucked into that game, and mostly I succeed. But as part of the happiness thing, there is also my desire to create. I like writing my code because I enjoy the process of creation. Creating makes me happy. In my definition, what I produce is wealth. In your world - is it wealth, or plunder?
’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
I like your perspective Broadspectrum. I would also add that as Chris has often noted, when belief systems become challenged, emotions can run high.
The comments from MKI obviously do raise some hackles but on the positive side, it also presents an opportunity to examine or reexamine the basic concepts of our predicament and the facts which form the basis of that predicament.
IMHO, there is a sizable portion of the population that will never accept the facts as presented nor choose to delve into their own examination of the data. Whatever the personal motive in desiring to challenge a body of work presented for critical evaluation, I can only wish that it would be for a beneficial cause to improve or refine the actionable things individuals can/would do to make the transition to a care giving approach to our planet.
Extraction of wealth (resources) for our own benefit is probably a very basic drive to life itself. Humanity in all of its wisdom (technology) has yet to demonstrate that it has the ability to rise above that drive to create a stable and balanced ecosystem for life in all its forms.
As regards wealth creation, if humanity could accomplish this one feat, I say we would be a very valuable resource to the planet.
Coop
The comments from MKI obviously do raise some hackles but on the positive side, it also presents an opportunity to examine or reexamine the basic concepts of our predicament and the facts which form the basis of that predicament.
Humans have free will. They are allowed to have evil dreams, fell purposes, and angry passions. Can those very real dreams, purposes, and passions lead to “true wealth”?
My answer is “it depends”, did a persons actions cause harm? in the original definition it says “to the benefit of the common good is known as wealth”.Again, any gain gotten from harm, evil or from less than honorable manner is not wealth. It’s riches, assets or plunder, in my opinion, of course.
But as part of the happiness thing, there is also my desire to create. I like writing my code because I enjoy the process of creation. Creating makes me happy. In my definition, what I produce is wealth. In your world - is it wealth, or plunder?
Interesting observation Dave. Does creating really make you happy? What is happiness? What about satisfaction and contentment? Your coding is a tool. And at the end of the day, or the end of our life, we each must look in the mirror, or inward, or in the face of our god, and evaluate if the earth is better because our feet walked on it.
My definition of happiness is that it’s the emotion that’s superficial, fleeting, temporary. A more desirable state of being would be contentment and satisfaction. Perhaps our observations of the most desirable state of being changes with age and our journey in life.
Good discussion Dave. Perspective is like noses, we each have one, and they are not the same. I would enjoy sharing the glass if wine-you sepeak of.
Cheers
AKG
UT: I appreciate your faith in human progress, MKI, but I expect it smacks somewhat of human hubris.
Look, I have no “faith” in human progress at all. It’s just an objective fact that humans had massive economic growth over the last 300 years (which includes my entire life). No faith needed here. To think this will suddenly change in the last half of my life due to lack of energy (or whatever) is a prediction, and one I’m not bold enough to make. To think growth will “probably” continue over my lifetime is also a prediction, yes, but it’s the least “hubris based” prediction a humble person can hold. And it’s been a very profitable view to hold over my entire life so far, of which 40% of these considerable profits now sit in physical gold & real estate, which is fairly tangible. I’ve had no Road to Damascus moment. But boy, it sure seems like many here have a religious fervor & faith in their energy acumen that I lack. I’m just a plodding PE too skeptical for bold claims.
To wit: You showed a graph of energy use…I can only assume you are making the claim that this energy use is the “cause” of our economic growth (not merely that we waste so much energy because we are so rich)? If so, I would note this hasn’t been proven or disproved. It’s just a theory. I’ve examined it, and found it possible yet unconvincing. I’m afraid I lack such faith. Myself, I could easily see people cutting their energy use back 75% yet still living a very high standard of living AND increasing worldwide GDP at the same time (hell many could move to town and cut half of their 70% oil barrel used for transportation and we would all be better off). Or finding a new replacement like we did with oil. I have no idea and make no prediction. What do I know? All I know is that I have no faith whatsoever about humans. I’m merely projecting forward based on the recent past. Could this all change tomorrow, especially with war or some Black Swan? Sure. But this speculation won’t effect my investment strategy.
You, sir, are an idiot.
There, I said it.
You do not seem to understand the costs that sprawl beyond monetary value, nor do you take into account any statistical analysis presented to you in any way, shape, or form. You have not acknowledged nor competently argued any facts presented to you by people whose opinions I may not share, yet whose data I trust. You are a shiv, and a bad one at that.
Chris and Adam, I understand if this gets me banned from PP for a bit. I deserve it, and I’ll take it readily for the community at large.
MKI,
Have you considered the exponential function as it applies to just about just about every function in today’s Economy, Energy, & the Environment? One would be hard pressed to find examples of simple linear functions in regards to the 3E’s. This world is currently in a state of stable instability. The past 40 years of “success” (growth) or whatever you like to call it is largely irrelevant to the next 40+ years. You can claim many here at PP have a religious-like faith in their beliefs about the 3E’s. I would argue quite the opposite; a majority of the crowd at PP believe in simple math. Few (highly educated) people in society have any type of understanding how quickly things can happen with doubling times and the exponential function on the steeper part of the curve (ie the eye dropper filling a football stadium with water at an exponential rate or the lily pad in a lake examples).
https://peakprosperity.com/blog/86131/compounding-problem-crash-course-chapter-4
Perspective like noses? I heard it was opinions, and a different body part entirely.
I’ve been fortunate in my career in that I pretty much enjoy what it is I do. And if if the fun stops for some reason, I change things around so I get back to enjoying my work once again.
Agreed, good discussion. It has me ruminating about wealth, and meeting needs, and happiness.
I’d definitely be up for a glass of wine…
It’s no good, I’m just going to say it…
i just P****d in my pants…
I for one, welcome mk1 comments. Having someone challenge ones belief systems is good for you. It helps you to refine your own arguments. The main thing is to remain civil at all times and for it not to become personal.
I would also recommend peakresilience regulars to visit other sites that promote other world views and make challenging comments on them.
I worry that society is becoming too fragmented in which people just live inside their own echo chamber in cyberspace.