Desperate People

It just occurred to me that all these 911 truthers and people who follow Alex Jones around are all just really desperate for a metanarrative. These are people who may well be smart enough to know that the things they believe are fucking crazy, but what would they do with their lives then? The feel like they're doing something really important by handing out fliers to people on the subway and protesting at their tea bagger parties. Without that, they'd have to go back to their depressing, pointless lives.

Our Need for a Metanarrative

In the later part of this lecture, Chuck talks about how we don't have a really powerful story that grabs everyone's attention these days. We have no underlying struggle or aim to our culture nowadays. The Cold War is over, too many people think the war on terror is bullshit to really take that seriously and the environmental movement has yet to gain enough strength to inspire that many people. Things may get more interesting if global warming starts to really have some impact, but until a few more major cities are flooded and there are heat waves in Scandinavia, global warming isn't going to get people out of their chairs.

In all likelihood, things will remain painfully boring unless the Singularity hits.