Projection

Give two people the exact same situation, and much of the time they'll come to completely different conclusions. It works with religion, people project what they think onto the universe, it works with politics, it works with relationships. And it works when people are predicting what the world's gonna look like. I was reading through WorldChanging and one of the blogs linked from it, and people were discussing what the world's gonna look like in the future. In particular, after oil starts to run out. Some of the people were looking forward to a world that sounded a lot like the 1950s, without refrigeration and stuff, others were saying how cities were going to die and the world was going to go back to something that sounds a lot like the middle ages. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of changes and shakeups and a lot of really Bad Stuff going on thanks to climate change and energy reserves running low and stuff, especially with many governments (especially ours) not caring or doing anything to prepare or even just do things in less wasteful ways. But cities will still be there, and probably actually get denser. The real losers, I think, are gonna be the suburbs. They're completely designed around cars and the internal combustion engine. Not to mention how poorly man of the houses are built. But some of that probably comes from me projecting my own experiences with crappy subdivisions and such. Whatever the case, the future's definitely going to be weird and different than the world now.

And back to projecting, it's like how because my besetting sin is laziness, I blame a lot of the problems with people on laziness, rather than stupidity or evil or things like that. Of course, I think I'm right about that, too.