Doom-mongering

1. Intellectuals use each other to verify the state of the world. They depend most upon the experience of members of their own social network, but may also find incidents credible if they are observed by friends of friends. The sense of subjective probability is even influenced by reports of experiences twice removed. Reality testing works quite well as long as the networks remain constant in size, but social networks are doubled or trebled when people are in their twenties and thirties and are then usually maintained intact until the aging process makes itself felt, without the people themselves being conscious of the expansion. Therefore the threatening events coming to their attention per month increase by a factor somewhere around three to ten, depending upon the degree of overlap in social networks. The impression is reinforced and magnified further when they hear that such an impression is the virtually unanimous experience of everyone they meet in their circle. If one adds to this the improvement in communications which ensures that news travels faster and is less likely to be lost in a terminated rumour chain, it becomes evident that it would be a statistical miracle to find an optimist.

2. The current atmosphere of social and environmental catastrophe has been sustained by a cadre of professional doomsters. They have peddled their apocalypses in a multitude of books and articles predicting imminent nuclear, population, resource-depletion, environmental, biotechnological and economic crises. These apocalypse boosters aims to frighten the public into adopting their radical policy prescriptions.