[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The critical eye ...

[Bill Totten]

... for the nightmare and the dream

by Jan Lundberg

Culture Change Letter #187 (June 15 2008)


Oil/food crisis and government dissolution

Recent rises in oil prices help more of us perceive that something's
very wrong with what we've built and paved and sprayed. Anyone taking a
look around can feel overwhelmed by the sprawling petroleum
infrastructure, especially if the observer has any sense for its
fragility or impermanence. Becoming worried or sickened is a sane
response. Some also realize how we have been suffocated and brainwashed
to see little else than the mass illusion and the spoon-fed image of a
similar green-consuming future.

Then there are those who are hungry right now around the world,
protesting unprecedented fuel and food costs. These protesters will not
back down. Regimes will not only topple, as government rule will
dissolve for better or worse. This is eventually coming to the USA too,
and to all nations, because when masses of people anywhere experience
instability, and business-as-usual comes to a halt, the global economy
affects all - rapidly and painfully as it fails.

Somehow this vulnerability has been sold as "wealth" and "progress".
While it dawns on some of us that the materialist world is stripped
naked before us, die-hards still believe "prosperity" can be had widely
- although it never came for anyone but the few who gluttonize
non-renewable resources. The end result of the growing conflict will be,
after the likely bloodletting, a return to local economics and real
community. Meanwhile, the mess is right outside our window and has me
thinking:

It takes an unpopular critical eye to see the ubiquitous, utter waste
and be hit by the folly. The motor-vehicle oriented landscape and all
the businesses and properties depend on dwindling, ever-more costly
petroleum for their usually needless products and services. These
unsustainable establishments are in our face and keep us hemmed in our
mental prison. Like a giant bloodsucker it is something we ignore as if
it were a necessary appendage of civilized evolution.

Human relations can be conscious

Humanity is only now about to wake up to the dead-end of
petroleum-fueled exuberance (as William Catton called our lifestyle in
his 1980 book Overshoot). In so doing, people will not be able to help
but realize also that their social relations have also been an
embarrassing sham - neither enlightened nor just. Can there be another
way? It is more than a dream.

When love is relegated to romantic fantasy (of the honeymoon, say) or
familial duty (mainly feeding one's children and packing them off to be
educated by strangers), we miss most of life's opportunity for loving
and for sharing positive experiences with unlimited numbers of people we
can meet. We are deprived of this not by "human nature" but by the
narrow, controlled and repressive society we know to be all about
private property and individual gain. We are expected to find a
semblance of love only behind our own walls. Within our worship halls'
walls it's hardly worth calling love when authority judges us. It does
so illegitimately.

Creativity is the norm underneath

Poets and other artists and revolutionaries should not be the only ones
to see through the barren, ordered construct of the market economy and
what it has done to our natural surroundings and souls. The full
potential of beautiful creating that every person is capable of every
day can be realized only if we somehow all abandon or remove the
technological (=artificial) system that has already failed us. Through
it we have not only let down one another, but also our fellow creatures.
They are, we sometimes find when we are open enough, lovely and pure of
spirit - life itself. Their wildness is their enviable simplicity and
superiority, and is the source of undying admiration for those of us who
know there are chains around us that choke off clear thought and
feeling. Most of us moderns vainly imagine ourselves created above all
other species - above life itself! But each of the countless species
occupies successfully an essential niche in our common ecosystem. Yes,
we can destroy them - but we only destroy ourselves, as we are just
barely beginning to find out. Our aim, to a critical eye, seems only to
gain short-term, mindless comfort. Even as we achieve a mass extinction
for the future fossil record, we prove our "superiority".

To write this makes me feel something more real and permanent than
what's possible when being overwhelmed by the outrageously ugly
corporate eateries and stores here along Interstate 5 in Washington
State. I'm on a large shuttle bus en route to transfer to a car and a
train. Though I am as separate from "The System" as one can be and still
be connected to the "mainstream" I wish I were escaping like a native
American once could, less than 150 years ago - to lands beyond the white
invaders.

The critical eye that some of us utilize is curiously rare in this age
of denial as the American Dream bursts with it's unintended toxic
excrement. I'm past imagining any acceleration of terminating the
"global warming machine" (that is, industrial society), because I face
that people are still far from seeing the need to change their way of
life. They are not ready to storm city hall or the television stations;
instead they will storm the supermarkets and palaces of the rich.

Why that's inevitable: people remain either unexposed to alternatives to
ecocide and their own oppression, or, even when they have been
introduced, they stubbornly reject seriously participating in conserving
energy and non-renewable materials. Imagine that! Instead, they hand
over some more dollars to corporations for discretionary items.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one to almost vomit from the harsh
reality of our impotence, evil, apathy, and needless self-destruction.

Offering "a solution" to our ills and predicament is impossible, and it
has been so for probably centuries - although stamping out the emerging
dominant culture of greed and exploitation would have been easier long
ago. Perhaps it would even have been a trivial task if the first
mutation of neolithic culture, changing into what would soon become
Western Civilization, were nipped in the bud. Instead, the mistake (or
crime) was allowed to proliferate into mass selfishness enshrined
especially for the most aggressive and cruel among us.

Curtains

How did we keep allowing a vicious yet self-gratifying system to rule
over us generation after generation, even when we rebelled? One way was
to appeal to our superiority as young things, swollen with fancy
knowledge and technology. We pitied the older generations who didn't
have our technical abilities. We laughed that ancestors had no
telephones - how quaint and pathetic of them! If only they had been able
to enjoy what we know and do.

Except, instead, each new modern generation is in reality more ignorant
and weaker than the previous. More information does not a great human
make, nor does it serve to nurture and protect one's family. To the
contrary, we find.

As we have run up against the end of the automobile age - no more
running around in sleek comfort - we are starting to feel anxious about
even being able to have any transportation at all, or a livable
environment in which to do it. As we see desperate industries trying to
hang on in their gargantuan and overstretched states, trying to become
more energy-efficient to survive, the realization hits: At this point in
our abuse of Mother Earth and waste of nonrenewable energy, if we
persist in manufacturing any kind of car or airplane on a mass scale, we
flush our ecosystem and climate down the toilet.

As my father used to say, be of good cheer. Change is coming soon, and
it's far deeper and mind-blowing than Barack Obama is hinting at.

_____

Reflections from Le Bon

After discussion the above essay with Bill Le Bon, consultant for
Culture Change, we had a discussion that resulted in this statement
(mostly by him and partly by me, JL):

People are busy working for the man because they get the house, wife,
car and food. They give their day to the man but get to come back to the
wife and kids. They resent and yet appreciate what the man provides. But
they don't question why they want the house, wife and car. If they did
they might not want it. If people kept in mind that food and water and
shelter should be free, their politics would be different. But much of
what's out in the world is scary, such as homelessness, and keeps people
from learning about alternatives. To embrace the margin requires
believing in a better way based on much information and visible examples
of would be viable options. If they were obvious, people would drop out
from working for the man. They're out there, but the media don't cover
it and keeps bombarding people with messages to consume. It takes
profit-generation to get media. Money and power are goals in themselves
and have their adherents. The people with values don't have power or money.

_____

Jan Lundberg, founder of Culture Change, was a well-known oil-industry
analyst when he changed over to nonprofit environmental activism in
1988. His work has since been profiled in The Washington Post, Sun
Magazine, Associated Press, and he has broadcast his ideas on CBS Radio
Network, NPR, and elsewhere.

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=178&Itemid=1


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