Potemkin Villager wrote:nexus wrote:Nice idea
More importantly, who on here would be Sheldon?
yep it's a pretty tricky one that!
On the question of his eminence the arch druid perhaps greater
minds than mine would care to provide a short and concise precis in clear English as to precisely what he is getting at in the quotation at the beginning of this thread and what exactly it reveals.
I have tried reading it several times and am none the wiser ending up
only with a headache and the feeling he is taking the piss.
I have paraphrased each paragraph in turn (in blue) and have provided a critical response.
The most important of those forces, as I’ve argued in previous posts, is the widening mismatch between the fantasy of entitlement that has metastasized through contemporary American society, on the one hand, and the ending of an age of fossil-fueled imperial extravagance on the other. As the United States goes bankrupt trying to maintain its global empire, and industrial civilization as a whole slides down the far side of a dizzying range of depletion curves, it’s becoming harder by the day for Americans to make believe that the old saws of upward mobility and an ever brighter future have any relevance to their own lives—and yet those beliefs are central to the psychology, the self-image, and the worldview of most Americans. The resulting cognitive dissonance is hard to bear, and apocalyptic fantasies offer a convenient way out. They promise that the world will change, so that the believers don’t have to.
“People's expectations of handouts from the state might properly be considered a form of cultural cancer that has been fed by the availability of fossil fuels. Peak oil means this must end However, there is a psychological/cultural lag where expectations of entitlement are not keeping up with the the changing reality on the ground.”
This first paragraph completely ignores the fact that the vast majority of humans are denied access to the primary means of production and so are unable to operate outside of such a system. Thus, if that system in which they are imprisoned does not provide them with enough work or enough money from the work that they do, it is hardly surprising that they should be able to expect that they are compensated in the form of social security benefits.
Another example? Consider the rhetoric of elite privilege that clusters around the otherwise inoffensive label "1%." That rhetoric plays plenty of roles in today’s society, but one of them pops up reliably any time I talk about using less. Why, people ask me in angry tones, should they give up their cars when the absurdly rich are enjoying gigantic luxury yachts? Now of course we could have a conversation about the total contribution to global warming of cars owned by people who aren’t rich, compared to that of the fairly small number of top-end luxury yachts that usually figure in such arguments, but there’s another point that needs to be raised. None of the people who make this argument to me have any control over whether rich people have luxury yachts. All of them have a great deal of control over whether and how often they themselves use cars. Blaming the global ecological crisis on the very rich thus functions, in practice, as one more way to evade the necessity of unwelcome change.
“People who complain about having to reduce their lifestyle because the rich will not be forced to reduce their lifestyle should stop complaining because it is impossible to stop rich people over consuming”.
Here, Greer demonstrates little if any understanding of (or, perhaps, interest in) the psychology of a complex social species such as ours. Equity and fairness are
everything. If people are expected to reduce their access to resources, they need to see that this is being implemented fairly. Otherwise it will never happen. This is an inescapable fact of life of human psychology.
Along these same lines, dear reader, as you surf the peak oil and climate change blogosphere and read the various opinions on display there, I’d encourage you to ask yourself what those opinions amount to in actual practice. A remarkably large fraction of them, straight across the political landscape from furthest left to furthest right and including all stops in between, add up to demands that somebody else, somewhere else, do something. Since the people making such demands rarely do anything to pressure, or even to encourage, those other people elsewhere to do whatever it is they’re supposed to do, it’s not exactly hard to do the math and recognize that here again, these opinions amount to so many ways of insisting that the people holding them don’t have to give up the extravagant and unsustainable lifestyles most people in the industrial world think of as normal and justifiable.
“Each one of us should stop expecting someone else to shoulder the burden of a reduced lifestyle”.
No shit Sherlock. Also, see my response to previous paragraph.
There’s another way to make the same point, which is that most of what you’ll see being proposed in the peak oil and climate change blogosphere has been proposed over and over and over again already, without the least impact on our predicament. From the protest marches and the petitions, through the latest round of grand plans for energy futures destined to sit on the shelves cheek by jowl with the last round, right up to this week’s flurry of buoyantly optimistic blog posts lauding any technofix you care to name from cold fusion and algal biodiesel to shale gas and drill-baby-drill: been there, done that, used the T-shirt to wipe another dozen endangered species off the face of the planet, and we’re still stuck in the same place. The one thing next to nobody wants to talk about is the one thing that distinguished the largely successful environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s from the largely futile environmental movement since that time, which is that activists in the earlier movement were willing to start the ball rolling by making the necessary changes in their own lives first.
“The activist movement was better when I was a lad”.
This does not really merit any critical analysis. It sounds like little more than the nostalgic ramblings of, presumably, an old man.
Meanwhile, of course, the economy, the infrastructure, and the resource flows that make those perks and privileges and comforts possible are coming apart around them. There’s a great deal of wry amusement to be gained from watching one imaginary cataclysm after another seize the imagination of the peak oil scene or society as a whole, while the thing people think they’re talking about—the collapse of industrial civilization—has been unfolding all around them for several years now, in exactly the way that real collapses of real civilizations happen in the real world.
“I am far above the petty concerns of the here and now and have the vision to see the “bigger picture””.
Here, Greer is demonstrating the superior size of his willy.
Look around you, dear reader, as the economy stumbles through another round of contraction papered over with increasingly desperate fiscal gimmicks, the political system of your country moves ever deeper into dysfunction, jobs and livelihoods go away forever, whatever social safety net you’re used to having comes apart, towns and neighborhoods devastated by natural disasters are abandoned rather than being rebuilt, and the basic services that once defined a modern society stop being available to a larger and larger fraction of the people of the industrial world. This is what collapse looks like. This is what people in the crumbling Roman Empire and all those other extinct civilizations saw when they looked out the window. To those in the middle of the process, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, it seems slow, but future generations with the benefit of hindsight will shake their heads in wonder at how fast industrial civilization went to pieces.
“It's all going to get worse, bit by bit as we slowly grind down from the hydrocarbon age”.
Again, no shit Sherlock
