<Energy Prices, Inflation and DenialThe Oil DrumDrumBeat: February 5, 2008>

200 comments on I am Human, I'm American, and I'm Addicted to Oil...

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JonL on February 5, 2008 - 10:04am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Regarding the post on Natural born liars:

Anthropologists use the words emic and etic for explanations of social behavior. The emic explanation is how people explain their own culture whereas the etic explanation is how an outsider, who is supposedly impartial (i.e., the anthropologist), explains it. What this means is that people evolve a certain culture in response to their ecology (I am taking the World System's view here) and then make up stories to justify/explain it as well as to use as a teaching aid for their children. Every fable, fairy tale and morality story is teaching people how they should behave. These children will become the next generation of good, god fearing, moral villagers, whatever that culture defines as good, god fearing and moral. Natural born liars is just another phrase for social propaganda and conditioning. We believe what we believe because believing that way helps us cooperate with our neighbors and get something beneficial for ourselves. A good example of this is the need for efficient, reliable and sober workers for the factories during the industrial revolution. This created the idea of the Protestant work ethic.

Of course, the dirty secret is that anthropologists don’t apply these techniques to their own cultures. We are, after all, the ‘impartial’ ones.

Jon.

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Jason Bradford on February 5, 2008 - 5:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

From a cultural materialism point of view I see various social movements like Slow Food, Downshifters, Voluntary Simplicity, Relocalizers, etc. as ahead of the curve. They will be considered odd-balls, ignored, scorned, etc. by mainstream culture up until the time when the material conditions plus some leadership starts aligning with them. In one possible scenario, these movements will be co-opted by existing institutions because the big institutions have the means and the historical cultural clout to drive change.

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Stuart Staniford on February 5, 2008 - 10:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I see them expressing the Shadow (in a Jungian sense) of the dominant culture. The dominant culture is exploitive, fast-paced, globally integrated, competitive, unequal, rational/quantitative, views the universe as a pile of inanimate natural resources to be quantified and utilized as rapidly as possible, etc, etc. So all the "various social movements" you list (hmm, we need some kind of umbrella term here...) are expressing the opposite of that - slow, non-competitive, local not global, emotional/intuitive not rational, socially just, viewing nature/environment as sacred, not quantitative, etc, etc

Especially, it seems to me, not quantitative. And so prone to doing things like advocating biofuels "because they are more sustainable" without understanding the consequences of what will happen if they scale.

Jung would say (I think) that our tasks, as individuals and as a society, is not to become our Shadow, but rather to integrate our shadow into the dominant (ego) personality.

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Roger K on February 6, 2008 - 2:50pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I think that the dichotomy that you propose is too simple minded. On the Energy Blog you will find many enthusiastic supporters of biofuels who are clearly part of the competitive, growth oriented main, stream culture. Also there are many "greens" promoting biofuels, local food production etc who are planning to have their 401K fund growing at 8% per year forever, and are thus clearly part of the main stream culture. They see "green" technology as a way pursuing constant increases in wealth in a less destructive manner,not as a means of slowing down or sharing resources more fairly.

Human beings have a rational faculty that they use to solve specific concrete problems, but I do not see much sign that people's larger life goals are much driven by rationality. People are strongly resistant to major disruptions in the manner of living to which they have become habituated. When such disruption is threatened a strong irrational denial mechanism starts operating. In my perception smart, analytical people are subject to this denial just as much as more intuitive people. Their denial may be more subtle than that of more intuitive people, but the confidence with which many of them predict a hundred more years of economic growth seem to me to be more strongly driven by wishful thinking than by an objective evaluation of the probabilities.

To my mind the most rational response to resource depletion is to forge new social agreements which voluntarily limit consumption and which share resources fairly. I have been told over and over that this idea is impractical, unsalable, inconsistent with human nature, etc. I have even recently been accused of being insane for holding this idea. Nevertheless, from a purely physical point of view this is clearly the most sensible response to the crisis we are facing. Furthermore, in the long run we must create economic institutions that do require constant growth for healthy functioning. If we cannot get our brains around this idea today, why do we believe that people a hundred years from today will be able to do so?

'Localization' is not my mantra for achieving this goal. As transportation energy costs grows economies of scale based on centralized production will change, but barring a catastrophic collapse of energy supplies we should expect a continuous change of economic efficiency and not an abrupt transformation from centrality to locality. Of cource if social structures collapse then radical localization may be forced on us even if it is not the most efficient choice from a purely physical point of view. Insisting that we go on growing until necessity forces us to do otherwise increases the likelihood of such a social collapse.

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