Slipped and fell into another painful bout of clarity.

Clarity about our future is painful. Awakening from complete conformity is often accomplished accidentally by stumbling across blind spots. Places where the media will never lead us, never show us (except after the fact), and certainly never encourage us to explore. Our accepting the conformity is the natural result of a lifetime of not being told anything that would upset us and cause us not to buy the sponsor’s product.

We paid for and received exactly what we asked for. No BAD NEWS. If you want to know who brainwashed you, why you didn’t know about peak oil, global warming, LIMITS TO GROWTH, population overshoot, look no farther than yourself. You created a circular reference – a system where you watch what is presented to you by people that you control by purchasing their goods. How long would you have paid for a TV show that mentioned all the million ways in which you are currently fucked and how it is getting worse?

The habit of any “civilized” society is to conform and to explore only those things that our conformity delivery system suggests we explore. For example, bible scholars can made a life, gain tenure, and teach the distinctions they find on a single page of the Bible. They do not question the book, they question the logic and content contained in the book.

This world society, this methodology of consumption, is our book. We move within it, aspire to climb in power and material goods, but we don’t look to see if our society is a fact or fiction. We don’t question the book! Does this society pass the test of a “good” society? Does it present you with opportunity for exploration, personal growth, relationship development, as well as food, and water and the chance to procreate your genes forward into the future, forever? The society should have a set of cornerstone beliefs in stability and sustainability over a generational time. Do we?

We have a complex society, yet on the whole what do you think? Are we keeping our mandate to pass on a better world to the generations to come or rather are we the fat rats in the granary who can just hardly eat another bite? We sit on the precipice of societal collapse yet barely can hear a word about collapse or what we are doing without recoiling back into our comfort devices. We are the fiddlers at Rome’s burning.

Ok, so you know all that. You know we are not thinking into the future, indeed we are acting as if the party is infinite, the oil infinite, the land and water infinite. Of course we all know that is not true, we just don’t think about it. It has always been tomorrow and if we don’t look it always will be, right? We don’t look at the book, only at the pages. We don’t enjoy these brief moments of clarity.

But today I want to talk about what it feels like to flip back and forth between remembering that this is speeding train heading into a wall, and then snapping back to the daily world, the inside of this book, where we actually live. If you have been reading this and all the other sources of movies, books, websites, and blogs about peak oil, the collapse, global warming, and the die off, you come here already aware of the pain of that exploration. Ouch –yep, we’re even more fucked than yesterday. Yet when you leave, you go back to CNN, the new season on TV and nothing has changed. It’s all good! What do you learn? We learn not to look. The monster in the closet, the monster in our future doesn’t exist as long as we don’t look. What a crock of shit! What the fuck is going on? That’s the schizophrenia we all face as we learn that reality is not.

We each listen, read, and absorb as we can, and we can’t stand it any more we look away. No one wants to discuss this past the bad news that is finally received. If this is the Titantic, we just want to go back into the ballroom finally, because there is nothing to do. I know that, I’m sorry. I wish for all of us that it wasn’t so. But as math works, chemistry works, and 3 apples minus one apple equals 2, it comes.

Our hero wakes one day through a failure of the delivery system of the daily drug that was placed in his water system. A contractor has failed to provide a part in the water system on time, and for two weeks he has been slowly withdrawing from the drug that allows his conformity machines - his tv/ipod/radio/newspaper from effectively killing his curiosity, and numbing his cognitive processes. He is once again starting to subtract 84 million barrels of oil a day from the earth, the one earth, and coming up with “not enough.” Hmmn. He finds himself drawn to the shape of Hubbert’s curve in everything around him. He finds himself looking for things not made from oil and natural gas, surprisingly few.

He has been sleeping fitfully; he feels irascible. He listens to the morning news and it seems absurd. He is slipping into a brief bout of clarity. He hopes they will fix the water soon, he wants to go back, he desires the numbness, the unknowing. He wants the time before he understood when everything around us was supposed to be getting better and better and more and more. He wants the peaceful sleep of childhood.

Peak oil means peak power. We are right now at the top of the mountain of cheap energy via petrochemicals. We wield the largest number of energy slaves that will ever be fielded on the earth. We are the most powerful people who will every have existed. Of course, to generations to come we will be the most hated as we squandered the earth’s most precious treasure trove. Oil.

Lucidity at the peak of energy production - the peak of the Empire - is a shocking slap, that subsides to a depressive recognition, yet, yet, you could feel it there in the background all your life. You knew. This was not sustainable! You looked away, I looked away and waited for others to make the sacrifices to cry out to the great brainwashed crowd, “the emperor has no clothes!” I let it slide, you let it slide, and many of you, most of you, and I, knew it. That makes the moments of clarity, the moments where we think outside the box, even more poignant, painful.

The brainwashing is only effective because we desire the dream. We are willing participants in our own delusion because otherwise we have to admit our guilt, or lack of action, our truth of our species drive to procreate ever more, faster and to the edge of all resources. Our little trick – that of believing the absurd political “truths” of religions that said the earth was made for man let us destroy and befoul our very home. Shit I knew that was bullshit and so did you. Who are you kidding? We just wanted it, just because we could. It is good to be king.

So when you’re feeling all alone in your painful recognition the blatantly obvious, once you stop pretending not to see, seek out others who have the courage to let the guilt, pain, and hopelessness in. It is like an intervention. You can’t get to it until you let yourself go all the way down. But oh the painful moments of clarity, the stabbing wound of epiphany when we are not the heroes of future stories but the villains.

At the bottom we can start planning for the future for those who will be left. We cannot bequeath this world to even one more generation. We must give them a path out of this, even if only for the few. Find others who will look, who will hear, who can stand the pain, at least long enough to begin to plan.

It is hard to know what we can accomplish, but if we begin to see a future, if we can imagine the stories of any future that is sustainable we can begin to aim ourselves towards that future. If you can only work in brief moments of clarity – then do so, then head back to the comfort of TV, books, etc. However do not mistake your moments of clarity and pain as the “insane” time. Your time in front of the tube is the fantasy, the diversion, purchased at tremendous cost from your children’s future.