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.

Perpetual Sacrifice

I never see the wind blow. I see what the wind blows. I see the tumbling mocha, triple shot, skinny, grande empty cup, tumbling down the street. I know it is the wind, for were I not to believe that, I would have to believe the cup has become auto-animated, or a whirling dervish has taken up residence in it. Thus it is the wind.

I'm listening to the traffic tonight on Warthen road. Friday sincerity, Friday night rushing speed, tires singing on the new pavement. Important people rushing to these good friends, those spread legs, this or that lonely bar. But all rushing. I wonder if it is the wind that pushes them, but more likely, it is the pre-breed, post fuck, spurting rush of the selfish gene pushing each person to deposit their genetics into the future. And if they both have to be drunk to make that deposit, the genes care not. And I think they are like the wind blown cup. I only guess the motivation, the shape of the push because I see their cars and hear their frantic intention in their speed.

I'm reading "The Ascent of Humanity" on line by Charles Eisenstein. This leaps out at me.

"Perpetual sacrifice. It is an ideology that invades nearly every aspect of our lives. What is being sacrificed? What is the common thread? Most fundamentally, it is a sacrifice of the present for the future. Cut back today so you will have enough for tomorrow. Work comes before play. No pain, no gain. Control yourself. Whether it is in diet, education, or personal development, we find the same sad prescription. Why is it that for so many people, the Heaven of physical fitness, or financial independence, or cessation of an addiction remains forever just as distant as technological Utopia? How long do your New Year's resolutions last? Well, try harder. It is like the man who decided to walk to the horizon, and failing to get there, concluded that he needed to run instead."

I have run enough. I ran because my father ran. He taught me with lines like "put your balls behind it" and "if you want to cry, I'll give you something to cry about." He was a kind but distant man that cared about technology, and the freedom from drudgery and labor more than he cared for his sons. He heard and believed the siren song of "progress, and a brighter tomorrow."
Well dad, you were no different than the boys who are driving up and down the road tonight. Everyone has sold out to the social need to find themselves a way to win in the mating game, and they are listening to each other, watching each other, believing that sacrifice today will bring them joy, success, love and prosperity tomorrow, even as the wealthy two percent of the world slink quietly away with the larger share of your efforts and material goods.

But the hell with that. Here's my Friday night suggestion, my recipe for ex-slave stew. Get naked in the wind, stand still with one hand tight to the collar of your animal self, keep yourself calm, centered and forget distraction of those people stuck deep in the fantasy matrix of "reality." Let the wind blow around you. Watch for the others that are looking at the horizon, their spears in hand, each calm, yet hyper alert for changes that are taking place NOW. These are the players of your children's futures. They have gone a different way, and even if that may be not exactly the best fit for tomorrow - it is by far a better fit than the industrial soup and nuts we are living in and creating every single day, en masse!
The majority of people are simply watching the wrong things. They are watching work, the market, the 401Ks, the home investments, the TV, the latest girlfriend or boyfriend, the latest prescription drug, the latest greatest hope for an every better future if you will only, if you will only, if you will only, continue to believe, continue to work, continue to shop, continue, continue, continue to be the little droid who does because he must, because really, he can't think of one fucking other thing to do.

I have a headset on listening to music that pulls me out of my little self and into my long view epic self, and I can see the forces driving that cup across the barren ground. There are others that see it too. All the hurry around me is like a film shown on fast forward, with monkey antics and frenetic pace signifying nothing. If you haven't figured it out yet, the TV, the cars, the houses, the clothes the jobs are all about your genetic fitness to procreate - to be chosen most fit to put your genes into the future. Unfortunately the fit the boys and girls are trying out on Warthen Road tonight is the WRONG genetic fit for the next half century.

This oil driven society is already creaking, groaning and farting to a halt. The talking heads of the economic priest hood are trying to keep you calm while they prepare their escape to another future where they wait with different chains in hand for us. Are you willing to put on a new set of chains after the crash?
Do you want your children to toil under the same stupid lies that stole your life? What if we just all fucking stopped it? What if we all just didn't lie to each other, didn't posture? What if we said, this ain't working, I quit this shit!?
Oh I hear you, " but we would starve, get a job bum!!!" We went down the wrong path. We sold away the quiet place of great power and creation within ourselves many many generations ago, but like the last one hour of a game of Monopoly we are in the boring part where you already know this game is done. It has not gone to the tireless worker of the capitalist state who worked hard and long and even unto death for the better future life his children. No, the future and the end was cast in concrete the moment we let money be more durable than the assets it was meant to value and purchase. We let money make interest, separate from the real world, separate from what we could make and eat and grow with our own hands.

We used to belong here on this beautiful planet. We used to be part of all that happened. Our need, drive, genetic imperative to grow to the edge of sustainability is no different than any other bug or plant or mammal. Except for one thing. Nothing tops humans. Of course only in the short run. Mother earth is shrugging now. She's found a little itch where it is hard to scratch, but she is twitching, shaking a little, and making antibodies to us.

So do not bequest the rich man's mantra of try harder and put off to tomorrow to your children. A slave begets a slave for the master, and who better to put the chains on a child other than his own father? I see no chains upon you except what you have forged. Rosseau said it and it is more true now than then.

"Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains."

It is obscene. We wake and we put our shackles and chains of perpetual sacrifice on ourselves. We are so used to the yoke that we do not feel it. They, I, are paid for our labor, and they , we, are conditioned, taught, instructed and NEED to buy what has been prepared for us that ensures our perpetual slavery, your perpetual sacrifice.

So put the head phones on. Play some music that pulls you out of here to a place where you are epic, mythic in size and fierceness. Find yourself where you stand strong against the wind that is blowing the Starbucks, the Walmarts, the General Electrics, the entire oil fueled and lubed world into the past along with most of the people you know. Look toward the horizon, be vigilant now, the artic is melting, the easy energy gone, soon no cars, and soon no economy and soon embrace a very different set of needs and expectations.

Ah, Alan is nuts tonight. Each day of your life is a choice. You can choose to open your arms up and look up from your life. Look up, look around. Let the obnoxious buzzing of the insect normals buzzing about, reassuring themselves that all is well cancel themselves out. They are the vacant shells of future ghosts. Find your real people, your close people. Make your tribe, find your heart, care about your children and grand children, really care, prepare them for what comes. Become that epic hero who lives inside you, you were born for this, you are the transition generation to a completely new future. Get mad, get happy, get up, get the fuck up, wake the fuck up! Look around!

We are truly aliens in a strange land. We constructed this. We can de-construct it. You were born whole with a birthright on this incredible world, do you want to live a small live of perpetual sacrifice forever?

Night chickies.