For those who havent and even those who already have viewed my recent blog post "Peak Everything", I have recently updated it and recommend a re-read as I have added some pertinent, interesting new information:
Peak Everything
Thursday, December 29, 2011
A grantlawrence.blogspot.com Round Up
Research on the Roman Empire's Wealth Inequality Spells Bad News for the American Empire
Grant Lawrence--Bodhi Thunder
Researchers have found that the income inequality in the United States is far worse than that experienced in Ancient Rome.
One of the major reasons identified for the collapse of the Roman Empire is that the common people no longer cared about supporting an Empire that favored the Rich Patricians over them.
Today we see the 99% of Americans realizing that the system is rigged against them. That their politicians are puppets of the Super Elite. That the endless wars and the destruction of the Constitution is the byproduct of our Globalist Empire.
2012 may not be the end of the world, but it may be the beginning of the end for the American Empire.
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2011/12/research-on-roman-empire-wealth.html
News Report: See Secret UFO Being Transported Down Kansas Hwy
In the news report below, you will see a strange "UFO" craft being towed down a Kansas Highway.
The local Sherrif says he was told to keep quiet about it.
Residents say it looked to be a UFO.
Reports are that it was some sort of governmental experimental craft.
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2011/12/news-report-see-secret-ufo-being.html
5000 Years of UFO Visits May Offer Clues to Stonehenge and Crop Circles
Grant Lawrence--Bodhi Thunder
Wiltshire, England is one of the most mystical spots on earth.
Not only does it have Stonehenge and surrounding stone monuments, but it also boasts of numerous crop circles that generally appear there every year.
But there is something else strange about Wiltshire and Stonehenge. UFO sightings have been going on there for thousands of years.
Recently it was reported that the massive stones of Stonehenge came from Southwest Wales. Many people cannot understand how an ancient people with presumably limited technology could transport these stones hundreds of miles. In fact, many cannot understand how the stones were even cut and placed in their positions by ancient Celts.
So some people attribute these massive stones to the work of UFO Aliens. A similar theory is used to explain the pyramids around the world.
But massive stones, like those on Easter Island, have perplexed even the scientists that laugh at an ET explanation.
However there does seem to be a strange link between the UFO sightings, the crop circles, and Stonehenge. Perhaps in the future this link will become better understood.
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2011/12/5000-years-of-ufo-visits-may-offer.html
Another Fukushima? Not If, but When.
Grant Lawrence--Bodhi Thunder
As I have previously reported,
Japan's Buddhist Federation Warns "Nuclear Power Threatens Life"
The Federation consists of 96 million Buddhists and they are rightly taking a stand against nuclear power.
Japanese mothers are also trying to stop nuclear power in Japan.
It is also important to keep in mind that a major quake could hit California as well as other quake prone parts of the world causing Fukushimas outside of Japan.
Clearly we are playing a dangerous game with Nuclear power and people the world over are beginning to wake up. As long as we have these nuclear power plants, there will be more Fukushimas. The question is not if, but when.
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2011/12/another-fukushima-not-if-but-when.html
More:
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/
 |
| Image via Wikipedia |
Researchers have found that the income inequality in the United States is far worse than that experienced in Ancient Rome.
According to research done recently by historians Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen, cited by Per Square Mile's Tim De Chant, the income inequality gap in modern day America is far greater than the separation within the societies during the days of Julius Caesar. During the Ancient Roman Republic, says the duo’s study published in Per Square Mile, the top one percent controlled 16 percent of society’s wealth. If you fire up the Delorean and go from the Diocletian Empire to twenty-first century USA, you’ll see that things are a little more uneven. Today, that one percent on top controls 40 percent of the country’s wealth.
In coming up with their research, Schiedel and Friesen mulled over papyri ledgers, old school estimates and Biblical passages, specifically at around the times when the Roman Empire was at its population peak — around 150 C.E. Putting together the top members of the hierarchy around that times — the patricians, senators, equestrians and decuriones — the researchers have determined that the top 1.5 percent of the 70 million or so citizens of the empire had all-in-all around 20 percent of the wealth....Read More at RT
One of the major reasons identified for the collapse of the Roman Empire is that the common people no longer cared about supporting an Empire that favored the Rich Patricians over them.
Today we see the 99% of Americans realizing that the system is rigged against them. That their politicians are puppets of the Super Elite. That the endless wars and the destruction of the Constitution is the byproduct of our Globalist Empire.
2012 may not be the end of the world, but it may be the beginning of the end for the American Empire.
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2011/12/research-on-roman-empire-wealth.html
News Report: See Secret UFO Being Transported Down Kansas Hwy
In the news report below, you will see a strange "UFO" craft being towed down a Kansas Highway.
The local Sherrif says he was told to keep quiet about it.
Residents say it looked to be a UFO.
Reports are that it was some sort of governmental experimental craft.
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2011/12/news-report-see-secret-ufo-being.html
5000 Years of UFO Visits May Offer Clues to Stonehenge and Crop Circles
 |
| Image via Wikipedia |
Wiltshire, England is one of the most mystical spots on earth.
Not only does it have Stonehenge and surrounding stone monuments, but it also boasts of numerous crop circles that generally appear there every year.
But there is something else strange about Wiltshire and Stonehenge. UFO sightings have been going on there for thousands of years.
...In fact, the recently released British government UFO documents state that “Stonehenge is off the chart when it comes to reported UFO sightings over the past 5,000 years.” At the same time, ancient druids considered Stonehenge to be sacred ground were “ancient astronauts” would visit “over the centuries;” while a vortex around these famous stones produces a “concentrated energy field” that druids say “radiates from both the stones and the ground” producing a sort of mental energy and awareness that allows some druid members to “understand such things as if the New Year will be good or bad.” According to the “Stonehenge vortexes,” good things are in store for the planet and its people in 2012; as a counter to the Mayan Calendar predicting 2012 as “a time of apocalypse.”....Read More at Huliq.com
Recently it was reported that the massive stones of Stonehenge came from Southwest Wales. Many people cannot understand how an ancient people with presumably limited technology could transport these stones hundreds of miles. In fact, many cannot understand how the stones were even cut and placed in their positions by ancient Celts.
So some people attribute these massive stones to the work of UFO Aliens. A similar theory is used to explain the pyramids around the world.
But massive stones, like those on Easter Island, have perplexed even the scientists that laugh at an ET explanation.
However there does seem to be a strange link between the UFO sightings, the crop circles, and Stonehenge. Perhaps in the future this link will become better understood.
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2011/12/5000-years-of-ufo-visits-may-offer.html
Another Fukushima? Not If, but When.
 |
| Image by Sterneck via Flickr |
As I have previously reported,
Japan's Buddhist Federation Warns "Nuclear Power Threatens Life"
The Federation consists of 96 million Buddhists and they are rightly taking a stand against nuclear power.
Japanese mothers are also trying to stop nuclear power in Japan.
Japan's nuclear power industry, which once ignored opposition, now finds its existence threatened by women angered by official opaqueness on radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after it was struck by an earthquake-driven tsunami in March.It is important to keep in mind that another Fukushima could happen in Japan at any time. That Island nation could be hit with another massive quake which would destroy another nuclear plant. Those plants, as we have seen with Fukushima, are not capable of handling big quakes.
"Mothers are at the forefront of various grassroots movements that are working together to stop the operation of all nuclear plants in Japan from 2012," Aileen Miyoko Smith, head of Green Action, a non- governmental organisation (NGO) that promotes renewable energy told IPS.
More than 100 anti-nuclear demonstrators, most of them women, met with officials of the Nuclear Safety Commission this week and handed over a statement calling for a transparent investigation into the accident and a permanent shutdown of all nuclear power plants....Read More at Guardian.co.uk
It is also important to keep in mind that a major quake could hit California as well as other quake prone parts of the world causing Fukushimas outside of Japan.
Clearly we are playing a dangerous game with Nuclear power and people the world over are beginning to wake up. As long as we have these nuclear power plants, there will be more Fukushimas. The question is not if, but when.
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2011/12/another-fukushima-not-if-but-when.html
More:
http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/
Podcast Recommend: "Philosophy Talk"
Latin-American Philosophy
Latin American Philosophy began centuries before anything of much philosophical consequence happened in North America. Yet in our own time, Latin American Philosophy is undergoing a protracted identity crisis. Is it just transplanted European philosophy? A reaction to analytical philosophy? A reflection of the themes of liberation theology? John and Ken explore Latin America's philosophical traditions with Joesph Orosco from Oregon State University, author of Cesar Chavez and the Common Sense of Nonviolence. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at OSU in Corvallis.
Download this episode (right click save as)
Is it Wrong to Wreck the Earth?
There are too many people, doing too much damage to the ecosystem, essentially guaranteeing that future generations will have a damaged Earth, and will have to invest incredible amounts of time, money and labor to repairing what can be repaired. But future generations are made up of people who don't yet exist – what obligations do we have to them? And what obligations, if any, do we have to our fellow fauna and the flora we all depend on? John and Ken welcome environmental ethicist and celebrated author Kathleen Moore for a program recorded live at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
Download this episode (right click save as)
more:
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/philosophy-talks/
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Peak Everything
Peak Everything with Richard Heinberg
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
(recently revised, cleaned up and made more entertaining)
For the Techno-Optimists and those who champion a cultural response of intensification of the most heinous aspects of our failing death culture, namely the efficient conversion of the living into the dead, of our living home into a veritable Death Star, replete with an overbearing Shock Troop/Goon Command/Gestapo and literally, quite literally a hyper violent, repressive Fascist political structure wrapped up in the patriotic flag of "Freedom, Hope and Change".
In every instance of failed societies, from the Maya to the Romans, towards the very end they all exhibited an intensification of the very dysfunctional cultural behavior that culminated in their fall, be it monumental architecture, claims of divine authority accompanied by grander legitimization ceremonies, wars of imperial conquest and gross insults on the environment. This is superbly explicated by Jared Diamond here.
We live on a finite sphere of a system, a planet that is not free from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics or Entropy, it is axiomatic that we cannot "grow", in terms of urban "development" and human population size indefinitely. Yet the techno-optimists and Neo-Classical economists in company with Milton "Free Market" Friedman want you to believe the impossible. Now the Universe is chiming in with a bitch slap to return to reality in the form of depleted oceans, fossilized aquifers, polluted everything, Deep Water Horizon's and Fukushima's and more looming on the horizon.
I think as time goes by it is becoming apparent that the only ones who truly cling to this antiquated, outmoded and patently false worldview are the status quo, the 1% (well when you count the Goon Commando's and the rest of the Military Industrial Corporate Congressional Complex the number is closer to 5 or 10%) who benefit from such a self-destructive system. But thats the trick. They think they benefit from this. But I dont think they do. Nor do I think if they truly understood that the implications of the perpetuation of this failed ideology meant the consignment of their children (no we are past talking about the consignment of their grandchildren, the crises are knocking at the door now) to impoverishment and possibly/likely death.
I believe every organism of sufficient capacity to alter their environment for the improvement of their material well being eventually encounters a point in time when they are required to re-examine and modify the innate tendencies inherent in a consciousness developed in austere conditions over millennia upon millennia that favored self-preservation and procreation. We now are confronted with an organism that has a dangerous mismatch of sophisticated technological ability and a still immature or primitive level of behavior and interaction with its broader environment.
The beings that are here to assist Humanity into this metamorphic process that is before us and that is requisite for our continued survival have also faced a similar turning point and consciously chose to change. Many organisms have not made it beyond this point. If you follow mainstream astronomical developments, your'e likely aware that we have discovered not one but four planets in distant solar systems that occupy the "habitable zone" of their respective star. The truth is, we don't need to look that far for intelligent life elsewhere, we have been in direct contact with it all throughout human history. But why, why are the mainstream scientific institutions making this a part of our world of ideas now? Could it be to seed the idea that the strategies historically employed by past failing societies, which involved a spilling over of its population into other regions of the globe, aka the Spanish Conquest of the 15th century onward and "Manifest Destiny" to the west of the Mississippi in North America is our pre-ordained destiny?
Its a form of collective denial, for to truly confront the origin and continuity of our collective insanity, which many believe to be a collective manifestation of our ego, would require a reappraisal of our behavior and imply a massive shift of consciousness being requisite for our continued survival and well being. But if youre in deep denial, and you have benefited from the inequality, the slavery the self-inflicted wars for geo-strategic access to resources abroad and control and pacification of society at home, of the massive insults on the environment, and you have undue, biased influence on mass consciousness, you literally own and control what is covered in all forms of mainstream media, well guess what, youre going to justify the insanity.
"This is natural behavior, Survival of the Fittest!" (Actually, Darwin attempted to modify his original hypothesis towards the end of his life to say that organisms that respond the most quickly to changes in their environment tend to pass on their genes and drive evolution (which strongly contradicts a conservative oriented ideology, again see Jared Diamond's work above for the result of failing societies remaining rigidly conservative during times of dynamic upheaval), but the British elite/status quo got behind the original formulation of the theory of evolution with fervor as it supported the massive inequality in Britain at the time, and that brings up another point: it wasnt exactly Charles Darwin who occupied a wealthy rung of the socio-economic ladder that first posited the idea of natural selection but Alfred Russel Wallace, a lower class commoner, one of the 18th century's 95% who wrote to Darwin expressing the original idea).
"No we dont have to change our behavior, for how will we (the status quo) be able to continue to have a vampiric relationship with the whole!?" "We have to go out there to the Final Frontier and Democratize the galaxy, Make the Milky Way (and beyond, to "boldly go where no man has gone before") safe for democracy!" "The sentient beings elsewhere are Terrorists, they threaten our Consumer Freedoms!"
"Anglo-Saxon Neo-Conservatives (and Zionist Jews) are the Masters of the Universe! Any threat to our divine supremacy is terrorism and must be either eliminated or taken to Guantanamo immediately and indefinitely"!
"We must prove to the rest of society living in abject squalor (this author sleeps in a tent by the way, for those who have yet to read my introduction to the right) a justification for our massive mis-allocation of resources and energy into pretty much the hands of the few under the guise of "Counter-Terrorism" and "Democracy Promotion". "How will we do this?! Oh how did we sell the invasion of Iraq to them? Oh we will orchestrate a fake alien invasion! 9/11 writ large! Theyve come for our meager resources!! They hate us because of our consumer freedoms!"
"Yes we most go out and "democratize" the beings there at those planets and convert them to our religion of the worship of material crap and reductionistic science and death."(like that depicted in the psi-fi film Avatar).
No.
We wont be allowed to.
This insanity ends here.
Again the beings of great sentience and advanced psychic and technological ability survived and thrived because they chose to grow up and build an advanced society on a foundation of love, empathy, inclusiveness, equanimity and compassion.
Whether or not Humanity chooses to grow up and metamorphose into our higher potential is a question that remains to be answered.
P.S. The idea of travelling to these distant earth sized planets is a tall order being that they are a considerable distance away. The whole fake alien attack idea, if it is used by the international economic elite, will be used to justify a planet wide expansion of surveillance and control, just as with 9/11, in response to the supposed threat, meaning a level of global political consolidation akin to the UN on steroids, meaning draconian control and a considerable loss of freedoms.
Power tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely - John Dalberg Acton
In the face of resource depletion we will likely experience a repeat of Feudalism; those presently in control are fully aware of the situation and will do anything they have to to remain comfortable. If they dont have carbon based energy to meet their needs guess what? There's presently a glut of human muscle energy! Unemployed? Want some food? Yeah come on down to a peasant manor near you! (this is after the initial die off/zombie apocalypse phase when people begin to "get it" that the same economic elite dont really have any solutions to the problems of Peak Oil and overpopulation, and start panicking. This is also why the 3rd Infantry Brigade has been re-deployed within CONUS (continental U.S.), and why there is a bill authorizing the same forces the right to detain indefinitely and U.S. Citizen at home or abroad who is a suspected "terrorist". Pretty broad gray area here, by writing this am I a terrorist?
Thought Crime!
But what will likely play out first is the beginning of World War 3 with Iran, China and Russia. Either way it doesnt look good. My recommendations? Get off the grid, get close to where your food comes from, start learning practical skills, Permaculture, etc etc.
see also:
Jared Diamonds Collapse: A National Geographic Special
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
(recently revised, cleaned up and made more entertaining)
For the Techno-Optimists and those who champion a cultural response of intensification of the most heinous aspects of our failing death culture, namely the efficient conversion of the living into the dead, of our living home into a veritable Death Star, replete with an overbearing Shock Troop/Goon Command/Gestapo and literally, quite literally a hyper violent, repressive Fascist political structure wrapped up in the patriotic flag of "Freedom, Hope and Change".
In every instance of failed societies, from the Maya to the Romans, towards the very end they all exhibited an intensification of the very dysfunctional cultural behavior that culminated in their fall, be it monumental architecture, claims of divine authority accompanied by grander legitimization ceremonies, wars of imperial conquest and gross insults on the environment. This is superbly explicated by Jared Diamond here.
We live on a finite sphere of a system, a planet that is not free from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics or Entropy, it is axiomatic that we cannot "grow", in terms of urban "development" and human population size indefinitely. Yet the techno-optimists and Neo-Classical economists in company with Milton "Free Market" Friedman want you to believe the impossible. Now the Universe is chiming in with a bitch slap to return to reality in the form of depleted oceans, fossilized aquifers, polluted everything, Deep Water Horizon's and Fukushima's and more looming on the horizon.
I think as time goes by it is becoming apparent that the only ones who truly cling to this antiquated, outmoded and patently false worldview are the status quo, the 1% (well when you count the Goon Commando's and the rest of the Military Industrial Corporate Congressional Complex the number is closer to 5 or 10%) who benefit from such a self-destructive system. But thats the trick. They think they benefit from this. But I dont think they do. Nor do I think if they truly understood that the implications of the perpetuation of this failed ideology meant the consignment of their children (no we are past talking about the consignment of their grandchildren, the crises are knocking at the door now) to impoverishment and possibly/likely death.
I believe every organism of sufficient capacity to alter their environment for the improvement of their material well being eventually encounters a point in time when they are required to re-examine and modify the innate tendencies inherent in a consciousness developed in austere conditions over millennia upon millennia that favored self-preservation and procreation. We now are confronted with an organism that has a dangerous mismatch of sophisticated technological ability and a still immature or primitive level of behavior and interaction with its broader environment.
The beings that are here to assist Humanity into this metamorphic process that is before us and that is requisite for our continued survival have also faced a similar turning point and consciously chose to change. Many organisms have not made it beyond this point. If you follow mainstream astronomical developments, your'e likely aware that we have discovered not one but four planets in distant solar systems that occupy the "habitable zone" of their respective star. The truth is, we don't need to look that far for intelligent life elsewhere, we have been in direct contact with it all throughout human history. But why, why are the mainstream scientific institutions making this a part of our world of ideas now? Could it be to seed the idea that the strategies historically employed by past failing societies, which involved a spilling over of its population into other regions of the globe, aka the Spanish Conquest of the 15th century onward and "Manifest Destiny" to the west of the Mississippi in North America is our pre-ordained destiny?
Its a form of collective denial, for to truly confront the origin and continuity of our collective insanity, which many believe to be a collective manifestation of our ego, would require a reappraisal of our behavior and imply a massive shift of consciousness being requisite for our continued survival and well being. But if youre in deep denial, and you have benefited from the inequality, the slavery the self-inflicted wars for geo-strategic access to resources abroad and control and pacification of society at home, of the massive insults on the environment, and you have undue, biased influence on mass consciousness, you literally own and control what is covered in all forms of mainstream media, well guess what, youre going to justify the insanity.
"This is natural behavior, Survival of the Fittest!" (Actually, Darwin attempted to modify his original hypothesis towards the end of his life to say that organisms that respond the most quickly to changes in their environment tend to pass on their genes and drive evolution (which strongly contradicts a conservative oriented ideology, again see Jared Diamond's work above for the result of failing societies remaining rigidly conservative during times of dynamic upheaval), but the British elite/status quo got behind the original formulation of the theory of evolution with fervor as it supported the massive inequality in Britain at the time, and that brings up another point: it wasnt exactly Charles Darwin who occupied a wealthy rung of the socio-economic ladder that first posited the idea of natural selection but Alfred Russel Wallace, a lower class commoner, one of the 18th century's 95% who wrote to Darwin expressing the original idea).
"No we dont have to change our behavior, for how will we (the status quo) be able to continue to have a vampiric relationship with the whole!?" "We have to go out there to the Final Frontier and Democratize the galaxy, Make the Milky Way (and beyond, to "boldly go where no man has gone before") safe for democracy!" "The sentient beings elsewhere are Terrorists, they threaten our Consumer Freedoms!"
"Anglo-Saxon Neo-Conservatives (and Zionist Jews) are the Masters of the Universe! Any threat to our divine supremacy is terrorism and must be either eliminated or taken to Guantanamo immediately and indefinitely"!
"We must prove to the rest of society living in abject squalor (this author sleeps in a tent by the way, for those who have yet to read my introduction to the right) a justification for our massive mis-allocation of resources and energy into pretty much the hands of the few under the guise of "Counter-Terrorism" and "Democracy Promotion". "How will we do this?! Oh how did we sell the invasion of Iraq to them? Oh we will orchestrate a fake alien invasion! 9/11 writ large! Theyve come for our meager resources!! They hate us because of our consumer freedoms!"
"Yes we most go out and "democratize" the beings there at those planets and convert them to our religion of the worship of material crap and reductionistic science and death."(like that depicted in the psi-fi film Avatar).
No.
We wont be allowed to.
This insanity ends here.
Again the beings of great sentience and advanced psychic and technological ability survived and thrived because they chose to grow up and build an advanced society on a foundation of love, empathy, inclusiveness, equanimity and compassion.
Whether or not Humanity chooses to grow up and metamorphose into our higher potential is a question that remains to be answered.
P.S. The idea of travelling to these distant earth sized planets is a tall order being that they are a considerable distance away. The whole fake alien attack idea, if it is used by the international economic elite, will be used to justify a planet wide expansion of surveillance and control, just as with 9/11, in response to the supposed threat, meaning a level of global political consolidation akin to the UN on steroids, meaning draconian control and a considerable loss of freedoms.
Power tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely - John Dalberg Acton
In the face of resource depletion we will likely experience a repeat of Feudalism; those presently in control are fully aware of the situation and will do anything they have to to remain comfortable. If they dont have carbon based energy to meet their needs guess what? There's presently a glut of human muscle energy! Unemployed? Want some food? Yeah come on down to a peasant manor near you! (this is after the initial die off/zombie apocalypse phase when people begin to "get it" that the same economic elite dont really have any solutions to the problems of Peak Oil and overpopulation, and start panicking. This is also why the 3rd Infantry Brigade has been re-deployed within CONUS (continental U.S.), and why there is a bill authorizing the same forces the right to detain indefinitely and U.S. Citizen at home or abroad who is a suspected "terrorist". Pretty broad gray area here, by writing this am I a terrorist?
Thought Crime!
But what will likely play out first is the beginning of World War 3 with Iran, China and Russia. Either way it doesnt look good. My recommendations? Get off the grid, get close to where your food comes from, start learning practical skills, Permaculture, etc etc.
see also:
Jared Diamonds Collapse: A National Geographic Special
Bakken Shale and U.S. Oil Production
original source: http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2011/12/bakken-shale-and-us-oil-production/
By Roger Blanchard
On Sept. 25, 2011 National Public Radio’s All Things Considered program had a segment consisting of what I considered highly questionable information concerning oil production in the Bakken Shale region of North Dakota and U.S. oil production in general. The segment indicated that U.S. oil production would rise dramatically in the foreseeable future due to new technological developments. Segments like this may play well to the public’s desire for optimism but they don’t present an accurate assessment of future oil production in the Bakken Shale region or in the U.S.
Early in the segment, the host, Guy Raz, stated that there was 11 to 20 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken Shale formation. I was surprised by the 11 and 20 billion barrel figures because an April 2008 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report estimated the amount of technically recoverable oil within the Bakken Shale formation at 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels, with a mean of 3.65 billion barrels.
The USGS has had a sorted history when it comes to estimating oil reserves. To illustrate their estimation problems, it’s only necessary to look at their estimates for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A). Prior to 2002, their mean estimate of technically recoverable reserves was 9.3 billion barrels (Gb). In 2002, they upped their estimate to 10.5 Gb. In 2010 they had to downgrade their estimate to 0.896 Gb when it became obvious their previous estimates were far too high. For a long time I had been stating that the NPR-A would not produce anything remotely close to 9-10 Gb.
The state of North Dakota also released a report in April 2008 which estimated that there are 2.1 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in the Bakken Shale formation.
In reality, the actual volume of oil that can be economically recovered from a region will be considerably less than the technically recoverable estimates by government agencies, assuming the estimates are reasonably accurate. I personally think that an ultimate recovery from the Bakken Shale formation of 1.5 Gb is realistic if not a bit optimistic. Based upon my modeling of Bakken Shale oil production with a 1.5 Gb ultimate recovery, peak production would occur in the 2013-2014 period.
In recent years there has been intense oil development in the Bakken Shale region with an average annual oil production increase during the 2008-2010 period for North Dakota of 36.0%/year. When production of a resource such as oil is increasing rapidly, it’s easy to think that the production will continue to increase for a long time. Unfortunately, history is replete with examples of oil production increasingly rapidly within a region then in short order declining rapidly. I expect that to happen in the Bakken region.
Only two U.S. states have had oil production increases in recent years worth mentioning: North Dakota and Texas. There have been minor production increases in a few western states such as New Mexico and Colorado as well. The vast majority of oil producing states had either flat or declining production in recent years in spite of the high price of oil.
In 2009 and 2010, oil production increased significantly in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GOM), contributing to U.S. oil production increases during those years but in the first half of 2011, Gulf of Mexico oil production was down 11.1% (188,000 b/d) compared to the first half of 2010. I’ve made the case for a long time that deepwater GOM oil production would peak around 2010 (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/44870) and that prediction looks good.
With mature fields in the deepwater GOM declining at average rates of 10-20%/year, it takes many new developments just to replace the declining production from older fields. The problem for future deepwater GOM production is that there are few fields that are projected to come on-line in coming years and the best areas have been quite thoroughly explored and developed.
Interestingly, one of the oil experts in the NPR segment was Amy Jaffe. Apparently NPR news programs don’t vet their experts. If they did, it would be obvious that Ms. Jaffe has at best a dismal forecasting record when it comes to oil. Here is the summary of an article she wrote in 2000:
The price of oil in recent years hasn’t even been close to the 2000 average of $27.39/barrel (U.S. average domestic price) that Ms. Jaffe considered so high at the time. For the period 2005-2010, the average annual oil price was never less than $50/barrel and in 2011, it will average approximately $90/barrel.
Considering that global oil production (crude oil + condensate) has been essentially flat since the start of 2005 and that the exportable amount of global oil production declined by over 2 mb/d during the 2005-2009 period based upon US DOE/EIA data, I don’t think anyone can make the case that there is a glut of oil on the world market.
Ms. Jaffe gave what I thought was very deceptive information concerning future U.S. oil production. She stated that,
Unfortunately she didn’t provide a numerical value for the absolute or percentage increase she expected but my impression was that an increase of 50% or greater is what she meant. At a 50% production increase over 2010, U.S. oil production would have to increase ~2.7 mb/d. I view that as not in the realm of possibility over any time frame.
The NPR segment conflated Bakken Shale and what is termed “oil shale”, the shale in places like Colorado that has a solid organic material called kerogen in it. In Bakken Shale, there is actually oil impregnated into the shale which can be obtained through fracking. That is not the case for most shale in the U.S. During the segment, Mr. Raz provided an oil reserves estimate for the U.S. of 2 trillion barrels. That’s quite an impressive figure but the vast majority of that estimate is based upon oil shale that has kerogen in it, not oil. No amount of fracking will remove the kerogen from the shale to provide oil.
In general, media in the U.S. act as cheerleaders for the oil and gas industry. If the public is to understand important aspects of our energy supply, it’s important that they receive unbiased and independent reporting on energy issues. Without unbiased and independent reporting, it’s easy for the public to believe that U.S. oil resources are infinite, which appears to be the present case for a significant percentage of the public.
Roger Blanchard teaches chemistry at Lake Superior State University and authored the book “The Future of Global Oil Production: Facts, Figures, Trends and Projections by Region,” McFarland & Company (2005).
Posted By Roger Blanchard • on December 26, 2011
(Note: Commentaries do not necessarily represent the position of ASPO-USA.)By Roger Blanchard
On Sept. 25, 2011 National Public Radio’s All Things Considered program had a segment consisting of what I considered highly questionable information concerning oil production in the Bakken Shale region of North Dakota and U.S. oil production in general. The segment indicated that U.S. oil production would rise dramatically in the foreseeable future due to new technological developments. Segments like this may play well to the public’s desire for optimism but they don’t present an accurate assessment of future oil production in the Bakken Shale region or in the U.S.
Early in the segment, the host, Guy Raz, stated that there was 11 to 20 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken Shale formation. I was surprised by the 11 and 20 billion barrel figures because an April 2008 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report estimated the amount of technically recoverable oil within the Bakken Shale formation at 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels, with a mean of 3.65 billion barrels.
The USGS has had a sorted history when it comes to estimating oil reserves. To illustrate their estimation problems, it’s only necessary to look at their estimates for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A). Prior to 2002, their mean estimate of technically recoverable reserves was 9.3 billion barrels (Gb). In 2002, they upped their estimate to 10.5 Gb. In 2010 they had to downgrade their estimate to 0.896 Gb when it became obvious their previous estimates were far too high. For a long time I had been stating that the NPR-A would not produce anything remotely close to 9-10 Gb.
The state of North Dakota also released a report in April 2008 which estimated that there are 2.1 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in the Bakken Shale formation.
In reality, the actual volume of oil that can be economically recovered from a region will be considerably less than the technically recoverable estimates by government agencies, assuming the estimates are reasonably accurate. I personally think that an ultimate recovery from the Bakken Shale formation of 1.5 Gb is realistic if not a bit optimistic. Based upon my modeling of Bakken Shale oil production with a 1.5 Gb ultimate recovery, peak production would occur in the 2013-2014 period.
In recent years there has been intense oil development in the Bakken Shale region with an average annual oil production increase during the 2008-2010 period for North Dakota of 36.0%/year. When production of a resource such as oil is increasing rapidly, it’s easy to think that the production will continue to increase for a long time. Unfortunately, history is replete with examples of oil production increasingly rapidly within a region then in short order declining rapidly. I expect that to happen in the Bakken region.
Only two U.S. states have had oil production increases in recent years worth mentioning: North Dakota and Texas. There have been minor production increases in a few western states such as New Mexico and Colorado as well. The vast majority of oil producing states had either flat or declining production in recent years in spite of the high price of oil.
In 2009 and 2010, oil production increased significantly in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GOM), contributing to U.S. oil production increases during those years but in the first half of 2011, Gulf of Mexico oil production was down 11.1% (188,000 b/d) compared to the first half of 2010. I’ve made the case for a long time that deepwater GOM oil production would peak around 2010 (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/44870) and that prediction looks good.
With mature fields in the deepwater GOM declining at average rates of 10-20%/year, it takes many new developments just to replace the declining production from older fields. The problem for future deepwater GOM production is that there are few fields that are projected to come on-line in coming years and the best areas have been quite thoroughly explored and developed.
Interestingly, one of the oil experts in the NPR segment was Amy Jaffe. Apparently NPR news programs don’t vet their experts. If they did, it would be obvious that Ms. Jaffe has at best a dismal forecasting record when it comes to oil. Here is the summary of an article she wrote in 2000:
As oil flirts with prices that call to mind the shocks of the 1970s, the usual Cassandras have been warning of dwindling oil supplies and sky-high prices. But the danger is precisely the opposite. The next two decades will witness a prolonged surplus of oil, which will tamp prices down. This world of cheap oil will have serious political reverberations. Without rising oil revenues, such key states as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Mexico, and Colombia will face worsening crises at home. The same is true in spades for Central Asia, where Washington’s current wrongheaded policies could drag it into crises that make the Balkans look like a pregame warm-up. The world should worry less about a scarcity of oil than about a glut.
Considering that global oil production (crude oil + condensate) has been essentially flat since the start of 2005 and that the exportable amount of global oil production declined by over 2 mb/d during the 2005-2009 period based upon US DOE/EIA data, I don’t think anyone can make the case that there is a glut of oil on the world market.
Ms. Jaffe gave what I thought was very deceptive information concerning future U.S. oil production. She stated that,
“In 5 to 10 years, U.S. oil production will go up dramatically, not by 10% but by considerable volumes”
The NPR segment conflated Bakken Shale and what is termed “oil shale”, the shale in places like Colorado that has a solid organic material called kerogen in it. In Bakken Shale, there is actually oil impregnated into the shale which can be obtained through fracking. That is not the case for most shale in the U.S. During the segment, Mr. Raz provided an oil reserves estimate for the U.S. of 2 trillion barrels. That’s quite an impressive figure but the vast majority of that estimate is based upon oil shale that has kerogen in it, not oil. No amount of fracking will remove the kerogen from the shale to provide oil.
In general, media in the U.S. act as cheerleaders for the oil and gas industry. If the public is to understand important aspects of our energy supply, it’s important that they receive unbiased and independent reporting on energy issues. Without unbiased and independent reporting, it’s easy for the public to believe that U.S. oil resources are infinite, which appears to be the present case for a significant percentage of the public.
Roger Blanchard teaches chemistry at Lake Superior State University and authored the book “The Future of Global Oil Production: Facts, Figures, Trends and Projections by Region,” McFarland & Company (2005).
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Reading Excerpt: Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine
(My apologizes for hastily posting this a few days ago, I have only now gone through and proof-read it and corrected a few minor errors, again this is the ONLY complete first chapter of Mumford's work, let alone any chapter, on the internet at present and I had to manually reproduce it, word for word. The only issue I have with the work is that the true historical origins and actual technical prowess of pre-dyanstic Egypt is up for re-evaluation in light of the discovery of the Piri Reis map (among a few other pre-industrial maps depicting an ice free Antarctica) and the cogent formulation of an unorthodox theory by Graham Hancock which is summarized in an earlier blog post here) I really enjoyed reading this chapter a second time through and the chapters that follow are equally stimulating, I highly recommend "The Myth of the Machine" by Lewis Mumford. Enjoy.)
Chapter One
Chapter One
Prologue
Ritual, art, poesy (sic), drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread: man's true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations.
THE CONDITION OF MAN (1944)
The last century, we all realize, has witnessed a radical transformation in the entire human environment, largely as a result of the impact of the mathematical and physical sciences upon technology. This shift from an empirical, tradition-bound technics to an experimental mode has opened up such new realms as those of nuclear energy, supersonic transportation, cybernetic intelligence and instantaneous distant communication. Never since the Pyramid Age have such vast physical changes been consummated in so short a time. All these changes have, in turn, produced alterations in the human personality, while still more radical transformations, if this process continue unabated and uncorrected, loom ahead.
In terms of the currently accepted picture of the relation of man to technics, our age is passing from the primeval state of man, marked by his invention of tools and weapons for the purpose of achieving mastery over the forces of nature, to a radically different condition, in which he will have not only conquered nature, but detached himself as far as possible from the organic habitat.
With this new "megatechnics" the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man's role, will either be fed into the machine or strictily limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations.
My purpose in this book is to question both the assumptions and the predictions upon which our commitment to the present forms of technical and scientific progress, treated as if ends in themselves, has been based. I shall bring forward evidence that casts doubts upon the current theories of man's basic nature which over-rate the part that tools once played--and machines now play--in human development. I shall suggest that not only was Karl Marx in error in giving the material instruments of production the central place and directive function in human development, but that even the seemingly benign interpretation of Teilhard de Chardin reads back into the the whole story of man the narrow technological rationalism of our own age, and projects into the future a final state in which all the possibilities of human development would come to an end. At that "omega-point" ["Singularity" in Kurzweilian terms] nothing would be left of man's autonomous original nature, except organized intelligence: a universal and omnipotent layer of abstract mind, loveless and lifeless.
Now, we cannot understand the role that technics has played in human development without a deeper insight into the historic nature of man. Yet that insight has been blurred during the last century because it has been conditioned by a social environment in which a mass of new mechanical inventions had suddenly proliferated, sweeping away ancient processes and institutions, and altering the traditional conception of both human limitations and technical possibilities.
Our predecessors mistakenly coupled their particular mode of mechanical progress with an unjustifiable sense of increasing moral superiority. But our own contemporaries, who have reason to reject this smug Victorian belief in the inevitable improvement of all other human institutions through command of the machine, nevertheless concentrate, with manic fervor, upon the continued expansion of science and technology, as if they alone magically would provide the only means of human salvation. Since our present over-commitment to technics is in part due to a radical misinterpretation of the whole course of human development, the first step toward recovering our balance is to bring under review the main stages of man's emergence from its primal beginnings onward.
Just because man's need for tools is so obvious, we must guard ourselves against over-stressing the role of stone tools hundreds of thousands of years before they became functionally differentiated and efficient. In treating tool-making as central to early man's survival, biologists and anthropologists for long underplayed, or neglected, a mass of activities in which many other species were for long more knowledgeable than man. Despite the contrary evidence put forward by R. U. Sayce, Daryll, Forde, and Andre Leroi-Gourhan, there is still a tendency to identify tools and machines with technology: to substitute the part for the whole.
Even in describing only the material components of technics, this practice overlooks the equally vital role of containers: first hearths, pits, traps, cordage; later, baskets, bins, byres, houses, to say nothing of still later collective containers like reservoirs, canals, cities. These static components play an important part in every technology, not least in our own day, with its high-tension transformers, its giant chemical retorts, its atomic reactors.
In any adequate definition of technics, it should be plain that many insects, birds, and mammals had made far more radical innovations in the fabrication of containers, with their intricate nests and bowers, their geometric beehives, their urbanoid anthills and termitaries, their beaver lodges, than man's ancestors had achieved in the making of tools until the emergence of Homo Sapiens. In short, if technical proficiency alone were sufficient to identify and foster intelligence, man was for long a laggard, compared with many other species. The consequences of this perception should be plain: namely, that there was nothing uniquely human in tool-making until it was modified by linguistic symbols, aesthetic designs, and socially transmitted knowledge. At that point, the human brain, not just the hand, was what made a profound difference; and that brain could not possibly have been just a hand-made product, since it was already well developed in four-footed creatures like rats, which have no free-fingered hands.
More than a century ago Thomas Carlyle described man as a "tool-using animal", as if this were the one trait that elevated him above rest of brute creation. This overweighting of tools, weapons, physical apparatus, and machines has obscured the actual path of human development. the definition of man as a tool-using animal, even when corrected to read "tool-making", would have seemed strange to Plato, who attributed man's emergence from a primitive state as much to Marsyas and Orpheus, the makers of music, as to fire-stealing Prometheus, or Hephaestus [the Greek version of the Roman god Vulcan], the blacksmith-god, the sole manual worker in the Olympic pantheon.
Yet the description of man as essentially a tool-making animal has become so firmly embedded that the mere finding of the fragments of little primate skulls in the neighborhood of chipped pebbles, as with the Australopithecines of Africa, was deemed sufficient by their finder, Dr. L. S. B. Leakey, to identify the creature as in the direct line of human ascent, despite marked physical divergence from both apes and later men. Since Leaky's sub-hominids had a brain capacity about a third of Homo Sapiens--less indeed than some apes--the ability to chip and use crude stone tools plainly neither called for nor by itself generated man's rich cerebral equipment.
If the Austrolopithecines lacked the beginning of other characteristics, their possession of tools would only prove that at least one other species outside the true genus Homo boasted this trait, just as parrots and magpies share the distinctly human achievement of speech, and the bower bird that for colorful decorative embellishment. No single trait, not even tool-making, is sufficient to identify man. What is specially and uniquely human is man's capacity to combine a wide variety of animal propensities into an emergent cultural entity: a human personality.
If the exact functional equivalence of tool-making with utensil-making had been appreciated by earlier investigators, it would have been plain that there was nothing notable about man's hand-made stone artifacts until far along in his development. Even a distant relative of man, the gorilla, puts together a nest of leaves for comfort in sleeping, and will throw a bridge of great fern stalks across a shallow stream, presumably to keep from wetting or scarping his feet. Five-year-old children, who can talk and read and reason, show little aptitude in using tools and still less in making them: so if tool-making were what counted, they could not yet be identified as human.
In early man we have reason to suspect the same kind of facility and the same ineptitude. When we seek for proof of man's genuine superiority to his fellow creatures, we should do well to look for a different kind of evidence than his poor stone tools alone; or rather, we should ask ourselves what activities preoccupied him during those countless years when with the same materials and the same muscular movements he later used so skillfully he might have fashioned better tools.
The answer to this question I shall spell out in detail in the first few chapters; but I shall briefly anticipate the conclusion by saying that there was nothing specifically human in primitive technics, apart from the use and preservation of fire, until man had reconstituted his own physical organs by employing them for functions and purposes quite different from those they had originally served. Probably the first major displacement was the transformation of the quadruped's fore-limbs from specialized organs of locomotion to all-purpose tools for climbing, grasping, striking, tearing, pounding, digging, holding. Early man's hands and pebble tools played a significant part in his development, mainly because as Dr. Brul has pointed out, they facilitated the preparatory functions of picking, carrying, and macerating food, and thus liberated the mouth for speech.
If man was indeed a tool-maker, he possessed at the beginning one primary, all-purpose tool, more important than any later assemblage: his own mind-activated body, every part of it, including those members that made clubs, hand-axes or wooden spears. To compensate for his extremely primitive working gear, early man had a much more important asset that extended his whole technical horizon: he had a far richer biological equipment than any other animal, a body not specialized for any single activity, and a brain capable of scanning a wider environment and holding all the different parts of his experience together. Precisely because of his extraordinary plasticity and sensitivity, he was able to use a larger portion of both his external environment and his internal, psychosomatic resources.
Through man's overdeveloped and incessantly active brain, he had more mental energy to tap than he needed for survival at a purely animal level; and he was accordingly under the necessity of canalizing that energy, not just into food-getting and sexual reproduction, but into modes of living that would convert this energy more directly and constructively into appropriate cultural--that is, symbolic--forms. Only by creating cultural outlets could he tap and control and fully utilize his own nature.
Cultural 'work' by necessity took precedence over manual work. These new activities involved far more than the discipline of hand, muscle and eye in making and using tools, greatly though they aided man: they likewise demanded a control over all man's natural functions, including his organs of excretion, his upsurging emotions, his promiscuous sexual activities, his tormenting and tempting dreams.
With man's persistent exploration of his own organic capabilities, nose, eyes, ears, lips, and sexual organs were given new roles to play. Even the hand was no mere horny specialized work-tool: it stroked a lover's body, held a baby close to the breast, made significant gestures, or expressed in shared ritual and ordered dance some otherwise inexpressible sentiment about life or death, a remembered past, or an anxious future. Tool-technics, in fact, is but a fragment of bio-technics: man's total equipment for life.
This gift of free neural energy already showed itself in mans primate ancestors. Dr. Allison Jolly has recently shown that brain growth in lemurs derived from their athletic playfulness, their mutual grooming, and their enhanced sociability, rather than from tool-using or food-getting habits; while man's exploratory curiosity, his imitativeness, and his idle manipulativeness, with no thought of ulterior reward, were already visible in his simian relatives. In American usage, 'monkey-shines' and 'monkeying' are popular indentifications of that playfulness and non-utilitarian handling of objects. I shall show that there is even reason to ask whether the standardized patterns observable in early tool making are not in part derivable from the strictly repetitive motions of ritual, song and dance, forms that have long existed in a state of perfection among primitive peoples usually in far more finished style than their tools.
Only a little while ago the Dutch historian, J. Huizinga, in 'Homo Ludens' brought forth a mass of evidence to suggest that play, rather than work, was the formative element in human culture: that man's most serious activity belonged to the realm of make-believe. On this showing, ritual and mimesis, sports and games and dramas, released man from his insistent animal attachments; and nothing could demonstrate this better, I would add, than those primitive ceremonies in which he played at being another kind of animal. Long before he had achieved the power to transform the natural environment, man had created a miniature environment, the symbolic field of play, in which every function of life might be re-fashioned in a strictly human style, as in a game.
So startling was the thesis of 'Homo Ludens' that his shocked translator deliberately altered Huizinga's express statement, that all culture was a form of play, into the more obvious conventional notion that play is an element in culture. But the notion that man is neither Homos sapiens nor Homo ludens, but above all Homo faber, man the maker, had taken such firm possession of present-day Western thinkers that even Henri Bergson held it. So certain were nineteenth-century archaeologists about the primacy of stone tools and weapons in the 'struggle for existence' that when first paleolithic cave paintings were discovered in Spain in 1879, they were denounced, out of hand, as an outrageous hoax, by 'competent authorities' on the ground that Ice Age hunters could not have had the leisure or the mind to produce the elegant art of Altamira.
But mind was exactly what Homo sapiens possessed in a singular degree: mind based on the fullest use of all his bodily organs, not just his hands. In this revision of obsolete technological stereotypes, I would go even further: for I submit that at every stage man's inventions and transformations were less for the purpose of increasing the food supply or controlling nature than for utilizing his own immense organic resources and expressing his latent potentialities, in order to fulfill more adequately his superorganic demands and aspirations.
When not curbed by hostile environmental pressures, man's elaboration of symbolic culture answered a more imperative need than that for control over the environment--and, one must infer, largely predated it and for long outpaced it. Among sociologists, Leslie White deserves credit for giving due weight to this fact by his emphasis on 'minding' and 'symbolizing', though he has but recovered for the present generation the original insights of the father of anthropology, Edward Taylor.
On this reading, the evolution of language--a culmination of man's more elementary forms of expressing and transmitting meaning--was incomparably more important to further human development than the chipping of a mountain of hand-axes. Besides the relatively simple coordinations required for tool-using, the delicate interplay of the many organs needed for the creation of articulate speech was a far more striking advance. This effort must have occupied a greater part of early man's time, energy, and mental activity, since the ultimate collective product, spoken language, was infinitely more complex and sophisticated at the dawn of civilization than the Egyptian or Mesopotamian kit of tools.
To consider man, then, as primarily a tool-using animal, is to overlook the main chapters of human history. Opposed to this petrified notion, I shall develop the view that man is preeminently a mind-making, self-mastering, and self-designing animal; and the primary locus of all his activities lies first in his own organism, and in the social organization through which it finds fuller expression. Until man had made something of himself he could make little of the world around him.
In this process of self-discovery and self-transformation, tools, in the narrow sense, served well as subsidiary instruments, but not as the main operative agent in man's development; for technics has never till our own age dissociated itself from the larger cultural whole in which man, as man, has always functioned. The classic Greek term 'tekhne' characteristically makes no distinction between industrial production and 'fine' or symbolic art; and for the greater part of human history these aspects were inseparable, one side respecting the objective conditions and functions, the other responding to subjective needs.
At its point of origin, technics was related to the whole nature of man, and that nature played a part in every aspect of industry: thus technics, at the beginning, was broadly life-centered, not work-centered or power-centered. As in any other ecological complex, varied human interests and purposes, different organic needs, restrained the overgrowth of any single component. Though language was man's most potent symbolic expression, it flowed, I shall attempt to show, from the same common source that finally produced the machine: the primeval repetitive order of ritual, a mode of order man was forced to develop, in self-protection, so as to control the tremendous overcharge of psychical energy that his large brain placed at his disposal.
So far from disparaging the role of technics, however, I shall rather demonstrate that once this basic internal organization was established, technics supported and enlarged the capacities for human expression. The discipline of tool-making and tool-using served as a timely correction, on this hypothesis, to the inordinate powers of invention that spoken language gave to man--powers that otherwise unduly inflated the ego and tempted man to substitute magical verbal formulae for efficacious work.
On this interpretation, the specific human achievement, which set man apart from even his nearest anthropoid relatives, was the shaping of a new self, visibly different in appearance, in behavior, and in plan of life from his primitive animal forebears. As this differentiation widened and the number of definitely human 'identification marks' increased, man speeded the process of his own evolution, achieving through culture in a relatively short span of years changes that other species accomplished laboriously through organic processes, whose results, in contrast to man's cultural modes, could not be easily corrected, improved, or effaced.
Henceforth the main business of man was his own self-transformation, group by group, region by region, culture by culture. This self-transformation not merely rescued man from permanent fixation in his original animal condition, but freed his best-developed organ, his brain, for other tasks than those of ensuring physical survival. The dominant human trait, central to all other traits, is this capacity for conscious, purposeful self-identification, self-transformation, and ultimately for self-understanding.
Every manifestation of human culture, from ritual and speech to costume and social organization, is directed ultimately to the remodeling of the human organism and the expression of the human personality. It is only now that we belatedly recognize this distinctive feature, it is perhaps because there are widespread indications in contemporary art and politics and technics that man may be on the point of losing it--becoming not a lower animal, but a shapeless, amoeboid non-entity.
In recasting the stereotyped representations of human development, I have fortunately been able to draw upon a growing body of biological and anthropological evidence, which has not until now been correlated of fully interpreted. Yet I am aware, of course, that despite this substantial support the large themes I am about to develop, and even more their speculative subsidiary hypotheses, may well meet with justifiable skepticism; for they have still to undergo competent critical scrutiny. Need I say that so far from starting with a desire to dispute the prevailing orthodox views, I at first respectfully accepted them, since I knew no others? It was only because I could find no clue to modern man's overwhelming commitment to his technology, even at the expense to his health, his physical safety, his mental balance, and his possible future development, that I was driven to reexamine the nature of man and the whole course of technological change.
In addition to discovering the aboriginal field of man's inventiveness, not in his making of external tools, but primarily in the re-fashioning of his own bodily organs, I have undertaken to follow another freshly blazed trail: to examining the broad streak of irrationality that runs all through human history, counter to man's sensible, functionally rational animal inheritance. As compared even with other anthropoids, one might refer without irony to man's superior irrationality. Certainly human development exhibits a chronic disposition to error, mischief, disordered fantasy, hallucination, 'original sin' and even socially organized and sanctified misbehavior, such as the practice of human sacrifice and legalized torture. In escaping organic fixations, man forfeited the innate humility and mental stability of less adventurous species. Yet some of his most erratic departures have opened up valuable areas that purely organic evolution, over billions of years, had never explored.
The mischances that followed man's quitting mere animalhood were many but the rewards were great. Man's proneness to mix his fantasies and projections, his desires and designs, his abstractions and his ideologies, with the commonplaces of his daily experience were, we can now see, an important source of his immense creativity. There is no clean dividing line between the irrational and the super-rational; and the handling of these ambivalent gifts has always been a major human problem. One of the reasons that the current utilitarian interpretations of technics and science has been so shallow is that they ignore the fact that this aspect of human culture has been as open to both transcendental aspirations and demonic compulsions as any other part of man's existence--and has never been so open and so vulnerable as today.
The irrational factors that have sometimes constructively prompted, yet too often distorted, man's further development became plain at the moment when the formative elements in paleolithic and neolithic cultures united in the great cultural implosion that took place around the Fourth Millennium B.C.: what is usually called 'the rise of civilization.' The remarkable fact about this transformation technically is that it was the result, not of mechanical inventions, but of a radically new type of social organization: a product of myth, magic, religion, and the nascent science of astronomy. This implosion of sacred political powers and technological facilities cannot be accounted for by any inventory of the tools, the simple machines, and the technical processes then available. Neither the wheeled wagon, the plow, the potter's wheel, nor the military chariot could of themselves have accomplished the mighty transformations that took place in the great valleys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, and eventually passed, in ripples and waves, to other parts of the planet.
The study of the Pyramid Age. I made in preparation for writing 'The City in History' unexpectedly revealed that a close parallel existed between the first authoritarian civilizations in the Near East and our own, though most of our contemporaries still regard modern technics, not only as the highest point in man's intellectual development, but as an entirely new phenomenon. On the contrary, I found that what economists lately termed the Machine Age or the Power Age, had its origin, not in the so-called Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, but at the very outset in the organization of an archetypal machine composed of human parts.
Two things must be noted about this new mechanism, because they identify it throughout its historic course down to the present. The first is that the organizers of the machine derived their power and authority from a heavenly source. Cosmic order was the basis of this new human order. The exactitude in measurement, the abstract mechanical system, the compulsive regularity of this 'megamachine', as I shall call it, sprang directly from astronomical observations and scientific calculations. This inflexible, predictable order, incorporated later in the calendar, was transferred to the regimentation of the human components. As against earlier forms of ritualized order, this mechanized order was external to man. By a combination of divine command and ruthless military coercion, a large population was made to endure grinding poverty and forced labor at mind-dulling repetitive tasks in order to insure "Life, Prosperity and Health" for the divine or semi-divine ruler and his entourage.
The second point is that the grave social defects of the human machine were partly offset by its superb achievements in flood control and food production, which laid the ground for an enlarged achievement in every area of human culture: in monumental art, in codified law, in systematically pursued and permanently recorded thought, in the augmentation of all the potentialities of the mind by the assemblage of a varied population, with diverse regional and vocational backgrounds in urban ceremonial centers. Such order, such collective security and abundance, such stimulating cultural mixtures were first achieved in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later in India, China, Persia and the Andean and Mayan cultures: and they were never surpassed until the megamachine was reconstituted in a new form in our own time. Unfortunately these cultural advances were largely offset by equally great social regressions.
Conceptually the instruments of mechanization five thousand years ago were already detached from other human functions and purposes than the constant increase of order, power, predictability, and above all, control. With this proto-scientific ideology went a corresponding regimentation and degradation of once autonomous human activities: 'mass culture' and 'mass control' made their first appearance. With mordant symbolism, the ultimate products of the megamachine in Egypt were colossal tombs, inhabited by mummified corpses; while later in Assyria, as repeatedly in every other expanding empire, the chief testimony to its technical efficiency was a waste of destroyed villages and cities, and poisoned soils: the prototype of similar 'civilized' atrocities today. As for the great Egyptian pyramids, what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favored few.
These colossal miscarriages of a dehumanized power-centered culture monotonously soil the pages of history from the rape of Sumer to the blasting of Warsaw and Rotterdam, Tokyo and Hiroshima. Sooner or later, this analysis suggests, we must have the courage to ask ourselves: Is this association of inordinate power and productivity with equally inordinate violence and destruction a purely accidental one?
In the working out of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.
This survey will bring the reader to the threshold of the modern world: the sixteenth century in Western Europe. Though some of the implications of such a study cannot be fully worked out until the events of the last four centuries are re-examined and re-appraised, much that is necessary for technics will be already apparent, to a sufficiently perceptive mind, from the earliest chapters on. This widened interpretation of the past is a necessary move toward escaping the dire insufficiencies of current one-generation knowledge. If we do not take the time to review the past we shall not have sufficient insight to understand the present or command the future: for the past never leaves us, and the future is already here.
The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development
The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power
The mischances that followed man's quitting mere animalhood were many but the rewards were great. Man's proneness to mix his fantasies and projections, his desires and designs, his abstractions and his ideologies, with the commonplaces of his daily experience were, we can now see, an important source of his immense creativity. There is no clean dividing line between the irrational and the super-rational; and the handling of these ambivalent gifts has always been a major human problem. One of the reasons that the current utilitarian interpretations of technics and science has been so shallow is that they ignore the fact that this aspect of human culture has been as open to both transcendental aspirations and demonic compulsions as any other part of man's existence--and has never been so open and so vulnerable as today.
The irrational factors that have sometimes constructively prompted, yet too often distorted, man's further development became plain at the moment when the formative elements in paleolithic and neolithic cultures united in the great cultural implosion that took place around the Fourth Millennium B.C.: what is usually called 'the rise of civilization.' The remarkable fact about this transformation technically is that it was the result, not of mechanical inventions, but of a radically new type of social organization: a product of myth, magic, religion, and the nascent science of astronomy. This implosion of sacred political powers and technological facilities cannot be accounted for by any inventory of the tools, the simple machines, and the technical processes then available. Neither the wheeled wagon, the plow, the potter's wheel, nor the military chariot could of themselves have accomplished the mighty transformations that took place in the great valleys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, and eventually passed, in ripples and waves, to other parts of the planet.
The study of the Pyramid Age. I made in preparation for writing 'The City in History' unexpectedly revealed that a close parallel existed between the first authoritarian civilizations in the Near East and our own, though most of our contemporaries still regard modern technics, not only as the highest point in man's intellectual development, but as an entirely new phenomenon. On the contrary, I found that what economists lately termed the Machine Age or the Power Age, had its origin, not in the so-called Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, but at the very outset in the organization of an archetypal machine composed of human parts.
Two things must be noted about this new mechanism, because they identify it throughout its historic course down to the present. The first is that the organizers of the machine derived their power and authority from a heavenly source. Cosmic order was the basis of this new human order. The exactitude in measurement, the abstract mechanical system, the compulsive regularity of this 'megamachine', as I shall call it, sprang directly from astronomical observations and scientific calculations. This inflexible, predictable order, incorporated later in the calendar, was transferred to the regimentation of the human components. As against earlier forms of ritualized order, this mechanized order was external to man. By a combination of divine command and ruthless military coercion, a large population was made to endure grinding poverty and forced labor at mind-dulling repetitive tasks in order to insure "Life, Prosperity and Health" for the divine or semi-divine ruler and his entourage.
The second point is that the grave social defects of the human machine were partly offset by its superb achievements in flood control and food production, which laid the ground for an enlarged achievement in every area of human culture: in monumental art, in codified law, in systematically pursued and permanently recorded thought, in the augmentation of all the potentialities of the mind by the assemblage of a varied population, with diverse regional and vocational backgrounds in urban ceremonial centers. Such order, such collective security and abundance, such stimulating cultural mixtures were first achieved in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later in India, China, Persia and the Andean and Mayan cultures: and they were never surpassed until the megamachine was reconstituted in a new form in our own time. Unfortunately these cultural advances were largely offset by equally great social regressions.
Conceptually the instruments of mechanization five thousand years ago were already detached from other human functions and purposes than the constant increase of order, power, predictability, and above all, control. With this proto-scientific ideology went a corresponding regimentation and degradation of once autonomous human activities: 'mass culture' and 'mass control' made their first appearance. With mordant symbolism, the ultimate products of the megamachine in Egypt were colossal tombs, inhabited by mummified corpses; while later in Assyria, as repeatedly in every other expanding empire, the chief testimony to its technical efficiency was a waste of destroyed villages and cities, and poisoned soils: the prototype of similar 'civilized' atrocities today. As for the great Egyptian pyramids, what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favored few.
These colossal miscarriages of a dehumanized power-centered culture monotonously soil the pages of history from the rape of Sumer to the blasting of Warsaw and Rotterdam, Tokyo and Hiroshima. Sooner or later, this analysis suggests, we must have the courage to ask ourselves: Is this association of inordinate power and productivity with equally inordinate violence and destruction a purely accidental one?
In the working out of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.
This survey will bring the reader to the threshold of the modern world: the sixteenth century in Western Europe. Though some of the implications of such a study cannot be fully worked out until the events of the last four centuries are re-examined and re-appraised, much that is necessary for technics will be already apparent, to a sufficiently perceptive mind, from the earliest chapters on. This widened interpretation of the past is a necessary move toward escaping the dire insufficiencies of current one-generation knowledge. If we do not take the time to review the past we shall not have sufficient insight to understand the present or command the future: for the past never leaves us, and the future is already here.
The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development
The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power
Response to Charles Eisenstein's Critique of THRIVE
original source: http://www.realitysandwich.com/gambles_response_eisensteins_critique_thrive
Foster Gamble
Foster Gamble
Charles Eisenstein, the author of Sacred Economics, has written an article,"Synchronicity, Myth and the New World Order", and a critique of THRIVE: What on Earth Will It Take?, that have engendered much discussion. I welcome this opportunity to have a broad and public conversation to look more deeply into some very important issues that he and my film THRIVE raise.
I took the time to read Charles' book in depth, and though I disagree with much of what Charles proposes, I think his work has important offerings. My intention is that this on-going conversation further our mutual quest for core ethics, truth and effectiveness in transitioning to a world where all can thrive.
Correcting Some Innaccuracies
Before diving into the philosophical and strategic discussion, I want to clear up some initial inaccuracies in the review of THRIVE. The title of the review ("THRIVE: The Story is Wrong but the Spirit is Right") immediately casts our discussion into the polarization of right and wrong. I recommend some different distinctions going forward: 1) more or less USEFUL, and 2) ETHICAL or NON-ETHICAL.
Charles' assumption that I was invoking (p.3) and trying to wage a "war against EVIL" (p. 1) is contrary to the tone and claims in THRIVE. I do not believe there is some separate force in the Universe called EVIL. Perhaps he confused this with his own observation in his conspiracy article, "Evil and its expression as The New World Order...has like all other things its place in the world." (P. 15) I do observe that some people, in certain mental/emotional conditions and self-justified by certain worldviews and institutions, do intentionally mean and destructive ("sinister") things to others. I am very interested in protecting life by neutralizing the aggression of those individuals and transforming the systems and obsoleting the agendas of which they are a part.
Next, I want to be clear that THRIVE is not advocating or counting on some sort of "Technological Utopianism."
Charles claims:
Charles claims:
"...the film's contention that the main reason for the misery of the Third World masses is lack of access to energy, and that unlimited clean energy would be a near-panacea for humanity's problems and would usher in an era of abundance. The story here - call it "technological utopianism" - is that technology is going to rescue us, create a new and better world, and solve our problems."
I believe that having cheap, clean and safe access to energy all over the planet for would be a huge boost economically, ecologically and would provide useful evidence for a new paradigm of universal abundance. It supplements, but does not replace shifts in consciousness as well as financial and other systems. Access to energy and means for healthy commerce (i.e. an honest money system) are currently bottlenecks through which people can be impoverished and forced to put all their attention on subsistence instead of thriving. Thrivemovement.com goes into the myriad issues that accompany the liberated global access to energy and economic solvency. We emphasize the core transformation of energy and commerce systems because without that other changes are insufficient.
Though Charles writes in his book that "free energy technologies have been in existence for at least a century," (SE, p.443), in his THRIVE review he contradicts himself by taking a swipe at our credibility in saying, "I won't consider here the scientific plausibility of such technology, which appears to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics."
Let me clarify that first, a toroidal technology, like an atom, a human or a galaxy is an open system and the 2nd Law applies to closed systems. It's not the motion of the machine which is perpetual, (all matter wears down) it's the source of energy! Second, what is the explanation for the fact that these inventors are getting raided, shut down, threatened and sometimes killed if they are actually all charlatans? It's documented that the US Government has denied and confiscated over 3000 patent applications for alternative energy devices. Doesn't it make sense that they might actually know something about how and which devices actually work?
In his book, Charles goes so far as to excuse J.P. Morgan's suppression of Nikola Tesla's radiant energy tower by writing "Perhaps Morgan was even on some level cognizant that humanity was not ready for Tesla's gift." (Sacred Economics, p. 443).
Wow. I wonder how all the people suffering from lack of energy and all the species rendered extinct in the course of dirty energy proliferation feel about that.
Eisenstein refers to THRIVE having attracted a "cult following." This strange and inaccurate term, of course, has been seized upon and often repeated by government trolls and would-be debunkers to try to undermine the credibility of the thrive movement. More accurately, the movie has been seen by over a million people all over the world in its first month with over 95% rave approval and appreciation for providing coherent, fact-based information and grounded solution strategies. I request that intelligent critical thinkers who appreciate THRIVE not be dismissed as cult followers. There is no cult here and the people finding value in this critical information deserve more respect.
Charles has obviously done a lot of research for his book. I especially appreciate his detailed look into the history of money, alternative currencies, localization and his efforts to come up with some out-of-the-box thinking about what approaches might restore healthy lives and ecologies. It's well worth the $16 he charges for it on Amazon - especially for its value in triggering critical thinking and exploratory interchanges just like this one.
My two biggest concerns about the Eisenstein perspective are that:
a) It can serve to lull people back to sleep and provide the temporary comfort of denial, while distracting from what is really going on...and
b) Many of its proposals, though sounding good at first blush, are ultimately based on government intervention backed by threats of violence - rather than the true protection of the rights of each individual.
Conspiracy
Although Eisenstein acknowledges on page 13 of his book that a totalitarian one world government seems to be approaching, he then goes on (pages 3,5,8,9,14,91) to undermine others from taking it any more seriously than to work on our egos and remember our oneness. An example:
"What if our emotions and beliefs actually attract experiential data that fits them...so that it looks like a conspiracy even if there are no conspirators?" (NWO, p.8)
No conspirators? People conspiring to accomplish certain goals is undeniable- the question is at what scale and to what end. Check out this site. I am personally encouraged to know that what we experience as systems-wide failure is not random or just the cruelty and incompetence of all of humanity, but instead the consequence of our unwitting participation in an agenda that we have the power to obsolete through non-violent non-participation.
Belief in conspiracy theories is a ...victim state. (NWO, p.5)
If we ignore the agenda for domination, we will end up experiencing a whole new level of meaning to the term "victim state."
In one of his most unlikely conclusions, Charles states:
"A nefarious power, inimical to human well-being, manipulates the course of human events from behind the scenes, seeking the total control of every human being. Rather than an evil Illuminati, could that power be money? Could it be that it is rather the money system that controls the global elite?"
This is like saying the gun was guilty of the murder. Are the banking elite unaware of the unfair advantage the money scam gives them? They have the power to remedy it if it is not their intention. Our corrupt money system did not create itself, nor will it get rid of itself without dedicated effort.
"Give me control of a nation's money system and I care not who creates the laws." --Mayer Amschel Rothschild
"Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world." --Henry Kissinger, 1973
Charles writes that..."conspiracy theories eventually bring most people to a kind of despair, even paralysis..." (NWO, p.14)
Gratefully, this is not the reaction we are getting to THRIVE. Viewers report that the tone, the coherence, the honoring of nature and the human spirit, and especially the in-depth solutions, provide a sense of motivation, traction and viable things to do with the energy that arises. Many people feel validated in their perception and more hopeful than ever now that we have thrivemovement.com through which to share vital information within a context of hope and activism.
He says: "The conspirators are not others, they are we, you and I and everyone..."
This is an example of where I think it is vital to remember our unification, while simultaneously recognizing our individual distinction. Why do we take care to avoid a dangerous street if we are walking alone at night? Some people are desperate and will harm others. That is true on small and large scales and pretending otherwise is dangerous.
Solutions
When I search for viable solutions being suggested by Eisenstein's "sacred" approach, unfortunately a great number of them seem to play directly into the hands of the agenda for global control and undermine the individual's rights and ability to take action.
Non-Action
Charles writes that:
"The dark energies have nearly run their course... Though some might try to hold onto it a little longer, sooner or later they will accept that their time is over, and they will bow out of service..." (NWO, p.15)
What is the evidence for this? I do not see any indication that they are going to go away on their own. In my experience, it always comes down to individuals waking up, speaking up and taking action if we are going to expose and transcend tyranny.
Choose a Belief that Feels Good
"I suggest we choose a belief, and the corresponding psychological state accompanying it...consider how each belief-state feels, what it implies about the world, about human beings, and about oneself." (NWO, p. 12)
How about logic and observation? How about going through the uncomfortable feelings that may come up around facts we wish weren't true? Shall we pretend no one is starving because it doesn't feel good to acknowledge it? I believe we can be empowered by feeling the discomfort - as anyone who has successfully navigated grief or rage can attest to. On the other side we feel the strength of knowing we are not victims and that we have the right to control our own lives, as long as we do no harm to others.
No Principles
"I, however, don't live by principles, nor do I recommend it."(NWO, p. 398)
I believe that in order for people to live without rulers dominating their actions, we need clear rules instead - based on the core principle of non-violation - that no one has the right to violate another person or their property except in true self-defense.
Just for the record, there are numerous principles Eisenstein recommends. Some of them follow.
"To charge a fee for service, or even for material good, violates the spirit of the Gift." (SE, p. 401)
Impracticality
"The key to right livelihood is to live off gifts." (SE, p. 397)
"Musicians, artists, prostitutes, healers, counselors, and teachers all offer gifts that are debased when we assign them a price...the only honorable way to offer it is as a gift." (SE - 412)
Theft
"Most corporations and business owners are not ready to step into a gift-based business mode. That's OK - you can give then a little push! Simply implement it unilaterally by "stealing" their products, for example by illegally downloading or copying digital content like songs, movies, software, and so on." (SE, p. 411)
To imagine that people's lives are going to be restored by others stealing from them is dangerously incomplete and self-serving in its logic. If you want to gift your goods then gift them. But to impose your choice not to on the creator of them is violation, and exactly what gives you the right to impose that violation?
Though Charles has written, "When we convert ‘have to' into ‘want to' we are free," (SE, p. 358), many of his proposals seem to be ultimately based on force.
"The state could determine by fiat who gets credit..." (SE, p. 456)
And we have confidence in this why? Every State in history has grown to violate its people. I believe people have the right to determine their own systems of exchange and that those that serve the real needs will prevail without State imposition or subsidy.
Fractional Reserve
Charles states: In a fractional reserve system, one way to view what happens is that banks are not creating new money at all, but simply allowing existing money to be in two places at once. (SE, p. 454)
This notion has reached its ludicrous exposure in so-called "naked short sales" where up to 300 people have been documented to be claiming to own the same shares of stock. It has been used by investment banks to manipulate markets to the disastrous destruction of many individual's financial well-being.
He then says: "Is the money in your savings account "really there" or not? That is the question that bothers "real money" advocates, but ultimately it is not a useful question." (SE, p.455)
"In a credit system, most of the credit should go to those who will put it to good use."
(Who decides what "good" is? To prevent abortion? To support it?)
He goes on to say, "The "social function" I describe doesn't dictate to whom it goes; it merely sets the conditions so that it will be most likely to go to a certain area that represents the social consensus of good use. This function can be adjusted."(SE, p.456)
By whom? - The enlightened? Property is based fundamentally on our right to own ourselves, our bodies...and then the fruits of our labor. As soon as you eliminate property and give authority to a state, much less control over a fiat credit system, you have all the key historical ingredients for tyranny. I assert that the fundamental unit of wholeness at the human level is each individual, not the "social consensus." It is of grave concern to me that Charles writes that the Marxist solution "does not reach deeply enough." (SE, p. 185) If there is no valid property, do you endorse violating a person's body? How about their home, their bank account, their income? Where exactly would you draw the line? What rights do you think an individual should be free to defend?
"We are using money to destroy money...
The time for the mindset of wealth preservation is over. Wealth preservation brings to mind a swarm of rats, each clamoring over the others to reach the top of the mast of a ship that is sinking."
The desire to "kill" money, I believe, is better channeled into having an honest money system with no lending of money one doesn't have, no printing of money that doesn't correspond to value. It is about sound, honest and accurate money (medium of exchange) rather than, in effect, raiding someone's investments, grain silo, or rainy day savings to re-distribute it against their will. This coercive approach is, I believe, based on the very notions of scarcity and fear that Charles is trying to overcome and ignores the creative capacity of humans to innovate how to do more with less (lighter building materials, more capable shrinking computers, zero-point energy devices, robotics, virtual communication, electric cars...) In agrarian societies of old, women managed banks based on honest interest repayable with the fruits of the harvest - fruits, grains, and offspring - tapping the creativity of nature. The Sumerian word for interest meant "calf." (Web of Debt, Ellen Brown, p. 58)
Preservation of Existing Financial Structure
Charles says: "Perhaps most importantly, a credit-based system can accommodate all of the proposals of this book without the revolutionary destruction of the existing financial infrastructure and rebuilding of a new one." (SE p. 457)
I suggest the key word is voluntary. It is not what kind of monetary system is the best for some to impose, but how do we preserve the freedom to have people be able to try different currencies, different kind of banks, different kinds of insurance and dispute resolution organizations so that the ones that are most trustworthy rise to the surface, and without state subsidies or bailouts, the less sound ones disappear. Is a "sacred economy" one where a few individuals who consider themselves wiser than the rest centralize control and try to manage markets, prices and money supplies, or is it the on-going flow of free individuals exchanging by reciprocal and mutual agreement?
Non-Aggression Principle
On page 78 of Sacred Economics is a dangerously misunderstood interpretation of liberty. It implies that the liberty perspective is somehow "dependent on impersonal and coercive institutions that govern from afar." My research leads to exactly the opposite conclusion. I recommend to Eisenstein that he read more carefully the one person in his bibliography, Hans Hoppe, who does not write in favor of state controlled economics, and also to explore Stefan Molyneux, who will show countless viable alternatives to government that foster just and thriving community.
Charles has written, "Ultimately, I envision decentralized, self-organizing, emergent, peer-to-peer, ecologically integrated expressions of political will." (SE, p. 187) Here is an ethical level on which I believe we can all meet. I look forward to potential future collaboration in such an endeavor.
Conclusion
Consciousness growth is not a substitute for activism. I think that for us to be free and thrive, they need to be able to proceed hand in hand. If you want to focus on the meta-psychology, that is important. There is no reason for that to impede or distract those who are waking up and standing up to take highly-leveraged, non-violent action.
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