Violence – Dalai Lama – Intelligence

Centralisation of fossil fuel based power: terrorism/war, energy supply, climate change. Centralisation of cultural power, e.g. the television: fragmenting societies. Globalisation: the centralisation of resource, political, and other forms of power. In response, the internet as an unregulated and (so far) decentralised cultural and social system is breathing new life into the efforts of those of us who are, to varying extents, distancing ourselves from centralised power.

An important (the most important?) question arising on the net concerns the potential end of civilisations as we know them. Many people who are developing ideas surrounding, and solutions for, global social and population collapse are putting those ideas out on paper. Jared Diamond’s Collapse is but one of hundreds if not thousands of books on the topic of global human/environmental collapse, dealing with the questions governments either don’t want to face, or are attempting to address covertly (and probably ineffectually) because the conclusions are too unpalatable for the public. There is no doubt also that the minds of the security and intelligence services are also focusing on these issues.

In this context Derrick Jensen [1] argues that the only solution to our civilisation’s collapse (known as civ among dissenters) is to cut its vital resource organs in order to force localisation of power. This is necessary because, Derrick argues, existing hierarchical civilisation will continue rampaging til the end, beyond the point of no return and a mass extinction. The rebirth of a similar society is possible… that is, if enough people survive. We simply do not know how much of a ‘nuclear winter’ there might be after all the coal, oil and gas have been burnt but there is the potential that no mammal may survive, apart from the frightened little mouse-like creatures who survived the dinosaurs’ apocalypse. Or, maybe only the ants will survive. That is a potential reality. Derrick argues that the solution is, for those who have awoken to the enormity of the problem, to dismantle and disrupt the systems of the hierarchical civ and hence give societies time to adapt to a low-impact lifestyle, only it will not be called lifestyle and will not be in glossy magazines. It will be lifestyle under the fingernails.

Civilisation is an expression of a system in full feed-forward mode, driven by the application of agricultural production for surplus and enabled by a pocket of fossil fuel, which may now be at its peak of output before declining over this century. Note that we believe agricultural production probably to be around 12,000 years old, and that the use of fossil fuels at current scale has only been occurring in the last 150 years. Coal has been mined since 50BCE; oil/gas has been drilled for from about 400CE and was used to pave the streets of Baghdad with asphalt by 800CE, and was being pumped through pipelines by 1000CE. Marco Polo saw ‘hundreds of shiploads’ worth of oil being pumped from the wells. This is valuable stuff. Oil has been used at its current scale since 1846, and this coincided with the increased use of coal. We can see the roots of climate change in exponential growth of the industrial revolution, which brought together different kinds of fossil fuels, and later made possible complex chemicals from the by-products of those fuels which now artificially feed crops. Thus, when the oil runs out, green production will also decrease. Western industrialised civilisation is insecurely predicated on finite fossil fuel.

We are now at a point where we have realised that the oil we are using to maintain our current lifestyle is about to start declining in availability. At the very same time, other emerging economies are now able to afford oil and coal and they are demanding it. They also have increasing wealth to pay for it. £20 or $30 per gallon of fuel is not a possibility, it is inevitable under the free marker laws of supply and demand. How would you function if every mile you travel in a car costs $1 or if heating your home cost $30 a day? How would you afford this if wages fell to $100 per week? As fuel costs increase we will be faced with becoming heavily industrially and agriculturally labour intensive – think of the conditions in factories in the developing countries and you are imagining what could potentially happen in Europe, North America and Australia. If you are in your thirties or forties now, with a lifespan of perhaps 80 years, just imagine what your last decade could be like living in the conditions faced by the majority of people in China. This is a realistic projection.

Each year that goes by the cost of fossil-fuel energy for developing renewable energy infrastructure will rocket from for example $1 trillion to $10 trillion in a decade. The green revolution, which was powered by oil-based artificial chemicals and transport networks, will retract, making food scarcer again. The production required in order to equip everyone with wind, wave and solar renewables would put as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere fossil fuels as we have done already since the industrial revolution.

If we don’t engage all our resources now, in future we will need to learn to live on the few watts of electricity that can be provided with a small area of solar panels or a family sized roof-top wind turbine. Furthermore, if we don’t drastically reduce consumption to such levels the effects on climate change are truly scary. Billions will die as tropical regions turn to deserts, killing off the rainforests and releasing a significant part of the carbon sink, making the situation even worse. Wars will be fought over resources. We are already at the brink of war between several African nations due to water source disputes. The implication is that when today’s healthy and well-fed 30-40 year old Westerner is 70 a life of hard physical existence awaits.

We have a choice, all of us now. Many don’t know they have this choice, others have already taken it for a variety of reasons. The Amish people of the North Eastern US live and farm in a strict interpretation of Christian values. They do not approve of rising above God’s earth, so any form of technology and sophistication is avoided . They exist simply, and I have no doubt with a far lower dependency on the earth’s resources or pollution of Gaia in return. There is also a modern and scientific system for maximising human and agricultural existence with the minimum impact on the earth, known as Permaculture [2]. Permaculture argues that we can all exist based in small communities with our food resources all around us, and without fossil fuel energy. In a permaculture, human culture, agriculture and the environment are all in balanced. Multiple closed loops (both socially and agriculturally) cycle energy and resources, and human cultural and political power, locally. There are no doubt many traditional communities in parts of the world who exist in this balanced way, and there are ‘intentional communities’ in the industrialised West who exist under permaculture principles. These communities probably don’t have TV’s: why would anyone burn 200w of electricity to see other people when the local community, like the earth it exists on, produces so much home grown culture, knowledge, and entertainment?

A society somewhat akin to the Amish and communities currently practising permaculture might arise naturally if enough time is available, and I suppose this is one of the aims of those who would want to dismantle civ; to give us enough time for humanity to reorganise away from fossil fuel and the centralised power it permits. The more successful community (or node) would probably be based the permaculture method since it is not averse to technology, but embraces technologies not based on oil and profligacy, and reusing resources locally in novel ways.

Jeff Vail [3] argues that unless something is done to prevent hierarchy from taking hold again there is no point in trying to force civ to decrease its voracity for the planet. Jeff argues that rhizomes [4] are the natural state or order, civilisation is an imbalance in the natural order. Derrick Jensen argues that industrialisation is the problem. Jeff argues that agriculture is the problem. I think that Jeff has it right about agricultural production for surplus, as Marx did before him (by the way Jeff works in intelligence so he’s probably good at spotting emerging patterns). Derrick argues that we are going to kill off most of the human species (and most of the other species) unless civ is stopped, and there are plenty of examples in his book A Language Older then Words.

However, I think that industrialisation is merely a symptom and that it is agriculture and fossil fuel that are the drivers of civ. If I am right then the projected decrease in fossil fuel availability will force us towards low impact living (and hard physical labour). We are going to face a gradual process for the industrialised West, a process that James Kunstler call the Long Emergency. This is in contrast with some pretty awful events that are to happen (and already happening) in countries affected by global warming. Many of those events will also directly affect the industrialised West. The people of the Middle-East and North Africa will be wanting to enter Europe, and the people of an area including Central America and the Southern US will be wanting to enter the Northen US. Their progress will be slow, over decades, and will be mediated by war and civil war.

On the whole though, those of us in our comfortable temperate countries are going to face a future of complete economic downturn over decades, as fuel becomes more expensive and as people turn away from complex technology and non-renewable energy, and as we find more sustainable and efficient applications of our current human knowledge. Permaculture is both a workable way to become sustainable, and it is the natural conclusion for human society which has scientific and cultural knowledge. Knowledge, without fossil fuel to permit it to be used under centralised power, must be applied to simple technologies which produce cause and effect cycles only at local nodes of the rhizome. There simply won’t be enough quick-release energy to cause hierarchical civilisation to bubble. The level of sophistication of this balanced state of human existence is debatable. It is debatable whether we would be able to run something like the internet, given the complexity of sub-processes required for it to be of use in the way it is right now in 2006. A telephone system may be possible. Equally, it is questionable as to whether we would want people to be communicating other than through their local rhizome node. To do so would permit a power hierarchy of knowledge – of an intelligence and exploitation culture – to emerge independently of the local control of the anarcho-democracy that rhizomatic tribes would be self-organised into.

A recent debate opened on Derrick Jensen’s discussion list as to whether the Dalai Lama’s Eastern ‘personal compassion’ approach is compatible with Derrick’s assertion that we must ‘take down civ’; that we must all become the change we wish to see by taking responsibility for our immediate actions (Ghandi). We can act for change, and ‘blow up’ the infrastructure that civ depends upon [5], or by default we will be taking part in an apocalyptic genocide. The solution of blowing things up is extreme, but if we accept Ghandi’s teaching that we must become part of the change then it may have greater moral value than to continue to support civ. This discussion offers a glimpse of the reasons why Western governments are so scared of counter-culture and activism that they see them as dangerous radicals: radicals hold morally legitimate opinions that are dangerous to the concept of centralised/hierarchical civ predicated on cheap energy and technology, and there are millions of them. A significant number are probably prepared to act for change and would be convinced they are right to do so because of the evidence that people like Jensen and Vail and hundreds of others are coherently and convincingly articulating. The logic is as compelling to progressive activists, who are emotionally and intellectually alienated from mainstream Western culture, as is a mullah’s words to a young man orphaned by ‘collateral damage’. Terrorism as a response to Western civ will evolve into a War in the Minds played out through centralised power and centralised culture against any attempts to ‘take-down’ civ through illegal or legal means. We will see a diverse range of organisations, some religious fundamentalist, others simply driven by clear moral positions, all taking up a struggle against civ. It won’t be possible to label all these people as terrorists – the public will see the patterns and the moral logic. But if a War in the Minds develops, driven by centralised power and effected by security and intelligence services, then the public may be denied access to information and the communication channels needed in order for society to be aware of what is happening. If you think the news is currently biased then wait til you see what the CIA can do with psyops and cointellpro activities within the mainstream (and alternative) media.

It is to be expected that the security and intelligence services are already beginning to infiltrate progressive activism groups in order to prepare the ground for War in the Minds. It is also likely that extremist activist groups are plotting to commit acts of destruction or even violence against people in order to attack civ. However, I just don’t think either side need bother. The supply and demand of oil and the extent of climate change due to use of fossil fuel are going to be the deciding factors in the future of the human race. You can play at War in the Mind and you can play at terrorism/freedom fighting but none of it will change the facts.

We do not need to choose between violence and being part of the problem; these are both part of the problem if we take the Dalai Lama’s personal compassion perspective. We will slowly be forced to (or wisely prepare for) to a return living in balance in Gaia or we will perish. This will force an evolution in human society, changes that are already being outlined in Vail’s and Jensen’s critiques of current human society and power. We can become a part of the solution by getting off-the-grid, going back to the land in intentional and intelligent communities, and by preparing the knowledge banks and library shelves with the best of human culture and useful (non fossil fuel based) technologies before the internet goes out.

We do not need to be violent or destructive towards civ, instead we should take the best of what it has to offer and transfer scientific and social knowledge towards systems like intentional communities and permaculture – turn the forces of civ into forces for good. The sooner we do this the more complex the technologies we will be able to transfer. If we leave it until the brink of collapse there may be no time and we will all go back to the stone age – literally. This is how to be a part of the solution – to lead the way immediately and prepare the ground for the millions who eventually will be forced to follow us. You can do something today by getting hard copy information, off the internet, out of libraries, on your bookshelves and begin to understand how to live like people did before we had oil – but more intelligently, using the best of current scientific and technical knowledge.

If the intelligence and security services and their agents, who are not doubt at work within progressive activism communities preparing the War in the Minds battlefield, really want to do something positive for human society in the next few decades they will not work against progressive activism. Instead, they will work with us all to turn away from the pointless conflicts of history and now anachronistic concept of centralised power based on finite cheap/free energy. They will work within the media and use cointellpro techniques to get the message and mantra of sustainability into the minds of every person in the world. In doing so they will be a part of the solution.

1. Derrick Jensen http://www.derrickjensen.org/
2. Permaculture: A system of sustainable and intelligently applied low eco-impact living. Permaculture means permanent agriculture and permanent human culture where energy and cultural power are used within local cycles. Bill Mollison and David Holmgren
3. Jeff Vail A Theory of Power
4. Rhizome: a system of nodes with power distributed more-or-less evenly across them rather than power being unequally distributed hierarchically (c.f. Western linear cause and effect v Eastern complex cycles of nature).
5. The writer makes no assertion that anyone should blow up anything. This statement is provided as an example of the kind of consensus that people are coming to on Derrick Jensen’s discussion list.