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There's an article in the June edition of Haper's in which Jared Diamond
argues that societies tend to collapse shortly after they reach their peak in
wealth and power because of the enormous stress they put on their environmental
resources. He uses the Maya, perhaps not the best example, to make his
case. I don't know if we are now moving into an end-game, but I find our
enormous dependence on a finite environmental resource, hydrocarbon energy,
frightening. It does not seem to have hit home that this resource must run
out. Nor does it appear to have occurred to world leadership that its
wasteful use in huge and destructive military machines will make the resource
run out much faster than it otherwise might. Just as Diamond describes the
Maya doing before they slipped back into the jungle, it does seem as though we
will go on fighting, destroying and wantonly consuming until the end.
Ed Weick
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 1:26 AM
Subject: [Futurework] End-game (was:The
ultimate praying machine . . .)
I think there's too much socio-economic
name-calling and anathemitising going on these days, and we're all getting too
nervy without realising why. The truth is that our present era of
industrialisation is not going to be able to deliver for everybody and we're
now moving into an end-game.
Only a few (including the group
behind Bush) know what it's all about. That's why they have lied about their
motives in invading Iraq and were also able to persuade Blair to perjure
himself in front of his own nation. All done with the best of motives (so the
historians will tell us). They don't trust the public enough to tell them what
it's really all about.
We really ought to be forgetting about all the
ideological scapegoats. The truth is that we probably have no more than about
two decades in which to invent a large and powerful new energy technology and
develop it in time to take over from oil and gas. If this doesn't happen, the
mentally weakest and laziest will go to the wall -- as they have always done
throughout the whole period of our species.
Just at the moment our
species in the developed world is committing suicide anyway by refusing to
procreate sufficient replacement children. The reason why is that we have
become conned by both the left and the right. The left has conned us that the
welfare state will look after us in our old age, and the right has conned us
that the financial services industry can be trusted to keep us prosperous
until the day we die. They are both disastrously wrong.
We are now back
to the same game that has been going on for the last 100,000 years or so --
survival.
Keith Hudson
.At 19:09 08/06/2003 -0400, you
wrote:
Ed Weick wrote:
Brad, get used to it.
Obscenity is the name of the game, though no one who
uses it or
benefits from it would call it that.
If you want to
get power out of a river, you dam it up.
This is, I propose (basing
myself on
my reading of Freud...), the "message" of societies'
repressive
manipulation of sexual energy.
> However, it does
make one
wonder where the world is going
and how fast it will get there. Rich and
powerful countries
behaving like rogue states (though calling others that)
terrorize and
destroy poor ones on trumped up grounds of harbouring terror
and
possessing weapons of mass destruction.
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath,
England
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