Descent in Anarchy?

I read a lot of books in preparation for C-Realm podcast interviews, and I often read to Olga as she works in the kitchen. I could get the reading done more quickly if I read to myself, but by reading aloud to her, I have someone to discuss ideas with in advance of getting together with the author on Skype.

Normally “working in the kitchen” involves food, but recently Olga has been plastering the walls, and while she worked, I read aloud to her from Dmitry Orlov's most recent book, The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit. I interviewed Dmitry earlier today for C-Realm Podcast episode 365: Communities that Abide.

John Adams

The other morning I was reading to Olga from a section of Dmitry’s book called "Anarchism's Charms." By “anarchy” Dmitry simply means “without hierarchy." It is important to note that he does not use the word “anarchy” to mean “the embodiment of a coherent ideology of Anarchism.” I learned from David Graeber's new book that anarchy and democracy used to be used interchangeably to describe rule by the people, a situation that our "Founding Fathers" were keen to avoid. They championed a version of liberty in which only a select few people directed the actions of government. The nightmare scenario which they resolved to avoid was a universal political franchise in which everyone had an equal voice. James Madison argued that such societies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

John Adams, who would become the second president of the United States, warned that instituting democracy in the United States would result in the majority immediately voting to cancel debts and re-distribute real estate, thus dismantling the complexity of a socio-economic state heroically held far from the equilibrium of a Hobbesian “state of nature,” which amounted to “a war of all against all.” The world of one man/one vote would eventually degenerate into one that is devoid of any significant form of human cooperation. It would contain no art or grand architecture, no refined culture or complex social arrangements and, worst of all, no productive surplus to be accumulated into vast personal fortunes. Adams argued:

Suppose a nation, rich and poor, high and low, ten millions in number, all assembled together; not more than one or two millions will have lands, houses, or any personal property; (...)if all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not [they] think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have? Property is surely a right of mankind as really[sic] as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted.

Democracy got a huge boost when Andrew Jackson ran a populist campaign for president in 1828 and described himself, provocatively for the time, as a democrat, by which he meant to emphasize his camaraderie with common people and his antagonism to bankers and bureaucrats. By mid century, democracy had metamorphosed from a term of abuse into an accepted label for a republic in which representatives are elected by the people. Today, democracy is riding so high that the US Federal Government, a system explicitly designed to prevent rule by the many, is trumpeted as the archetypal example of democracy, something so noble and morally salutary that we justify invading other countries by claiming that we do it not for our own advantage but with the altruistic aim of  "spreading democracy."

The word "anarchy" has not fared so well. Its etymology describes a social arrangement that is "without rulers." No surprise then that our rulers would prefer that we equate such a situation with mob violence, burning cities, and landscapes pillaged by nightmare monsters from the id.  In a linguistic environment shaped by the needs of capital, the word “anarchist” fits nicely into the phrase "bomb-throwing anarchist." While some anarchists surely have thrown bombs, "bomb-dropping capitalist" has many more concrete referents than does "bomb-throwing anarchist." And yet, "bomb-dropping capitalist" reeks of grumpy leftist ideology, whereas "bomb-throwing anarchist" just seems like a reference to an uncontroversial archetype.

Thomas Hobbes and those “Founding Fathers” who agreed with his views claimed to believe that everything good about human civilization was only possible when the rabble subordinated their individual autonomy to a ruler and accepted direction from above. Given that they were arguing to preserve their own privileged status, this was a convenient belief for the founders to hold. Whether or not they actually believed it I can’t say, but a less ideologically constrained look at the few remaining pre-literate cultures left to serve as windows into our own pre-historic past shows that cooperation and coordination of effort, without any compulsion or direction from on high, is the basic human modus operandi. It's just what we do. As Dmitry put it:

The striking success of the human species has everything to do with our superior abilities to communicate, cooperate, organize spontaneously and act creatively in concert. In turn, the equally glaring, horrific, monstrous failures of our species have everything to do with our unwelcome ability to submit to authority, tolerate class distinctions and blindly follow orders and rigid systems of rules.

When I paused in my reading, Olga pointed out that, in English language conversation, at least in the United States, the word "anarchy" is very likely to occur as a part of the phrase "descent into anarchy." The unspoken assumption being that up is good and down is bad. We build up. We strive to climb higher, to continue the work of the great men who came before us and raise the edifice of our civilization ever skyward. A movement in the opposite direction represents a loss of hard-won human achievement, a slide in the direction of the Hobbesian hell of our brutish origins. A descent is a fall; perhaps even a re-enactment of The Fall.

A fall is something to be avoided, but if increased social and technological complexity is synonymous with moving up, then we may be obliged to make some kind of downward movement in the near future. Nobody wants to fall, but when you are standing on a rickety, teetering scaffold that you built by bolting one kludge onto another onto another, until you are precariously perched atop a teetering structure of Rube Goldberg complexity, swaying in the wind, a move in the direction of the steady ground of anarchy might be just the thing. When the ossified and hyper-complex structure of class division, codified inequality and technological dependence starts to shake and list, and collapse seems likely, a deliberate descent sooner beats an obligatory fall later. How much later? Hard to tell, but why risk it by lingering? For the commanding view? Is it really better than anarchy?

And lest you imagine that I invoked the concept of collapse as a scare tactic, I am using the word as Joseph Tainter does in his classic, The Collapse of Complex Societies. According to Tainter's conception of collapse, a civilization that responds to challenges by increasing the complexity of its civic arrangements simultaneously increases the fragility and vulnerability of the system. Consider this excerpt from Occupy World Street: A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform by Ross Jackson:

While most people automatically think of collapse as a catastrophe, Tainter's theory is not that simple. Collapse should rather be seen as an "economizing process" that occurs when it becomes necessary to restore a positive marginal return on organizational investment. Collapse is simply a better economic alternative than continuing the old ways. Indeed, it is the most rational, most appropriate response to the crisis. For the population involved, it may well be experienced as a positive change to a simpler existence with both economic and administrative gains.

Or as Joseph Tainter himself put it, "Collapse is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity." In other words, bossman says that we shouldn’t complain about toiling to make him rich because we wouldn’t have it anywhere near as good as we do now if we were working for ourselves and for each other rather than working for him. Freedom from his hierarchy would be the freedom to starve and die at hands of our fellow brutes.

Don’t you believe it.

Has Charles Mann Turned to the Dark Side?

I've been getting e-mails and communications via social media from C-Realm listeners who are… let us to say "concerned" that Charles C. Mann, respected researcher and author (as well as repeat C-Realm podcast guest), has sold his soul to the fossil fuel industry.  CCM has an article entitled "What If We Never Run out of Oil?"  in the May 2013 edition of the Atlantic monthly magazine.  For the magazine cover the editors chose to remove the question mark and change a 'what if' question into the bald assertion that we will never run out of oil. While I agree that the article grants the techno-optimists too much credibility, I think that champions of the peak oil narrative are over-reacting and missing the point of the CCM's presentation.

I will explain in detail why I think CCM's Atlantic article has merit, but first, let's run through the flaws. In the article, and in an ensuing discussion on an episode of To the Point where CCM and three of the experts he quoted in his Atlantic article participated in a roundtable discussion on the topics of energy and climate,  all of the participants (except the program's host, Warren Olney) largely ignored the distinctions between oil, petroleum, fossil fuels, and 'natural gas (which sounds euphemistic to me and which I will refer to only as 'methane' going forward) and treated them as as a single resource called 'fossil fuels.' They also ignored the difference between liquid fuels which are used for transport and other types of energy resources which power the electrical grid.

C-Realm listener Bruce W. summarized what he saw as flawed reasoning and equivocations as follows:

One of the things that struck me about the Atlantic piece was what I took to be an odd definition of “petroleum” as “a grab-bag term for all non-solid hydrocarbon resources-oil of various types, natural gas, propane, oil precursors, and so on-that companies draw from beneath the Earth’s surface. The stuff that catches fire around stove burners is known by a more precise term, natural gas, referring to methane, a colorless, odorless gas that has the same chemical makeup no matter what the source-ordinary petroleum wells, shale beds, or methane hydrate.”

Well, okay, not wrong exactly, I guess - but the title of the article is “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?”  Industrial society, the infrastructure we built in the latter part of the 20th century, runs on oil - specifically light sweet crude that we got out of giant fields, all of which are in or edging toward decline or depletion. The crisis we are facing is a liquid fuel shortage, for which NGLs or whatever we might eventually possibly make out of methane hydrates do not adequately serve as a substitute (it's my understanding that NGLs deliver only about 66% of the energy of gasoline).

You can see the confusion on Mann's part when he writes, “ASPO was born after (Jean) Laherrère and Colin Campbell, another retired petroleum geologist, predicted in 1998 that ‘within the next decade, the supply of conventional oil will be unable to keep up with demand.’ Given the record-high petroleum reserves of the time, the claim was gutsy. Campbell and Laherrère insisted that talk of ever more oil was nonsense.” So what are we talking about - Peak Oil or Peak  “Petroleum”?

The same confusion ran rampant through the discussion on “To The Point”.  Plopping everything under the same general heading (of “energy” or “petroleum”) when what you actually want to talk about is “oil”, which undergirds our food production and distribution, our transportation, and a whole host of other systems, is either deliberately misleading (as Kunstler maintained) or just some fuzzy-headed writing.  I tend to think it’s the latter...

In the Atlantic article and in the subsequent radio discussion, CCM discusses hydrocarbon fuel sources obtained through advances in hydraulic fracturing and a decade-long Japanese program aimed at harvesting methane clathrates as reason enough to justify asking what the climate implications would be if the peak oil people are wrong and we don't run out of accessible hydrocarbon energy anytime soon?  What happens to the climate if we keep taking carbon that is sequestered underground or in seafloor ice and pumping it into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide?  I think it is a question worth asking, and I think that some of the fuzzy thinking about the different forms of hydrocarbon energy that has allowed the discussion to be framed in terms of never running out of oil is what has allowed this conversation to slip past the gatekeepers of the mainstream conversation who normally do not countenance any talk of limits to growth or resource constraints.  When the keepers of the public discourse grant such messages any air time, they make sure that talk of limits is always presented in the context of a techno-utopian refutation or as disaster porn.  

I also think that aggressive doomsaying about oil supplies in years past prompted CCM to overcorrect in the opposite direction.  He explains that he wrote a story on fossil fuel production 12 years ago in which he spoke to a few petroleum engineers who were excited at the prospects of something called hydraulic fracturing for accessing petroleum deposits that were not accessible via conventional means.  At the time, unidentified sources assured CCM that such talk was just wishful thinking.  As a result, CCM left fracking out of his story from 12 years ago.  He regrets that decision, and with this most recent Atlantic article, he was not about to be fooled again into omitting a potentially important element in the fossil fuel story.

Twelve years ago, fracking was the potential game-changer.  Now, the potential game-changer is the possibility of harvesting methane gas from seafloor ice.  This methane-rich ice, which goes by many names including methane clathrates, may exceed all other sources of hydrocarbon energy combined.  The Japanese, who lack any significant source of domestic energy and who have relied on imported energy and nuclear plants to power their modern techno-industrial infrastructure, have led the pack in exploring ways to access the energy locked up in methane clathrates.  

For the Japanese, it would represent an enormous achievement which could free them somewhat from their dependence on potentially unreliable sources of foreign energy.  They have conducted a decade-long research project and have just recently extracted the first commercial quantities of methane from ice on the bottom of the ocean using an enormous, custom-built research vessel.  As Chris Miller pointed out in an article published in Grist, the Japanese have spent $700 million over 10 years to recover $50,000 worth of natural gas liquids.  Taken in those terms, the project has not provided a very impressive return on the Japanese investment. Still, compared to what Americans and Japanese spend on cosmetics every year, $700 million over ten years is a pittance, and the potential returns could prove that investment to have been money well spent.

Other voices from the C-Realm have responded with indignation at CCM for having taken energy industry cheerleaders at their word.  I posted to the Friends of the C-Realm Group on Facebook that I might be interviewing CCM about his article and asked if C-Realm listeners had any questions they would like for me to ask him.  One listener responded with,  "Why, Charles?  Why?"  That same listener continued with, "Or if you're feeling cheeky, ask if he's receiving any payments from the oil and gas industry."

Oil production in the United States 1920 - 2012

James Howard Kunstler argued that CCM's Atlantic piece wasn't quite "mendacious"  (a fancy word for "dishonest") but that it was "tragically dumb."  John Michael Greer, not responding specifically to CCM, has written that peak oil theory predicted that, as the price for oil and other forms of fossil fuel rose, production of resources that once could not be extracted profitably would become economically feasible.  He has a graph that he has made repeated use of in his blog posts that shows a little uptick amid the greater downward trajectory in domestic US oil production in recent decades.  Domestic energy production peaked decades ago in the United States and that little uptick at the far right of the graph from fracking hasn't returned us to the production level of 1970 or brought us anywhere close.  To take this evidence as support for fairy tales of a return to abundance requires a powerful motivation on the part of the reader.

Nicole Foss, in a talk she gave here in New York City in January of 2013, described the low price of natural gas as a result of a misperception on the part of investors.  She reasoned that the gas industry has profited from fracking not so much with actual gas production but by bundling drilling leases and selling them as investment products.  She explained that in order to make those investment products attractive it is in their interest to crank up the hype machine about a supposedly new era of energy abundance.  CCM reports in his Atlantic article that Jean Laherrère made that same case about abundant oil from fracking when CCM interviewed him in February.

Shortly after the publication of his Atlantic article, CCM appeared on a segment of the NPR program To the Point in a segment devoted to fossil fuels and climate change.

CCM was joined by three other guests, all of whom had contributed quotes to his Atlantic article.  After CCM recapped his case for thinking that human civilization would never run out of fossil fuels (a category which includes methane from seafloor ice and not just oil as the cover of the Atlantic asserted) the host, Warren Olney, asked Michael Levi, author of Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future, "Whatever happened to the idea of Peak Oil?"  Levi's answered, "The idea of peak oil wasn't on very good foundation in the first place, but it certainly got popular during the 2000s.  That wasn't the first time that it was popular.  We thought that we were running out of oil in the 19th century.  We thought we were running out of oil around World War I.  We thought we were running out of oil around World War II.  And then we thought again in the 1970s that we were running out.  And what happens every time is what Charles has said; we are able to extract more resources as prices go up and as the economic incentive to develop technology and explore new places increases."

Michael Levi, who is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), almost certainly knows that M. King Hubbert's peak oil theory is not the simple worry that "we are running out of oil."  There are many subtleties to peak oil, but in general, peak oil theory predicts that production of conventional oil will eventually stop growing, reach a plateau, and then decline.  To characterize it as the unfounded fear that "we are running out of oil" is the sort of strawman characterization that cheerleaders for the fossil fuel industry usually reserve for audiences who are either completely naive about peak oil or ideologically predisposed to reject it and won't ask too many questions of people who tell them what they want to hear. After that opening, I struggled to take anything Michael Levi had to say at all seriously, though I agree with him about it being foolish to hope that peak oil will save us from climate change when we can't bring ourselves to reduce carbon emissions voluntarily.

What occurred to me in that moment when Warren Olney asked Michael Levi about the notion of peak oil was, "When was there ever a serious conversation about peak oil on NPR?"   This is a topic I have been following for about six years.  The conversation takes place on Internet forums like The Oil Drum and Energy Bulletin.  It takes place on blogs like Jim Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation and John Michael Greer's the Archdruid Report.  It takes place in books by authors like Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov, and Sharon Astyk.  It takes place on podcasts like the C-Realm and Extraenvironmentalist.  With exceptions so rare that they prove the rule, it does not take place on NPR.

Suffice it to say that CCM has heard the story of energy abundance from people like Levi, whose mainstream credibility derives from the fact that they tell it convincingly. But that's not the only reason that he has framed his piece as a refutation of peak oil theory. CCM thinks that he made a mistake 12 years ago when he took "several prominent energy pundits" seriously when they assured him that fracking would never scale up to provide energy at an economically viable scale.  He omitted fracking from his story then, and he was not about to repeat that error of omission in the present.  Clearly, the prophets of doom sold their case a little too effectively.  CCM regrets having taken them seriously back then, and in an effort to avoid repeating that error, he may be overcompensating and committing a new kind of error now.

Even so, his central question, the one in the title of his article, is crucial. Atmospheric carbon is at 400 parts per million today. We need to get that down to 350 ppm to keep global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius. Economic growth proceeds in lock-step with energy use. Energy obtained by pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground or off of the seafloor and then burning them puts more carbon into the atmosphere. Our business and political leaders are hell-bent on fostering economic growth which means burning hydrocarbon fuels. People who are concerned about climate change and aware of peak oil have been hoping that supply constraints would put the brakes on our collective suicide machine for us since we can't seem to muster the gumption to do it of our own free will. You may not have swallowed the energy glut hype, but the question remains. What if supply constraints aren't going to do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves? What if we don't run out of fossil fuels to burn before we set off self-sustaining climate feedback loops? What are we going to do? That's an important question, and it bears a passing resemblance to a question which absolutely cannot be asked in polite company or in the mainstream conversation curated by the corporate media and by NPR.

In November of 2011, I gave a presentation at a conference in northern Michigan where I shared the stage with Albert Bates, Nicole Foss, Steve Keen, and Guy McPherson.  In one breakout session, Guy McPherson proposed as a worst-case scenario. He proposed that the discovery of a practically limitless, free, clean source of energy would be disastrous as it would allow the planet-consuming machine that is industrial culture to continue its omnicidal campaign against all life on earth.  When we reconvened with the larger assembly, very few conference attendees grokked how the discovery of a clean and abundant source of energy with which to power our civilization could be bad news.  I spoke with Guy McPherson again recently for C-Realm podcast episode 354: Rapid, Unpredictable & Non-linear Responses.  I asked him to revisit that conference breakout session.

KMO: Would you summarize the thinking behind limitless, clean, free energy being terrible news?

Guy McPherson: Well yes.  It's been essentially free energy in the form of crude oil that has allowed us to develop a system that allows us to destroy every aspect of the living planet upon which we depend for our survival.  So, it's the development and implementation of an almost free energy source that allows us to commit planetary suicide.  And people want more of that because it looks like we are on the verge of running out of the cheap oil?  Or maybe we already have run out?  The root of the problem here is cheap energy which allows us to fly all over the world, drive all of the world, and develop an electrical grid and have access to all kinds of other energy sources... Fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources, all of which have extremely adverse consequences that, for the most part, we just look away from.  And so free energy forever is a prescription for absolute disaster.  I can't imagine that that would turn out well.  It certainly hasn't turned out well in the recent past when we have had, for all practical purposes, free energy at our ready disposal.

KMO: It would be a bit like winning the lottery, I think.  Winning the lottery tends to be a disaster for most people that it happens to.

Guy McPherson: Yes, and we have won the lottery as a society.  Or as Jane Goodall reports, there's an interesting little experiment she did.  There was a bunch of apes that she was studying, and they were all getting along just fine as a community, and so she throws a bunch of bananas into the mix.  And they start fighting and beating each other up and really acting in a way that we don't associate with wild animals so much as we do with human beings fighting over limited food.  They went bananas, and it appears that when it comes to cheap energy that we went bananas too.  I don't think that more of that is going to lead towards improvement in our behavior.

KMO: The solution to the life problems that have befallen somebody who has won the lottery and wasn't prepared for it is not to have them win the lottery a second time.

Guy McPherson: Right.  Exactly.

CCM has challenged the peak oil narrative and provoked the champions of that narrative into a reflexive defense.  There are reasons to believe that the current glut of methane from fracking will prove fleeting and that the current price  reflects a deliberately-cultivated false belief about its seeming abundance.  Energy companies certainly have an economic motive to use expert propaganda to cultivate public belief in newly abundant fossil fuel energy.  By accepting that propaganda, and by taking for granted that peak oil theory languishes in defeat, CCM is free to ask, "What are the consequences of cheap and abundant methane?"

Methane burns cleaner than coal, but still puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and none of the experts that CCM interviewed for his Atlantic article argued otherwise or even implied that business as usual was viable in the light of anthropogenic climate change.  Even Michael Levi, who in the roundtable discussion on To the Point, told Warren Olney that the case for peak oil had never been strong, warned that an abundance of relatively clean energy in the form of methane would likely inspire political laziness and complacency at a time when we need to push hard in the direction of renewable energy.  The scenario that he hopes to avoid is one in which we use cheap and abundant methane as a 'bridge fuel' for moving from the coal-powered past to the coal-powered future.

In the Atlantic article, CCM told the story of the personal and professional rivalry between M. King Hubbert, the father of peak oil theory, and Vincent E. McKelvey, the head of the Unite States Geological Survey (USGS) from 1971 to 1977, who provided a Panglossian picture of US energy reserves.  President Jimmy Carter, prophet of conservation, forced McKelvey to resign, but that was not the end of the contest between Hubbertians and McKelveyans.  CCM presents the McKelveyans as the current champions.  He quotes several McKelveyans for every Hubbertian in the Atlantic article, and the only voice representing the Hubbertian view on the To the Point segment was the program's host. Peak oil proponents may cry foul, but the point here is not a fair fight between the avatars of abundance and scarcity.  CCM's presentation is much more a professional wrestling spectacle, where the winner of the match is preordained, than it is actual competition.

If the Hubbert vs. McKelvey contest were presented as a fair fight, then we would not have the same vantage point from which to scrutinize the preordained winner's victory dance for indications that he will blithely continue in a mode which is nudging the cradle of terrestrial life in the direction of a Venusian hothouse hell. What's more, if Hubbert vs. McKelvey were not a fixed fight, the match would have taken place in a backyard or in an alley behind a biker bar rather than in a glitzy Las Vegas casino before a live audience of thousands, and we would never have enjoyed such a high-profile presentation.  Peak oil's defenders are too indignant over the disrespectful treatment of their favored contender to appreciate what we can learn if our fighter takes a voluntary dive and leaves the cornucopians to demonstrate their willingness to suffocate in their own success.

Boomers Go Bust

In the wake of World War II, the USA stood intact amidst countries leveled and exhausted by conflict.  The United States dictated the terms for the new international economic order, relieved the British of their global empire, set the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, and established a flow of imperial tribute from the global economic periphery to the new center of imperial gravity while demurring at the prospect of actually calling ourselves an empire.  Our soldiers returned home to a booming industrial economy that was hungry for workers.  Jobs were plentiful, as were houses in the new suburbs for qualified GIs.  The corporations feared underproduction, and the government feared discontent among veterans who might organize and agitate, and so advertisers convinced workers to define themselves and express their individuality through their purchases.  Their patterns of consumption became their identity.  The rights and privileges of citizens devolved into the rights and privileges of consumers.

The architects of suburbia laid out the new subdivisions without public spaces and with houses designed to direct the family's attention to the backyard rather than to the street.  Fossil fuels were practically free, and a new interstate highway system and prosperous workers elevated the car, that was a necessary component of suburban living, to an exalted position in the pantheon of consumer goods.  Jim Kunstler's Age of Happy Motoring commenced.

The children of this jubilant period, the Baby Boomers, were the ultimate repository of the aspirations of this triumphant culture, and their parents, the self-identified Greatest Generation, told their children that they were the heirs to the kingdom of heaven made manifest on earth.  They could have anything, do anything, and surpass God's angels as the ultimate manifestation of His vision.  The Boomers' parents told him that if they played by the rules, embraced their own self-aggrandizing mythology and worked hard, that they could enjoy unprecedented educational opportunities, careers, prosperity and abundance.  And so it was.  For a time.

In that period in which the Baby Boomers self-congratulatory narrative was taking shape, the United States was the world's biggest oil exporter.  By the time I was born in 1968, domestic oil production was reaching its peak.  I was a child when the second OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s created fuel shortages.  TV news reports focused on the long lines and short tempers at gas stations.  The embargo was short-lived, and the bonanza soon resumed, and by the time I started driving in 1984, gas still cost less than a dollar a gallon.  My father continued to repeat the core tenet of the Boomer belief system, that every generation in America does better than their parents.

Douglas Copeland published his novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture in 1991, when the Boomer belief system remained unassailable.  The explanation for the fact that the Boomers' children did not seem to be on track to exceed their parents in achievement and material abundance was a story of how the Gen Xers were cynical, psychologically detached and more interested in sabotaging the American dream with their hip irony than in joining the workforce and embracing their American birthright.  The problem had nothing to do with the decline of an economy based on manufacturing or with the rise of the new financialized economic order that didn't need nearly as many workers as before.  The problem was clearly with young people who could have lived even larger than their Baby Boomer parents if only they would shrug off their unjustified malaise and get with the program.  According to this narrative, the Gen Xers' obscure media obsessions and their rejection of the supposedly bourgeois values of their parents was just a smokescreen for laziness.  

Richard Linklater's 1991 film "Slacker" sealed the deal and indelibly affixed the suffix "slacker" to my generation.  Just speak the words "Gen X slacker" aloud.  Notice how easily they roll off the tongue.  As easy as it is to say, the "Gen X slacker" meme slotted into the Baby Boomer's worldview just as effortlessly as it spilled out of their mouths.

The Greatest Generation propelled the USA on its path to global dominance with their hard work and belt-tightening at home and with their courage and self-sacrifice in the theaters of war.  Or so goes their self-serving narrative.  Louis Menand, writing about Timothy Leary for the New Yorker, offers a different take.

Leary belonged to what we reverently refer to as the Greatest Generation, that cohort of Americans who eluded most of the deprivations of the Depression, grew fat in the affluence of the postwar years, and then preached hedonism and truancy to the baby-boom generation, which has taken the blame ever since. Great Ones, we salute you!

The Baby Boomers enjoyed an unprecedented starting position, and they did their part to fulfill the glorious destiny that their parents’ heroism made possible.  Then along came Generation X, and in a self-indulgent fit of unjustified cynicism, the slackers sabotaged the whole glorious enterprise with their obstinate refusal to get with the program.

This scapegoating of Generation X is a narrative you probably haven't heard repeated any time recently, but if you are a Boomer you surely did not encounter the phrase "Gen X slacker" for the first time here on this blog.  You may not have heard it or read it (much less, said it) since the fall of 2008, but reading it now surely activates long dormant mental circuits as when hearing an advertising jingle from yesteryear.  "Plop plop.  Fizz fizz.  Oh what a relief it is.  Fast.  Fast.  Fast."

Now that the grand scale malfeasance of a financialized economy is a fait accompli and the speculative bubbles that seduced homeowners into liquidating the accumulated equity in their homes have effected a massive transfer of wealth to the rentier class, and the Boomers feel the walls of the shrinking middle class closing in on them, the Gen X slacker meme no longer fits the current narrative.  Consequently it has fallen into disuse.

The Boomers may have conveniently forgotten how regularly they once used that detestable phrase or how fully they embraced it as a label that identified something real, but for most of my 20s and well into my 30s, the mainstream narrative of the echo chamber corporate media and the dinner table conversations that it informed treated the concept of the Gen X slacker as if it had real explanatory and predictive power.  The Boomers may have forgotten their behavior from this period, but we Gen X slackers remember.  Now that the glorious destiny of the Baby Boomers lies in ruins and Boomers have eclipsed depressed teenagers and the elderly as the group most likely to commit suicide, it is tempting, though certainly not helpful or praiseworthy, to enjoy a moment of schadenfreude as the Boomers wallow in their incomprehension, disbelief and despair.

If you are a member of Generation X or some later generation and grew up in the confining shadows of the most annoyingly smug, self-important, pampered and flattered demographic phenomenon in living memory, a group that has insisted that they did everything right and now that things are visibly falling apart that it must be because young people are too lazy or self-absorbed to take on the roles of responsible working adults (no, the Boomers don't see the irony in their accusing anyone of putting selfish obsessions above the good of one's community, nation or civilization)… Well, if you want to take a moment and enjoy their wailing and gnashing of teeth, go ahead.  We have work to do, but if you don't think that you have taken ample time to gloat, snort and savor their lamentation, then a nagging sense of a missed opportunity might distract you from the task ahead.  That task will require your full attention and focus, so if you want to just pause here and take satisfaction in the Boomers' moment of manifest failure and ignominy, that's okay.

I won't even say, "I'll wait," because I cannot claim that I've yet had my fill and that I'm over it.  I will be gloating right along with you for as long as you care to linger in this moment of anti-bodhisattvahood.

[Insert timeless moment for gloating]

Okay.  Done?  Good.  Me too.

Now, let's build up a little compassion before we continue, because we are going to be a lot more useful to our communities and to our civilization if we are working in a spirit of compassion and empathy than if we move forward with a gale force ideological wind filling our egoic sails with righteous indignation.  What's more, forgiving the Baby Boomers and welcoming them into the ranks of conscious revolutionaries will be good practice for forgiving and learning to work with the 1%.  We cannot build lasting prosperity, effect ecological restoration and navigate the challenges of increasingly disruptive technological development while simultaneously fighting a war against our oligarchs.  I certainly don't want to leave a world to my children that is the product of a global revolution in consciousness born of savagery and vengeance.

As annoyed as you may have felt at Boomers who thought that their own choices and actions created the unprecedented prosperity that they enjoyed from birth, right up to the moment when they had the rug pulled out from under them at the end of their careers, you probably never wanted to parade them through the streets, march them up onto a platform and end their lives in a public spectacle of brutal revenge entertainment.  But, if you don't occasionally thirst for the blood of the 1%, the people who robbed the rest of us with debt, presided over the dismantling of the industrial economy, confiscated that portion of the Imperial tribute gravy train that used to go to the middle class, and used the occasion of global crisis to justify a massive transfer of wealth to their own strata and simply assumed that the rest of us would just reconcile ourselves to the new normal and continue to feed on the false hope of winning the lottery or somehow becoming famous, then you are a more spiritually advanced being than I am, and I salute you.  We will need more like you if we are going to make it through the coming transition with our souls intact.

For the time being, just know that the Boomers were, for the most part, either doing what their parents told them was the right thing to do or trying to correct the moral and intellectual failings of their parents and mostly failing themselves but in new and spectacularly creative ways. If we can learn from the mistakes of previous generations, the Boomers have much to teach us.

The Neoliberal War on Imagination

I recently spoke with Tom O'Brien of the From Alpha to Omega podcast.  Tom asked me about zombie films and their political freight.  He also asked me about Occupy Wall Street. He thought that I would have an opinion about OWS because, as long-time C-Realm listeners know, I made two visits to NYC during the late summer and fall of 2011 when OWS first manifested as the occupation of Zucotti Park. I made casual visits to the encampment, collected interviews and provided an account of my experiences in C-Realm Podcast episodes 280: OWS - the Spark and 281: The One Percent Narrative.

In those early days, when OWS had the support of local unions and thousands of people assembled to chant “We are the 99%” and “This is what democracy looks like,” I let the energy and excitement of the moment sweep me up in the dream of a revolutionary ground-swell that would lead to a rapid transformation of the political and economic landscape.  I described to Tom the great anticipation and ultimate disappointment that I experienced around the form that Occupy Wall Street would ultimately take in the spring and summer of 2012. By then, I was living in Brooklyn, and I was excited to see what OWS would look like after a rejuvenating winter time-out. From my vantage point, Occupy’s 2012 incarnation basically fizzled.

It seemed like the establishment had made better use of the winter hiatus than had the activists, and OWS did not manage to reclaim the space it had won in the corporate media conversation the previous fall. It was as though the champions of the mainstream worldview had effectively neutralized the challenge from OWS. Then came Hurricane Sandy in the late fall of 2012, which left psome of NYC’s reviously underserved and marginalized communities like Far Rockaway, without electricity, potable water, or respite from the cold and with little prospect of immediate relief coming from the city, state, or federal government. This was Occupy’s opportunity to demonstrate mutual aid, spontaneous organization and community-building, and they performed well above my expectations.

After my conversation with Tom O’Brien, I heard from Josh Fuhrman (a Friend of the C-Realm). He directed me to an excerpt from David Graeber’s new book The Democracy Project: a History, a Crisis, a Movement, which appeared as a freestanding essay in the web magazine The Baffler. In it, Graeber describes the long-term effects that the organized opposition to the Vietnam war had on American foreign policy and the use of military force in the decades since. Graeber argues that the protests exercised a lasting influence on the tactics and priorities of the power elite in managing the worldview and containing the imagination of the American populace.   I wish that I had read that essay prior to recording my conversation with Tom, because in it Graeber clearly articulates notions about the Occupy movement that I was struggling to clarify in that podcast interview.  

Graeber explains that, in the United States,  the global revolution of 1968  took the form of an alliance  between students, dropouts, and other marginal players who united in opposition to the Vietnam War.  The popular view of those protests is that they failed to remove the United States from that theater of war any sooner than would have happened without the protests. Graeber argues that a longer term view shows something different. As a result of those protests, the United States would not commit American soldiers to a massive ground war for another 30 years.  

When 9/11 broke the US out of that pattern, the fear of domestic resistance to the war caused military planners to hamstring themselves. Thinking that the loss of American lives would spark protest on the homefront, the architects of the War on Terror made keeping US casualties to a minimum their overriding priority. They did this even though minimizing American body counts meant imposing such hardships on the civilian populations of Iraq and Afghanistan that it made both wars essentially unwinnable from a military perspective.  The US war planners understood that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan provided any threat to a geopolitical order which much of the world identifies as neoliberalism, but which the United States simply calls "freedom." The over-arching concern of the defenders of the status quo seems to be that a massive organized resistance to US military hegemony could grow into a coordinated expression of discontent against the neoliberal worldview.

“Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure. But it raises an intriguing question: What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?” -David Graeber

Graeber then describes his experience attending a protest intended to disrupt a series of IMF meetings in Washington DC in 2002.  The police presence and their overbearing tactics quashed any notion that the protests might succeed, and Graeber left the scene feeling defeated and depressed.  He later learned that the IMF had canceled many of the scheduled meetings. In practice, the police security measures meant to prevent organized protest of the meetings, became so onerous to the attendees that it was easier for them to  conduct their meetings online than in person.  The protests, which, to the protesters themselves, seemed like such a washout, turned out to have been really quite effective.  

This set Graeber to wondering if perhaps the ultimate goal of the neoliberal establishment is to maintain the sense of powerlessness among citizens and to prevent them from imagining any large-scale change to the economic and political order.  Could it be that the highest priority for the neoliberal establishment is to maintain a demoralized state of mind in people who do not support the system but who have no sense that they could choose something different? Neoliberalism is, after all, something which Americans are not even supposed to recognize as being just one set of political and economic arrangements among many possibilities. The corporate media imposes such strict discipline on the American vocabulary that financialized capitalism of the neoliberal variety is only identified using terms like “free trade” and “the free market.” Neoliberalism itself must not be named, much less examined or challenged.

The philosophy of neoliberalism, as Graeber describes it, holds that the primary objective of government is to foster economic growth, and that all other social goods will flow from the ingenuity of the people operating freely in the market and in an environment of economic growth.  That means that governments must subordinate all other concerns to growth. If, in the short term, that growth seems  incompatible with human rights or with peaceful international relations, then governments must still take action to foster growth even at the short-term expense of peace or human rights.

For me, the key insight that Graeber communicates in this essay is that if fostering economic growth really were the primary objective of the neoliberal agenda, then its effectiveness over the last thirty years is certainly underwhelming.  If, on the other hand, the primary objective of neoliberal policies has been to foster the widespread belief that no other economic system is possible, then it has achieved a resounding victory. Even though this system, which Graeber describes as "financialized, semi-feudal capitalism," is clearly not fostering reliable growth, much less providing the majority of people with meaningful work, it has succeeded gloriously in preventing the majority of Imperial American subjects from considering alternatives to the neoliberal order.

David Graeber describes the campaign to make the current global economic arrangements seem like the only possible choice as a “war on imagination.”  The actions of military planners and police seem to support the idea that the highest priority of the system is the perpetuation of the assumption that, as the late Margaret Thatcher so famously put it, “There is no alternative.”

From here, David Graeber went on to echo something I had heard from Federico Pistono, the author of ROBOTS WILL STEAL YOUR JOB BUT THAT’S OK: How To Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy.  Federico was the guest on C-Realm podcast episode 352: Drive, Flow, Purpose. In his book and in our recorded conversation, Federico makes the point that, for several decades, automation has been displacing workers and destroying jobs faster than it creates new types of employment and that the process is about to accelerate with, for example, self-driving cars eliminating the jobs of millions of truck and cab drivers. As artificial intelligence grows more subtle, adaptable, and better able to navigate the vagaries of working in the physical world, that process will not only continue, but will exacerbate our economic woes.  

One mental stricture that keeps human society from responding adaptively to current circumstances and technological trends is the unquestioned belief that employment is a good unto itself and that people must work a job in order to justify their continued existence. In other words, we treat the notion that everybody must earn a living as an unquestioned article of faith.

Federico's position is that if we fail to break our ideological commitments to the value of work, we will create enormous ecosystems of unnecessary employment that will consume enormous amounts of resources that could and should be put to much better use.  Warning of the dangers inherent in addressing the future while maintaining the assumption that people must work a job in order to live, Federico writes:

“I can envision a plethora of futures where everyone has a job. One job could be to show up at the office, sit down, look busy, and read emails all day. Another could be to look at robots working, and make sure nothing is wrong. The fact that only one in ten thousand robots fail over the course of a week, and that one supervisor per facility would suffice matters not. We can have hundreds of supervisors. And then supervisors of supervisors. And then managers, and managers of managers, up in the food chain. We can fabricate new diseases, and then create professions to cure those fictitious illnesses. Finally – desires, as economists teach us, are infinite, therefore we can perpetually generate things to fulfil those desires, however frivolous or whimsical they might be. While this may sound laughable to some of you, it may also sound striking similar to what we are already doing today.” -Federico Pisotono

Federico concludes that the idea that everyone must earn a living is a spurious conceit that we must eliminate before we squander our resources trying to give every human a job to do in an environment in which artificial intelligence and robotics are eliminating whole categories of human labor.

Not only will the newly created jobs serve invented needs, but they will mostly fail to provide people with any sense of meaning or challenge because the work, by its very nature, is unnecessary, and so if it is done poorly or not done at all, the only consequence will be invented consequences in the way that we invent and impose harsh consequences on people who cultivate illegal plants.

Not only will the failure to perform unnecessary work have no meaningful consequences, but the diligent pursuit of the duties of those made-up jobs won't produce any tangible good.  Such work can provide no sense of accomplishment unless one takes seriously accolades like employee of the month or top sales achiever for the year.

In Federico's view, and in my own, the belief that every human must toil and earn a living serves mainly to prevent people from imagining any alternative.  It is one piece of a belief system that serves the neoliberal establishment's goal of quashing any inkling of an alternative vision.

As I was reading David Graeber's ideas about the self-reinforcing agenda of the neoliberal establishment, I recognized a part of his argument from my recent forays into the writings of Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.  In his manifesto Kaczynski debunked the notion of the leftist crusader as a rebel who opposes the techno-industrial system by pointing out you cannot oppose the system in terms of the system's own values.  

If an activist opposes the polluting practices of some industry on the grounds that pollution harms human health and imposes a burden on local communities, the system can relent and reform itself just enough to defuse the protest,  discontent and protest which motivated it. This process of relenting and reforming actually makes the techno-industrial system more resilient. The would-be rebel, in pointing out the ways in which this system is out of alignment with its own professed values, strengthens the system against further criticism and protest. Kaczynski is particularly critical of would-be opponents of the techno-industrial system who focus on social justice issues.

“Many radicals fall into the temptation of focusing on non-essential issues like racism, sexism and sweatshops because it is easy. They pick an issue on which the system can afford a compromise and on which they will get support from people like Ralph Nader, Winona La Duke, the labor unions, and all the other pink reformers. Perhaps the system, under pressure, will back off a bit, the activists will see some visible result from their efforts, and they will have the satisfying illusion that they have accomplished something. But in reality they have accomplished nothing at all toward eliminating the techno-industrial system.” -Theodore Kaczynski

To actually oppose and weaken the system, the would-be revolutionaries must oppose the system on grounds that the system cannot accept.  Kaczynski gives the example of biotechnology.  You cannot weaken the techno-industrial system by arguing that biotechnology is harmful to human health because promoting human health is a value that the system supports. The system can implement new safety standards, new methodological protocols and monitoring systems.  

In fact, increased regulation is good news for the powerful.  When government imposes a new monitoring regime and establishes new requirements for the biotech industry, that actually strengthens the established players in the techno-industrial system because onerous regulations favor the large companies that can afford to devote considerable resources to regulatory compliance. The burden of complying with government regulation raises the bar to entry into that sector and prevents the established players from having to worry about competition from upstart competitors.

If, on the other hand, one opposes biotechnology on the grounds that it is an affront to nature, God or the sanctity of life, those are not values that the system can agree with or on which it can afford to give ground.  When pushed at a point where the system cannot afford to give ground it can only reject the complaint as baseless. Critics who continue to push where the system cannot afford to give ground can expect to be denounced and vilified, and if they assemble in large numbers, they can expect violent repression from the system.

The rebel, Kaczynski argues, doesn’t want to reform the system. The rebel wants to provoke the system. The rebel wants a fight.  The critic who continues to push when the system responds with violence and repression rather than minimal compromise and reform is the true rebel.

David Graeber makes the argument in his new book, The Democracy Project: a History, a Crisis, a Movement, that one place where critics of the system can oppose the current neoliberal establishment is on the moral value of work and debt. A central tenet of the neoliberal orthodoxy, and one on which it cannot afford to give ground, is the idea that people must pay their debts. This belief has some under-appreciated nuances. For example, it seems beyond questionthat powerless people who earn money with their labor must honor their debts to wealthy people and organizations that make money by financial speculation and collecting tribute. In stark contrast, the debts that the powerful owe to one another are negotiable. The debts that the powerless owe to the powerful are sacrosanct and must be honored, even if paying them off is mathematically impossible.

“The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.” -David Graeber

Returning to the theme of the war on imagination, I wonder what I can do to empower people to imagine over, around, or through the roadblock of debt as moral obligation and employment as a good unto itself. Learning the real history of current institutions is a good start. Graeber informs his readers that the framers of the US Constitution, our so-called Founding Fathers, deliberately and explicitly designed our system to preserve privilege for the few and to prevent the mob from exercising democratic power to cancel debts and redistribute land. The propaganda that institutions present to children (and childish adults) as history rarely benefits from a grown-up examination of actual history.

I enjoy history, but I’m no expert, so the project of aiding the human imagination by teaching it to use historical jiujitsu against the neoliberal establishment will have to be one for the long-term. I welcome your suggestions.