Political and Economic Organization
The Alchemy of Language in the Pacification of the American People
Monday, July 14th, 2014Orwell’s term “doublethink”[1], the use of language to create a false picture of reality, has spawned a large literature, but that exposure has not stopped powerful interests from inventing new ways to use the capacity of language to control thought.
Something primed me many years ago to automatically search for the camouflage, innuendo, and outright misrepresentation [...]
Locked In: The Paradox of Capitalism
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014Much of this post was lifted from an article by another author, because I found the logic and the language so compelling. But I neglected to keep the reference. If I learn who the author is, I will be happy to credit him/her with those statements that are not mine, and provide a link to [...]
Folk Tales, Foreign Policy, and the Value of Systems Thinking
Thursday, January 30th, 2014In the tale of the boy who cried wolf, a boy who is tending sheep and serving as a lookout for wolves seeks to relieve his boredom and gain attention by crying wolf when in fact there is no wolf. This decision/policy succeeds for a while, then it no longer works. A systems thinking [...]
The Future of Industrial Society: “Progress”, A Microscopic Scientific Paradigm, and Blowback
Thursday, January 2nd, 2014Nothing is more important to understanding the behavior of a large social entity than awareness of its collective worldview. Usually that worldview is so deeply embedded and taken for granted that its inhabitants rarely know that it exists and shapes their individual and collective behavior in many ways. A common parallel is fish who do [...]
The Interdependence of Phantom Financial Wealth, Phantom Carrying Capacity and Phantom Democratic Power
Monday, May 13th, 2013Capitalism is a total social system in which most land and other capital assets can be privately owned. Over time this allows profit, wealth and power to concentrate in the hands of a minority. As a result, that minority makes or indirectly controls all the major decisions that shape US society and the [...]
Why Trying to Save Industrial Civilization with Alternatives to Fossil Fuels Only Makes Things Worse
Saturday, April 6th, 2013A recent Cornell report on how to convert New York state energy consumption to alternative fuels perpetuates the nonsense that in a declining economy we can convert NY or anywhere else to “clean” wind and solar energy, maybe dimming the lights a bit, and thus continue the party (industrial civilization and the US way of [...]
Scenarios of Political Response to Energy Descent Crises
Sunday, December 9th, 2012A number of students of the energy descent have concluded that the new era will include tipping points where key economic and political institutions suddenly go into crisis[1]. Charles Hugh Smith, for example, describes “snapback” points[2] when increasing divergence between “phantom wealth” and real wealth collapses. In The Case for a Disorderly Descent I described [...]
Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios
Monday, October 8th, 2012This article was originally reviewed, edited and published by Tompkins County Relocalization, a group in upstate New York that is researching various aspects of energy descent.
“A city could be defined, almost, as a human ecosystem that grossly exceeds the carrying capacity of its local environment.” – William Catton
The vulnerability of cities and suburbs in [...]
Reductionist Science and the Rise of Capitalism: Implications for a New Educational Program of Agricultural Science
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012The thesis of this essay is that there is a way of doing science that is characteristic of scientific inquiry under capitalism because its methods provide the kind of “irresponsible knowledge” that a profit-at-whatever-cost social system like capitalism requires. As my title implies, I will argue that as capitalism evolved to become an ever more [...]
An Outline of Benefits from a Lower Energy Civilization
Monday, December 12th, 2011The Premises
The universe ultimately runs on an energy economy, not a market economy as the dominant economic ideology claims. Ecological damage is tied to energy use of any kind in our peculiar type of economy where the operating rules of the system require maximization of profits at any cost. Unrestrained profit maximization in turn impels [...]
