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At
the height of its power, Rome had become an enlightened
culture. The arts and sciences flourished, education and
technology had matured to the point that it had inspired
investments in such innovations as the Aqueducts and other
such amenities that made the people more productive and
successful than any other culture of its time.
Soon the ruling elite were wealthy beyond their wildest dreams
and yet they continued to dream of even greater wealth and
power. They eventually came to a crossroads perhaps without even
realizing that is where they had arrived:
Wanting
more wealth the ruling elite had a choice: They could
expand the educational opportunities of their people, thus
unleashing the creative power of the masses in hopes of even
greater technological and scientific innovation and discovery that might promise to increase the common wealth of the
nation…. Or they could simply tax their people a bit more
and fill their coffers immediately. After all, they
reasoned, the people had grown happy and successful because of
their leadership and investments in infrastructure… they should
get more of the bounty. They chose the latter option.
At first
this seemed to work ok, but eventually the people began to
resent having to postpone their own enjoyment and didn’t
like having to pay this extra bounty to their leaders, and so
they began to object. These objections didn’t quite
sit well with the leadership and so they reinforced their army
and made a show of power to help the people understand which
side their bread was buttered on. All this led to a more
creative strategy on the part of the leadership. Look,
they told themselves, we have more power and wealth than
anyone in the vicinity. Why don’t we just reinforce
our army and conquer other peoples and bring back the wealth
that we capture… and of course, that’s what they began to
do. Now this strategy turned out to be
fantastically successful.
The people
of Rome loved this idea. It meant that they would not be
taxed as much but rather it would be the conquered peoples
that would have to pay the price. So Rome prospered.
But slowly and without much notice by the ruling elite or the
people, as their empire expanded, keeping the army well fed
and happy became more and more expensive. With each
successive venture more weapons had to be produced and
greater distances had to be traveled to reach each new
territory to be conquered. The people who had grown
happy and relatively wealthy didn’t like sending their youth
off to war and it became unpopular. So the ruling elite
had to beef up their security forces even more to keep people
in line at the same time they had to improve their weaponry
and defend their borders.
Eventually, the ruling elite
had to tax the people again and this time even more to keep
all of these ventures going and the income coming in from
these foreign places. In addition to increased taxes,
less money was being spent on infrastructure and education,
and people who used to be fairly well off now became less
productive to the point, eventually, where they could hardly
support themselves let alone send money back to the emperor.
Eventually, the cost of defending the empire which was now
being regularly attacked, required more wealth than the
emperor could raise and the entire enterprise collapsed.
Now this story is a short version of what happened and
probably not very accurate as to details, but in general, this
is how it went.
Now fast
forward a couple of thousand years to present day United
States of America. We are at a point where we are the
recognized super power of the world. We have prospered
because of our great educational systems, our infrastructure,
and of course our scientific and technological innovation.
But much of our success depended upon cheap energy in the form
of oil. In the beginning, the US was the world’s
largest producer of oil and it was so cheap to extract that we
grew fat and happy on its use. Where we used to pay 10
cents for a gallon of gasoline, now we pay $3 or more.
But if the
truth be known, and if our accounting systems were accurate,
the actual cost of a gallon of gas is probably more like
$100/gallon. Now how can this be?
Well, like
Rome our wealth once was created by the innovations and
advances of our local economy. As we saw our own natural
resources dwindle, our own wealthy elite began to see that if
we were going to remain wealthy, we had two choices. We
could either greatly expand the educational opportunities of
our people; give them more of a stake in the wealth that was
being created and thereby release their creative energies in
hopes that their innovations would lead to sustainable wealth, or
like Rome, we could expand our armies and begin to expropriate
the wealth of other nations. And like Rome we took this
second option.
Like Rome
we now tax our people indirectly by slowly withdrawing the
infrastructure that allows them to prosper and grow.
Rather than expand the educational opportunities of all
children, we limit them. Instead we spend great sums of
money to maintain great
armies around the world, largely to insure that we can
expropriate the wealth of other nations, the most important
source of
which is oil. We do not like to send our children to war
to die and to kill and so great amounts of wealth has to be
spent to misdirect the people’s attention to other matters.
And so our ruling elite spends enormous amounts of money to influence
our media and other institutions to make sure that these
institutions hide the truth about how we maintain the illusion
of our own wealth. We tell our children that they need
to go to school and get good grades so that eventually they
can get a good job and earn lots of money. We don’t
realize what we are really telling them is that they have to
go to school so that they can be taught to think like, act
like, and accept the values of those who one day will pay their
salaries. We must teach them to fit into a culture that
requires an acceptance of the status quo and voluntary
unconsciousness if they want to get
ahead in life.
Maintaining
that status quo requires the direct or indirect usurping
of wealth belonging to and produced by the people of other
nations... at the same time that it requires we suspend our disbelief
at how
we are told we have become as wealthy as we are.
The ruling elite, in order to maintain their
power and position, must corrupt the media and the political
processes in a manner that allows them to maintain their
lifestyle… and that lifestyle, to be maintained, requires a
great standing army, security forces to keep track of people
to make sure that they do not act out their inevitable frustrations. They have
to keep the mainstream media in line and make sure that what
children learn in school is aligned with and consistent to
their ends.
All of this deception requires great wealth
to produce and sustain. It costs a lot of money to
create and maintain illusions and these illusions and the
mentality that is required to maintain them is what I call the
popular culture or state of consciousness. And of course
all of this expense, in reality, is what it cost to keep the
supply of oil flowing. When people stop believing in these illusions, the whole enterprise
will
collapse.
As it turns out, if people continue to believe
in these illusions the entire enterprise will collapse
anyway… because the enterprise is built entirely on
illusions and illusions cannot sustain results or alter
reality.
We have stopped
producing real wealth as we try to take the wealth that other
people have and make it our own. We have become what
Rome once was and we are following in their footsteps to our
own destruction.
Our tax laws, our financial
arrangements, our legal system and our educational system have
all been corrupted in the process of creating and maintaining
a popular world view that has brought us to this point in support of
our ruling elite. But that world view is unsustainable.
Still, those who benefit from it do not want it to change.
And
so, like that culture that we read about that died, having cut down all the trees
on which its economy was based, we are also on a trajectory of
consuming our own sources of wealth. You would have
thought that when there was only one tree left on that island,
that the people would have protected it with their lives.
Instead they fought with each other to determine who was going to get
to cut it down and consume the prize. We seem to be following in their
footsteps too.
What I do
know is that the wealthy elite are terrorized to the bone by
the thought of peak oil
which is coming fast upon us and can only think to defend
themselves by throwing culture, law, art, and civilization
itself out the window... in favor of relying on brute force for
their survival. It’s going to be death and destruction
to anyone who gets in their way or has what they think they need to survive.
Anyone who lives out of such terror cannot easily be
dissuaded. If the rest of us also gives into our fears,
once we understand the challenges we face, it will
be a free for all. A zero sum game with no winner other
than the last man standing there with his horse and plow in
hand.
The
accumulated wisdom that we need to survive and prosper has
already been thought of and expressed. You will find
it on the bookshelves of almost any library or searchable on
the internet. And yet we are left to wonder… will it
ever matter to most of us that some of us took the time to
think things through and write down what we have come to
understand for the benefit of all mankind?
The answer to this question still eludes me.
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