Cipher's Sell Out

Last night on "The Lifeboat Hour" with Michael Ruppert he had Carolyn Baker on as a guest.  Carolyn Baker is pretty much the psychiatrist for the Peak Oil Movement.  The PO movement is really no longer about PO.  Sometime this year Dimitri Orlov wrote a blog where he stated that Peak Oil was in the past and so we need to start talking about it differently.  Beyond the fact that peak oil is now a given is the fact that there are more pressing issues to deal with just now.  It's true that peak oil is the driver of the collapse.  It's ultimately responsible for the fact that our civilization's growth is over and that we will henceforth begin contracting into something different.  What that will look like is anybodies guess, but certain aspects about that collapse will certainly come to pass within the next ten and twenty years.  Right now, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is where all of the energy circling the collapse is coalescing.  It doesn't have a specific bullet point agenda because it has just been born.  Right now it's just about having a grievance with the system, any grievance, and uniting in that solidarity alone.  It's inevitable that it will grow into a full blown revolution come spring because as Michael Ruppert likes to say, "things break down not up."  As in, society is going to be in worse shape come spring.  There will be more unemployed college grades with nothing but debt to show for their higher education come spring.

So on last nights Lifeboat Hour they were talking about the Occupy Santa Rosa (OSR) encampment.  Ruppert stated that if he could create a flag for the movement it would feature a tent.  That's an interesting point.  He said that the tents represented the movements freedom, self-reliance, and tribal nature.  He talked about how tribal OSR has become and how well that it works.  No surprise since mankind has been tribal for the majority of it's existence.  I think that any organisational form beyond tribal is not going to work for man for various reasons that could fill an entire book, as I'm sure it has (maybe I should look into that).  I think tribal nation's are how mankind will ultimately find himself organized a hundred years into the future (if the nuclear power stations don't finish us first).  I don't think that we will ever evolve to a point where our animal nature will be satisfied in any setting other than a natural one.  Maybe that's the reason our civilizations keep collapsing.  Or maybe that's just how human ecology works; the same as any other ecology, or living organism for that matter.  It's born, grows, matures, and decays.

There should be no doubt that our civilization is in the final stage to anybody paying attention.  This is the onset of collapse and what's left is for us to accept that truth.  Nothing is going to change if we continue business as usual (BAU) as a civilization.  I recently finished Richard Heinberg's latest book, "The End of Growth."  Most of what was said in that book I have read before, but it was worth seeing it all in one linear persuasion.  Yes, growth is over for mankind.  Question is, what are we individually to do about it?  Our government is not going to address this issue in any meaningful way because they can't.  They are going to continue trying to fix the ship of civilization to keep it afloat when what is actually happening is that the water is drying up.  That is, they are trying to fix the problem of the old paradigm while the new one has already been born.  The way forward is to adapt to the new paradigm and not to attempt to keep the end stage cancer patient alive with further poison.  They can't fix this problem because it's no longer a problem, but a predicament as John Michael Greer has said.  The difference between the two is that a problem has a solution whereas a predicament does not.  A predicament must be dealt with but it cannot be solved.  The predicament is the end stage of our civilization as ruled by the old paradigm.  The solution is for the new paradigm and that is to adapt.

Again, what are we to do individually?  We are told by the leaders of the Transition that what we need to do is foster community.  Get to know our neighbors and start building communities so that when things can no longer be ignored we won't be running around fighting each other.  The idea is to learn to cooperate with each other and live as if we are tribal.  We are no longer tribal, we are suburban.  OWS has apparently fell into tribal by default, but that is still a very small movement relative to our population.  The old way may be dying, but it has no idea of that fact.  We are stuck in what must be the most uncomfortable phase of collapse.  We are stuck in the beginning where the new can be seen but not reached.  We have families to care for and hanging on to the old way seems easier even though it continues worsening by the day.  My wages are decreasing, insurance is becoming more expensive, and my employer is treating me worse almost by the day.  It's not just the corporation I work for treating me badly to keep the bottom line viable.  It's everybody in the chain of command from the top to the bottom each individually making decisions that suck more of what little remaining dignity I have away from me.  Not because they intend to treat me like a slave, but because they themselves are being treated like slaves and misery loves company.  It's sort of like an old Roman death sentence I've read about where they put you, a dog, a monkey and a snake in a sack and then toss the sack into the ocean.  Something like that.

Whatever the case, life is becoming more and more miserable because of the circumstances the beginning stage of collapse manifest.  So Carolyn Baker said that we should all be walking away from the old system.  She actually said to walk away from our debt, all of it, because it's part of the old dying system and it has to be put to death.  The best we can do is facilitate the death of the old to make room for the new, which is inevitable.  She said to walk away from our credit cards, to walk away from our jobs and our houses.  Where are we to walk away to?  A tent city?  I would do that but I have a family to care for.  So I, along with many like me, are stuck in an old dying system.  I feel it in my soul and gut.  I feel this thing dying and I want it to die so badly.  Even if what comes next is much more difficult, I'm tired of anticipating it.

I'm tired of being treated like I don't matter to my employer.  I feel that way because I don't matter, because there's a line of faceless people all waiting to do my job for five dollars less per hour than they are paying me.  Every year they tighten the noose around my neck in the hopes that I will say fuck it and make room for the next indentured servant that will pick the fruit for five cents a bushel.  We are all becoming like the Joad's setting off with all we own strapped to our Jilapi hoping that we will be able to keep on keepin' on.  Against all odds.  This way of life is completely meaningless.  We are all isolated from our own humanity.

For all intents and purposes it's just my wife and my son in my world.  There is nothing else worth my energy, just my little family.  All of my relatives are 2400 miles away on the other end of the continent.  This modern life has facilitated the atomization of family.  We have chased the great American Hustle without even knowing it.  I was born into this hustle and probably never had a much of a chance to escape it.  The best one such as I could have hoped for is to have made it to the top of the hustle.  I could have made it to the top of the pile where whatever worthless consumer item I wanted was made available but I turned it down.  I was idealistic enough to realize that it was pointless but not realistic enough to realize that there was no other alternative.

So now what?  OWS?  Deep inside of me where the dispatch of my consciousness resides there is a clarion screeching like a broken trumpet that fell from the burnt skies during the apocalypse.  The skeleton ghosts that have been resisting our own inhumanity since we began torturing ourselves, the ones that scream that its' time for REVOLUTION are filling my psyche with their meaning.  Tears fall from my face as I lament the lose of my dignity and my wild animal nature awakens.  It grips me with anger and demands that I turn against my oppressors and fight for what is right.   The rage has grown into a full blown tree and it's massive and I never watered it or nurtured it.  It grew anyways without my assistance.  It wants revenge and it is righteous.  I'm like a dog who's been cornered and I am not a weak one.  I am ferocious and powerful and can rip your arm off in the name of justice.  The warrior is trying to awaken and I can sense his eye lids opening.  Somebody is going to have to pay for the hedonistic celebration that has been taking place at the top of the tower in Babel.  I don't want to be put back into the machine.  I want to fight, and yet it must be a peaceful one.  My head gets that, but the rest of me wants blood.  I fear that my only chance to ride the end of this Tsunami of the old is going to be passively influenced by fukitol.  Maybe I need to make another appointment.

"Doc, how about some of those Icantakit Knowmores?  The fukitol light wore off and I quit taking it.  We need to up the dose before I do something stupid like honoring my integrity and authentic nature.  There's too much at stake here.  Actually, let's just get it over with and schedule my actual lobotomy.  My spirit is too strong for a chemical one and at any rate the chemical route still allows choice.  I want to have no choice, but I want to be somebody important, like a movie star.  And I don't want to remember anything."