The Long Descent (11 page)

It's a brilliant strategy, for more than one reason. To begin with, making changes in your own life is the necessary first step toward making them at any other level of human society. Gandhi's comment, “You must be the change you hope to see in the world,” is as much a guide to effective tactics as anything else. Yet there's more going on here than clever politics; another factor at work is a very old but very potent technique for shaping consciousness. Put the ideal and the real cheek by jowl and learn to live with the cognitive dissonance between them, and the paradox itself can become a source of creativity and insight. It's been a core technique in the toolkit of initiatory schools since ancient times. Whether the original New Age communities got the idea from the old initiatory traditions or stumbled across it on their own, it quickly caught fire and spread across alternative scenes throughout the industrial world.

The strategy of paradox has a vulnerability, though. There's always the risk of losing track of the “as if ” — the gap between the ideal world and the real one where creative paradox lives — and starting to believe that the ideal world is the one that actually exists. That way lies the futile heroics of Don Quixote, who maps the ideal world of chivalric romance onto the prosaic realities of the Spanish countryside with such abandon that he tries to assault windmills under the delusion that they're wicked giants. Of course the windmills fail to play their assigned parts in the romance, and clobber him. Something similar happened to the New Age movement as it became less visionary and more marketable, and the subtle discipline of “live as though you're creating the reality you experience” got dumbed down into “you create the reality you experience.”

Of course each of us does play a part in creating the reality we experience; subtle factors such as expectations and assumptions have a much more powerful role in the way our lives turn out than most people realize. In the first stages of their training programs, the old initiatory schools taught simple methods for redefining expectations and assumptions to give neophytes the confidence to tackle the much subtler and more demanding work ahead of them. As the New Age movement gained members and lost focus, though, gimmicks of this sort became the basis for a philosophy of cosmic consumerism that claims the universe is supposedly set up to give people whatever they happen to want, so long as they ask for it in the right way.

It's a popular philosophy that sells exceedingly well, as its latest rehash — the current book and video phenomenon titled
The
Secret
¹⁴
— shows clearly enough. The problem is that beyond a certain point, the philosophy doesn't work in practice. You can try as hard as you like to convince yourself that the universe wants to give you whatever you want, but that doesn't mean you will get it. At that point, the monkey trap closes tight around your hand, because if the ideology you've embraced tells you that you have to believe completely in it to make it work, any awareness that it's not working gets shoved aside as an obstacle to success.

Responses to this predicament in the New Age scene have covered the entire range of monkey antics, but one in particular bears noticing: the dramatic increase in the popularity of conspiracy theories in the New Age community over the last few years.

Conspiracy theories start from the recognition that connections aren't always visible, that what looks random and disconnected often has a thread of purpose and meaning tying it together beneath the surface. That recognition is far from useless. In particular, it's a crucial tool for making sense of today's global predicament, not to mention a necessary first step toward the ecological awareness that's our best hope of moving toward a more sustainable way of life. It's also a fundamental element in spirituality; mystics and poets have been pointing out for thousands of years that everything is connected to everything else — as Wordsworth put it, “thou canst not pluck a flower without troubling of a star.”

Here, as so often, though, the devil's in the details. While everything's connected to everything else, in any given context some connections are more relevant than others. Some series of subtle links connects the peanut butter sandwich you ate last Tuesday with the state of your career, no doubt, but if you got turned down for a promotion on Friday, the peanut butter sandwich probably doesn't belong very high up on the list of the reasons why. If you don't want to discuss the more important reasons, though, the sandwich might just make a good way to talk about your career troubles instead of factors you'd rather not mention.

Quite a bit of the conversation about fossil fuel depletion, global warming, and other aspects of our current predicament uses exactly this strategy. While I was writing this chapter, five minutes on an online search engine turned up websites making diametrically opposed but equally sweeping claims about the “peak oil conspiracy.” One website claimed that peak oil is a conspiracy being perpetrated by left-wing extremists who are trying to bring down the status quo by foisting a fake crisis on the world. Another web-site claimed that peak oil is a conspiracy being perpetrated by financiers who are trying to shore up the status quo by foisting a fake crisis on the world. Now it's certainly true that some political activists have done their level best to hijack the oil depletion issue for partisan purposes, and it is possible that the recent run-up in oil prices was pushed in an attempt to pump more financial liquidity into a faltering world economy. Those are, however, secondary factors. The driving forces behind peak oil are these:

• The world's oil reserves are finite.

• We've already used close to half the total recoverable oil on the planet.

• Every year since 1964 we've pumped more oil than we've discovered.

• Production at most producing oil fields is declining.

• New fields and alternative sources such as tar sands are barely filling the gap.

• The situation is more likely to get worse than better in coming decades.

These hard physical realities provide the context within which activists, financiers, and everyone else make their decisions and pursue their goals. If liberals are manipulating peak oil to support a partisan agenda, or if the big investment banks are encouraging speculation in the oil markets, that's worth noting, and arguably worth criticizing as well. But neither the liberals nor the bankers can change the reality of peak oil. Still, if you don't want to talk about the reasons that you got passed over for promotion, that peanut butter sandwich makes a good distraction.

Listening to the Space Lizards

You can often make sense of a phenomenon by watching it in an extreme form, and I've had the opportunity to do that with the rise of conspiracy thinking over the last few years. In the small southern Oregon town where I live, quite a few residents participate in the New Age movement, and a fair number of them are into the baroque conspiracy theory launched a few years back by a soccer player turned New Age guru named David Icke.
¹⁵

Icke's theory claims that all the world's political, economic, and cultural leaders are actually evil lizards from another planet. This is admittedly only one of many popular flavors of New Age paranoia these days. Older and potentially more dangerous theories have also begun to surface. It's not precisely a comforting sign that Icke and several other New Age conspiracy gurus have written books that include the complete text of the
Protocols of the Elders of
Zion,
the hoary anti-Semitic forgery that helped inspire National Socialism. Still, Icke's version of contemporary conspiracy theory will do as well as any, particularly since it has a wide circulation these days in the New Age scene we've been discussing.

The conjunction between Icke's brand of cosmic paranoia and the New Age movement may seem odd, since one of the core elements of the current New Age credo is “you create your own reality.” Why, you might well wonder, would people who believe they create their own reality want to create one in which the world is ruled by evil lizards from outer space? Like most questions, this one contains its own answer, because there are at least three reasons why a world ruled by evil space lizards is more comforting than the one we actually inhabit.

First,
it's not your fault.
If evil space lizards dominate our planet, it doesn't matter that your comfortable lifestyle depends on Third World sweatshops and environmental devastation, or that the choices you make are helping to guarantee your grandchildren a poorer life on a more barren world. Because the lizards run the world and you don't, they're to blame, not you.

Second,
the world does what it's told.
If evil space lizards control the world, that means the world is under control, and thus at least potentially under
your
control. The world around you loses its independence and becomes an object to be pushed around at will. You don't have to confront a universe governed by its own laws and momentum, in which you, your desires, and your opinions aren't important.

Third,
you don't have to change your life.
If evil space lizards are responsible for all the world's problems, then opposing the lizards is far more important than solving the problems. It's also much easier, since it doesn't require you to give up unsustainable lifestyle choices.

These advantages go a long way toward explaining why Icke's lizard mythology has become so popular on the far edges of today's zeitgeist. The same three ideas, though, play at least as large a role in the far less exotic versions of conspiracy theory that surround the current predicament of industrial society. Far too often, talk about the various manifestations of that predicament focuses exclusively on who's to blame. Whether the target du jour is liberal activists, financiers, oil companies, or George W. Bush, the assumption seems to be that if only the right scapegoat can be found and punished, the problem will be solved.

It won't, though. Criticism has its place in any healthy society. When it turns into a replacement for constructive action, on the other hand, it becomes wasted breath, and when it becomes a way for people to avoid dealing with their own complicity in the situation, it can easily become part of the problem it claims to address. That's true even if some of the potential scapegoats helped make the situation worse than it had to be.

The shift from visionary mysticism to paranoiac conspiracy culture makes sense when read in the context of psychologist Carl Jung's theory of “projecting the shadow.” The shadow, in Jung's psychology, is the sum total of everything we don't accept about ourselves.
¹⁶
We try any number of psychological tricks to keep from becoming aware of our shadows, but one of the standard methods is to project it onto someone else. Instead of owning up to the fact that we have characteristics we claim to despise, we see those characteristics in
Them
— whether “them” is an ethnic group, a religious community, a political party, or what have you. The more intense our hypocrisy, the more forcefully we project our own negative characteristics on somebody else, and the more savagely we hate the target for mirroring back to us, at least in our own minds, the things we project onto them.

This process of projection is exactly what's going on in large parts of the New Age community today, with a twist. The shadow of the New Age is the reality of limitation — the hard fact that you can't always get what you want, no matter how much you want it. Projecting that shadow, as Jung pointed out, is one effective way to deal with it, and conspiracy theories allow the faithful to project the shadow of their failure onto a fantasy of ultimate evil. In David Icke's theories, for example, the evil space lizards aren't just to blame for everything wrong with the world, they deliberately created and maintain the “illusion” of a material reality with real, inflexible limits. Thus believers in Icke's worldview can maintain their faith in their ability to create their own reality; if it doesn't work in practice, that's because the space lizards are slithering around behind the scenes messing things up.

The Religion of Progress

Now all this may seem to have little to do with the themes of peak oil and societal decline discussed in this book, but there's a direct connection. The myth of progress, like the belief that everyone creates their own reality, raises expectations that the real world simply isn't able to meet in an age of diminishing resources. As the gap between expectation and experience grows, so, too, does the potential for paranoia and hatred. Those who cling to faith in progress, like those who believe they create their own reality, are all too likely to go looking for scapegoats when the future fails to deliver the better world they expect.

The emotional power of the myth of progress makes the quest for scapegoats a difficult trap to avoid. The claim that progress is inevitable and good has become so deeply woven into our collective thinking that many people nowadays simply can't get their minds around the implications of fossil fuel depletion, or for that matter any of the other factors driving the contemporary crisis of industrial civilization. All these factors promise a future in which energy, raw materials, and their products — including nearly all of our present high technology — will all be subject to ever-tightening–limits that will make them less and less available over time. Thus we face a future of regress, not progress.

The problem here is that regress is an unthinkable concept these days. Suggest to most people nowadays that progress will soon shift into reverse, and that their great-great-grandchildren will make do with technologies not that different from the ones their great-great-grandparents used, and you might as well be trying to tell a medieval peasant that heaven with all its saints and angels isn't there any more. In words made famous a few years ago by Christopher Lasch, progress is our “true and only heaven;”
¹⁷
it's where most modern people put their dreams of a better world — and to be deprived of it cuts to the core of many people's view of reality.