Collapse and Re-birth . . .

Since March 2020, we've been plunged into a surreal universe of insane rules, restrictions and never ending hype. Clearly, there's Global co-ordination of this creeping psychosis, but why? What's really going on?

I think we're seeing the 0.0001%'s (e.g. the billionaires club), trying to manage and control the inevitable collapse of the system (which is akin to King Canute trying to hold back the tide). Yes, there's a strong cohort of ideologues and fascists amongst them, who have always yearned for (and planned), this type of control - but why now? Where's the underlying material shift? What's changed to allow these people to come to forefront? 

A reading of Jared Diamond's book Collapse is an excellent intro. Wars that were previously explained as a clash of ideologies or religions are dissected through the lens of material reality, e.g. a sharp and irreversible decline in keystone resources, leading to intense competition and ultimately, the disintegration of complex societies. 

Today, we're seeing the predestined clash between a monetary system that demands infinite growth (Fractional reserve banking), and an energy resource in irreversible collapse (Peak Oil). Paul Grignon (Money as Debt), Richard Douthwaite (The Ecology of Money) and Ellen Brown (The Web of Debt), are excellent resources re our doomed monetary system - and Richard Heinberg (multiple titles, especially Power down and The Party's Over) and Mike Ruppert (Crossing The Rubicon), are excellent introductions to a petroleum supply in terminal decline. 

Heinberg explains why renewables will never be able to power industrial society's current levels of energy consumption (because of the energy return on energy invested, otherwise known as "EROEI"), plus why there will always be oil in the ground (but useless, because extracting it takes as much energy as it yields). In other words, the future's simpler and much more localised.

Nature offers no free lunches - and the last 100 years of the oil boom was essentially a phantom "Free lunch," based on an ancient solar savings account we've raided, but now exhausted. The Goddess (or Gaia), is about to assert her immutable authority once again. 

However, the 0.0001% are human too and thus prone to that fatal human flaw, hubris. In their "Elevated" position, this is even more of deadly achilles heal. Centralised control and wars take an awful of of energy, which is exactly what they're missing right now. This is why the Roman Empire fell apart, despite the frothing of increasingly powerless "Leaders." More and more people will wake up as the reality of energy decline makes sharp material impacts on their daily lives - and when "Leaders" can't deliver the basics of daily living, the outcome's a foregone conclusion.

It's well past time to create our own path, a parallel and alternative life support system that will hold and nourish our children and their children to come. Those that are awake and those yet to waken must incubate the new in the womb of the old.