[oowolf]

Peak oil is not the problem and hybrid cars and fuel cells are not the future. There is no future; this "civilization" WILL end, and not soon enough for Jensen. Jensen is the Bertrand Russell of the Earth First segment of society that actively opposes a civilization devoted to destruction on a scale that can only be described as "hatred to all things living".

In this book the Holocaust hasn't ended and we, who apparently unashamedly benefit from the continuing slaughter, are nothing more than Nazis.

This is an investigation of a civilization based on hatred: that civilization is ours and Jensen's analysis is visceral and devastating. Drawning on Freudian psychoanalysis applied on a social scale (through Erich Fromm's work in "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness") as well as the lore of saner societies (the Hopi, for instance). "We" are all a mixture of "biophilia and necrophilia" that is, the love of life and the love of death. We are a predator species, and as such, exist precariously near the top of the food chain. We must destroy life in order to live-there is nothing good or evil in this; it is the way life is. The key to human survival is maintaining a check on destruction-not maximizing it. In this, our civilization (that is, our course over the last 10,000 years ago) has failed over and over. And our current industrial experiment is a failure on a mass extinction level.

There is no escaping this; the evidence is all around us for anyone willing to wake up and see it. This book rubs your nose in it for 700 pages that may come as a shock to those who have so far lived their lives in the media induced "Culture of Make Believe" that passes for life in the industrialized world. It is way past time for us to realize what we're doing to our own species as well the rest of the planet. The only possible reaction to this book is despair and that is as it should be.

Some will turn away, some will lash out-Jensen seems to be amongst this group.I personally admire someone who is willing to go to prison to destroy a few dozen Hummers when the U'Wa of Nigeria are willing to commit mass suicide if Occidental Petroluem defiles their land. (And Occidental Petroleum is destroying the U'Wa so YOU can live as you do.) However, as I see it, destruction merely excites the powers-that-be, and they're masters at it. But I don't presume to judge the Earth Liberation Front, etc. I "dropped out" a long time ago to tend my garden-if the rest of society wants to go on a rampage of destruction-don't expect too much support from me. Passive resistence and trying to live more sustainably is my response to the horror of industrialism and also to the despair of knowing, as does Jensen, that the rest of you aren't going to rise up and demand an end to the slaughter.

This is not a book for the timid or deluded.

[MicroHydro]

I worked through these issues in 1973, when I shocked my classmates at university by stating that a motorcar driver was worse (for the planet) than a murderer.

The stone age peoples considered the most 'primitive' (Paupa New Guinea, the Amazon) might have practiced constant tribal warfare and canibalism, but they lived sustainably on their land for many thousands of years.

Meanwhile, motorcar man has brought the whole planet to ruin in just a century. Now motorcar man will destroy the ancient forests of Borneo to get biodiesel for a few more years of motoring. Who is the most depraved savage?

[smallpoxgirl]

Big fan of Jensen. Haven't read this book yet, but it's on my list.

The U'wa are in Columbia. They didn't end up comitting suicide. They prayed for the oil to move out from their forest. Oxy's test wells came up dry and they went away. You can judge for yourself wether it was the effect of prayer or just chance.

Ken Sara Wiwa was from Nigeria (executed with six others by the Nigerian government at Shell Oil's behest essentially for the crime of politically opposing Shell drilling in the Niger Delta). That is a different though very related fight.

[killJOY]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Drawning on Freudian psychoanalysis applied on a social scale

[JustinFrankl]

I read this about a year and a half ago and heartily agree. Speeding train, side of a mountain, splat, that is the near future for our culture I fear.

I feel the more I engage civilization on its terms, the more I fundamentally contribute to its problems. The third-world poverty that enables the products I buy, my purchases which in turn further enable poverty conditions. The cheap energy I use which increases demand for it, which further increases our reliance on it. The money and banks I use which fuel an unsustainable debt-based expansion. Every interaction with a business client where the business's underlying goal is growth.

And underlying it all the objectification that isolates us from friends, lovers, and family, that seperates us from an authentic and genuine experience of the world around us.

The Powers That Be have done a remarkable job with the smoke and mirrors which obscure these dirty secrets from most people's view.

[azreal60]

I have not read Jensen, but his ideas sound like a slightly more activist version of Daniel Quinn. If you have not read his Ismael, The story of B, and My Ishmael, Do so. Those three books I consider the sustainable livers bible. Literally. Heck, the hero in the story of b is the guy who admits to being the antichrist. And yet, it makes sense. Good reading. I advise you to pick it up.

[oowolf]

I read this book over a year ago but didn't post on it beacuse it is so unrelentingly depressing. You can get the sane <this is a typo, probably Freudian(sorry kJ) You can get the same message from the Kogi in Alan Ereira's "The Elder Brothers" without the Aristotilian mumbojumbo. (I'm certain I don't "get" the Kogi metaphysics.) I think its interesting to hear the stories of enlightenment from those of us who have come from "within" the death-culture and know that some part of it will always be a part of us, no matter how much we may come to despise it. The fact remains we're on an evolutionary dead-end limb and most of us are super-redundant. Happy Holidays, folks.

Thanks SPG for moving the U'Wa back to the correct continent.

[EnergySpin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'I') spent an afternoon with Jensen. Seemed like a nice guy. I expect one of the few militant anti-doomers left around here to raise their shrill voices to denounce Jensen as a:

-fascist because he hates people;
-an anti-american because he doubts technologic utopia
-a terrorist because he supports radical environmentalism
-stupid because he disagrees with them

JohnDenver devoted an entire blog rant to Jensen on his Peak Oil Debunked blog site. As usual with JD the language is impressive, the ideas poorly conceived but well thoughout, and the heart is black.

[Revi]

I started on the book, and got about 1/2 way through it before I decided that I needed to read something a bit more hopeful. I am a big fan of very dark books, but this one was too dark, even for me. I know that we might not make it as a species. I know we injure the earth, and other people just by living. I get it.
My culture of make believe is that we can figure out a way to live on this planet without wrecking the place. Reality is agreed perception. If we all start thinking like that the landlord might not throw us out.

[NordicThora]

"The Culture of Make Believe" is a great book, though very difficult to read. Many times I put it down and cried - and there were a few sections that were so horrific that I simply skipped over them; I could not bear to read them at the time. Never does he veer into the realm of the gratuitous, however. He's writing about the atrocities of this insane culture for damn good reasons, and somehow he manages to leave his readers with a sense of optimism and even inspiration. I don't know how he does it!

I've heard great things about Jensen's upcoming book Endgame: The Collapse of Civilization and the Rebirth of Community. The first volume won't be released until June, but I'm eagerly awaiting it.

[wilburke]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergySpin', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'I') spent an afternoon with Jensen. Seemed like a nice guy. I expect one of the few militant anti-doomers left around here to raise their shrill voices to denounce Jensen as a:

-fascist because he hates people;
-an anti-american because he doubts technologic utopia
-a terrorist because he supports radical environmentalism
-stupid because he disagrees with them

JohnDenver devoted an entire blog rant to Jensen on his Peak Oil Debunked blog site. As usual with JD the language is impressive, the ideas poorly conceived but well thoughout, and the heart is black.

[ALBY]

SPG whipped out the Nazi card yesterday on the pilgrims in another thread, so lets just acknowledge that tortured analogy is misused by people on all sides of the debate.

With regard to Jensen, I think (hope ?) he is a victim of linear thinking and and his own special form of environmental millenarianism. I am given to apocolyptic nightmares myself. So frankly, I find him to be pretty entertaining.

[smallpoxgirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')PG whipped out the Nazi card yesterday on the pilgrims in another thread

[threadbear]

Jensen is so right to call people in the developed world Nazis. We most certainly are and it's no wonder we all carry a big stick to fend off others and subdue the natural world. We might better use that stick to help us keep our footing while wading through cesspools of propaganda we refer to as knowledge and "the way things are". Social Darwinism as a theory of what makes the world go round, is one of the stinkier bits of unlovliness we have to get through.

Darwinism is mired in capitalist theories of ongoing struggle and will at some point yield to more subtle and complete theories of life that place far more emphasis on cooperation than competition. People may strive to create a smaller personal footprint, in the future, in deference to their new found ideas of what is natural and inevitable and what is not. Darwinism, social and otherwise will be seen as a hidebound ideology of the conceptually narrow thinker, who focusses on one dynamic of life at the expense of others. You might like this article.

Kropotkin vs Darwin -- Cooperation as an evolutionary force


We have all heard of Charles Darwin. Some of us have even heard of Alfred Russell Wallace, the scholar who independently came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection. But few of us have heard of Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin. Although reduced to a footnote in historical surveys of intellectual thought, the czarist-era Russian nobleman and geographer made significant contributions to evolutionary theory, ecology, and social criticism. In 1902, he gathered these ideas together in Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution, a work that has mostly disappeared down the Anglo-American memory hole. Yet his ideas on the cooperative nature of life on Earth, though radical in his time, have received greater support over the past 30 years. Life, it turns out, may even be more cooperative than Kropotkin thought

http://www.commonground.ca/iss/0509170/ ... eoff.shtml

[aswerfawf]

he wrote another book before this one called "a language older than words", im reading it right now and hope to make a post when i finish. but i just have to say, it is amazing. what he attempts (and so far does a good job) is to connect personal suffering and the violence experienced by all of us within our daily lives with the war against nature. he begins this tale by recounting the horrible physical, sexual and emotional abuse he himself experienced as a child and as a stratedgy of coping silenced his ability to feel emotions and quieted his memory, in short denied reality. doing so helped him to survive his ordeal, it also explains how is father could have brought himself to do such horrible things to his wife, sons and daughter, by denying the reality of his own actions.

jensen forces us to acknowledge that this is exactly what we are doing when we commit genocide against indigenous people or manufacture nuclear weapons or level a mountain for its coal or commit rape: we deny the reality and inherent subjectness of everyone and everything around us. the language he speaks of as being older than words, is the communication which naturally occurs between species, between human and rock and human and stars. it is only by denying the personhood and objectifying mother earth or the female gender can we possibly bring ourselves to enact such violence against them. im not sure where he is going with all of this just yet, but he offers a glimpse of hope in the idea of confronting the reality of our actions and accepting responsibiluty for what we do; accepting the fact that we are living in a world which is actually real and was not made for us (and hence does not have a relational identity), but stands all by itself, we can begin to renew our relationship with the world around. one thing i have learned in my own life is that the inside mirrors the outside, the micro the macro, the violence inside of each of us IS the violence that makes up the world around us.

[eric_b]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('killJOY', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Drawning on Freudian psychoanalysis applied on a social scale

[aswerfawf]

while im not a big fan of frued's theories, i do have to give him credit for making to point that the experiences and thoughts that people have are as much a part of reality as a tree or a rock. while the idea still hasnt really caught on in the mainstream of our culture, theres a sizeable portion of us that believe that our direct experience of the universe can tell us something real.

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('smallpoxgirl', 'I') was thinking of millinerianism which would of course be a belief system based on the selling of women's hats.