[advancedatheist]

I have to wonder whether the otherwise intelligent people who are cognitively resisting the Peak Oil/Dieoff message are doing so because it threatens to explode their myth of the "productive" individual. While it makes sense to speak of some individuals being more "productive" than others in matters like thinking about advanced mathematics or writing novels or engaging in other activities that don't require much in the way of energy, when it comes to the kind of material production our society depends on, energy from fossil fuels does the real work while we're just along for a luxurious ride. I've read that Americans enjoy something on the order of 8,000 "energy slaves" per capita, mostly coming from fossil fuels. If we had structured our society somewhat differently, with that kind of input we wouldn't have had to work at all during the Oil Age.

Peak Oil and its aftermath will destroy this productivity illusion fairly quickly. "What do you mean, Mr. Oilman, that you don't have any gasoline to sell me, at any price? I thought you were supposed to be 'productive'!"

Ironically Ayn Rand, a guru to many of the Hubbert deniers, understood intuitively that the self-professed (I would say "deluded") materially "productive" elite depends on artificial sources of energy to do their thing. She portrays a plausible "collapse" scenario in her novel Atlas Shrugged, for example, that the novel's hero could have prevented by not withholding his invention of a free-energy machine.

In a real situation where such an elite tried to escape from their society's collapse, the outcome would probably be more along these lines:

[PenultimateManStanding]

You know, it really does seem as though we are conceptually priviledged to know what the real score is in all these debates between thinkers such as Rand, the Marxists and what have you from the 20th Century because they didn't seem to have an energy/ecology understanding. The one's who did get it back a generation ago (Club of Rome) were not taken seriously by enough people (and did they even understand how petroleum played into all this?). The cartoon was funny and makes me want to go back and read the book again since its been about 35 years since I read it. Atlas Shrugged really is a brilliant title for the book. The implication being that Atlas just moved his shoulders a bit while carrying the world, maybe he's getting tired, maybe he'll put the world down and quit carrying it. Shrug also implies doubt: such as 'Why am I even carrying the world anyway?' One could argue that Ayn Rand had it wrong; the brilliant minds and creative doers weren't 'Atlas', Energy from Oil was really 'Atlas' and he is shrugging indeed.

[advancedatheist]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', ' ')One could argue that Ayn Rand had it wrong; the brilliant minds and creative doers weren't 'Atlas', Energy from Oil was really 'Atlas' and he is shrugging indeed.

[ohanian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('advancedatheist', 'I') have to wonder whether the otherwise intelligent people who are cognitively resisting the Peak Oil/Dieoff message are doing so because it threatens to explode their myth of the "productive" individual.

[advancedatheist]

I found this statement by Objectivist David Kelley amusing:



$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'G')eorge Gilder has written eloquently about the dynamism of a capitalist economy, showing how wealth is not a static thing but a process driven by human imagination and intelligence. Julian Simon has written eloquently of the human mind as the ultimate resource, not iron ore, crude petroleum, or arable land. These things are easy to see in an information age: intelligence is stamped on the silicon of a computer chip for even the slowest person to see.

But Rand understood all of this forty years ago. She had an incomparable skill at dramatizing the intelligence embodied in even the grimiest quarters of industrial civilization.