Oil to run out 2020 -> the nature of the system

Just read an article by George Monbiot on the International Energy Agency's 2008 report on oil. Forget the details of the picture we can't do anything about that what is staggering is what I've come to accept about the establishment ... the IEA are incompetent. Yet the British government and governments around the world take what they say as gospel.

I was 9 when I realised we were going to run out of oil (and thereby plastic and fertiliser and almost everything). If we take something and it isn't put back then it will run out. Its clearly not the complexity of the picture which must be hampering people from seeing the reality.

The IEA presumably funds people to do a job. Apparently this year is the first year that they have actually done a study into oil reserves! Previous years are guestimates. What have they been doing!

Yet it is the same picture the world over from institution to institution. It is interesting to me that the much more complex global warming issue has managed to make it into mainstream politics. I admit I never foresaw global warming as a child, for me it was much more tangible stuff like population, land supply and food which were going to be the problems. Climate is a much less tangible thing. Yet some how the people with power have been persuaded down this road.

It does all seem very random, and the reactions of the institutions that we phantasmogorically believe run the show (when actually they don't even exist - they are just people) seem very random anyway.

As visitors to India often remark it's a country where one has to believe in God to explain how anything ever happens in such a chaotic world. Is the Human destiny one of luck, a continuation of the serendipity which originally produced us, or is anyone actually capable to steering the boat? During my short life I've certainly only seen evidence to contradict the last one.

Piece of personal psychology. I realise at this point that it is the hypocracy of power that riles me. Power expects diligence, responsibility and competence (especially in the employment system) - just listen to all the rubbish we have to pour out in interviews (I was honest once and the interviewer told me in these exact words: I should have lied!)- and we assume this is the nature of the system... or at least I have. I'm a slow learner it seems but actually it looks more like a process of self-delusion where we say these things to make ourselves believe them.

The system is not like this. All it demands is allegience to the System. In evolutionary terms the survival strategy of the system (how is has survived) is not so much because its inherent merits but because it selects for members who are loyal, and especially members who will work to destroy rival groups. Just look at the American's and Communism/Socialism. Thus groups and systems survive.

In this view The System is not an intelligent God given higher feature of Human Life but rather an emergent property. Modernism Enlightenment thinkers liked to think of the system in its positive light of co-operation, goodness, harmony, order probably because economically and politically it suited their place in the world - it was benevolent. I've always been deeply aware that where a system supports one person it is always at the expense of someone else. Only equanimity and complete egalitarianism can avoid this and this is not a system by definition.

Hmmm back to self reference - Egalitarianism is not a system because to identify any components and to place them in fixed relation in any way requires an order which must lie outside the system and so impose itself upon the system. It is non-egalitarian then. Only a self-determining order can be egalitarian but is this possible or even meaningful? Order is always one group imposing (maybe by invitation in a Rousseau like fashion) on another. Anyway order is always in dialectic with dis-order so there is no stable social system - all systems are temporary and conditional. Only systems which accept this have any chance of longevity.

Note on Progress: Occurred to me recently that maybe all systems track a parabolic trajectory - a rise and fall. Researching on Progress it has been astonishing the certainty with which European Enlightenment (and now American) thinkers seem to assume that progress is a constant vector. Even Dawkins accepts that evolutionary trends are temporary - adaptation improves within a context and then when the context changes it becomes mal-adaptation. We see that in the economic system at the moment. Companies which had tuned themselves to a world of cheap credit and even 18months ago were the most successful now find themselves maladapted and extinct. "The only certainty is change" goes the narrator of the Japanese TV show Monkey (Buddhist Monkey-King (Hsiyu-Chi) profoundly at odds with the Chinese hegemony of Confusionism and Cosmic Order). As Buddha says in his great dependent-origination teaching - external causes and conditions are solely responsible for the arising, sustaining and decay of all things. (the pattern of Indoaryan gods: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva of Hinduism; God, Holy Spirit, Jesus of Christianity; maybe even Tiw, ?, Woden in NW Europe). Systems are really governed from outside themselves - what is not the System! No system can govern itself. I guess the Greeks profoundly realised this in tragedy, irony and hubris.

That links to the self-reference thing. I noticed recently that my challenge is not to self-reference exactly. Clearly a sentence can be used in such a way as to denote itself. Thus "This sentence is composed of seven words" makes complete and trouble free sense. And I can add some more interesting examples to this.

The next sentence is not being read. But while the last sentence is now not being read this sentence is being read. The references come into context and go out of context.

The problem is not with self-reference but maybe rather with self-identity. Something can't be itself. That flies in the face thousands of years of philosophy so I say it only tentatively. The problm lies in the way that you identify "itself". I've always had a problem with this notion - I'll explore it in due course [just noting it here].

So to summarise this regurgitation of recent ideas: the dawning realisation is that their is no goal to human existence. The belief that we can enter the world to make lasting changes for good is a profound misunderstanding of reality. Recognisable humans have been on this planet for a million years or so in that time we have each lived lives of value and satisfaction. Been faced with struggles, difficulties, triumphs and celebrations. We have all had life. The idea that one persons life is more valuable or better lived only makes sense within a context. Within the education system of Western society we can achieve great things - but cast into the arctic snow fields and we need other skills. Its all contextual. We have statues around London of great men - few women. Clearly in this omission alone we can see that they are not absolutely Great, simply successful within the rules of the game and the context of the time. To Innuit Indians they are not great at all. Their lives were not absolutely well spent in that sense. However they were well spent in the sense that participation in the world is the foundations of worldly life and worldly happiness. Be it leading a seal hunting party, or being project manager in a big company the essence is the same : of participating in the game. That is the value of life. It is not the system itself, or what the system does that matters but simply the taking part. Gordon Brown is having a great time because the economic downturn has created a whole new set of games to play. If other people start playing them better tho he might lose his place in the game and then he won't be so happy.

I still find this hard to accept absolutely tho. Is all life just a series of inter-personal language games and socially constructed opportunitiues for inter-personal participation. Is having a job simply the being part of the human race? The "doing ones job well" simply valued by the importance the game places on it?

Self-reference will blow this apart instantly. Is the meaning of this simply the playing the blogging game, and the finding a power and position in society by criticising it? Am I simply playing a game here? Well the sentence "playing a game" must be more than a game else it loses its meaning.... I must find a rigorous way of arguing this self-reference point...

In society I see most people admittedly just playing an interpersonal game. That is what I found so tedious in my last employment - it was just a toy company, taken out of the box and assembled by instructions to give the bosses something to play with. There was no heart in it, no sincerity and no real purpose. Surely these things are beyond the games and the systems? Surely running out of oil is actually a big deal? A realisation that the status-quo is only temporary and we should look a bit further than the extant system for our sustinence?

That article...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/15/oil-peak-energy-iea