Deculturation: Mass Deprogramming of Global Society

This article is a continuation of a series that includes Mud pies and Dunce Caps - Part 2, Give me a Child Until......, and Waking up, Into the Nightmare!

Can the deprogramming techniques used on those rescued from cults or the mass deprogramming suggested in the "Social Reason" program be looked to as a means of achieving mass global deprogramming for the purpose of achieving a mass disassociation from the modern capitalist paradigm and a shift in worldview to stewardship and sustainability?

What is the source of a nation's culture? Who defines it? How is it transmitted through the nation's population such that it becomes so integrated into the individual worldview and mind set that it becomes "common knowledge", becomes the core of the national identity? There was a reason that large "nations" like China, India, the US, Russia and others did not exist earlier in our history, why nations that did exist were still loose collections of tribal enclaves much like we are finding Afghanistan still is today. The means to create and, most importantly, constantly reinforce a national identity did not exist. People do not inherently identify with "nation" but rather some smaller, more intimate grouping. The key to sustaining a national worldview is media; TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, music and movies. The extension of that reality is the growth of globalization and the establishment of key elements of a global mind set through the agency of global communications; through global television and radio aided through satellites, through globalization in the entertainment industry in music, magazines and movies, and, more recently and far more importantly, the rapid growth of global digital communications that brings into a common technology base not only broadcast media but telephone, the internet, facsimile transmission and image transmission.

One of the first and most important targets of the rebel forces in any revolution since the early part of the twentieth century, and earlier though in more limited fashion, is almost always the communications and media; the radio, TV, newspapers and printing presses. Control of the media, until then in the hands of the government being overthrown, is recognized as a critical part of gaining control of the hearts and minds of the people. Media is always, at least in modern society, at the heart of national culture. It is the means by which government and business mobilize the public support of their goals. As Robert W. McChesney outlines in The Political Economy Of Radio, "As a rule of thumb, if certain forces thoroughly dominate a society's political economy they will thoroughly dominate its communication system, and the fundamental questions of how the communication system should be organized and for what purposes are not even subject to debate. So it is and so it has been with the Communist Party in various "people's republics," and, for the most part, with big business interests in the United States."[(1)] And, in fact, it is the same with business control of the media in every free country on the planet.

We are bombarded by the reinforcing symbols and messages of our culturation and social indoctrination from cradle to grave. But beginning with the various means of mass communication, starting with radio, that culturation and indoctrination has been increasingly and insidiously commercial. Beginning in the 1920s capitalists and business leaders began to recognize the power in radio that they could use to improve their businesses and, more importantly, to "manufacture" and maintain public loyalty to their product and, increasingly, their political agenda. With that recognition, they set out to control these mass communication media. McChesney writes, "It was only in the late 1920s that capitalists began to sense that through network operation and commercial advertising, radio broadcasting could generate substantial profits. Through their immense power in Washington, these commercial broadcasters were able to dominate the Federal Radio Commission. As a result, the scarce number of air channels were effectively turned over to them with no public and little congressional deliberation on the matter."

The dangers inherent in commercial control of broadcast media were the rallying call of a reform movement through the 1920s. They argued that ".....if private interests controlled the medium and their goal was profit, no amount of regulation or self-regulation could overcome the bias built into the system." This reform movement essentially lost their battle with the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, which established the FCC. They did not lose in a fair fight, however. As McChesney explains, "The radio lobby dominated because it was able to keep most Americans ignorant or confused about the communication policy matters then under discussion in Congress through their control of key elements of the news media and their sophisticated public relations aimed at the remainder of the press and the public."

Commercial domination of broadcast media did not end with radio, of course. "When television came along in the 1940s," McChesney says, "the FCC effectively turned it over to the same networks that dominated radio. Almost from the beginning commercial broadcasting has generated criticism that it ignored or downplayed controversial political programming, or entertainment and cultural programming that would not attract huge audiences. In addition, advertisers served as powerful censors of broadcast content, and it was not in their interest to sponsor programming that might undermine their sales messages."[(1)]

After four generations of commercial control and manipulation of the broadcast media that is the central source of our cultural identity, plus two decades of escalating commercial intrusion into our public school systems, we have become so indoctrinated into a carefully orchestrated worldview that we have largely surrendered and lost both our ability and our desire for critical independent thought. In one of the many online sites called Deprogramming, put out by The Center for Human Deprogramming, it is put this way, "Everything we feel and know inside is gradually replaced with values originating from media and education until we have completely lost our ability for independent, creative, or critical thought. After years of this process, we lose our identities and internal equilibrium and become dependent on the external."[(6)] We have as a population largely fallen into a pattern of follow-the-leader, looking to government and business to solve our problems, satisfy our perceived needs, and to tell and show us where we are supposed to go. To quote myself, from my book Oilephant Down: Canada at the End of the Age of Cheap Oil, "the more you ask your government to do for you the more it will do to you without your asking." Just consider the wholesale erosion of civil liberties in legislation like The Patriot Act passed since 9/11. But we keep asking. As Carolyn Baker says in American Born, Addicted to Happiness, "Americans, even so-called Progressives it seems, appear to be fixated in an eternal adolescence that wants to repair adversity as quickly as possible without living it, or God forbid, learning from it. One facet of maturity is the awareness that the challenges of human existence are rarely simplistic, usually fraught with complexity, and typically last much longer than we ever dreamed we could endure them. ..... Like puerile MTV viewers, we demand that the right politician, the right book, the right motivational speaker, the right spiritual teacher, the right journalist tell us what to do and make it “all better” so that we can avoid suffering."[(2)]

That is not a national mind set and worldview that should give anyone comfort as we rapidly and aggressively push toward the global crises ahead of us, most importantly but not exclusively peak oil and climate change. A problem cannot be its own solution. We cannot expect to avoid, remedy or mitigate these crises with the same government and business leadership that has led us through a global sleepwalk to this cliff and seems to be intent on pushing us off into the abyss with their mindless pursuit of business-as-usual. They are aware of the crises before us. If the average citizen did not realize that with President Bush's "America is addicted to oil" statement in his 2006 State of the Union address, then they simply are not listening. They may, however, simply be incapable of hearing. As Laura Knight-Jadczyk says in Official Culture in America: A Natural State of Psychopathy?, "...how effective the "official culture" actually is in the US. It isn't just a question of ignorance, but a question of the long-term thoroughness of the propagandizing that began in the early days of the last century. It was proposed that this propaganda is so complete that not only are most people in the US ignorant of what is taking place on the US political scene, and in the world as a direct result of US policy, they are ignorant of the fact that they are ignorant."[(4)] But the solutions consistently put forward by President Bush, his administration, the US government and business leaders is to develop more new technology to solve the problems. It is technology that has brought us to this dangerous point. As Joseph Wilkerson put it in Energy and Psyche: Resource Addiction in the Technological Age, "....if the industrial relationship to petroleum and other energy sources is indeed an addiction, then it will take more than “technology … reliable alternative energy sources and … clean-energy research” (united) to facilitate our recovery." Knight-Jadczyk goes on to say, "...all of us who were raised in the US have been duped via this Official Culture mind control imposed through the educational system and the mass media." [(3)]

As long as those powerful government, institutional and business interests vested in the maintenance of the status quo remain in control of the legislation that creates the laws that govern our lives, in control of the education system that molds the mind and character of our children to their objectives, in control of that national media that creates, manipulates, controls and constantly reinforces the national cultural mind set supportive of their elitist interests, any broad-based, grass roots social movement for change will be very limited in its ability to affect that change. Even the most fervent social movements have been but small blips on the radar of those in control of our culture. Lip service is paid while passions are high and then it's back to business as usual, maybe with a new coat of disguising paint. With the media in the control of such powerful vested interests the opportunity simply will not be "granted" for any popular social change to get off the ground. In a paper titled Seizing the Media put out by a group called Immediast International, the frustration engendered by this reality is clear. "The time has come to veto, overwhelm, and subvert the messages of all airborne commercial broadcast media until they are returned to complete public direction, access, and control. How long should we wait to liberate public spaces from the blister of billboards and advertisements? The air is public domain, and the airwaves are ours to hear our own voices, see our own colors, enjoy our own conversations, and celebrate in the vast community of cultures. Remember: dialogue offsets the hegemony, and intimacy empowers. ..... The time has come to restore the democratic power and public space that have been co opted and colonized by commercial media."[(5)]

If our leaders remain focused on perpetuating business as usual and have no solution to the problems ahead other than ramping up the technology that has been such a key part of our destruction of the planet's biosphere, and if machinery of culturation and information remains firmly in their grasp, how are we to overcome our increasing sense of doom and have any hope of avoiding the crises ahead (Let's call them what they will be, disasters!)? How are we to prepare as a society for the most dramatic and traumatic transition in human history as the impact of peak oil, climate change and other looming global disasters befall us in quick succession? Somehow we have to find a way. This is how it was put in Knight-Jadczyk's article. "A picture is forming of a deliberately contrived society of televised conformity, literate and creative inadequacy, and social unrest and decadence. It is apparent that the media is in charge of propagating these conditions, and the media is controlled by what? ..... Capitalistic, competitive Economics."

Deprogramming is a technique developed and fine-tuned over this past half century originally intended as a program to undo the indoctrination and brainwashing of individuals rescued from cults of various descriptions. It is a very intense, one-on-one process that seeks to supplant inculcated beliefs, "truths", triggers and signals and replace them with a renewed affinity for the mainstream culture. The process uses, out of declared necessity, some of the same techniques of indoctrination and brainwashing that was used to draw the subject into the cult in the first place. Both the strength and the weakness of the technique is that it is one-on-one. If the masses are to be deprogrammed out of the mainstream culture in order to effect a change toward a post-energy sustainable world it is not likely to happen if it relies on intense, one-on-one reculturation of every individual. There is a technique called Social Reason developed by Milton W. Raymond and presented to the Ethical Society of Boston, School for Ethics. This paper purports to be a technique for broad social deprogramming during traumatic social changes such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-absorption of Hong Kong into Communist China and introduction of western Democracy into conservative Islamic states.[(6)] To my knowledge the theory presented in the paper has never been put into practice. Most practitioners and experts on deprogramming are quite insistent that it can only work on an intense one-on-one basis. I remain intrigued, however, whether Raymond's technique has any merit and whether it could be the key to effecting the social transition from our current high-energy, high-tech world into the sustainable world that must follow the collapse of the global energy bubble.
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1) The Political Economy Of Radio by Robert W. McChesney
http://www.infoshop.org/texts/seizing/mches.html
2) American Born, Addicted to Happiness by Carolyn Baker / Research on Globalization (CRG)
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/American-Addicted-Happiness30nov04.htm
3) Energy and Psyche: Resource Addiction in the Technological Age By Joseph Wilkerson
http://www.ecopsychology.org/journal/ezine/archive3/addiction.pdf
4) Official Culture in America: A Natural State of Psychopathy? by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/official_culture.htm
5) Seizing The Media: The Immediast Underground Pamphlet Series
Immediast International - New York City / Amsterdam / Seattle (Looks quite good)
http://deoxy.org/seize_it.htm
6) Resolving "Irreconcilable" Differences by Milton W. Raymond
http://www.bostonethical.org/SocialReason.html

Waking up, Into the Nightmare!

Much of what I have written on the blog lately ("Give me a Child Until...." and "Mudpies and Dunce caps Part 2") has to do with the degree of social indoctrination and brainwashing in support of current society. I have always been and still am most concerned with government, business, media and religious indoctrination in the elementary levels of the public school system (a phenomenon which is now increasingly creeping into private schools as well), the degree to which those institutions take control over the formation of the character of our children to suit their aims, the role of media through television, radio, music, movies and magazines in targeting our children and reinforcing that institutional indoctrination. There is a solid reason for that concern. This article should be seen, therefore, as a continuation of the above series of articles. Many of the other articles on the blog also are musings on various specific aspects of the same line of thought (e.g. "The Right to Pursue Powerdown").

We are arguably headed into the most difficult struggle for survival that our species has ever had to deal with. We and our children are, in this new century, going to have to deal with some combination of serious global problems any one of which by itself could force a serious readjustment of human society. To have to deal with a number of them within the same century is a more onerous prospect than the problems underpinning any of the major turning points in human history. What are those problems?

* Global population growth that has already pushed us well beyond the natural carrying capacity of this planet and continues to push us even beyond the artificial carrying capacity achieved through the use of fossil fuels. 20-40,000 people die globally every day from starvation and nutrition-related illness. A full third of the human population is, by our western standards, malnourished or undernourished.
* Peak oil and peak energy or, more importantly, the decline in oil, natural gas and other forms of energy following the global peak in oil and natural gas. Professor Richard Duncan, in his Olduvai Theory, draws a direct link between the peaking in oil and natural gas and the comparatively rapid depletion of other sources of energy that will follow.
* Global warming and climate change and its attendant issues of desertification, ice cap and glacier melting, sea level rise, shift of growing zones, possible shutting down of the Atlantic thermal conveyor and the strong potential of an associated new ice age in Europe, a steady dramatic global increase in storm severity and unprecedented aberrant weather patterns, etc.
* Global loss of soil fertility through top soil degredation and depletion through the use of pesticides, artificial fertilizer, over irrigation, over cultivation, over cropping, loss of organic matter and humus, etc. Once the artificial fertility afforded by fossil fuel inputs is no longer available (it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel input to produce one calorie of food using western agricultural methods) we will have only natural fertility to support us.
* Accelerating global decline of fresh water resources through pollution, aquifer depletion, loss of ground water through global warming, overuse of fresh water for irrigation for agriculture, golf courses, unnatural desert cities, etc.
* The increasing global loss of viable agricultural land to urban sprawl, infrastructure spread, soil salination and toxicity, erosion from wind and water, etc.
* The increasing global loss of food security through unfettered population explosion, loss of soil fertility, nutrient loss in increased photosynthesis due to global warming, inexorable encroachment and destruction of traditional farming practices by multinationals like Monsanto, Dupont, ADM, etc.
* Runaway global species extinction through increased competition from the growing human population, wholesale habitat destruction and destruction of natural migratory routes, habitat destruction through global warming, shifting of critical climatic ranges toward the poles through global warming, breaking the ecological links between different species through isolation, reduction of species gene pools to critical levels, human monopolization of insolation to grow our crops at the expense of natural food sources for other species, etc.
* The growing potential of endless terrorism and resource wars, very possibly including nuclear and biolgical weapons.
* The dramatically increasing probabability of a major global pandemic (bird flu, HIV/AIDS, ebola, hanta, marburg, west nile, etc.) due to human encroachment on disease reservoirs in Africa, South America, and elsewhere, on global degredation of human immune systems due to overuse of antibiotics and vaccines, the continuing avoidance of breast feeding in developed and, increasingly, developing nations, the increasing use of antibiotic cleansers and other products in the home and its impact on impairing the immune system development in our children and causing a global epidemic increase in childhood illnesses, etc.
* The strong potential of a global economic meltdown following peak oil and other disasters listed above.

AND MORE...................

None of this is news, of course, at least not if you are a regular reader of my blog or Energy Bulletin or any of the hundreds and thousands of online websites, newsgroups, e-mail groups and other sites that have been discussing these issues, or any of the hundreds of books available on peak oil, global warming, overpopulation, and other imminent global disasters. If you do a google on "peak oil" you will find that there are over six million links available, and that number grows by thousands every day. A global warming google will net you more than 65,000,000 links. So if all of this is so readilly available why can I still run across tidbits like this in The Cheap Oil Mirage in The Daily Reckoning - Weekend Edition:

"Recently . . . the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, in an extraordinary session, heard testimony that the nation is in grave danger of a permanent oil crisis. Some of these senators affected to be shocked and surprised. What planet have they been living on? What is the nation getting for the hundreds of million of dollars paid to their staffers? Outgoing Republican chair, Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), said to the witnesses that "what you told us today is absolutely startling with reference to the future." Is it too early for a dumbass of the year award?"

If our national and global leaders are ignorant of the crises before us, either intentionally or unintentionally - and I am very much not suggesting that they are ignorant of these crises - is it any wonder that the vast majority of average people likewise remain unaware of the crises ahead? I would strongly suggest, however, that the vast majority of our politicians and leaders are very much aware of the crises ahead of us. So why aren't they talking? Would you? If you were in George Bush's shoes and you were aware of the imminence of peak oil and the implications of a declining global oil supply would you admit it publically? The thing with being a politician is that admitting to an awareness of a problem imposes upon that politician expectations that something will be done about. The politician who talks about a problem must have solutions for that problem. Does any politcian or leader on the planet have a viable solution to peak oil, global warming, or any of the other global disasters that are likely to assault us over the course of this century?

I would suggest the answer is a resounding NOOOOOOO.........

So think about it. You're George Bush. You know peak oil is fast approaching. You know you have no solutions, probably know there are no solutions. You know you can't admit that you know these things because you don't have answers. So what do you do? All of this information is out there in the public arena so more and more people will gradually find out. You can't shut down the sources of that information. They're too numerous and global in nature. If a critical mass of awareness develops it could lead to uncontrollable civil unrest. You can't let that happen. What's your best course of action? Fall back on tried and true methods. Deny, deny, deny! Never utter the words. Spearhead a campaign of misinformation and disinformation to discredit such information, to cause confusion. Capitalize on social loyalty of the sheeple to authority. Use the words "theory" and "conspiracy" often, always accompanied by a smirk or a laugh or a lifting of the eyebrows accompanied with a shrug. Keep the populace focussed on other problems like terrorism, political scandals, corporate scandals, WMD and if there aren't big enough problems already then create some. Keep waving the flag and reminding the sheeple that you are the only truly patriotic leader they have available. And most importantly, you ratchet up the indoctrination and brainwashing of the nation's children to ensure that they perpetuate the compliance of the masses to the desires and directives of the national leaders. And most importantly, you keep the focus away from the problems long enough to leave it to the next president to solve.

Our government, business, religious and media leaders are doing absolutely everything they can to keep us sleepwalking toward the cliff ahead. Bereft of solutions they are doing all that they can to ensure they at least continue to have control of the masses. But there is an absolute nightmare ahead of us. More and more people everyday are waking up to the nightmare of an increasingly uncomfortable reality. When the spell of the global hypnosis is finally broken and a critical mass of the population realize that the nightmare is real we will be at potentially the greatest turning point in human history. Leaders who have maintained their hold on power by keeping the masses ignorant of a serious and unpreventable and unsolveable problem always eventually fall to the overwhelming will of the people when the subterfuge is revealed. The longer and more aggressively the masses are kept ignorant of the problem the more passionate and voilent the backlash when it comes. But leader after leader has still naively followed this path. Manipulating public apathy and ignorance of the truth can only be carried on for so long.

Awareness is building. The more it does the closer we get to potentially a global day of reckoning. To quote, I think, P. T. Barnum, "You can fool some of the people all the time, all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time." With a global erosion of civil liberties leaders are playing a very dangerous game. Be careful dealing with a people who have nothing left to lose.

I will return to this theme again and again. Stay tuned.

Give me a Child Until..........

How will we ever get a critical mass of awareness and willingness to change and prepare for a post-peak, post-meltdown, post-apocalyptic world when we are all indoctrinated from cradle to grave into supporting and being part of the current industrial/economic/capitalist societal paradigm?

Where is the line between information, education, culturation and indoctrination? What someone views as indoctrination would seem to be any attempted or, particularly, successful dissemination of an ideology or philosophy that differs markedly from those ideologies and philosophies that person holds and follows. Generally the person levelling the accusation of indoctrination seems not to understand that the ideology they adhere to was also acquired through indoctrination. Bertrand Russell, in The Impact of Science on Society, said, "....the populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated .. education should aim at destroying free will...." [(33)]

In an article titled, American Indoctrination -- The harsh reality of public school, in Liberty Forum it is summed up this way; "Indoctrination. Forced conformity. Government worship. A blending of Christianity with "patriotism." The wholesale assembly-line production of jingoistic, unquestioning drones, assaulted at their most impressionable time in life." [(14)] In Are Lady Liberty's Books for Education or Indoctrination? Guy T. Sturino states, "Probably most, by that time, have adopted the political party and social attitude of their parents or peers without a second thought. The result is that the majority of the working class does not have sufficient foundational education to even be concerned about what is happening around them – or to them." [(15)] In The Central Fallacy of Public Schooling, Daniel Hager states, "When parents send a child to a tax-funded school, they sacrifice their autonomy to alien interests. The state has goals of its own that are distinct from those of parents. The price of tax-funded schooling is that parents give up their children to become instruments of the state." [(16)] Such statements simply reinforce for me my belief that it is impossible to separate education, even at the most basic level, from indoctrination.

How can we expect or assume that students entering high school and university or, afterward, adult life, are prepared for critical assessment and constructive dissent and debate, reasoned thought and assessment, or independent thinking, when they have spent the first eight years or more of their education in an environment which neither fosters nor tolerates dissent, disagreement, questioning or debate, or independence of thought? In High School Indoctrination, Sol Stern claims, "The younger the students are, of course, the less likely are they able to withstand – or even detect – attempts at social and political thought control in the classroom." [(18)]

The K-8 public school system teaches and trains children by the strict rote of the school curriculum in which daily repetition and environmental manipulation reinforce in those children a belief that authority is right, that authority must be obeyed, that authorities decide what you will learn and when and how, that the student must respect, obey and rely and be dependent on that very authority. Many behavioral scientist favoring the "nurture" theory of character development "believe that people think and behave in certain ways because they are taught to do so." [(30)] American psychologist John Watson said, "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select...regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors." [(30)] The old Jesuit saying, "Give me a child..... until he is seven, and I will give you the man" [(6)], displays a clear recognition that the earlier you can gain access to a child's mind the stronger control you have over the formation of that child's character and beliefs. Could any person, after eight years of even the level of "brainwashing" and indoctrination in our public schools emerge from that process without being affected and without their character being molded to that desired by the system from which they are "graduating"? "After pupils have left school," Bertrand Russell adds in The Impact of Science on Society, "they will be incapable .. of thinking or acting otherwise than their schoolmasters would have wished." [(33)] One of the most insidious student control tools being employed in recent decades, of course, is Ritalin and similar psychological control drugs. In 18 Ways Public Schools Can Hurt Children and Parents and many other sources we are told "Public schools pressure many parents who have bright, normal children to give their kids potentially dangerous mind-altering drugs like Ritalin to make the bored kids "behave" in class. Over four million normal but allegedly "unruly" school children take Ritalin every day. Methylphenidate (sold as Ritalin) and cocaine are both listed on "Schedule II" of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's Controlled Substances Act (CSA)." [(28)]

In recent decades, with the ever-increasing outflow of jobs from the industrialized world to the lower cost job markets of developing nations like China, India, Taiwan and Indonesia, there has been an increasing, though perhaps confused, belief that the school systems in our industrialized nations are not turning out workers that are competitive with those graduating from school in developing nations. Much of this belief, however, is being fostered by corporations who are actively and energetically campaigning for an ever-increasing role in our public schools, institutions which came into being for the purpose of, and are still focused on, turning out standardized workers for business and industry. In Government Can’t Run Schools Like Businesses, Thomas L. Johnson, professor emeritus of biological sciences at University of Mary Washington takes a decidedly pro-business and anti-government stance in stating, "If freedom is to survive in America, it will be necessary to eliminate the psychologically crippling and mentally debilitating authoritarian socialist public-school system that inevitably inflicts upon all of its students a long and thorough indoctrination in authoritarianism and convinces them that government force is a valid and necessary means to achieve virtually any desired ends." [(13)]. He would, instead, have corporations doing the indoctrination.

In Nightmare Awaits Under Globalization - effects on public school system in Canada, Rick Sawa states "Corporations want governments to get out of the way of business when it comes to education. They feel that decisions must be taken by a school system for good business reasons, with a minimum of public intervention." [(17)] In Smaller Learning Communities: Preparing Workers for a State Planned Economy, Edwatch states, "Goal 6 of Goals 2000 states in part, “Every major American business will be involved in strengthening the connection between education and work." It is a philosophy, and it is the focal point of the new restructuring of American society. It is a means for appointed bureaucratic central planners to link government-directed education with government-directed economic development and government directed workforce preparation systems. Children are, in practice, human resources for a centrally planned economy." [(12)] It was not meant to be this way, of course. As we are reminded in the article Indoctrination and filtering, "The founders of our country saw that a well educated citizenry is essential to preserving Liberty. Yet they also knew that education ought not be centrally controlled. For no matter who is in power, those persons will inevitably impose their particular propaganda onto the schools. For this reason, the federal government was forbidden (by the Tenth Amendment) from involving itself in education." The article goes on to remind us, like so many others, "Rather than teaching honest self-reliance, the system seduces our children into dependency." [(19)] In Echoes of corporate influence, Dorothy Shipps, assistant professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University writes, "Corporate leaders have assumed the unrivalled moral authority to define the purposes and methods of public schooling in response to the new technology-driven global economy." [(4)] In Public Schools: Enforced Social Conversion & Parental Denial, tireless education and home schooling advocate, Nancy Levant, states, "Children all over the world are being converted to social compliancy and servitude. ..... No parent in the United States has any excuse, whatsoever, for ignoring the political-corporate take-over and manipulation of knowledge and learning." [(7)]

Such government and corporate manipulation of the education system is and will continue to be aimed at not just pushing corporate agendas on the school system but preventing opposing agendas from gaining a foothold in that same system. In Science a la Joe Camel Laurie David reports, "The producers of "An Inconvenient Truth," decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. Thanks but no thanks, they said. ..... Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp." [(1)] In Influencing future decision makers, Dr Sharon Beder states, "This strategy [of creating confusion by challenging scientific evidence] is now making its way into school science curricula as corporations supply "educational" materials that promote clear cutting of forests whilst casting doubt on phenomena such as global warming and ozone depletion. For example, Procter and Gamble argued in their package that disposable diapers are no worse for the environment than cloth diapers, a claim based on scientific studies funded by Procter and Gamble. The company just happens to be the world's largest manufacturer of disposable nappies although this wasn't mentioned in the package." [(3)]

But corporations, particularly large multinationals, have now seriously broadened their horizons. No longer content with having to push their agenda on a region by region, state by state, nation by nation basis, they have now set their sights on standardized global education. In an article titled United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development in Edwatch, the broad brushstrokes of international corporate control of globalized education standards are revealed: "The international community now strongly believes that we need to foster — through education — the values, behaviour and lifestyles required for a sustainable future." [(10)] In a counter article entitled Education for Sustainable Tyranny: The United Nations Plan for Our Children, Michael J Chapman writes, "At the September 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, so-called “representatives of the peoples of the world” adopted a document called, “Agenda 21,” the global roadmap for SD implementation. ..... The Chapter Titles of Agenda 21 reveal the extent of government control necessary to implement SD, including goals to: Change Consumption Patterns; Promote Sustainable Human Settlements; Plan & Manage All Land Resources, Ecosystems, Deserts, Forests, Mountains, Oceans, Fresh Water; Agriculture; Rural Development; Biotechnology; Ensuring Equity; an increased role for Non-Government Organizations (NGOs); and even defining the role of Business and Financial Resources. ..... The United States is pleased to return to UNESCO… There and here, we agree that we must make education a universal reality. Our governments have entrusted us with the responsibility of preparing our children to become citizens of the world." [(11)]

We who are involved in the peak oil movement have, as one of our greatest concerns, the apathetic lack of public awareness of the disasters that lie before us, not just peak oil but also human-induced global warming and a host of other potential or even probable catastrophes all the result of serious human overpopulation. We are all aboard a runaway train racing down the track toward a collapsed bridge, with the engineer and other staff on the train doing their damnedest to keep us ignorant of that reality. We are labeled as doomers because we insist on trying to push those future problems into the public consciousness. In reality, of course, we are trying to minimize the potential severity of those problems by raising public awareness and pushing society towards preparation. Is that ever likely to happen, however, with the current government and corporate control of our education system? We tend to focus our efforts on the adult population around us. But that adult population is a product of a school system that spent twelve years and more indoctrinating and brainwashing them into accepting and supporting the status quo. Only a small minority of the graduates of that system, I would suggest, are capable of breaking free of those years of mental programming.

Unless we can break the grip of senior governments and corporations on our school system neither the present generation of school students nor those yet to come will be able to break free and move away from the status quo and in a direction consistent with the needs for societal survivability in a post-peak, eventually post-energy, world. We know that our current resource-wasting society is not sustainable. We know that we are gradually but irrevocably destroying the earth's ability to support life, including our own species. And yet our children are spending their formative years in an education system that continues to reassure them that that is okay, that there will always be another technological solution, that it is okay for us to use up the last of the resources available because they are confident we will find other solutions when they have run out.

If we are ever to gain serious momentum toward ending our suicidal destruction of this planet - our home planet, the only one in the universe we know to support life - we must start with our children. We must stop allowing them to be brainwashed into supporting the societal norms that are responsible for our race to self-destruction. We must also reach our leaders and do what we can to get them to look ahead and realize that the bridge is out and get them to start leading in a different direction.

Is either likely to happen? Not likely, but we must keep trying. I think the long-term of our species is worth the effort.

For a more detailed review of the debate over the government and corporate indoctrination taking place in our public schools follow the links below.

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1) Science a la Joe Camel - By Laurie David
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR2006112400789.html
2) Software business profits from influence, good timing
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-te.software20s2sep20,0,1461628.story?coll=bal-education-storyutil
3) influencing future decision makers by Dr Sharon Beder
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/beder/story.htm
4) Echoes of corporate influence
http://www.unesco.org/courier/2000_11/uk/doss12.htm
5) How Business Gained Influence over Chicago Public Schools
http://www.children.smartlibrary.org/newinterface/segment.cfm?segment=2141
6) The Religious Policeman
http://muttawa.blogspot.com/2006/01/give-me-child.html
7) PUBLIC SCHOOLS: ENFORCED SOCIAL CONVERSION & PARENTAL DENIAL
http://www.newswithviews.com/Levant/nancy9.htm
8) Fifth Annual Report on Commercialism in Schools / The Corporate Branding of Our Schools
http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/CERU/Documents/CERU-0210-09-RW.doc
9) New Education Initiative: Public Education as Transnational Corporate Welfare
http://www.libertycoalition.net/new_education_initiative_public_education_as_transnational_corporate_welfare
10) United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (January 2005 – December 2014)
http://www.edwatch.org/
11) Education for Sustainable Tyranny: The United Nations Plan for Our Children
http://www.f21sc.net/site/downloads/chapman_sustainable_tyranny.pdf
12) Smaller Learning Communities: Preparing Workers for a State Planned Economyhttp://www.edwatch.org/
13) Government Can’t Run Schools Like Businesses
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0501f.asp
14) American Indoctrination -- The harsh reality of public school
http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?&Number=1437055
15) Are Lady Liberty's Books for Education or Indoctrination?
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=5058
16) The Central Fallacy of Public Schooling By Daniel Hager
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4846
17) Nightmare Awaits Under Globalization - effects on public school system in Canada
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JQV/is_6_30/ai_76911355
18) High School Indoctrination
http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21563
19) Indoctrination and filtering
http://www.edaction.org/New/intr0006.htm
20) Political indoctrination seeping into private schools
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MattTowery/2006/08/24/political_indoctrination_seeping_into_private_schools
21) Political indoctrination in the curriculum during four periods of elementary school education in Taiwan.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3547/is_200305/ai_n8365087
22) FIRE Has Never Been ‘Sheepish’ on the Danger of Confusing Free Speech with Indoctrination
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/5377.html
23) The Road to Democracy Starts at the Schoolhouse Door; Teaching our Children Beyond the "Three Rs"
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/legal_issues/legal_updates/other_noteworthy_cases/free_speech_rights_students.htm
24) Brainwashing and Thought Control in Scientology -- The Road to Rondroid
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/wakefield/us-14.html
25) Throw Out Your TV- Mass Mind Control
http://www.catholicintl.com/noncatholicissues/tv.htm
26) Public Schools Warned: Requiring Ritalin Is Unlawful
http://www.wildestcolts.com/safeEducation/release8_01.html
27) How Public Schools Coerce Parents Into Giving Mind-Altering Drugs To Their Children
http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com/adhd/mind_altering_drugs.asp
28) 18 Ways Public Schools Can Hurt Children and Parents
http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com/pspm/dangers.asp
29) Just Say Yes to Ritalin!
http://www.alternet.org/story/9838/
30) Nature vs. Nurture: Are We Really Born That Way?
http://genealogy.about.com/cs/geneticgenealogy/a/nature_nurture.htm
31) Freedom: Transcending Enculturation and Choosing for Ourselves
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/CY-FREED.html
32) Avatar and the Restoration of Free will
http://www.avataroverdrive.com/avatar_journal/vol13_1/freewill.htm
33) IS MANIPULATION REAL?
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/brain2.htm
34) Propaganda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
35) Pulling kids out of government schools
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24253
36) Central High School
http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/1/6.html
37) Education or Indoctrination?
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0807-06.htm
38) Bill Gates and the Corporatization of American"Public" Schools
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0406-31.htm
39) Schools With a Slant
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/hilde/Phl_325c/antienvironmentaled.html
40) A Citizens Guide to Adopting Commercial-Free School Board Policies In Your Community
http://www.ibiblio.org/commercialfree/policies.html
41) Curbing the Commercialization of Public Space
http://www.newrules.org/info/publicspace.html
42) Naming Rights Sold -- This Time, at High School Field
http://www.commercialalert.org/news/Archive/2002/08/naming-rights-sold-this-time-at-high-school-field

Mud pies and Dunce Caps - Part 2

What is the value of our current education system in preparing our children for a future that will be dominated by the impact of peak-oil, global warming and climate change, and other global disasters on the near-term horizon?

Our society tends to take for granted the availability of universal public education. We also tend to believe that the role of that public education system is to prepare and optimally develop our children for success in the world in which they will live their adult lives. It is a core part of the means by which we try to ensure that our children have the best possible chance of living the dream of having the most successful life possible in the wealthiest and most advanced society in the world. Few realize that universal public education is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. The first surviving system was developed in Prussia only in 1819 and the rise of public education system in America was modelled on that system and came later[(3)]. Historian Bernard Bailyn, twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, wrote in Education in the Forming of American Society: "The modern conception of public education, the very idea of a clean line of separation between “private” and “public,” was unknown before the end of the eighteenth century."[(2)]


More important, however, is the misinterpretation of the objectives of that public education system. The purpose of that system is not to achieve the optimum development of our children's abilities but rather to standardize their thinking patterns to socially accepted norms and to prepare them to be complient and authority-following workers in the industrial, business and financial institutions around which our society is oriented and in which the majority of our children will find employment after graduation [(2) (3) (5) (6)]. This role of public education was at the core of its development during the industrial revolution in Europe and America. It was meant to transform the flood of "undisciplined" agrarian masses flowing into industrializing cities into law-abiding and rule-following workers for the burgeoning industries and businesses [(4)]. That responsibility of the public education system to turn out cogs for the wheels of industry has been even further pursued in recent years with the advent and growth of globalization [(1) (7) (10)].

In a rapidly changing and developing society, however, an essentially reactive public school system is faced with pressures to adapt that the lethargic monolithic bureaucracy cannot possibly respond to[(8) (9)]. Our reactive public education system does not prepare students for the future but rather for a world already in the past. By the time anything new makes its way into the school curricula that new is already old. This is a hard lesson that school systems are learning in trying to incorporate technology training (computers) into the school curriculum. One high level educator complained that: "We get computers in here and before we know it they're outdated. The technological revolution is a money pit. You never have enough money to buy more hardware or software."[(8)]

Business and industry, indirectly through government departments and directly in many jurisdictions, are already partners in design, administration and running of public education systems and in curriculum development [(6) (7) (10)]. The corporation and the corporate logo are becoming ubiquitous in our schools, from the computer lab to the caffeteria [(6)]. However that does not seem to be enough to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the corporate world for controlling our lives. Throughout the world but most particularly in highly industrialized countries like the US, UK and Canada, corporations are seeking to take over the public schools [(1) (6) (7) (9)]. These "EMOs" (Education Management Organizations) are using and exagerating the weaknesses in the school system in the face of a rapidly changing world as the foundation of their pitch and argument, coercing teachers, students and parents alike. In the process they paint a picture of a school system much worse than reality. But they have good reason. Education is a half trillion dollar industry in the US alone. In the same way that HMOs stepped in to save the health system, EMOs are putting themselves forward as the saviors of the beleaguered education system.



What has this to do with peak oil and preparing our children for an uncertain, possibly disaster-prone future? From the outset the public education system has been designed to turn out compliant workers for business and industry who have been partners in developing the curricula that schools will follow. Very little curriculum flexibility has ever been tolerated and then only when it fits within the tight boundaries of that role of serving business and industry. That education system, however, has never been proactive, nor can it be. It always lags slightly behind the current state of evolution of the society in which it operates. In a rapidly or dramatically chaging environment that system lags ever further behind the current societal reality. It gets locked into an ongoing battle just trying to keep pace. A system that can't even keep pace with the changes going on around it cannot possibly be expected to gear its efforts towards turning out students prepared for the realities that will exist twenty, thirty or fifty years in the future, especially when such preparation would be outside of the primary role of serving business and industry and turning out workers for them.

But that is exactly what is needed at this time. Peak oil is no longer debateable, even if the timing is. Global warming is no longer debateable, though the timing may be. Our children are going to have to cope with the dramatic impact of one or both of them, and a plethora of other global disasters waiting in the wings, during their lifetime. Yes, they need to be able to make their way in the current world until those realities begin to dominate their lives and world affairs. But for the public education system, whose role includes the development of the mindset and worldview of the students in its charge, to do nothing to prepare those students for these emerging realities simply continues to produce graduating classes trained to perpetuate the very unsustainable world that is about to fail. How can we ever produce a generation prepared to examine our place in this world, to question our destruction of the environment, to challenge our continued depletion of finite resources, if we continue to build in them the same societal mindset that has brought us to this sad and dangerous point in human history? How will we ever break away from our destructive interaction with this planet? We don't need periodic tweaks of the education system. And we certainly do not need to turn it over to the TLC of the corporate world. We need to take it in a whole new direction focused on stewardship and sustainability, on learning to live with the natural world that sustains us rather than destroying it.



-----------------------------------------------
1) A short angry history of American forced schooling
http://4brevard.com/choice/Public_Education.htm
2) Puritanism: The Origin of Public Education
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/puritanism-the-origin-of-public-education/
3) The "Real" School Is Not Free by Thom Hartmann
http://www.thomhartmann.com/realschool.shtml
4) History of education England
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-47586/history-of-education
5) Public Education: Remaking A Public
http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/issue31/i31pub_education.html
6) The Education Industry: The Corporate Takeover of Public Schools
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=889
7) Molding Human Resources for the Global Workforce
http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/HumanResources.html
8) A retiring University educator looks at the state of education
http://mac10.umc.pitt.edu/u/FMPro?-db=ustory&-lay=a&-format=d.html&storyid=5682&-Find
9) Is American Education Obsolete
http://www.campusreportonline.net/main/articles.php?id=1409
10) Towards the Interculturally Proactive School
http://cmslive.curriculum.edu.au/leader/default.asp?issueID=9691&id=4618

Mud Pies and Dunce Caps

We are experiencing an epidemic rise in childhood diseases. What are the implications for their survival as we slide past peak oil and go into permanent energy decline?

Every parent wants to do the best they possibly can to prepare their children to deal with and overcome the obstacles and struggles they will face in adult life. That is the best they can do. They can't fight their battles for them. They can only ready them to fight their own then set them free to do so. The simple reality at this crucial point in human history, however, is that by preparing our children for the world in which we now live, for the struggles we have had to face in our own lives, we are in no way preparing them for the world in which they will live most of theirs.

It is our children who will bear the brunt of the devestating impact from the world we and the hydrocarbon generations before us have created. They will have to survive the fallout from peak oil, resource depletion, climate change and global warming, aquifer depletion, global pollution, species destruction, top soil loss, critical overpopulation, rampant globalization, the probability of economic and social collapse including a progressive decline in our health care system, the increasing possibility of resource wars using nuclear and biological weapons and more. The evolving world they will be thrust into in their adult lives will be as different from today as our world is, not from that of our parents but rather from that of our great-great-grandparents.

We must not fall into the easy trap of teaching our children or allowing them to be taught to become dependent on our current high-energy, resource-wasting lifestyle which is both unsustainable and will not be available to them possibly for the greater part of their lives. The insidiousness of advertising, among other factors, that targets our children and tries to lure them into that world means the battle to prepare them for a very different world will be doubly difficult. But it must be done. A chip off the old block otherwise will very likely end up as kindling for the fire of societal destruction.

Probably never in the course of human history has there been the possibility of such a tumultuous change in global society from one generation to the next. Another comparable dramatic shift resulted in the cargo cults when primitive, stone-age societies suddenly met the modern world and built crude idols of the flying machines that landed in their forest clearings and disgorged into their midst strangely clad white men with talking boxes and fire sticks. These are, of course, comparisons of opposites. The cargo cultists were suddenly thrust forward toward the modern world. Our children will be just as suddenly disenfranchised from it like Adam and Eve being banished from the Garden of Eden.

So just how do we prepare our children? What if we prepare them for the wrong world? How will they fit in then? No one knows exactly how the future will unfold or when. We never do. Our children spend twelve to twenty years getting an education to help them make their way in the world. There are no guarantees that the education they receive will be suitable to the world as it exists when they graduate and take their first steps into the job market. I have met a lot of college and university graduates driving cabs and standing behind retail counters. There is even less guarantee that it will sustain them through a long life dominated by energy decline and global warming.

Iin a future that will be shaped by oil and energy decline and global warming, the greatest preparation that our children are going to need is good health. And that is an area where we are failing them badly. We are, sadly, experiencing an epidemic rise in childhood diseases over the past several decades despite massive increases in health care expenditures. Most of these conditions will have serious health implications as our children mature and age. It is almost guaranteed that as they progress through their adult lives deeper into the post-peak-oil/energy world the high-tech, high-energy health care system and various levels of social safety net that we take so much for granted will go into serious decline.

This is not restricted to one or two health conditions. Type 2 diabetes, formerly considered adult onset diabetes, is becoming increasingly prevalent among children as young as ten and even younger [(1) (2) (3) (4)]. Childhood obesity, an underlying condition to many other diseases and debilitating health conditions, is still increasing at epidemic rates [(6) (7)]. Childhood asthma has been increasing dramatically now for several decades [(5) (15) (16)]. Autism is reaching the level of a national emergency [(9)]. Pediatric MS (Multiple Sclerosis) has been termed a silent epidemic [(20) (21) (22)]. An icreasing incidence of birth defects has been linked to pesticides, herbicides and industrial chemicals [(11)]. There are arguments that our ubiquitous use of flouride, primarilly in our drinking water, is a contributor to an increasing incidence of Down's Syndrome [(10)]. These are some of the main culprits but by no means all.

Considered together, these represent a dramatic increase in the numbers of those who are going to have an increasing difficulty coping in a world changing dramatically
due to oil and energy decline and global warming. As the global economy falters and perhaps collapses during their lifetimes, the medical system on which they will most certainly continue to be dependent will also falter and may also collapse. In a society increasingly fighting a struggle for survival the desire to support the medically needy will probably be stressed to the limit.

This trend, however, can, in my opinion, be reversed. There are clear underpinnings to these dramatic increases in juvenile health problems. Corrective action can be taken for most of these underlying contributors. One of the primary contributors is the dramatic rise in childhood obesity [(6) (7)]. Much corrective action is already being undertaken but clearly much more needs to be done since this problem is still on the increase. In "The spread of childhood obesity epidemic" [(7)] the core of the concern is spelled out. "A major concern regarding childhood obesity is that obese children tend to become obese adults, facing an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, orthopedic problems and many other chronic diseases."

Another primary contributor, unfortunately, has very few options that we can pursue as individual parents. That is pollution [(5) (10) (11)]. That does not mean that we should do nothing. Much of the contributing pollution is caused by our use of fossil fuels. That contribution will begin to decline when we reach peak oil and peak energy but clearly there are strong arguments for beginning to scale back our use of fossil fuels now. That burning of fossil fuels is also the primary contributor to human induced global warming so scaling back our use of fossil fuels can help reduce the potential impact of global warming for our children and grandchildren.

Our fixation on women's breasts as sex objects and the attendant reduction of breast feeding is also a serious contributor to this dramatic increase in childhood health problems [(12) (13) (14)]. The confered immunity made possible by colostrum has already been largely lost to several generations. Those generations thus far, however, have had the benefit of antibiotics and a very advanced medical system to keep them healthy. Our children and grandchildren will not be as fortunate.

Perhaps the most serious contributor, however, and potentially the most controversial, is our misguided attitude toward bacteria. We are sterilizing our children to death. We are seriously degrading the development of their immune systems through our attempts to protect them from germs and bacteria [(15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (23) (24)]. The bacteria that children encounter making mudpies in the back yard and rolling around in the dirt and playing on the floor at home are, in fact, major and often primary agents in developing our children's immune systems. When we use antibiotics, whether as medicine or in the form of cleaning agents, we kill far more good, beneficial bacteria than we do bad bacteria. And in striving for that sterile environment and our overuse of antibiotics we weaken the very immune response that antibiotics are intended to strengthen, leaving our children more vulnerable to the impact of pollution, chemical toxins and more.

We can undo much of the damage that we are doing to our children's health that is making them increasingly vulnerable in the face of the serious impact energy decline and global warming are going to have on our society. If we truly want to prepare them as best we can for their future it behooves us to start doing so now. Too many of these health problems will endure and possibly worsen in their adult lives seriously affecting their future survivability.

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References

Type 2 Diabetes in Children and Adolescents
1) http://care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/reprint/23/3/381.pdf
2) http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/projects/cda2.htm
3) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9726592&dopt=Abstract
Type 2 diabetes increasing dramatically among kids
4) http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2005/05/11/obesity050511.html
Asthma and Air Pollution
5) http://www.arb.ca.gov/research/asthma/asthma.htm
Childhood Obesity
6) http://www.cofbc.ca/
The spread of the childhood obesity epidemic
7) http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/163/11/1461
Increasing Incidence of Autism Spectrum Disorders
8) http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/irca/generalinfo/increasing.html
Autism 99: A National Emergency
9) http://www.garynull.com/Documents/autism_99.htm
Fluoridation & Down's Syndrome
10) http://fluoridealert.org/downs-syndrome.htm
Birth Defects Caused by Herbicides, Insecticides, and Industrial Chemicals that Disrupt the Endocrine System
11) http://consumerlawpage.com/article/endocrine.shtml
What is colostrum? How does it benefit my baby?
12) http://www.lalecheleague.org/FAQ/colostrum.html
Substances: Colostrum
13) http://www.asada.gov.au/substances/facts/colostrum.htm
What's colostrum?
14) http://www.babycenter.com/expert/baby/babybreastfeed/8896.html
Mimicking microbial 'education' of the immune system: a strategy to revert the epidemic trend of atopy and allergic asthma?
15) http://respiratory-research.com/content/1/3/129
National Jewish Medical and Research Center Expert Says Bacteria By-Product Found in Household Dust May Protect Infants from Asthma Later in Life
16) http://www.njc.org/news/y2000/news65.aspx
Bacteria: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
17) http://www.beyondbooks.com/lif72/2b.asp
Good Bacteria Gone Bad
18) http://www.las.uiuc.edu/alumni/news/fall2005/05fall_bacteria.html
How 'good' bacteria could counter overuse of antibiotics
19) http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug05/WCMC_probiotics.mh.html
A 50-year follow-up of the incidence of multiple sclerosis in Hordaland County, Norway
20) http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/66/2/182
Pediatric (Childhood) MS
21) http://www.nationalmssociety.org/Pediatric_and_Childhood.asp
Childhood MS: A silent epidemic?
22) http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2002-12-03-ms-usat_x.htm
Beyond Antibiotics
23) http://www.drlwilson.com/Articles/antibiotics.htm
The Antibiotic Alternative
24) http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewwork.asp?id=4576

Reverse Engineering Industry for a Post-Peak World

I look at the simple lamp on my desk and realize that it has over thirty parts to it. Each of those parts had to be manufactured, hopefully to precise standards, and then brought together and assembled into that lamp. How many "industries" were involved in making that lamp from the extraction of the raw materials involved through to the magical appearance of that lamp on the shelf in the store in which I bought it? Literally dozens! And between each of those extraction/process/maufacture/assembly industry components there is the involvement of the global transportation/distribution industry. All to put a $20 lamp on my desk!


Every stage in the process of turning those raw materials into that twenty-dollar desk lamp involves the use of often-subsidized energy in some form. As we pass beyond global peak oil and the peak availability of other forms of exogenic energy, how does that twenty-dollar lamp end up on a shelf near me?


Under the current structure of globalization the different raw materials involved and the manufacture of the different parts that eventually are assembled into that lamp could have occured on every continent on the planet, in dozens of different
countries, could have involved literally thousands of different people. All to put a $20 lamp on my desk!

In a more general sense, as we begin to slide down the downslope of energy decline into that post-peak world how will manufacturing have to change in order for manufactured items to be available in all the markets in which they are available today? More importantly what manufactured items will be available? Will those items important to sustainable living in a post-peak world survive the collapse of globalized manufacturing? Where and how will they be made? What materials will they be made of? Where will those materials come from?

These are very important questions that are too easilly drowned out in the discussion/debate over fuel issues. Ultimately the fuel to run the family car is a non-issue. Once people come to grips with reality that we are moving into a new world devoid of the multitude of energy sources and choices we have today they will then find themselves staring into the face of the most important of all issues of energy decline: how they ensure long-term survivability for themselves, their children, their grandchildren and their grandchildren's grandchildren. Like it or not, the generations alive today have before them the task of determining the long-term survivability of our species in a post-peak and ultimately post-oil, post-energy world.

I am not one who believes that survival, other than for a very few, consists of rugged individual survivalism on an isolated homestead in the midst of the wilderness or in reverting to a hunter-gatherer existence. We are social beings. Long-term survivability after energy decline must center on community, whatever form that community might take. The survivability of communities well past peak-oil, however, is far more than a case of self-sufficiency. It is also a matter of self-reliance, of having within the community the full measure of skills needed for survivability, of being able to produce or locally acquire everything that that community needs to function.


In general, but not always, the prototype and initial manufacturing of a "new" product began in somebody's basement or garage, in a small workshop, in a barn or converted chicken coop. Each of the components of that new product had to be made by the original "manufacturer" (the meaning of which, by the way, is to make by hand), unless it was a stock item that could be adapted and incorporated into the
product. Only after that, when demand for the product developed or when an industrial manufacturer became involved, did integrated mechanized processes get developed to allow the production to become "efficient". But almost always the product and the manual processes to produce it existed before the industrial manufacturing processes were developed. The manual processes were engineered up into high-tech, high-energy mechanized manufacturing and assembly operations capable of turning out large volume replicas of that original hand-made product.


As our slide down the energy downslope accelerates those highly-complex, integrated manufacturing processes are going to have to be reverse-engineered into those discrete, manual processes from which they began. It will no longer be possible or practical or economically feasible to produce those products in one factory in the suburbs of Seoul or Shanghai and ship them to markets all over the world. As transportation energy becomes increasingly expensive and, ultimately, increasingly unavailable at any price, the manufacture of the items to be used in a particular market is going to have to be moved to or near to the market in which they will be used. The materials from which those items are made may have to vary from location to location, dictated by the local availability of raw materials (as goes oil so goes plastics). Planned obsolescence designed to facilitate the frequent introduction of new, slightly-altered models is going to have to give way to functional simplicity and durability; products are going to have to be made to last. The number of component parts in a product is going to have to be minimized and simplified by orders of magnitude.

Manufacturers are going to have to adapt to this new reality or perish. Size very definitely is no guarantee of survivability. When times get as rough as they are going to get it is the small and flexible that survive. In the great extinction the dinosaurs disappeared but small mammals lived on and gave rise to the great diversity of mammals on earth today.

Obviously very few of the manufactured items with which we surround ourselves today are going to have a place in the world that awaits us on the other side of the energy decline. Pretty soon we've got to start thinking seriously about what products will be needed and plan for their survival or re-introduction (so many items from the past that will be needed again have disappeared and exist only in museums and coffee-table books) during this transition period in which we currently find ourselves. All too soon the time for preparation and transition is going to give way to a new reality. We better be ready for it or it is going to get very ugly.