In this week’s Archdruid report, Mr. Greer claims that the peak oil movement has failed.  My friends and I were discussing this, and we seem to be having a couple disagreements on the topic.  Some of them accept his assertion, that because the organized aspects of the movement, like The Oil Drum, and The Energy Report, and Matt Savinar’s news aggregation and forum are no longer with us as thriving and functional places to learn more about whatever it is peak oil forum members like to learn, that the movement has failed.  Some of my friends, however, dispute it.  Those of my friends who are Deep Green or other kinds of activists, have not failed, at least not on balance.  Standing Rock has not failed.  Remember POSIWID?  The Purpose of a System is What it Does?  If something has changed as a result of it, then it is not a failure, because it did something, regardless of whatever utopian ideals the founders may have started out with.

Right now, there are a bunch of people in the first world, in the technocrat class, who seem to believe that the purpose of humans is to shoot rockets with themselves off into space and colonize other planets.  They have the utter hubris to declare, that if humans never leave Earth and successfully colonize other planets, then our entire existence upon the Earth was for nothing.  That it was a waste, and worthless.  That the entire human history was a complete and utter failure.  That should really make you ponder a lot on what they value, and on what they think is real.

I, too, believed in it for a very short period of time.  It is a tempting notion, after all, to think that procreation, that drive to survive no matter what, is the thing that humans should value.  It is a driving myth in our culture, right up there with that urge to stick as many humans onto the planet as possible, because we’ve cheated death, or claimed victory over it, or some such nonsense.  If, however, you step just a little bit to the side, and look at the life after death studies, or the morphic resonance stuff, or the telepathic field studies, and hold the notion that humans are more than merely their bodies, and there are a lot of different ways you can expand upon that notion, then death of the species is not something to be afraid of, and is not a failure.

You see, if people have immortal souls, and only wear physical bodies for such a very short period of time, then continuation of this particular line of physical bodies just isn’t all that important.  If souls can incarnate into vast networks of fungi, hundreds of miles long, or trees with miles of intertwined roots, or bees, or mountains, or rivers, or planets, or suns, or entire galaxies, why would I be worried about the extinction of any one particular species?  The fungi have already hopped aboard the mars rover, in perfectly space-proof spores, and have spread their seeds across the surface of the moon, mars, and will make their way (again) to the stars.  When the fungi have need of us again, on the other planets, they’ll slowly evolve the soil and the bacteria and the atmosphere and the ecosystems to sustain hominid lifeforms again.  And even if they did not, do you really think that a whole bunch of immortal souls who had need of physical bodies for whatever their purposes were in having physical bodies, couldn’t create another planet or ever another Universe and start all over again if they needed to?

In that light, I can’t consider the Peak Oil Movement to be a failure.  It brought together a whole bunch of people who talked about choosing technologies, and better ways of doing things, and shared experiences of their failures with others so they would not have to also fail.  It made a lot of people question their news sources, way before today’s “fake news,” as some members could share their experiences in actual failed police states with government propaganda news as the only news allowed on the radio and on the television, and in the newspapers.  It didn’t fail.  It decentralized.  Which is what you should do too.  99% of the news these days just plain isn’t about you.  It doesn’t concern you.  It doesn’t affect you.  Fail to be informed about the stuff you can’t do anything about and doesn’t affect your life.  Seek multiple sources and deeper information about the stuff that does affect you, and you can do something about.