Middle-Class Ghost Dance

I listened to Obama's Inaugural speech, full of powerful imagery and inspiration, I suddenly thought about the Ghost Dance.
For those who might not know, in 1889/1890, the Paiute prophet Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, had a vision, in which God promised that if the tribes gave up internecene warfare, found peace and harmony together, learned to love each other (very much the 'new age' message) and performed the sacred ritual dance in the prescribed way, then the ancestors would come back to life, they would all be young, the white man would stop invading, and they would all live in a happy hunting paradise.
Dee Brown wrote, in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, that doomed cultures tend to produce messiahs in their final days, messiahs who promise a return to some previous golden time of happiness and bliss. This is Anthony F. C. Wallace's revitalization model, only without the happy ending. The fate of the tribes were more like the collapses described by Jared Diamond.

Now, we have a few threats to our existence, such as climate disruption and the spectacular collapse of the fraudulent world financial system, but the proposed solution, in both cases, has been the idea that with enough investment in sufficiently advanced (magical) technology, we will discover some source of (infinite) energy that will revive our flagging growth-for-growth's-sake eoconomy and get us back on the path of eternal wealth for everyone, forever, as promised in the sacred texts of the "Free Market" economics. Mr Obama still sings this song, backed by the G20 chorus.

Only the Greens seem to grasp the significance of the caution by retired geologist Colin Campbell (Texaco, BP, Amoco):

"Throughout history, people have had difficulty in distinguishing reality from illusion. Reality is what happens, whereas illusion is what we would like to happen. Wishful thinking is a well-worn expression. Momentum is still another element: we tend to assume that things keep moving in the same direction.
"The world now faces a discontinuity of historic proportions, as nature shows her hand by imposing a new energy reality. There are vested interests on all sides hoping somehow to evade the iron grip of oil depletion, or at least to put it off until after the next election or until they can develop some strategy for their personal or corporate survival. As the moment of truth approaches, so does the heat, the deceptions, the half-truth and the flat out lies."

The deeper meaning of the global financial crash becomes clearer once we appreciate the reality that money is energy. As the financial system divorced itself from meaningful economic activity over the past forty years, it became free to create vast sums of fiat money that fed the illusion of wealth by providing everyone with bigger numbers to play with and a ponzi scheme of "investment vehicles" that allowed many to assume they could retire into eternal comfort. What this masked is the reality that meaningful economic activity is directly related to energy, either solar (i.e. farm produce) or renewable (e.g. hydro or wood) or limited, finite sources (i.e. fossil fuels & nuclear power). This is a limit. This limit defines what is possible. Current economic policies and financial system is illusion at best, deliberate fraud at worst.

Gnawing at the back of the minds of the average middle-class North American, is the buried awareness, since 1973, at least, that we depend on oil and oil will run out someday. Perhaps this is why fighting Climate Change gets the press and enthusiasm and generates all sorts of techno-fantasy solutions that reassure everyone that they will have all their luxuries in the future. we'll drive plug-in electric SUVs instead of gas-guzzling, fume-spewing SUVs. We can achieve infinite energy through "renewables" if we all buy new, energy-efficient gizmos and still live in luxury. Resource depletion is casually dismissed, if it is considered at all, with an airy wave and the pat answer that "they" will come up with some alternative.

Only the Greens seem to appreciate the significance of real-world limits with respect to runaway exponential functions.

So what I heard was Mr Obama, a charismatic - some might say messianic - leader feeding the need of the North American Middle Classes with a campaign of (vague) hope and (unspecified) change that would promise a return to those halcyon days of, circa 1950, when the U.S. enjoyed absolute moral rectitude, having freshly defeated an incontrovertably evil foe (the Nazis), a U.S. whose (white) citizens had the highest standard of living in the world, far beyond those poor benighted souls in the despised "workers paradise" of the Soviet Union, a U.S. whose unshattered industrial economy was the most productive and wealthiest in the world (because everyone else had been bombed into twisted rubble). He promised, in essence, that if we start working together, treat each other (including the rest of the world) decently and, of course, perform the proper rites (in this case, by wishing into existence piles of fiat money to account for the fictional value of nominal 'assets' and obfuscatingly-named 'derivatives' that are the holy scripture of a faith-based "free-market" economics that preaches infinite expansion to provide unlimited wealth for everyone forever) we can return to those Happy Days.

As one who lives on this very finite and surprisingly fragile planet, I suspect that this grand scheme just might not work out quite as hoped, no matter how much Ghost Dancing they do.