By John Michael Greer
A comment during a discussion of the fossil fuel energy crisis reminded me that we’ve been missing an important factor in what’s going on now, especially among those people who insist there’s got to be some source of energy to maintain current levels of consumption as the oil wells run dry. It’s a thing that happens fairly often when people get into a situation where strategies that were once successful no longer work.
Case in point: my Lakota ancestors, in the 1860s and 1870s, found themselves in a world where the old rules no longer worked. The Wasi’chu (“greedy ones” is the Lakota name for white Americans) were busily wiping out the buffalo and carving up the open plains into farmland. Lakota culture, however brilliantly suited it was to the pre-contact environment, didn’t have the tools to cope with a harsh new reality.
I don’t know if there’s anything they could have done that would have worked. Political and military unification of the Plains tribes, hardball dealings with the Confederacy and the English in Canada to get arms and equipment during the Civil War, or simply a mass flight across the border into Canadian territory… who knows? As it happened, though, they didn’t do any of these.
What they did instead was the Ghost Dance. They convinced themselves, with the help of a Paiute prophet named Wovoka, that if they did certain ritual dances, the buffalo would come back, the Wasi’chu would go away, and everything would be just the way it had been.
It’s important not to misunderstand what was going on here. The Lakota were relying on a familiar cultural resource, which (in Wasi’chu language) we might as well call magic. Magic is severely underrated as a technology. It may not do much to the physical world, but it has very powerful, proven effects on how people think, act, and experience the world. Like people in most traditional cultures, the Lakota used it systematically and efficiently to keep their society running smoothly, and they had a lot of experience with it.
The problem was that nothing on Earth—and certainly not magic—could make things the way they had been. The buffalo were gone or going, the Wasi’chu were here, and all the dancing in the world wasn’t going to alter those facts. So they poured their remaining energy into the Ghost Dance, doing nothing at all to help an increasingly desperate situation, and danced their way straight to Wounded Knee.
This sort of thinking—using the old strategies to face new challenges, even when the former are hopelessly inadequate for the latter—is very common. There’s a sociological classic titled “When Prophecy Fails”, by Leon Festinger et al., that shows how the failure of a model actually makes people cling to the model even harder. It’s easier to deny the evidence of your senses, in other words, than it is to admit that you were wrong.
It seems to me that this is the driving force behind the insistence that “there’s got to be more oil out there,” as well as behind the alternative energy schemes—renewables, fission, fusion, or what have you—when these claim to be able to replace oil and permit us to keep on chugging along in business-as-usual mode. These are the modern, technologically up-to-date equivalents of Wovoka’s visions. They all insist that things can be exactly the way they once were, if we just use our familiar cultural tools (in this case, our science and technology) in the ritually correct way.
No doubt as the energy crisis worsens, we’ll see more concrete manifestations of this sort of Ghost Dancing—huge, expensive, and much-ballyhooed programs to build new power plants, mine oil shale (even at a net loss of energy), expand research programs into fusion, and so on and so forth. This is the way we’ve done things in the past, and even though most of these projects will make matters worse rather than better—if only by using up irreplaceable energy resources—we’ll probably keep doing them all the way to our equivalent of Wounded Knee.
The problem is that all the construction projects in the world can’t get away from the fact that infinite growth on a finite (and rather small) planet is a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Unless we deal with that, abandon a growth-based way of life, and rein in our lifestyles to the point that they can be supported on sustainable resources, nothing we do is going to make much difference. Even if nuclear energy proponents are right and we can keep on growing for another hundred years on breeder reactors, that will simply delay the final result … and possibly not by much. (Energy limits are not the only limits to growth we are facing, after all.)
But people aren’t likely to see that. The more the current pro-growth, pro-wasting-energy worldview is disproved by events, the more desperately people will cling to it, and the more effort they’ll put into trying to dance the oil wells back. It’s tragic and rather stupid, but it’s also very human.
Thanks to Rick Reece at RunningOnEmpty2