Weird things happen when a whole way of life ends for an entire culture of people.
Like around the time when America drove the Golden Spike, connecting the railroad from sea to shining sea. That was when the entire Great Plains was a Buffalo Highway and all the tribes who lived there depended on buffalo for everything.
Bison were their source of food, housing, jobs, tools, clothing and spiritual meaning. The buffalo filled their lives and their lives were fulfilled around and within the Buffalo. You could say they lived in a Buffalo Bubble.
If you could have told those tribes that in a few short years the Buffalo would be gone, along with all the Buffalo jobs, housing and the rest, no one would have believed you. It was simply unimaginable.
Yet the unimaginable became the inevitable, the last pockets of Buffalo People dwindled, and these broken and diseased cultures clung to the fading remnants of their only known way of life. And right at that moment, between the time the Buffalo Highway disappeared and the previous notion that it could never possibly disappear, there arose among them an understandably desperate response: the Ghost Dance.
A very passionate and well-meaning guy named Wavoka went around to all the tribes with a very potent idea, and it flashed through the brittle tinder of those cultures like a dry wildfire across the plains:
All you have to do is dance the Ghost Dance. Wear the Ghost Shirt. Sing the Ghost Songs and Pray the Ghost Prayers. And if we all do that intently enough…
The bullets will not penetrate the Ghost Shirts. Our way of life will continue. The Buffalo will return. The whites will go away. Our ancestors will rejoin us, and all will be well.
Fast forward a few short years, and all of us in modern society today live in an Energy Bubble. Our whole way of life; food, housing, jobs, tools, clothing and spiritual meaning, all result from using vast amounts of energy. We are a Petroleum People, utterly enmeshed in the culture of machines that run on oil, coal, gasoline, diesel and electricity. Most of us are not even consciously aware of how much energy our modern lives require, how many hidden energy-machine slaves keep us warm, fed and mobile. It’s simply who we were born into being.
And now we’re running up against the planetary limits on the supplies of that energy. We’re waking up to find a world gone completely whack in any number of modern normalcies we take for granted every day.
And it’s a very scary thing to peer straight into the face of the demise of your entire way of life. It’s very difficult to even admit to, much less imagine, changes of that immensity. It’s much more likely for us to imagine ways to keep it all going. Somehow. Surely there’s something else in the wings that will save us in our darkest hour?
Of course there is: it’s called free energy. And all you have to do is oust the evil cabal of white men who rule the world, and then re-activate the potent relics of St. Nicolai, and you’ll have an unlimited supply of energy.
Obviously, this will once and for all bring harmony and peace to a troubled planet, because everyone will have what they need. What would we possibly fight over? This is the dawn of a new awakening that will change human nature like never before, and you don’t have to do a thing! It’s all those evil guys’ fault, remember?
Free energy is precisely a Ghost Dance in our times, promising the continuation of a way of life that is simply dying out. The prospect of an unlimited energy supply appeals to Petroleum Man precisely because He uses more energy to live His life than any human ever has. Ever.
It’s perfectly natural to not want all the Buffalo to disappear.
And it’s to be expected that our oil-saturated culture will collectively fantasize about all the previously impossible ways we can remain saturated. After all, regardless of denomination, we all worship the religion of technological advancement. Surely the Goddess of Progress Herself will maintain our status as the Darlings of All Creation? Please?
The psychology of previous investment is a powerful impediment to thinking clearly about your options. By the time you cut your losses, you’ve already lost your mind. Not meaning, necessarily, that you’ve gone crazy (although that should never be ruled out entirely). But that you’ve had to redefine for yourself who you really are under your particular circumstances.
Now, I don’t personally care if you want to believe in free energy, antibiotics, Santa Claus or vaccines. Knock yourself right out. But if you’re expecting me to enthusiastically embrace an un-demonstrated, unproven, unduplicated violation of the laws of physics, you might want to stop for a moment and ask yourself honestly, Why do I want to believe that? Do I believe it’s true because it’s really true, or because it would really suck if it wasn’t?
Desperately hoping for widespread and profitable techno-prophylactics between us and diminishing reserves is rather embarrassingly revealing, garishly displaying our private symptoms of cultural dysfunction for others to laugh at. Whenever we want something to be true more than it’s likely to be true, especially if it’s never happened to be true before… well, let’s say there’s a bit more to look at than whether or not it’s suddenly true.
But let’s say for a moment that free energy devices are bona fide. What if we actually bust open some dusty, diabolical Illuminati closet hiding the bones of Tesla. Or maybe a perpetually spinning gyro-gizmo emerges from behind the walls of some mythical Wozniak Basement of Wonders. Okay? Here they are. Now what?
How will free energy help your immediate life circumstances? How do you, personally, manufacture or distribute or purchase or maintain or for that matter, plug in your new device? How do you plug all of your devices into it? Would it drive your car to your new job? Would it grow all of your food for you? Would it make plastic for your year-round greenhouse? Would it generate some new medications for all the crazies? Pour you a martini and twist the lime? Where does it all end?
Where it begins. Far and away down the Road Not Taken.
The idea of free energy is detrimental regardless of whether or not such devices exist, actually or virtually. It’s a detour from any paths of effectiveness we might otherwise take, every day, you and me, and a distraction from any meaningful response to our true predicament. In short, it’s a setup for a major disappointment, as if losing your entire culture wasn’t a bummer enough.
Will it bring water to places without it? Will it dry out the places with too much? Will it help the topsoil organisms flourish? Will it benefit the worms? Will it mix more concrete to contain all the spent uranium from the decommissioned nukes?
Even if free energy became available to run all of our gadgets as they now exist, to keep all the machines running right now exactly as they are, would it really solve our true problems? No, it would not, because our true problems are not really problems in the sense that they can ever be solved.
We face instead a predicament, a set of planetary conditions that define the terms of life from here on out. How do we reconcile our daily lives within those terms? How do we mould our existence to the current imperatives of geology, geography and hydrology? These are the questions we ought to be asking of ourselves. They’re the only ones we can answer on our own, and whose answers will end up meaning anything.
When faced with acute energy shortages and profoundly deepening limitations in every sphere of daily life, every discussion about free energy prevents a discussion of how we simply might get along with less energy. Every fantasy of unlimited abundance actually blocks any movement toward the achievement of adapting to real planetary limitations like depleted aquifers and played-out topsoil.
There are things I can do every single day to mitigate the effects of a crumbling way of life all around me. And the truth is, I would rather do those things anyway, and not only because I know they’re actually effective. But because if I didn’t, I’d be bored out of my skull waiting around for another miracle product, more inspirational films, or a free ride out of this mess.
I do them simply because the space module fantasy doesn’t enchant me. I don’t see myself in it. I am enchanted by the idea of living in a modest place with a decent barn, tending garden, orchards, and hillsides of bees. Vineyards and animals, herbs and flowers… I know, cursed with limitation and drudgery. Clearly, it’s not for everyone.
I’d so much rather be enchanted by the very real work and risks of such a life, than be continually mesmerized by the endless droning murmurs of reassurance from Ghosts in the Machines.
Beautifully written, honestly told. Thanks once more for sharing your gift, your wisdom.
Bravo! I’ve seen free energy at work–amazing experience. I appeared and disappeared in the portal–among other things–while I was learning how it worked. It was an energetically demanding experience that could barely even be held by this human body . Ironically, this sacred space was located smack dab in the middle of a spiritual community full of folks that read all the books and saw all the movies and believed it all…yet, when the mechanism was right in their midst, they were terrified of it… demonized it. And these were “believers”!
Gardening and sustainability along the pathways you advocate actually has a greater chance of mass adaptation by humans than “free energy”–humans are STILL a long way off from integrating the full possibilities and potentialities of the universal energy stream just waiting to be tapped. The “show me” need humans have in their dTg DNA (doubting Thomas gene) is vastly limiting. Practicing hands on with the Devic realm in our fields, with our animals, and our medicine is one of the greatest means of ever beginning to integrate the remarkable abundance awaiting us on this Planet.
Good job, Scott, on outlining it all so clearly.
Run for President.
Nicely done. Glad I happened upon this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_suppression
Who is claiming “free energy”? There is a missing reference here.
Thank you, Anahata! You mean run FROM the President, right?
Thanks! Come back again sometime…
Yes, Thomas, I specifically avoided mentioning what triggered this particular outburst, else I would’ve tapped unknown reserves of vitri-oil! But it was the execrable new film “Thrive” that so many contemporaries are swooning over and taking far too seriously, that pushed me over the edge of the world. The point is not whether free energy is possible or impossible, but that far too many believe it’s highly probable, and therefore our best hope for the future. The fact that you or I can’t do a single thing about it this afternoon, one way or another, is part of the appeal, far more than its actual probability. We still wake up hungry.
Scott, I am almost always blown back in my seat with the sheer force of your big-picture intelligence and the clever way you can turn a phrase.
This might be my favorite post – ever! A tour de force…
To get it into wider circulation is imperative and that means chunking down the message into smaller bites so more people can hear what you have to say. I can’t wait to help with that…
Thank you, thank you, thank you. While I appreciate the effort that went into ‘Thrive’ I came away feeling that the ending (solution) proposed was pure fantasy. Talk about distraction. I want to know what I do when I get up tomorrow morning. What do I need to do to support the training of my 12 & 13 year old grandchildren? I refuse to stand in fear. But lets get on with this folks. Enough of the ghost dance!
Bravo, Scott!
Thank you, Meri…looking forward to it!
Thanks, Maya. The most empowering story, for me, is the one I can see myself living within, long enough to be able to pass it along. I found nothing in Thrive I could latch onto, nothing I could do about any of it.
I disagree with your metaphor completely. IF the ghost dance was so “harmless” to the wasichu, why did the army ban it? If the Ghost Dance was so foolish, why did they demand they stop it? Because the Ghost Dance wasn’t there to protect their beings from bullets, but to form community that cannot be killed by bullets. The Ghost Dance was what little they had left as a people, and to be a people they had to prove it as a people. From an eye witness:
“While these things were happening, the summer (1890) was getting old. I did not then know all that was going on at other places, but some things I heard, and much more I heard later.
When Good Thunder and Kicking Bear came back in the spring from seeing the Wanekia, the Wasichus at Pine Ridge put them in prison awhile, and then let them go. This showed the Wasichus were afraid of something. In the Moon of Black Cherries (August) many people were dancing at No Water’s Camp on Clay Creek, and the agent came and told them to stop dancing. They would not stop, and they said they would fight for their religion if they had to do it. The agent went away, and they kept on dancing. They called him Young-Man-Afraid-of-Lakotas.
Later, I heard that the Brules were dancing over east of us; and then I heard that Big Foot’s people were dancing on the Good River reservation; also that Kicking Bear had gone to Sitting Bull’s camp on Grand River, and that the people were dancing there too. Word came to us that the Indians were beginning to dance everywhere.
The people were hungry and in despair, and many believed in the good new world that was coming. The Wasichus gave us less than half the beef cattle they promised us in the treaty, and these cattle were very poor. For a while our people would not take the cattle, because there were so few of them and they were so poor. But afterwhile they had to take them or starve to death. So we got more lies than cattle, and we could not eat lies. When the agent told the people to quit dancing, their hearts were bad.
From the dancing on Wounded Knee I went over to the Brules, who were camping on Cut Meat Creek at this time, and I took with me six shirts like those I had seen the twelve men wearing in my vision, and six dresses like the twelve women wore. I gave these to the Brules and they made others for themselves.
We danced there, and another vision came to me. I saw a Flaming Rainbow, like the one I had seen in my first great vision. Below the rainbow was a tepee made of cloud. Over me there was a spotted eagle soaring, and he said to me: “Remember this.” That was all I saw and heard.
I have thought much about this since, and I have thought that this was where I made my great mistake. I had had a very great vision, and I should have depended only upon that to guide me to the good. But I followed the lesser visions that had come to me while dancing on Wounded Knee Creek. The vision of the Flaming Rainbow was to warn me, maybe; and I did not understand. I did not depend upon the great vision as I should have done; I depended upon the two sticks that I had seen in the lesser vision. It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among those shadows men get lost.”
So, I suggest YOU DANCE. Dance to your world that is dying, with you all hardly moving and barely trying. You who sell a world that others plundered and now we stumble through your garbage slide and tumble slide and stumble.
There is no sustainability in a world of metal. There is no sustainability in a world of Nature. For your “Nature” is pollution – pollution of the mind by your best intentions. Kill Nature and let nature be. You, younger brothers, must die off now. Good bye. You shall not be missed, but we will sing your songs for many years to come so we can remember the depth of your madness – a signpost in our hearts where not to go.
Well, okay then.
I never said the Ghost Dance was harmless or foolish. But I like what you said about how it “wasn’t there to protect their beings from bullets, but to form community that cannot be killed by bullets”. It’s good to read Black Elk again, especially his reminder about how men get lost in their shadows. You seem pretty lost in yours, and it’s clear from your curse that you have no idea what I’m really about. Save it for where it’ll do some good.
Thanks, Hawkeye, for the link. I do see where you’re coming from and I appreciate the passion with which you share your message. No, even if it exists, “free energy” (over-unity, new-energy, zero-point) will not automatically save us from ourselves and what we’ve wrought. And I agree with your critique of the waiting game that some may play hoping that “they” will release this new technology (and save us) therefore I can sit idly by.
That said, I am one who has great hopes for new energy. I think I laid them out for you in our discussion the other night.
And, rather than waiting for someone else to get this done, I’m meeting with someone this week who wants to talk production!
I’ll keep you in the loop.
Aloha, Chad
Thanks, Chad. Looking forward to it…”Show me the wattage!”