Power & Energy
by Jason Godesky
There is an assumption made here that we have never fully defended, but simply taken for granted, and I have noted it n some of the criticism we’ve recently recieved, so it’s high time to address the topic in a straight-forward fashion. The assumption is: Political power is a type of complexity, and thus it is a function of energy.
Ran Prieur recently pointed to a graphic illustration of this, provided above:
Someone made a global map of GDP per square kilometer, and pointed out that it’s almost identical to that “Earth at night” satellite image! I’ve never seen such a good illustration of the connection between the modern economy and energy consumption. And I’m wondering what kinds of economic activity are happening in the “dark” areas and not being calculated into GDP, and what kind of economy we would have, or could have, without so much cheap energy.
This brings us back to notions like White’s Law. Benjamin Shender approached this directly, and with a full mathematical model, in “Energy in Society. Jeff Vail powerfully pointed to the connection between energy and power in “Energy, Society & Hierarchy,” where he puts it quite succinctly:
Control over economic activity translates directly into political power (politics being generally defined as the decision process of how to distribute finite resources within a context of infinite desires). Similarly, control of certain energy resources needed to engage in economic activity translates directly into control over economic activity, which translates into political power.
An individual or group has social or political power when they are able to extract obedience from others. How is this made possible? While a respected elder or skilled rhetorician might be able to exert substantial influence, obedience is always the result of a monopoly on some essential of existence. Such essentials—food, shelter, water, etc.—all come down, in the end, to a question of energy. Ultimately, the root of all social or political power is the control of energy.
Why, then, should we be in the least bit surprised that a map of GDP density—the closest proxy of political power we have—aligns so perfectly with the electric lights that illuminate the earth at night?
Hehe - I just got to experience this “assumption”, first hand, in action.
Yesterday I got a last minute email that Naperville’s City Council (where I live, pop. 140K), which meets in 45 minutes, has on the agenda an option to buy into a 30 year partnership to build a coal-fired power plant, outside of St. Louis. I said “what the hell” and ran down there - got on the speakers list, absolute last minute. There were a few other folks from surrounding towns signed up to “speak” , as a part of Sierra Club, and a Naperville HS teacher/resident. The coal power consortium was 2nd to last item on the 3 hr agenda - by 10pm we each got a few minutes to say something.
There is no back & forth - you give your spiel for a few minutes, until time is up and you are cut off - and your little spit of dissent is boxed up and buried in the record. From the council - a few sincere stares, some concealed outrage, mostly impatient glances at watches. To close, the city power manager leaned heavily on his “authority & expertise”, debunked concerns from the speakers, and exhorted that this investment is solid & smart for Naperville. Then the council briefly discussed what they had already decided - and the vote rolled out 9-0 in favor. PUKE.
One council woman reasoned with a chuckle, making light of the power play: “After all, we have to keep the lights on”. Abso-f’n-lutely. Because she knows that when the lights go out, so does her prestige, authority, and control…. And Money Magazine’s #1 place to live - becomes the #1 place to leave.
The politicians will be the second to last to surrender their tenuous power propped up by energized complexity. The last will be the “owners” and direct extractors/brokers of that power…
Comment by JCamasto — 18 January 2007 @ 3:50 PM
Ahhh… Naperville… sounds so… familiar. I so do not miss it.
140K, now? You know, when I moved there it was listed as 30K? Yikes.
Civilization in action, eh?
Janene
Comment by janene — 18 January 2007 @ 6:27 PM
I wonder if we are those people. Primitivists and others are so often accused of hypocrisy by being on the internet and using modern technology, and while I’m not making that tired claim, nor do I place much value on being consistent, it does connect in my mind to some interesting lines of thought.
I know for myself that I got interested in anarchy, Peak Oil and the collapse of civilization when I realized that college and my grandiose dreams of political power in this system were no longer possible. But the interesting thing was that this was a last resort. I’d already tried everything I could, everything I knew how to do, to stay in the system and keep my place at the top of the hierarchy. I bargained, I negotiated, I pleaded and whined and stonewalled and evaded and basically used any leverage I could find. There is some truth to the accusation of people dropping out because they couldn’t be successful in civilization, to the idea that dropouts are “failures”, with a loose interpretation of what “couldn’t be successful” means of course.
So I don’t think this is just the politicians. We are aware that there are scarce resources, that only so many people can live on this earth. We are obviously aware of the mentality of “war of all against all”. But I wonder about myself and others how much us going beyond civ is just another way of making a power play.
How many of us are in those lighted areas? How many of our lights are on right now?
- Devin
Comment by Devin — 19 January 2007 @ 1:31 AM
How come India is shown as having a high GDP?
Comment by Anonymous — 19 January 2007 @ 3:31 AM
“How come India is shown as having a high GDP? ”
Because it does. The map is a graph of GDP per square mile, not per capita.
Comment by limukala — 19 January 2007 @ 5:39 AM
Hi Devin,
Maybe I’m alone in this, or maybe you’re extrapolating your own experience more broadly than is justified, but that’s not my experience. I didn’t get into anti-civ from the drop-out perspective, or from the “I’m frustrated because I haven’t been able to scale the hierarchy to my liking” perspective. I came to anti-civ ideas from environmentalism, and from leftism.
I became a lefty mid high school after some early high school conservatism, and then found my way to anarchism. Concurrently, my environmental science teacher told me that the only way I’d be able to reduce my environmental impact to zero, or to a point where it did not cause more harm than could be reapaired by ecosystems on their own, would be to move out of the city and live off the land.A year later, I was introduced to John Zerzan, and the logical conclusion was made: the answer really is to live off the land, and to live without the state or other institutions of coercion.
Later, it became solidified with Jensen and coming to understand the importance of spiritual connection and embeddedness with the land, and it ceased being merely an intellectual idea, but a felt necessity: to reconnect with the web of life, and defend my family, my home, who are being attacked.
I do understand, though, that becoming anti-civ probably has elements of a power play, and hedging one’s bets on the side we think will win.
Comment by Archangel — 19 January 2007 @ 10:24 AM
Perhaps I am overstating my experience. But I was an environmental leftist myself, and see the same tendencies toward power in these movements as well. I think the mindset of “we must live off the land in order to reduce our impact” is the inevitable counterpart to someone guilty about their power, and is often something that helps people rationalize staying in power. Another form of bargaining and leveraging our power, merely in a different and guilt-free direction. I think why we do things is easily framed a number of ways, and I certainly don’t cling to any single frame. In fact I like to look at things from a number of angles, as I tend to see more that way. So when I hear Jim saying something like that and Nene’s reply “Civilization in action, eh?” and combine that with my perspective that we are civilization too, my vision sort of rotated a bit.
I think most of what I was saying was that there’s nothing wrong with power, that the point is to empower everyone together, and cease to carry the “war of all against all” mindset with us. This isn’t us vs. the politicians. As long as change is seen as a war, Us vs. Them, nothing much is going to change.
I don’t think all of this was clear in my post. I’m still playing around with a lot of different questions. It’s fun.
- Devin
Comment by Devin — 19 January 2007 @ 6:49 PM
Devin:
This hits too close to home for comfort. I could, of course, try to reframe terms like “success” and “failure”, stating that one’s inability or unwillingness to participate in the only game in town, a game which is clearly insane, has got nothing to do with failing. But there is more to this, and I cannot quite get a hold of it although it seems crucial.
So, the Hobbesian view of the world as a fight around concentrated pots of energy/food/power/whatever requires concentrated energy in the first place. But outside of the realm of fossil fuels, energy on the planet is spread out more or less evenly, so there is hardly any need for struggle and not much of an overt power play possible. I think that it makes more sense to frame it as hedging one’s bets, as Archangel wrote, and to try to disentangle oneself from this direct form of power:
I think we are dealing with the (re-)introduction of a different game, or even a considerable amount of new games.
Devin:
But why guilt? At some point last summer I realised that the concept of guilt had ceased to make sense to me, that its everyday use–and probable over-use–tends to empty it of any meaning or impact. Whenever some kind of accident happens, fingers are pointed and blame is apportioned to somebody or something. But the damage has been done and cannot be reversed, regardless of how deeply somebody feels guilt. Also, guilt seems to serve as a strong incentive to prevent something from happening again, which usually means that energy is transformed into societal complexity: New safety measures, regulations, technological fixes, etc. Which in effect leads to inflexibility in organisations, to stiffness in a body, to contraction in a Reichian sense.
What is guilt, anyway? The German-language Wikipedia article contains a comparison between the concept of guilt as opposed to shame, according to Klaus W. Mueller. Roughly translating and paraphrasing:
Guilt:
In a culture of guilt, there is a focus on expiation of guilt
Shame:
In a culture of shame, a good public perception is of utmost importance
The article on the feeling of guilt phrases the matter differently:
All this rings a whole clock tower full of bells. The texts seems to show that guilt could be called an abstract product (or prerequisite?) of civilisation, where we live inside our heads instead of being influenced by our tribe and the entirety of life around us. Liedloff in her Continuum Concept explains that shame serves to influence people without breaking them, and yesterday Ran pointed to an article where Sabine Kuegler describes how taxing civilisation is for the soul, as opposed to physically more challenging native life. Jeff Vail’s article on Tort deserves a mention in this context, as does Dave Pollard’s post on Starring in our own movie, which left me deeply confused, yet seems to shed some light on our (lack of) actual power.
Devin:
How about this: Concentrated power and energy corrupts. Spread out evenly, it can serve to empower everyone. (Doesn’t sound like a terribly new idea, does it? What am I missing?)
Comment by Michael Kt. — 19 January 2007 @ 10:02 PM
[quote]How about this: Concentrated power and energy corrupts. Spread out evenly, it can serve to empower everyone. (Doesn’t sound like a terribly new idea, does it? What am I missing?)
[/quote]
Oh I don’t think it’s the idea, but the implementation.
Comment by Anonymous — 19 January 2007 @ 11:34 PM
Is it? Who owns the land? The way I see it, civilization has been around for thousands of years, and from the onset of the feedback loop there’s been a pyramid structure. Fossil fuels didn’t make civilization, they just made civilization bigger. When did Hobbes formulate his “war of all against all”, after all? Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say “outside of civilization” resources and energy are distributed more or less evenly, but then you have to ask — where exactly is “outside of civilization”? The melting arctic? The vanishing rainforest? The polluted sea? This is what I was getting at. I was merely observing that those attempting to rewild are mostly coming from urban middle class backgrounds, and that there is definitely a power-play going on with the last vestiges of American wilderness — and we are part of that. Timber companies want wood, hunters want hunting grounds, farmers want more agricultural land, environmentalists want it all to be conserved, developers want to develop it, the government wants to build mines and dams and extract all of its resources, and we want to rewild in it.
Is this really a different game? Or is it just a modern version of the same game, where military armies are replaced by armies of lobbyists and activists and monkeywrenchers and outlaws?
And as far as I can tell, in the above war, no one wins. It seems we really NEED to play a different game. I suppose this isn’t a very new idea, like Anonymous said, but it is exceedingly tricky to implement. How do we turn a deadly zero-sum game into a cooperative nonzero-sum game? How do we transform hierarchy into rhizome, or rather create a space for rhizome to emerge and eventually replace hierarchy?
I’m not entirely sure where you’re coming from with what you’re saying about guilt. I wasn’t saying guilt was useful, or that people SHOULD feel guilty, I was merely observing that guilt seems to go with a feeling of responsibility, indeed even serve to push people to take responsibility. So if we feel guilty about the poor poor victims below us, it serves to reinforce that hierarchy because the response then becomes an attempt to take responsibility for them. This mindset makes me sick. There is no solidarity, there is no empathy in this type of relationship, as there is no mutuality. The relationship is self-serving for the so-called privileged, and highly insulting to the so-called disadvantaged.
So anyway, I’m still interested in rewilding, but it has little to nothing to do with guilt. I’m looking for intimate, mutual relationships with spontaneity and unpredictability. I’m looking for a game where I’m playing with instead of playing against. And this is what’s always made me the happiest, as far back as I can remember. All of this has little to do with my “failure” in this culture except that my failure was of a false self that I was determined to keep, to protect that little kid inside of me.
- Devin
Comment by Devin — 20 January 2007 @ 9:13 AM
The government knows people don’t like them and don’t respect them. So they only way they think they can keep there power is by controlling energy and food distribution. If we can show we can make our own energy and food then their power is gone.
Comment by John Giroux — 20 January 2007 @ 11:38 AM
[quote]I suppose this isn’t a very new idea, like Anonymous said, but it is exceedingly tricky to implement. How do we turn a deadly zero-sum game into a cooperative nonzero-sum game? How do we transform hierarchy into rhizome, or rather create a space for rhizome to emerge and eventually replace hierarchy?
[/quote]
Sorry, Anonymous was me. I deleted my cookies trying to troubleshoot a web site, and forgot to fill in my info again before posting.
But, anyway, I think you’re on the money with these questions, I mean, these really [b]are[/b] the questions we need to figure out aren’t they?
Sometimes it does seem insurmountable to me, partly because I’ve never been particularly comfortable at community activities. But it does seem to me that the only way to do this is to do it the only way we’ve ever seen it done; we begin by improving ourselves and helping those around us, rhizome appears to arrive as a natural consequence of this. It seems important to me to also note that the recent discussion on [url=http://anthropik.com/2007/01/radder-than-thou]Radder Than Thou[/url] play into this a lot. How are we going to build community if we’re deliberately trying to eschew conventions in even the most trivial ways? At the same time, we certainly don’t want to quash individualtiy, so there’s a balancing act there, but I think the best way to acheive that balance is through an open and honest approach to the life around you. Perhaps I’m letting my optimism run away with me, but I think everything will flow naturally from that.
What I don’t want to do though, is insinuate that any of this is easy, I don’t think it is. But the difficulty doesn’t seem to be outside of us so much as inside of us.
Comment by jhereg — 22 January 2007 @ 10:04 AM
Hey Devin,
I think you’re right that a significant contingent of primitivists are those who “can’t cut it” inside civilization (which is to their credit). But it would also be an exaggeration to say all, or even necessarily most. I’ve been offered everything that civilization would deem “success”: power, wealth, status, etc., and I have, at one time or another, walked away from each in turn, because accepting it would preclude a tribal life, a life that could satisfy the things I really, deeply need.
I’ve often taken issue with Nietzsche, saying that the Will to Power is a mental illness that afflicts those who have no freedom. Only slaves want power, because he has no concept of freedom. He’s never experienced it. All he can really dream of is turning the tables—becoming the master himself.
As for how to create rhizome, I think we can already see the beginnings of that, and that it’s much closer than you seem to be willing to appreciate. You’re right, energy was concentrated before fossil fuels. It was concentrated by the cultural construction of food that demoted anything that wasn’t farmed to “not food.” Primitive skills eliminate the centralization of energy, and thus, they eliminate the possibility of hierarchy.
Of course, that’s only the first part. Equally important is learning how to interact with oen another in a tribal maner, and how to interact with other, non-human communities, as well. We step into this mode of existence fairly naturally for the most part; the rest we’ll stumble through out of necessity.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 January 2007 @ 10:55 AM
Interesting, Jason. I agree that it’s probably not most or all, but I do get the sense sometimes that some primitivists and dropouts are dejected and resentful of being unable to meet their expectations of living in society and have thus become bitter reactionaries, seeing how I myself was stuck in a bitter/reactionary mode for quite a while. And you’re right on with the Will to Power stuff, I think I was having a Nietzschean moment there. And you link to perhaps my favorite article on Anthropik. It really captures how rhizome and anarchy is just a model for how things already happen. You’re right that ultimately rhizome is emergent, or as you say “ascendant”. It’s just that sometimes I struggle to see all of the interconnection, and get into a mode where I question just how much possibility there still is for autonomy. Especially looking at something like those graphs and thinking about how little of the map is still open. That’s all.
Jhereg — yeah, those are the questions that are guiding my life right now. And you nailed the approach, being open and honest. I add vulnerable to that as well. I remain “optimistic” as well, which isn’t exactly the frame I want to use, because my so-called optimism isn’t based on hope at all, instead it’s based on faith, but it sort of works. I refuse to fall into despair, and defy that gravity, while at the same time I try to be as honest with myself as I can about what possibilities are in front of me. This often includes questioning just how much space there is for going beyond civ and also questioning the approach of others in the so-called beyond civ movement. I’m really just exploring, I really don’t cling to my perspective(s) and questions very tightly. I’ve found it’s much more fun for me that way.
- Devin
Comment by Devin — 22 January 2007 @ 12:51 PM
Like I said, you’re right that there are plenty of primitivists who simply “can’t cut it” in civilization (and again, that’s to their credit). But I actually draw hope from how much of the map is still open. This is peak; this is the high water mark. This is as bad as it gets, and there’s still an awful lot of that map that’s dark.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 January 2007 @ 12:58 PM
I agree!
Regards from Buenos Aires
Comment by Carlini, Carlos — 24 January 2007 @ 9:46 AM
Boreal forests are a large portionof those dark areas on the light map. The other dark areas are uninhabitable by people.
I think the question is, can leaving-types of people conscienctiously consort with each other rhizomatically to produce energy?
Yes they can.
So how do we find the leadership to do such a thing?
Many energy co-ops are very powerful, I don’t see why a small group of leavers would be enough to innoculate an area into a new age of sustainable and more importantly, equitable, energy production.
imagine this: a consortium of geologists, engineers and techies finding materials, creating materials, and employing amterials of the earth for clean energy production.
How many would it take? 2 geologists to find the metals and minerals, a metalurgist to purify, an engineer to develop the manufacturing, a few people to work the solar panel factory, a crew to install them, techies to monitor them, and a cadre of customer service and network-based support.
Does that really seem unreasonable in the most-unlikely scenario of total machine shutdown? Changing the energy scheme doesn’t change our desires or our capabilities, it only changes who benefits from them.
If we can take out the pyramid equation, many current endevours can truly serve humanity, rather than an oligarchy of initiative and capital.
It’s up to us to really ask the questions and find the solutions, to take what we’re passionate about roll with it.
Capital for a long time has presented itself as the only option, and we know much better as the prize winner in economics won for the concept of microloans.
So now that we know the masters, the keyholders of all that is locked up aren’t our only choice, why do we continue to choose them again and again?
For our part, Ishthink.org is running off solar-powered network servers, and I think that’s a big step.
Comment by Tony — 25 January 2007 @ 10:20 PM
Here’s a topical article you might find interesting :-
“Energy crisis as power cuts loom”
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=145612007
Comment by Scot Galego — 28 January 2007 @ 6:58 AM
Did you see the article in the comments?
For those global warmers out there, a possible solution :-
“Carbon-capture hydrogen plant”
http://www.peterheadhydrogenpower.com/go/doc/1141/119911
and one you won’t like, but he does put a good case to the contrary :-
http://www.newswithviews.com/NWVexclusive/exclusive113.htm
Anyway….
Comment by Scot Galego — 28 January 2007 @ 8:42 AM
Political Power is a mind/material complex and is a function of the thermo-dynamics of our psycho-energy.
Put bluntly, Politics is Sex by indirect means.
Power itself is a mindless energy, and only in a mind/material continuum can energy function as Political Power.
The Political character of Power reflects, not simply the potential of whatever material is at hand, but is in fact more reflective of the patterns of energy within our mind’s psyche.
True, our psycho-dynamic adapts our survival and reproductive behavior according to environmental stimuli, but that adaptation will in the end more profoundly reflect all the un-balanced psycho-energies of our neurotic preoccupations than the original external environmental stimuli.
In other words, our psychological environment has more influence over the character of our Political behavior than any simple material environment.
For example, hierarchy: Many peoples throughout evolutionary history have suffered prolonged periods of food scarcity, but only those peoples with a highly neurotic psycho-dynamic surrender to the behavioral adaptation of hierarchy.
Indeed, psychologically balanced, wholistic peoples would die of hunger before surrendering their psyches to the neurotic psycho-pathology of hierarchy.
But man’s FEAR creates this powerful neurotic inner-conflict with Man’s FEARLESS gender archetype.
Unfortunately, not only does such powerful inner-conflicts become chronic neurotic preoccupations, but fear also grips and stimulates the anal-sphincter; and chronic fear thus creates chronic un-conscious anal preoccupations.
Unfortunately because, not only do fear-driven men un-consciously know that we are inadequate to our fearless gender archetype, but also fear triggers a deep psychological association with homo-erotic anal stimulation.
Thus such men in a state of chronic fear will un-consciously see ourselves not only inadequate as men, but also men with deep latent-homosexual tendencies.
And men preoccupied with that kind of powerful un-conscious self-image will easily and submissively surrender, like hysterical women, their own unique and individual spirit path, and instinctively regress back to the weak, helpless child seeking the security and authority of a patriarchal father-figure hierarchy.
This is why our human psycho-dynamics molds the character of our Political Power far more than the original change in material environment that initially stimulated that behavioral adaptation to begin with.
Not only is Political Power within anal-hierarchies un-conscious Sex by indirect means, but un-conscious homo-erotic sex by indirect means.
Every boy raised in the anal-hierarchy of civilization will always have deep un-conscious latent homo-sexual tendencies.
Comment by hoodie — 18 February 2007 @ 10:23 PM