Peak freedom?

I read an article a week ago which argued that this – here, now – is what peak oil looks like

A decade ago, those few of us who were paying attention to peak oil were pointing out that if the peak of global conventional petroleum production arrived before any meaningful steps were taken, the price of oil would rise to previously unimagined heights, crippling the global economy and pushing political systems across the industrial world into a rising spiral of dysfunction and internal conflict.

With most grades of oil above $100 a barrel, economies around the world mired in a paper “recovery” worse than most recessions, and the United States and European Union both frozen in political stalemates between regional and cultural blocs with radically irreconcilable agendas, that prophecy has turned out to be pretty much square on the money, but you won’t hear many people mention that these days.

The point that has to be grasped just now, it seems to me, is that this is what peak oil looks like. Get past the fantasies of sudden collapse on the one hand, and the fantasies of limitless progress on the other, and what you get is what we’re getting—a long ragged slope of rising energy prices, economic contraction, and political failure, punctuated with a crisis here, a local or regional catastrophe there, a war somewhere else—all against a backdrop of disintegrating infrastructure, declining living standards, decreasing access to health care and similar services, and the like, which of course has been happening here in the United States for some years already.

[John Michael Greer, What Peak Oil Looks Like, 7 December 2011]

What if we have also reached ‘peak freedom’ – the maximum extent of individual freedoms and civil liberties?

Europe and America became considerably more free through the 19th and 20th centuries. Slavery was abolished; women gained the vote; homosexuality decriminalised and employment and welfare reforms provided a baseline of freedom from exploitation and freedom for all to have a chance at a decent living. We gained the right to unionise; to (all) own private property; that everyone could access legal representation through legal aid if they couldn’t afford their own defence. From the Chatterley trial, to journalist’s privilege not to name sources, to the rise of internet we have gained increasing freedoms of thought and expression.

Where next?

Wednesday I met up with an old, old friend by name of @metaleptic. We talked about 2011 and the coming end of the world – and what felt significant about our conversation is that perhaps for the first time I was as pessimistic as him.

What happened in 2011?

  • The Met Police, Tory government and supposedly independent judiciary seeking to criminalise all forms of protest that aren’t walking along a pre-determined march route (and how long will they keep authorising big protest marches, you wonder?)
  • Kettling, mass arrests, police infiltrators, 944 deaths in police custody since 1990. Et cetera
  • The US Senate overwhelmingly passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which gives the military (not the police) authority over domestic terror investigations and interrogations…
  • …allows for indefinite detention without trial of absolutely anyone suspected of being a terrorist…
  • …and defines the whole of the United States as a “battlefield”.
  • The normalisation of drone warfare and extra-judicial killings of British citizens in Pakistan, a country we are not at war with
  • SOPA and the Digital Economy Act threatening basic internet freedoms

What’s coming in the rest of my lifetime?

  • The start of a four-degree or more rise in global temperatures, leading to extreme weather events and potentially the total loss of climate equilibrium (then god knows what)
  • The oil runs out, as does rather a lot of minerals we use to make rather a lot of things
  • The water runs out and large parts of the globe become uninhabitable
  • Starving and/or displaced people in the billions
  • Fortress Europe to (try to) keep them out of our (collapsing) economies and welfare states
  • A geriatric population in the West no longer producing wealth but functioning as a massive voting block to stymie any change. (Actually Hugo and I did disagree here – he’s more cynical and doubts even the veneer of democracy, voting etc will survive. I predict a mere move through simulacra into simulation.)

Given that, then – Year of Protest or not – how is there any likelihood that the world will get more free?

The question becomes simply when we passed the peak – before or after 9/11?

  • nostradamus

    People throughout history have said ‘Wasn’t it better way back when…’, and ‘Oh God the world is going down the pan’, I find it reassuring nothing has changed! I think the reality normally proves to be different to what anyone expected, or predicted. The next real crisis will be something no-one saw coming, because they thought it was irrelevant, impossible or both. The ‘fears’ of military rule, democratic and economic collapse sound like predictable scaremongering to me.

    As fresh water becomes more scarce, surely people will put more time and capital into producing it?

    Climate science is pretty random…I find it unlikely everything gets worse simultaneously. While Cornwall might become an arid dustbowl, Alaska might become the most productive farmland on Earth.

    Maybe an fundamentalist islamic state will rise to power and unite several African states, bringing stability, education, economic growth, huge gender inequality and a substatial increase in pollution.

    Finally, police are paid to reduce crime – of course they want more power because that might help them do their job. However, they also want to go home at 5pm, and would rather read BBC news than stare at film cameras in York town centre. Maybe in 2019 Lockheed Martin deploys a fuzzy logic facial recognition system for the 5.4 million cameras across the UK (3.7 million work), 2 years behind schedule and 50% over budget, but the software is crashes a lot and none of the staff listened during training, so it results in a convincing 3.2% drop in muggings in Reading.

    The term ‘peak’ focuses on absolutes, e.g. everything was ‘better’, and now it is ‘worse’. I rarely see real life deal in absolutes.

    • http://twitter.com/hautepop hautepop

      Ah little brother, but I very rarely see life deal in equilibria! 

      Such systems are rare and fragile beasts indeed – I would say “as we seem to be seeing with climate”, although I gather you may disagree.

      To take two of your scenarios – first, water. Yes, more capital will go into producing fresh water. First, this only benefits the people with the capital, which is not the 99% majority of the people living in the arid parts of the world. They will pay more and/or go without – worse outcome, vast numerical majority over those who benefit, therefore net negative. Second, that capital being spent on water is being displaced from something else, and under any likely scenario that’s education or health rather than nuclear weapons programmes or the dictator’s Swiss pension scheme. Another net negative. 

      Some water-purification technology companies become exceedingly rich –  fabulous. Meanwhile, Sudan redirects the Nile tributaries, Egypt starts gathering its armies, Israel starts thinking it’s starting a nuclear weapons programme, panics, and bam, WW3.

      Second, Lockheed Martin. Substantial change in the relationship between the citizen and the state, with a highly asymmetric situation where no-one can custodiet ipsos custodes, plus increased levels of fear as people dread being hauled into the police station for things they didn’t do (the fuzzy logic system being a bit fuzzy on faces once in a while). It all gets a bit Guantanamo-on-Thames and for what, 16 teenagers not getting mugged for their phones. Net negative.

      So, firstly – your view how things change depends on your position. “Nothing has changed” since the 1800s for an affluent white male, perhaps, but those of us who’ve gained the vote since then regard that as a net positive. Likewise, facts of the two situations above are the same but the conclusions rather different.

      Second, even a fuzzy and complicated world is probably moving in one direction or another on average. It’s highly unlikely that the benefits received by the beneficiaries exactly equal the price paid by the loser…

      …Unless your calculus is so purely economic that WW3 is seen as a remarkable boost to employment and industrial production.

      Anyway, time will tell!