You wrote:

It would seem the only option is “back to the land” and back-breaking work, but surely there is something beyond this. “This” is really just the reality that a few white men have handed us for several thousand years. It’s their reality. I think our creativity and imagination have been sapped to the point that we don’t think there’s anything else but their way or back-breaking labor. But I believe that metaphysics tries to tell us there is something else.

I’m all for visualizing and re-visioning and co-creating and all the rest of it. My mother was taking me to meditation and “mind psi” classes from the time I was five. All of this What The Bleep stuff is 30 years old to me…

And here we are. At the brink of oblivion.

You’ll have to forgive me for not fully embracing the sitting-in-a-circle-and-holding-hands-path. It’s only because I’ve been there, done that. I got hungry at the end of the day. I had to eat. In order to eat, I needed money. In order to get money, I had to get a job….

The what the bleep stuff is a “reaction” to corrupt religions. You still need to eat at the end of the day. Bleep or no bleep. I don’t see too many innovations, outside of hard work, for resolving that issue.

But I’m open to suggestions!

That’s sort of my point. Not that that isn’t good and exactly what I try to do, but it’s really just a reaction. In order to truly change the paradigm we must create, not react. Remember, “We create reality.”

That’s where the new paradigm comes in. I think completely new thinking is the order of the day. What is it? Well, I don’t know. But I know it’s out there. I figure if it’s been “this way” for so very long then surely it’s time for another way. Don’t you?

It would seem the only option is “back to the land” and back-breaking work, but surely there is something beyond this. “This” is really just the reality that a few white men have handed us for several thousand years. It’s their reality. I think our creativity and imagination have been sapped to the point that we don’t think there’s anything else but their way or back-breaking labor. But I believe that metaphysics tries to tell us there is something else. I realize this sounds a bit like some imaginative nirvana- impossible to achieve. Is it? We think it is because that’s what we’ve been told. True transendence comes not from imagining the status quo, even from a religious perspective, but imagining an entirely different realm. And don’t think I think like this all the time. I read the news you guys link. I write angry letters and call my senators and congressman with desperation in my voice. We must get past it. We must or succumb.

It begins, I think, by what Ran Prieur posted about people dropping out of the system for a happier life (like you) and this: “Want change? Keep it in your pocket. Your dollar is your vote.”

Yep. I came to that conclusion long ago. I formally studied insurgency and counter insurgency in college. I have a pretty good grasp of how low intensity warfare works, theoretically. I thought long and hard about how I could strike the most damaging blow possible to this diabolical system.

Drop out.

Dropping out to the extent possible is the best choice. Doing that hurts this system in a serious way.

And, nope, it’s not easy out here on the Farmlet. But nobody said it was going to be easy! If I ever start to feel as though it’s too rough, all I have to do is think about that corporate prison camp reality I left behind. Fixes me right up.

Re: I think we either will go the way of the empire or through a complete metaphysical transcendence.

The difference between people like us and people like Cheney is that Cheney kills people like us to to get results.

People like us, well, we sit around and read books and write things on the Internet, raise livestock, tend our gardens, etc. While anything could happen, and there might be some kind of metaphysical transcendence, Cheney will continue to kill people like us.

Again, the best way to stop Cheney, et al. is to pull the money out from under him. But we have to take that work VERY seriously. I take that work VERY seriously. I don’t know how to take it any more seriously!??

If you carry the drop out theory out far enough, though, I think you’ll wind up back on the land, with the slop and the animals and the back breaking labor. This is the part most people don’t like.

Of course. I don’t know how old you are and I know Matt is in his late 20s (I think.) I’m 45, so I’m getting to the point where I’ve seen some things and done a few more. I lived the life you’re living, more or less, for about twenty years. Hard, hard work. I don’t particularly remember it fondly. Animals mean you never leave and we built our own log home and I did most of my cooking on a wood stove, etc. Oddly enough, my children (26 and 23) do. My daughter is starting to live that life. I still have my herb beds, but a new husband and a completely different life. Of course, most of my friends say they’re just coming to my house because I know how to survive the apocalypse. Perhaps you get that, too.

I was just on Ran Prieur’s site. Haven’t visited in awhile and just love it. The idea that things can’t change certainly isn’t justified if you read his postings. Especially his postings from around January 17. People are getting fed up. It seems like the corporate juggernaut is winning and god knows with the articles you and Matt link, it sure looks like we are going to hell in a hand-basket, but I refuse to give up. They’ll have to pry my visions of peace from my cold dead fingers

Seriously, I think we either will go the way of the empire or through a complete metaphysical transcendence. The idea that people will wake up one day and change- well, it’s like expecting Americans to voluntarily start using the metric system. Ain’t gonna happen. But change CAN happen. It begins, I think, by what Ran Prieur posted about people dropping out of the system for a happier life (like you) and this: “Want change? Keep it in your pocket. Your dollar is your vote.” That was posted by a reader at the ‘Deconsumption’ site quite a long time ago. I think it should be the clarion call for the new paradigm. It just takes the beginning of a tipping point. I want to be part of it.

You wrote:

People feel things “aren’t like they’re suppossed to” and that “it’s harder to get ahead” and they’re right when you do a net-energy analysis. PEople are working much harder and longer than 25 years ago but only for a few extra BTUs of energy in return. So they have fewer children.

Does this make sense?

It makes sense, but the premise of your argument, which is that energy is the grand unifying motivator of peoples’ actions, is flawed, at least as it applies to Becky and me.

Becky and I moved to a place that will be first to lose access to oil. Yet, we feel much more secure than we did in the U.S. How can it be that we are feeling happier and more secure (and indeed considering having children) with less access to energy and less energy security, if your theory is correct?

Actually, people feel things aren’t like they’re supposed to feel and that it’s harder to get ahead because the richest 2% own more than half the world:

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=1806182006

And that 2% is using the ridiculous notion that there isn’t easily enough energy from the sun, oceans and wind to control us with the manufactured myth of energy scarcity.

The energy scarcity myth must be kept in place, because it allows Them to control access to the resources that remain (water, copper, wheat, whatever). Plentiful, clean energy would totally upset the apple cart, and lead to cascading resource scarcity issues in other areas.

The system is doomed with plentiful energy and it’s doomed without plentiful energy. I’m bored with this path. Besides being dark, it leads nowhere.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way, Louie:

http://farmlet.co.nz

“I” personally wouldn’t do any such thing, i.e. keep populating. But, again, by everyone going immediately to the gutter, it only keeps the whole ball of wax going downhill. How to change it? I don’t know that. I do think I know that all this hand wringing: “Well, that’s what they have planned for us. The New World Order. “They” are going to win.” etc. etc. just feeds the momentum of the wrong type of thinking. I feel it’s a bit irresponsible to think that mankind, er humankind, can’t change at all. That’s the point of all of it. That a momentum-like group of people will decide, “Damn it. Enough. We are going to change things.” ‘What the Bleep’ talked about a group of 2500 meditators that got together in Washington D.C. and dropped the crime rate by 25%, or some such number. The police initially said, “The only way crime will drop by 25% is if we have a blizzard.” By the end they signed on and supported the meditators. That is momentous! I hope you read this, because I read you all of the time and I would like to have a discussion about moving away from desperation thinking and moving toward imagining a new way. It IS possible. It’s as simple as thinking of ourselves as transmitors and receivers. We send and receive the very things we think about. Just like the study says. They thought about their music and they later transmitted it, perfectly.

Kevin has a link to Rigorous Intuition. The world is a weird place. I read it and think, “You know we could turn this place into more of a living hell than it’s ever been.” OR we could make this the most beautiful place that’s ever been. Arundhati Roy says two things: “A different world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.” and “Change is coming. It can be beautiful or it can be bloody. It is up to us.” I think we might want to try to move away from the status quo, don’t you? I mean, why let them win?

http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/ener.....Stat1.html

Quad = 10 to the power 15 Btu = 2.931 x 10 to the power of 11 kilowatthours.

I want to have a Quad of Happiness!

substantial increases in energy availability = sense of economic security.

sense of economic security = “let’s have more kids!”

This is exactly what we had during the BAby Boom here in the states.

Once yearly increases in per-capita energy availability peaked around 1970, so did people’s sense of economic security even though from an aboslute standpoint they might be better off. Things stopped getting better so they stopped percieving a sense of security and they stopped having as many kids as in the decades prior.

Actually, things have plateaued in places like Germany and the U.S. since about the 1970s. I’ve written about this extensively on LATOC, how per-capita increases in energy availability were incredible from 1950-to-1970 and then began stagnating sometime in the 1970s. And that’s also when happiness peaked at least if you believe the studies. I don’t know anybody in the U.S. who feels things are nice and secure.

People feel things “aren’t like they’re suppossed to” and that “it’s harder to get ahead” and they’re right when you do a net-energy analysis. PEople are working much harder and longer than 25 years ago but only for a few extra BTUs of energy in return. So they have fewer children. My parents, for example, had they been able to visualize more economic assets into existence would have hade more kids. A lot of folks feel that way.

In less tech-advanced societies they have to have more children just to survive.

As far as your situation, do you feel more or less secure then you did before your move? My guess is more. I’m also going to guess that the chances of you feeling comfortable enough to have kids in your current location are far higher then they would be if you were in the U.S. Now I don’t know if you intend to have kids. Maybe you don’t. So let’s say there’s a 1 in 100 chance you and Becky would choose to have them now in NZ. My guess is that would be a 1 in 1,000 if you were still in the u.S.

Does this make sense?

You wrote:

“…people have more children when they percieve things are nice and secure”

The data on this, however, shows that the opposite is happening. In poorer countries, people have more children. In richer countries, people have fewer children.

Why?

http://www.globalissues.org/En.....t/Past.asp

“In the United States, the move to two-children families took place only after a society-wide transition that lowered infant death rates, opened opportunities to women outside the home, and transformed ours into an industrial rather than agrarian economy, so that families no longer relied on their children’s labor. If we contrast Lappé’s grandmother’s story to a latter-day urban middle-class family, we can see that children who were once a source of needed labor are now a source of major costs, including tuition, an extra room in the house, the latest model basketball shoes, and forgone earnings for every year that a professional mom stays home with the kids.

Without resources to secure their future, people can rely only on their own families. Thus, when poor parents have lots of children, they are making a rational calculus for survival. High birth rates reflect people’s defensive reaction against enforced poverty. For those living at the margin of survival, children provide labor to augment meager family income. In Bangladesh, one study showed that even by the age of six a boy provides labor and/or income for the family. By the age of twelve, at the latest, he contributes more than he consumes.

Type “Sub-replacement fertility” into Google:

http://www.google.com/search?s.....+fertility

Where is population declining?

In places where people, “percieve things are nice and secure,” they put their energy into creating ipods and garbage, not into making babies.

In the developed world, lots of educated people perceive having children as being a threat to their lifestyle (as the globalissues.org piece above demonstrates).

I like this one from Germany, where people are being paid 25,000 euros by the government to have a baby!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16438879/

Germany is a very nice and secure country. So nice and secure, in fact, that the government has to offer a massive cash bribe for people to have babies!

Where, however, is the majority of the energy consumed? That’s right: In countries with at or below sub-replacement fertility.

What’s a bigger problem? Billions of people living in mud huts, spending all of their time trying to figure out how to survive, or a few hundred million people living like Europeans and Americans, systematically murdering the planet?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I don’t know. Neither extreme seems good to me.

I live on a fraction of the energy used by most people in the “developed world.” On the other hand, compared to the poorest people on the planet, I live an extravagant lifestyle.

With the appropriate use of technology and careful allocation of resources, it’s easy to theorize how replacement fertility rates can be maintained without having to destroy the planet. But that would require restraint and forethought, which are always in tight supply when considering aggregate human behavior.

One problem with that: like everything else people will simply use the ability to “create their own reality” to capture more energy. Which leads to depletion of resources, emission of more C02, war and competition over those resources, etc.

Ask yourself what the 5 or 10 things you’ve attempted to use visuliazation/imagination/reality-creation and you’ll see most likely they put you in a position where you will either be capturing more energy or where you are more secure in which case you are more likely to have children thereby leading to more depletion of resources.

If you imagine a nice peaceful world, as an example, you will help overpopulate the planet leading to more warfare.. Why? because people have more children when they percieve things are nice and secure. (See the 1945-1970 baby boom in this country as an example.)