On Thursday, May 20, 2004, at 03:31 PM, I wrote:
Some of the more pessimistic ASPO predictions see peak
oil production this decade with a very steep depletion curve resulting
in some apocalyptic economic transitions such as collapse of large
scale agriculture in various regions (ie famines), a global market
crash and banking crisis, massive unemployment and more wars etc.
A couple of days later Campbell has a revised estimate for peak:
The present model departs from earlier ones in recognition that the Middle East no longer has sufficient spare capacity to discharge a swing role. A volatile epoch of recurring price shocks and consequential recessions dampening demand and price is now regarded as more likely, with terminal decline setting in and becoming self-evident by about 2010 (see http://www.peakoil.net and http://www.energybulletin.net ).
Lots of recent reports speculating about the Saudi's ability to increase production suggesting that the peak plateau may already have arrived with midpoint by 2008. If this turns out to be true then we're currently on the threshold of a gigantic transition in the structure of our modern globalised industrial civilization. I'm posting this not because I want to fuel the degradation of philosophy on this Heidegger list but quite the opposite, I think this transition is the primary motivating force in the turn towards the explicit, extreme nihilism of the will to will by the current leaders of the lone economic and military superpower. The pornographic torture scandals, illegal military adventurism, extralegal assassinations and incarceration, unilateral collapse of international law, mass murder of innocents, attacks on constitutionally guaranteed US civil rights, the bankrupting of the New Deal, the theft of the year 2000 election and the overwhelming regulation of corporate media as a propaganda tool are all merely effects of the urgent geo-strategic necessity for the leaders to think solely in terms of power.
From the perspective of Heidegger's Nietzsche will to will itself is simply a reaction to the necessities of the current world order, as Heidegger points out the leaders themselves have been subjugated to that ordering and its calculative reasoning. Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill, Bush and Blair have merely fulfilled their respective roles mediated by the play of global power and the historical logic of the will to will.
It's Heidegger's contention that the will to will is the fundamental metaphysical principle for our modern human understanding of reality, a principle founded not in reason as such but in the historical ordering of human relations in accordance with the as yet still unthought essence of technology.
In this sense the will to will is nothing merely subjective, rather it's the subjugating form of a modern understanding that is founded not in an individual's capacity for reason but in an 'intersubjective' historical order and practical setup that remains largely unthought. Heidegger names this modern blind spot the 'historical understanding of being', or more precisely 'presencing'. That we are blind to the origin of the will to will was for him the supreme danger, as it is an all-knowing blindness inevitably leading to modernity as an ongoing history of calamities.
Following the logic of the will to will and its quest for unconditional domination the collapse of cheap energy must eventually lead to the most base Darwinian form of competition for dwindling resources, global total war along with its companions famine and pestilence. Apparently most of us anglo democracies are already engaged in a global oil war, Neocon ideology espouses the notion of 'total war' and if anyone's interested in one of its most dreadfully eloquent renditions there's Goebbels famous speech 'Nun, Volk steh auf, und Sturm brich los!' (Nation, Rise Up, and Let the Storm Break Loose http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb36.htm ).
Leadership here equates to the total subjugation of the volk in the service of the total domination of all other powers. By the time of the defeat at Stalingrad the terror of the Soviet hordes and the threat of German extermination was real and they eventually consumed the Nazi war machine along with eastern Europe: D-Day was a spectacular sideshow in the defeat of Nazism. Nowadays we seem to be confronted with a frighteningly familiar power scenario but one that threatens the fundamentals of global growth, stability and order with terminal decline. The factical threat is geological in origin, fossil fuels are apparently depleting, the ideological threat is that we blindly follow the logic of domination in response to this terminal energy crisis.
It seems obvious to me that these various contemporary factical concerns are entirely relevant to Heidegger's critique of power and that his Destruktion of the metaphysics of will may help inform a more critical understanding of what we are currently involved in. At the very least it's certainly an interesting way to interpret our place in the constantly shifting global order.
Ontically speaking, those of us who support peace over war need a leadership willing to front the UN General Assembly, declare the coming global oil crisis and work towards a coordinated global response in the transition to alternative energy sources and the new world order that entails. It's unfortunate that the only option left to the world at the moment is another poll driven Skull and Bones puppet but as Bush has shown the front man is only as strong as the ideologues and managers that prop him up and it's possible that progressive forces may do the same for Kerry. As the latter stated recently, "A strong America begins at home with energy independence from the Middle East... Our dependence on foreign oil is a problem we must solve together the only way we can: by inventing our way out of it. Let's ensure that no young American soldier has to fight and die because of our dependence on foreign oil."
I'd say the simple truth about this coming terminal oil crisis is what needs to become public as soon as possible, it undermines machination and leaves us with a simple choice: Total warfare as a way of life or genuine international cooperation in adapting to the radical changes ahead. What does this list think?
Cheers,
Malcolm
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