The Long Descent by John Michael Greer

but the trucks, trains, ships, and aircraft that make our current way of life possible — are the food in the monkey’s hand and the pact that binds Mephistopheles to Faustus’ service. Even in the peak oil community, the problem of peak oil is too often framed as how to find some other way to keep the fuel tanks topped up. This seems like common sense, but that’s what the monkey thinks about getting the food out of the gourd, too.
    Approached as a question of finding something to fill our gluttonous appetite for highly concentrated energy, the problem of peak oil is just as insoluble as the monkey trap when that’s approached as a question of getting food. The discovery and exploitation of the Earth’s petroleum reserves gave human beings a fantastic windfall of essentially free energy, and we proceeded to burn through it at an astonishing pace. Now that the supply of petroleum is beginning to falter, the question before us is not how to keep burning something else at the same pace, or how to find some other way to power a civilization of a sort that can only survive by burning extravagant amounts of energy, but how to scale back our expectations and our technology enough to make them work within the limits of the same renewable sources our ancestors had four hundred years ago.
    I’ve suggested earlier in this book that expecting some other energy resource to provide energy on the same scale and level of concentration that petroleum does — just because we happen to want one — is a little like responding to one huge lottery win by assuming that when that money starts running out, another equally large win can be had for the cost of a few more tickets. This is close enough to today’s consumer psychology that it’s easy to imagine somebody in this position pouring all the money he has left into lottery tickets, throwing away his chances of avoiding bankruptcy because the only solution he can imagine is winning the lottery again. And this, again, is exactly the mentality of current attempts to fuel industrial society by pouring our food supply into our gas tanks.
    Faustus may be a better model for the emerging crisis than the monkey because the predicament we face, like his, is precisely the result of what we’re best at. Faustus became so dependent on his attendant devils that he lost track of the possibility that he could do something without them. Replace “devils” with “machines” and the parallel is exact. We have become so used to solving problems by throwing energy-intensive technologies at them that when technologies themselves become the crux of a predicament, we have no idea what to do. If any of the achievements of the last three hundred years are to be salvaged from the approaching spiral of crises, we need to rethink this now, before the social, economic, and political stresses become so pressing that clear thought becomes impossible and fossil-fueled spirits appear, on schedule, to drag us off to a close equivalent of the Hell of Marlowe’s play.
    Distracting Ourselves
    The problem of the monkey trap is already a potent factor in contemporary society. Watch the way that pundits and politicians keep trying to solve today’s crises with yesterday’s solutions — no matter how counterproductive the results — and it’s hard not to see a reflection of the poor monkey trying to get its hand out of the trap without letting go of the food that keeps it stuck there. The old saying, “When you realize that you’re in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging,” has relevance here. Easy to say, this can be hard to put into practice, especially when digging has been so successful and so profitable for so long that it’s the only thing you really know how to do any more.
    Yet the monkey trap fastened to the hand of modern industrial society has implications not often recognized. It’s best to come at this one in