Rant warning - yes, this is another post where I am having a good hard serious go at something. Read on, and you will see how this particularly odious miscreant has ruined everything.
I often think that if I could travel back in time and assassinate just one person for the greater good, it wouldn't be Hitler or Stalin, or even the guy who came up with the reality television concept. No, it would be Henry Ford.
But why, Pete, I hear you ask. Because he was the father of modern assembly lines used in mass production. However, his evil ways go much further than that. He came up with a concept now quaintly called "Fordism". A simple economic philosophy that states widespread prosperity and high (read obscene) corporate profits can be achieved by high wages, thus allowing said highly paid workers to go on a big spending spree and buy all of the wasteful destructive crap that they produce. I don't think he put it quite like that himself - he may have put a bit more of a positive spin on things...
What makes Fordism (and Capitalism in general) even more insidious is that, except for a few blessed madmen like myself, we all seem to think that it's a good thing. Wow, we get paid more, so we can go and spend our money on stuff we want. Surely that's a good thing. Hey, look at what a great time we are all having. Our standard of living is so much higher than any generations preceding us. We've got luxury goods coming out of our arses. We've got rolling suburbs of McMansions with double garages. We've got two big petrol-guzzling four-wheel drives (to make sure that the wife can negotiate all of those rough and rugged city streets to do their shopping and drop the kids off at school). We've all got reverse cycle air conditioning, because it's just too hard to wave a leaf in front of our sweaty faces during summer or put on a jumper (or heaven forbid, do some exercise) in winter. We've got home cinema systems to enrich our lives with all of the wisdom and true information that gets beamed into our homes by our cable provider of choice. We've got iPods and MP3 players galore, so that we don't have to listen to our thoughts for one second more than we have to. Hell, we've even got smart lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners that learn how to avoid obstacles and do the work for us.
Oh the orgasmic and never-ending stream of things that we have, giving us the luxury living that we all aspire to. And to think that all of this was made possible by just one little concept - Fordism.
I associate all of the evils of modern capitalism with mass production and mass consumption. These are the two things that, whilst sounding very economically viable, are counter-productive to the continued existence of not just the human race, but all life on the planet. How can we ever reach an equilibrium with our environment when there is the constant dangle of the carrot on a stick in front of us, leading us ever onwards to commit untold acts of rape and pillage on the environment around us? How can we be happy when the modern media continuously bombards us, telling us that we must consume, consume, consume to satisfy our sense of self-worth?
I find it an interesting commentary on our modern society that one of the first things George Bush said after the 9/11 terrorist attack was for the people of America to go out and spend - don't let those nasty terrorists win. That's right, continue to prop up the ongoing fallacy of modern economics - we have to keep growing to keep going. Without that 3% growth per year, we will never be able to afford the living-beyond-our-means lifestyles to which we have become accustomed. Without our continued confusion, chasing quantity instead of quality, we will not be able to give meaning to our existence.
Taken in that context, we seem to be defining ourselves as consumers, eating up all of the resources that our planet is struggling to supply us with. We are what we eat, and our appetite is insatiable.
So now I return to Henry Ford, that cloven-hoofed progenitor of the monied powers, and I think about killing him for the greater good. However, I know that some other opportunistic bastard would have just taken his place, and then I'd have to go back and kill him too, on and on, ad infinitum. And I know that eventually, even though I have Viking blood in my veins, I would grow sick of all the killing.
Thankfully, I see a great solution on the horizon. In fact, it is even closer than the horizon. I don't know how many of you amongst the Rambling Masses have heard of the concept of Peak Oil, so I'll give a brief definition.
Peak Oil is the point at which the world's oil reserves reach their absolute maximum production levels ever. There will be no more increases in world oil production after that point. We may plateau for a while, but then the gradual slide downwards will begin. You see, there's no gloom and doom yet, right? We won't run out of oil for at least another hundred years, so why worry, right?
See, the thing is, even a plateau will have untold cataclysmic ramifications for the very fabric of our society. We won't be able to continue that glorious 3% growth that Beige Howard, George Dubya, Blair Witch and all of the other world power cronies rabbit on about.
Oil is not just used to lubricate our machines and make petrol and diesel for our four wheel drives. Oil touches every part of our modern lives. We make plastic, fertilisers and herbicides from oil, along with a million other things too numerous to mention here (without the post getting annoyingly long). Every manufacturing process and transportation process relies on oil. Alternative energy sources will never be able to fill the void, since they cannot provide the same levels of cheap and available energy as oil can.
Ah, but bio-diesel and hydrogen cells will save us. Do me a favour. The process of manufacturing hydrogen requires more power to be put in than you can get from it. Bio-fuel would require an arable area greater than the size of all of the agricultural land in Australia currently being used, just to fuel Sydney's requirements. And where are we going to get the fertilisers and herbicides from when the oil dries up?
Things will, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, grind to an inevitable halt. And oh, how I will enjoy the silence. I for one welcome the end of the Oil Age, for it has meant nothing but rampant destruction and pollution on a grand scale. All of that cheap energy got to our heads, and we just went ahead and went crazy, leaving (to use a soon-to-be-anachronistic term) nothing in the tank for our future generations.
Yet one more evil perpetrated by Henry Ford was the industry that he chose to apply his oh-so-sensible economic rationalism to - the motor industry. Cars are responsible for vast amounts of oil consumption, giving us an easy way of getting from point A to point B, whilst at the same time fouling the air all around. You need only look at that glorious brown haze in major urban areas, take a deep breath, and enjoy the smell of sweet success.
And I laugh mightily at all of this, because we are not looking at the Peak Oil event happening in 50 years, or even 10 years. Future records will probably show that the world Peak Oil event has already happened, or is about to happen in the next year or two at the very latest. Ghawar, the largest conventional oil field ever discovered, accounted for about two thirds of Saudi oil production over the past half century. It supplied five million barrels of oil per day, which amounts to about 6.5% of the world's daily production of 84 million barrels. Well, advanced oil extraction techniques have been employed there for a while, to wring the last few drops from the rag, and it's well and truly on it's last legs. Peak Oil is here, and if you think that $1.40 per litre for petrol is a bit steep, just wait, oh Rambling Masses, just wait...
Bring it on, I say! I can't wait for our destructive society to crash and burn in the flames that have been waiting so long to engulf it. Finally, the demon spawn of Henry Ford will die a deserving and eternal death. Hopefully, we will have the resilience and resourcefulness as a species to bounce back and continue our existence. I only hope that we do not continue our destructive ways. I hear people talking about a revival of the Coal Age after the Oil Age fades into fond memories of glory days, of private jets, of golf courses, of 1o-cylinder luxury cars...
But hey, wait a minute! Isn't coal a finite and oh-so-polluting resource too?
I will leave you with a wonderful quote by an anonymous Saudi Arabian oil sheikh, who uttered these immortal words in 1982:
"My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a plane. His son will ride a camel."
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