Culture change: civil liberty, peak oil, and the end of empire

While we are daily witness to the powers of progress manifest in the extraordinary mechanical technologies we have developed in the industrial age, we remain woefully unaware of the most basic causes of social change in our society. Our lack of social awareness does not result from the difficulty of understanding social problems, it results from the active repression of such awareness. political resistance movements that developed in the twentieth century were adapted to conditions of economic growth. When an economy is growing, petitioning through political and legal means to assure increasing access to rights and wealth for traditionally disenfranchised groups met with a measure of success, and that success was the foundation for further movement building. Those movements cannot, as they are currently structured, guide us through the coming age. Many of the problems that we see as having purely political roots are strongly influenced by economic and ecological factors. Social issues that may seem far apart, such as ecological stress and women’s rights for instance, have common roots. In the modern context, much of the political unraveling that we are witnessing can be understood in terms of the limitations of growth of modern industrialism. growth of fundamentalism and militarism, the decline of civil liberty and the environment, all of these problems are going to get worse if we do not find a new means to address them. There are real solutions to these problems, but they are going to involve a quantum leap, both in thought and in action, beyond our current methods of political engagement. solutions themselves are not even terribly difficult, they are simply well outside of our current range of vision and will. Table of Contents Our Fate Civil Liberty—-Rise and Fall of Liberal Democracy Women’s Rights—What the Heck is Going on in South Dakota? Peak Oil, Biofuel, and Genocide—-Neoliberalism’s End Game? Ecological Decline—101 Painless and Ine.