The Origins and History of Consciousness

“When the individual falls away from the cultural fabric like this, he finds himself completely isolated in an egotistically infalted private world.  The restlessness, the discontents, the excesses, the formlessness and meaninglessness of a purely egocentric life – as compared with the symbolic life – are the unhappy results of this psychological apostasy.

“Following the collapse of the archeytpal canon, single archetypes then take possession of men and consume them like malenolent demons.  Typical and symptomatic of this transitional phenomenon is the state of affairs in America, through the same holds good for practically the whole Western hemisphere.  Every conceivable sort of dominant rules the personality, which is a personality only in name.  The grotesque fact that murderers, brigands, gangsters, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindelers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time.  Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized – and admired.  Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray achetypal content that has got them in its power.  The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because, in its one-track primitivity, it suffers from none of the differentiations that make men human.  Worship of the ‘beast’ is by no means confined to Germany; it prevails whereever one-sidedness, push, and moral blindness are appluaded, i.e., whereever the aggravating complexities of civilized behaior are swept away in favor of bestial rapactiy.  One has only to look at the educative ideals now current in the West.

“The possessed character of our financial and industrial magnates, for instance, is psychologically evident from the very fact that they are at the mercy of a suprapersonal factor – ‘work,’ ‘power,’ ‘money,’ or whatever they like to call it – which, in the telling phrase, ‘consumes’ them and leaves them little or no room as private persons.  Coupled with a nihilistic attitude towards civilization and humanity there goes a puffing up of the egosphere which expresses itself with brutish egotism in a total disregard for the common good and in the attempt to lead an egocentric existence, where personal power, money, and ‘experiences’ – unbelievably trivial, but plentiful – occupy every hour of the day.

“…Not only power, money, and lust, but religion, art, and politics are exclusive determinants in the form of parties, nations, sects, movements, and ‘isms’ of every description take possession of the masses and destroy the individual.  Far be it from us to compare the predatory industrial man and power politician with the man who is dedicated to an idea; for the latter is possessed by the archetypes that shape the future of mankind, and to this driving daemon he sacrifices his life.  Nevertheless, it is the task of a cultural psychology based on depth psychology to set forth a new ethos which shall take the collective effect of these daemonic possessions into account, and this means also accepting responsibility for them.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“As Lester Brown put it, we as a society, ‘have been behaving just like Enron, the rogue energy giant, at the height of its folly.’  We rack up stunning profits and GDP numbers every year, and they look great on paper ‘because we’ve been hiding some of the costs off the books.’  Mother Nature has not been fooled.  That is why we are having climate change.  That which is not priced is not valued, and if our open lands, clean air, clean water, and healthy forests are not valued, the earth, when it is this flat and this crowded, will become a very hot, no-cost landfill very fast.  When markets underprice goods and services by failing to price their externalities, and the impact of that underpricing has highly negative economic, health, and national security implications, it’s the job of government to step in and shape the market to correct that failure.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“The total investment in research and development by electric utilities in the United States in 2007 was about .15% of total revenues.  In most competitive industries, the figure is 8 to 10 percent.  In fact, the American pet food industry spends more each year on R & D than the American utilities industry does.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“I cannot stress this point enough.  If you take only one thing away from this book, please take this: We are not going to regulate our way out of the problems of the Energy-Climate Era.  We can only innovate our way out, and the only way to do that is to mobilize the most effective and prolific system for transformational innovation and commercialization of new products ever created on the face of the earth – the U.S. marketplace.  There is only one thing bigger than Mother Nature and that is Father Profit, and we have not even begun to enlist him in this struggle.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“‘How can we afford to transform our whole economy in order to prevent climate change, when climate change could turn out to be a hoax or a fad and we could misallocate all that capital?,’  my answer is always the same: If climate change is a hoax, it is the most wonderful hoax ever perpetrated on the United States of America.  Because transforming our economy to clean power and energy efficiency to mitigate global warming and the other challenges of the Energy-Climate Era is the equivalent of training for the Olympic triathlon: If you make it to the Olympics, you have a much better chance of winning, because you’ve developed every muscle.  If you don’t make it to the Olympics, you’re still healthier, stronger, fitter, and more likely to live longer and win every other race in life.  And as with the triathlon, you don’t just improve one muscle or skill, but many, which become mutually reinforcing and improve the health of your whole system.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“With oil at $200 a barrel OPEC could potentially buy Bank of America in one month’s worth of production, Apple in a week, and all of General Motors in just two days.  Up to now, Persian Gulf-based sovereign wealth funds have played a very healthy, stabilizing role in the 2008 American subprime mortgage crisis.  But it is hard to imagine over time that their economic clout will not get translated politically.  After all, that’s what America and Britain did when they had financial clout: They used their money to advance their national interests abroad.

“So what am I saying?  That we need to bankrupt all these oil producers?  No, I don’t want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Egypt or Syria or Russia or Indonesia.  That would only cause a different kind of destabilization, born of impoverishment.  Besides, the price of oil is not going to drop to zero any time soon, even if we all drive plug-in hybrids.  We will need petroleum-based products – from plastics to fertilizers – for as far into the future as anyone can see.  But the world will be a better place politically if we can invent plentiful renewable energy sources that eventually reduce global demand for oil to the point where even oil-rich states will have to diversify their economies and put their people to work in more innovative ways.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“Our oil addiction is not just changing the climate system; it is also changing the international system in four fundamental ways.  First and most imporant, through our energy purchases we are helping to strengthen the most inolerant, antimodern, anti-Western, anti-women’s rights , and antipluralistic strain of Islam – the strain propagated by Saudi Arabia.

“Second, our oil addiction is helping to finance a reversal of the democratic trends in Russia, Latin America, and elsewhere that were set in motion by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism.  I call this phenomenon ‘the First Law of Petropolitics’: As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down; and as the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up.

“Third, our growing dependence on oil is fueling an ugly global energy scramble that brings out the worst in nations, wheter it is Washinton biting its tongue about the repression of women and the lack of religious freedom inside Saudi Arabia, or China going into partnership with a muderous African dictatorship in oil-rich Sudan.

“Finally, through our energy purchases we are funding both sides of the war on terror.  That is not an exaggeration.  To the extent that our energy purchases enrich conservative, Islamic governments in the Persian Gulf and to the extent that these governments share their windfalls with charities, mosques, religious schools, and individuals in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Dubai, Kuwait, and around the Muslim world, and to the extent that these charities, mosques, and individuals donate some of this wealth to anti-American terrorist groups, suicide bombers, and preachers, we are financing our enemies’ armies as well as our own.  We are financing the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps with our tax dollars, and we are indirectly financing, with our energy purchases, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“‘The hallmark of those companies and countries that continually thrive is that they continually reinvent themselves,’ noted David Rothkopf, and energy expert and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment.  ’We reinvented ourselves as a continental industrial power in the nineteenth century, and we reinvented ourselves as a global industrial power in the twentieth century and then as a global information society in the twenty-first century.’  Now we have to – for our own sake and the world’s – reinvent ourselves one more time.  Making America the world’s greenest country is not a selfless act of charity or naive moral indulgence.  It is now a core national security and economic interest.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“Reaganism, which concluded with the collapse of America’s mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, ushered in a period of history in which more and more public officials denigrated government and offered painless bromides for prosperity.  The market was always right.  Government was always wrong.  And any policy proposal that involved asking the American people to do something difficult – to save more, drive more fuel-efficient cars, study harder, or be better parents – was ‘off the table.’  You could nut utter such phrases (so they claimed) and expect to be elected to any high office in America.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“[After the Arab oil embargo in 1974] European governments imposed very high gasoline taxes and taxes on engine size – and kept imposing them – and guess what?  Europeans demanded smaller and smaller cars.  America wouldn’t impose more stringent gasoline and engine taxes, so American consumers kept wanting bigger and bigger cars.  Big Oil and Big Auto used their leverage in Washington to shape the market so people would ask for those cars that consumed the most oil and earned their companies the most profits – and our Congress never got in the way.  It was bought off.”