Not the Future We Ordered

Peak Oil, Psychology, and the Myth of Progress

John Michael Greer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781780490885
  9780367101329
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429916656
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For well over half a century, since the first credible warnings of petroleum depletion were raised in the 1950s, contemporary industrial civilization has been caught in a remarkable paradox: a culture more focused on problem solving than any other has repeatedly failed to deal with, or even consider, the problem most likely to bring its own history to a full stop. The coming of peak oil-the peaking and irreversible decline of world petroleum production-poses an existential threat to societies in which every sector of the economy depends on petroleum-based transport, and no known energy source can scale up extensively or quickly enough to replace dwindling oil supplies. Not The Future We Ordered is the first study of the psychological dimensions of that decision and its consequences, as a case study in the social psychology of collective failure, and as an issue with which psychologists and therapists will be confronted repeatedly in the years ahead.

INDEX

acceptance (stage of grief), 105, 118–120

agency, human, 4, 31, 114, 116

Alaska North Slope oilfields, 13–14

anger (stage of grief), 105, 112–114

apocalyptic beliefs, 95–100, 138–139

archetype(s), 33–34, 85–87, 115

Aristotle, 33

atheism, 90

backfire effect, 58

Bakken shale, 20

bargaining (stage of grief), 105, 115–116

Bateson, Gregory, 62–64, 66

Bellah, Robert, 44

Bernanke, Ben, 102

biofuels, 21

Boortz, Neal, 3

Campbell, Colin, 18

Camping, Harold, 56

Caspian Sea oilfields, 19–20

Christianity, 51–52, 90–91, 95–97, 107–108, 139

Churchill, Winston, 38

civil religion, 44–48, 51–55, 75, 101, 107, 126

cognitive dissonance, 57–61, 109, 111, 127

Columbus, Christopher, 77

Communism, 52–53

Concorde fallacy, 58

“creation science”, 91

Deffeyes, Kenneth, 17–18

denial (stage of grief), 105, 111–112

Denver, John, 15

depression (stage of grief), 105, 116–118

deviance, 75, 85–93, 98, 122

double bind, 63–73, 127

drapetomania, 1–2, 122

Energy Information Administration (US), 17

Engels, Friedrich, 52

environmentalism, 92–94, 97–98, 139

ethanol, 20, 23, 124...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• One The unmentionable crisis
• Two The religion of progress
• Three The psychology of the progress myth
• Four Peak oil as deviance
• Five The five stages of peak oil
• Six Facing an unwelcome future
• References
• Index