The Power of the Nonrational (John Michael Greer)

  Oct. 8, 2008 (Archdruid Report) -- For the release of a book on the end of industrial civilization, it was certainly good timing. Over the last week or so, as my book The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age hit the bookstores, the wheels came off the global economy. As stock markets crashed worldwide and governments panicked, I found myself wondering if the marketing people at my publisher, New Society, had managed to pull off the great-grandmother of all publicity stunts.

  Now of course the crisis now under way has been building since the early 1980s, when politicians who had forgotten the lessons of the Great Depression threw out the prudent regulatory firewalls that kept banks from speculating with other people’s money. Deregulation was the word du jour, driven by a blind faith in markets that did its level best to ignore the lessons of history, and each of the crises that followed -- the 1987 stock market crash, the currency implosions of the 1990s, the dotcom bubble and bust at the turn of the millennium, and the orgy of delusional finance that drove the global real estate bubble thereafter -- simply brought cries for more of the same deregulation that caused the trouble in the first place.

  For a quarter century, those who recalled Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

  All this raises a question that deserves more attention than it usually receives: what makes a society accept or reject any given set of warnings about the future? At the ASPO-USA peak oil conference last month, a slightly more focused version of this question was much in the air. Several of the speakers expressed their frustration at the way warnings of global climate change have been picked up by the media and turned into an international cause célèbre, while warnings of the imminence of peak oil are still being dismissed as a nonissue by most people straight across the political and cultural spectrum. and its many successors, and pointed out that uncontrolled speculation always ends the same dismal way, were told that they ought to shut up until they learned something about economics. Sober warnings from distinguished scholars were drowned out by a chorus of cheerleading, while less prestigious voices were pushed out to the fringes of the blogosphere. What is now painfully clear is that those marginalized voices were right all along, and their warnings could have spared us a massive economic disaster if the pundits and politicians who dismissed them had listened instead.

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