Wrong end of the gun

Wendell Berry has a good piece on Peak Oil and general environmental trashing, the need to accept limits, etc. in the most recent Harpers Magazine (May 2008).

It's nice, his heart is in the right place, and he talks interestingly about the Faustian echoes in our refusal to accept any limits and so on.

But... to me this guy, Berry, who has a good track record of writing about economy and environment, he's just not in the game. While he's fussing with his tepid dinkly intellectualism, he misses the big picture, or should I say, the deep picture. Which is as follows:

The world is controlled by the Inner Party (Orwell's term) or High Command (Tabby's term). However you toetag them these guys are absolutely, resolutely, and immutably IN LOVE with:

• Money
• Machines
• Death

They love that stuff and NOTHING will ever change that. Not all the professorial gibbering about Faust or any other damn faggot nonsense (if I may paraphrase the Command's general point of view) is going to have any effect on that. All that crap, to them, is for girlie men.

And I do say 'men', advisedly. You cannot talk about these issues sensibly with bringing gender into it. The High Command is basically all men. The Outer Party, the intelligent functionaries and useful idiots who keep it all going, they are also mostly men, or in any case aping skill sets and thought motifs developed by human males as opposed to females.

The Proles of course are men and women. The male proles would wish to ape the Inner Party, in love with money, machines and death. But they are drugged with sex and TV as John Lennon has noted elsewhere. So they are out of the game. Meanwhile the female proles live in self-constructed emotional fantasy worlds, so they are pretty easy to mind control as well

Meanwhile, the Outer Party technologists continue to work on ever badder ass weaponry, so much beloved of the High Command. The megadeaths from atomic weapons and firebombs and so on of 1945 was just a little preflight check compared to what these guys have in mind. You might ask then why the relatively long period of relative calm and peace in the over-developed world, at least since 1945? Does that mean I'm wrong after all about these guys loving death so much? Naw they were just re-stocking the pond and re-greasing the skids, sharpening their axes.

Guys like Berry don't have or at least don't show any feel at all for the sheer overwhelming scale of  pure weaponery that exists in this world now. Not to mention other technologies of control, surveillance and so on. Is there even a ghost of a chance that the High Command would ever allow any radical social/economic change that in even the slightest degree impaired or impeded or even decelerated this death march? No chance in hell. None. They'll see us all dead first, and I mean that literally.

You can't reason with these guys. The High Command is psychopathic by nature and by definition. A guy like Berry will get as far with them as anybody got reasoning with Anton Sigur in the recent film No Country for Old Men.