Civil Liberty, Peak Oil and the End of Empire

Here's a link to a free 150-page Internet book "Culture Change" by Alexis Zeigler:

http://conev.org/ren14x.pdf

By involving and not distracting one another, we become people of hope.

Education is the great transformer (John Kenneth Galbraith). The future could be full of community centers, exchanging roles, personal work, labor-intensive investment and environment caring. Solidarity, social justice and sharing open doors while "self-healing" or "self-correcting" markets lead to unaffordable education, expensive housing and incomprehensible "financial products." Long-term necessities need not be eclipsed by short-term constraints. Without vision, the people perish and leave behind stadiums and an impoverished population rich in things and poor in spirit.

"Culture Change" by Alexis Zeigler could help us adjust to an economy in contraction and ecological life where nature is not a free good, external or sink but our mother and partner, the basis of our future.

Change of consciousness, peak oil, Greek and Roman colonialism, militarism and empire are critical subjects discussed in the book. These are often taboo subjects in our corporate educational systems and celebrity media where hucksters and arsonists are stylized as models of "efficiency."

American often repress "root causes" and reduce problems to one-dimensional political problems. The desire for progress can dull the sense of resource limits and alternative economics. We can be stewards and subjects of history, not owners or cogs in a hamster wheel.

New models and new rules of the game are needed to replace the myths of corporate beneficence, private vices as public virtues, vulgar materialism and turbo-individualism. "The only ones who believe in infinite growth on a finite planet are economists and madmen" (Kenneth Boulding).