The deadly deceits of the market

The history of our addiction to oil is a chronicle of violence, corruption and the worst excesses of frontier capitalism and social Darwinism. It was the case when the Nobel and Rothschild families grappled for control of Caspian Sea oil in the late nineteenth century; it is just as true now in the Gulf of Guinea. Like crack, tobacco or any other addiction enabled by a vast, powerful industry (Is it surprising that Big Tobacco financially supported global warming skeptics for years?), our oil addiction is hugely destructive, defies logic and is nearly impossible to break. But unlike crack and tobacco, we will eventually run out of oil.

But the true costs of cheap oil -- a vast military presence in the Middle East; environmental damage, including global climate change; the need to support corrupt "oilygarchs" -- have never been paid by consumers at the fuel pump. And a half century of "special relationships" -- or, more precisely, addictive codependencies -- have only produced Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, in the end, September 11, Osama bin Laden's murderous response to the permanent deployment of American troops in the oil-rich Saudi holy land.

Burroughs depicts a terminal capitalist world: the deadly deceits of the market, big business, state control and technological terror, and the mass production of mindless subjects. It is a dark, dystopian vision, but one that speaks directly to the realities that surround us: chronic dependency, demand without limits, violent acquisition and addictive control.
One of these realities is the energy system -- hydrocarbons in general, and oil and gas in particular -- that undergirds our modern way of life.

NVDL: This is quite deep for CNN. I have a feel, with a recession, people may slow down enough to have reality give them a cold, hard look wherever they find themselves in the darkness, and dystopia. It is about time.

clipped from edition.cnn.com There are those -- social psychologist Stanton Peele is one -- who believe that addiction has become an epidemic of modern society. Addiction, says Peele,"is not . . . an aberration from our way of life. . . . [It] is our way of life." Addiction industries enable and pathologize all manner of behaviors -- from shopping to gambling to drinking to the Internet. Addiction, in other words, is a peculiarly modern condition, the loss of both personal and social control. Some addictions are deep, structural and radically destructive; they expose the morbidities of modern life and of modern capitalism.