“Shift the Culture”
Mark Godges 高勉正
April 2017
As humanity, we are on the verge of a massive shift in culture through the way we interact with the natural world. Just as J. D. Rockefeller utilized a need for light, fuel for transportation, and an upcoming need for more material tools in the home and otherwise post-industrial revolution, we are now at the beginning of another shift. However taking it back before the 19th century, and maybe even quite a few centuries before that, Indigenous peoples were living in the plains, in the islands, and far north across Canada in the Tundra and Arctic. What the groups of past, the continual past into the present, and future have in common is that they all have a material base which intertwines with society as a economic system and overall culture, which perpetuates cultural norms and thus a way of life. In both American and Global society material creates culture, and the same blueprint for creating a culture of exploitation and dominance can be used for community and intellectual uprising through a direct change of materials. Currently we use oil as the material base for our entire lifestyles and culture, however if we look at the past and future we see the concept of oil is based in something that is not so far different from a natural human cycle of resource and culture.
The first step in establishing culture is its material base. In the way the Petroleum dictates our lives, there is a fractionation process of Oil into multiple states of matter and multiple uses for each of those states. First the Petroleum is broken up from Solid to Liquid, the solids are stored for tar, asphalt, etc., the Liquids are then used for gasoline, kerosene, etc., and when the liquids are broken up they are used for things like powering heat based appliances and others with butane, propane, etc. When we really break this down we are talking about us using plastics to create tools for daily lives like Caribou bones, heat and shelter like Caribou hide, transportation like Caribou herds, and the parallels go on. So have we really changed that much over centuries? Or has the purpose of our relationship with the natural world changed instead? One could make a valid argument that this is the very question many industries want to keep the population from thinking about critically, because once that happens, then we realize just as we can colonize our minds to use Oil as a means to materialize culture in the place of Caribou, Bison, or whatever the material base is for any given indigenous tribe, we can decolonize by simply finding another material. However, has Yergin illustrates multiple times in his book “The Prize” even if a population understands what is happening, with something as powerful as a calculated shift in resources that have an entire population of people at its fingertips, a person cannot simply say “this is wrong, please stop.”, there needs to be a new way of thinking. The reason the Oil industry rose to prominence in the first place through Standard Oil of New Jersey (and then as it broke into it’s six offspring companies and dissipated but continued its regime), was through a way of thinking previously unseen by the majority of the population, which is the “take what you can get, the rest can suffer, pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality often so idolized in America. It is here where we can see that colonialism and the Petroleum industry go hand in hand. If a majority of people built their entire culture on sharing and communal living, then they will give and give and give, as many indigenous peoples did, only to have a backlash of Cultural Genocide forced upon them through the entirely new culture of Oil, as they did not understand how to compete with something so massive and foreign. And because of that there is nothing more dangerous than a man with no remorse or empathy to his siblings on earth. However that being said, there is nothing more dangerous to the heart of a man with no remorse than the feelings of empathy love and community that he has so desperately buried in his soul.
When American Corporations establish coups in Central America to overthrow dictators and create a capitalist society, that creates a wave of immigrants to the US which Donald Trump demonizes, it is not a coincidence, neither is it a coincidence that the regions in the world with the most oil and the subregions of those areas with even more Oil are where we go to war, and neither is it a coincidence that the main refineries and factories that poison towns and people near them, are communities of color with less access to education and nutrition in food deserts, because white supremacy and capitalism go hand in hand, and they are in the hands of the monster of oil. The reason it is important to understand this is because not only does the culture of white supremacy which Oil supports and feeds have horrific consequences for everyone due to things mentioned above, in addition to those things being in cohorts with the monopolies of agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and prisons, but it’s very existence lies in the domination and exploitation of other people because of that, and a divided population is a population easily conquered, hence why the biggest non-coincidence of them all is the head honchos of the financial system in the world and the US working with petroleum, are watching the entire thing play out with no remorse, and creating ways of thinking through division of people through social constructs because of it, and feeding the people propagandists who believe social constructs supposedly don’t exist, as they are desperate to maintain the last stand of the angry white man.
So when we see the distinct similarities of “Caribou people” and “Petroleum people” in the sense of entire cultures created around materials, this shows us the blueprint for how cultures are made both nationally and internationally. And with every competitive business comes an urge to dominate, thus creating the patriarchy, with every ounce of fear for those different from us comes more racism and xenophobia fueling the business of racism, and with every fabricated void in our natural resource bank, is another reason to destroy a pristine landscape or somebody’s home, a process that simply makes more money. All this in consideration, looking toward the future, as Oil depletes and innovation expands, the world gets more connected, and young people begin to gain more empathy, what will happen to a business that runs and sustains itself on a culture of fear and anxiety from a deep seeded belief that we are alive simply to pay bills and die? What if every roadway was replaced with solar panels, every house ran on a battery, cars, soaps, clothes, building materials, plastics, and more were made from things like hemp, bamboo and algae? I don’t know the full answer, but what I do know is that it will require cooperation, a deep look at ourselves and our goals as a society, and whether we want to look like an American or Chinese hierarchy to fix the broken pieces of ourselves, or a Bhutanese or Scandinavian community who seeks gross national happiness, rather than gross national product, a decolonization process which may eliminate centuries of horror in a simple decade or so of a shift of racial and age demographics, using materials in the natural world to fuel our existence, but this time, the people will have the choice to create it, which may mean that if this time we make the right decision, it could be forever.
