The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [12]
“Technology will always meet our energy needs.”
There is a very strong chance that some or all of these stories (and many more) will prove not only to be wrong, but, like any false narrative, also highly destructive to hopes, dreams, capital, and prosperity.
We are at an absolutely unique time in humanity’s history, where a sharp corner lies in the road ahead, the traditional controls that we use to steer ourselves will no longer produce the intended effects, and much of what we believe to be true will be proven false. We need to locate these stories and change them, while at the same time supplanting them with realistic, positive visions that will guide the transformations that we need to see.
In most stories of change, there are winners and losers. I want to give you the opportunity to be among the winners. I also want to set the stage for building a more prosperous future for everyone. I believe it can be done. I don’t think we need new technologies, or revolutions, or dramatic breakthroughs in thoughts or ideas; we already have everything we need, save one thing: political will.
But that, too, can be overcome. It begins here between us, in this book, starting with a proper and open assessment of the situation in which we find ourselves. I am confident that together we can indeed create a world worth inheriting.
CHAPTER 4
Trust Yourself
To enhance your use of the lens described in Chapter 2 (The Lens), I invite you to adopt another somewhat radical technique: trusting yourself.
Rather than waiting for someone else to hand you an “expert” solution, give yourself permission to rely on your own intuition, research, and experience regarding what is best for you and your family. Go with what you just know to be right. If something doesn’t seem right, however you arrive at that conclusion, it probably isn’t. If you wait for authorities, even trusted professionals, to offer a clear signal that it’s time to take different actions and make different decisions, you will almost certainly be disappointed with the results. It may not sound easy, but if you learn to trust yourself first and foremost, it will greatly improve your chances of future success.
It took me a while to come to this realization, but I finally figured out that my interests were only accidentally and occasionally aligned with those of Wall Street and the numerous purveyors of their products. Conflicts of interest abound in this area and are mostly hidden, so when a downturn comes along and there’s not enough money both for Wall Street to pay itself and for your portfolio to gain in value, it pays to not follow the advice from Wall Street.
In fact, distressingly, it often pays to do the exact opposite of what Wall Street recommends. But Wall Street is just doing its job: making a profit . . . for itself. That’s all it cares about, that’s all it does, and it does it really well. Similarly, politicians deal in a form of profits, too, but their currency is power. It took me a while to see the game for what it was, but I now know that waiting for the political class to inform us about any issues of real or pressing urgency is not wise, especially when the issues do not have any clear political advantage. Take Peak Oil (discussed in Chapter 16), for example—there’s no “win” in that story for any politician in office, which results in nothing being said at all. They simply don’t talk about it . . . publicly, anyway.
Where Wall Street has misinformed us and politicians have chosen not to inform us about critical issues, the mainstream media has also dropped the ball, failing to counteract these transgressions by providing essential oversight and context. The media, our “fourth pillar of democracy,” has largely failed in its investigative duties, and now mainly provides interesting but generally unhelpful post-mortems on accidents after they’ve happened.
The way to counteract this conflict of interest is to simply decide for yourself what makes sense and act accordingly. Do not wait to read about a looming issue