Repent Ye Visa and Internal Combustion! The End is Near!

#14: Collapse

Twice a year I have to represent my department at recruiting open houses. Parents inevitably ask what one does with a degree in political science. I now have an answer. BA, political science UCLA 1972 = a chain smoking, wild eyed, Michael Ruppert.

Apparently Ruppert made his name, such that it is, as a cop in L.A. by publicly accusing the CIA of being involved in the street drug trade in the 1980's. From there he went on to expose a large number of government and corporate conspiracies--the kind that seem to transcend the left/right political divide and bring together survivalists, anarchists, old hippie communalists, and likely a Wiccan or two.

Despite the title, this film has more in common with George Noory than Jared Diamond's book by the same name.

In this documentary Ruppert is given free reign to "connect the dots" between peak oil, the fractional reserve banking system, organic heirloom seed hoarding, and the inevitability of T-Bill defaults to make his argument that the world is rapidly approaching the collision between an ideology of infinite growth and the reality of finite resources. In fact, this is a mash up of old fashioned Malthusian theory and an Errol Morris documentary. Well, an Errol Morris documentary without Errol Morris but with a Phillip Glassish electronica soundtrack, a single talking subject, and an ample sampling of archival footage. After illustrating the correlation between human population growth and the advent of the fossil fuel economy, Ruppert asks us to imagine what will happen when that economy collapses assuming that no alternative energy source or sources emerge. The future is one where governments collapse, civil society ceases to function, and, in his most colorful analogy, the slower "campers" get eaten by the bear while those of us who are better prepared get away to re-create some new, post-collapse, human-sized social order.

Rupert had his moment of clarity in re: the inevitable (and incipient) collapse of the global human system after a discussion of the science of peak oil. At that time he began to understand, he says, the interconnectedness of all of the discrete issues that he had "investigated" previously which lead him to predict, in 2005, the collapse of the financial system in the US and a subsequent world-wide depression.

Go ahead and insert your own "1000 monkeys typing for 1000 years" joke here.

It is not that Ruppert is necessarily wrong about any one of these issues; peak oil strikes me as logical even if it is difficult to predict before the fact, fractional reserve banking likely has its limits. But the way it is all put together here takes on the feel of paranoid delusion early and often. I can envision Ruppert as Russell Crowe in his carriage house linking random bits of information together into an intricate conspiracy while eluding an imaginary Dick Cheney played by Ed Harris. But that was a better movie than this one.