The Energy Revolution

A lot has changed in the last 500 years. And the most important changes have been in our use of energy. We now get most of our energy from fossil fuels, mostly from oil. And most of this is used by our cars.

This has changed who we are. We are not the people we were before the car.

I could see this easily in my own family. My father's father was a teamster, in the original sense of the word. He owned and operated a team of horses. One of the best in town.

My father looked down on him because he had a car, which was much more advanced. Which, to his mind, meant he was more advanced also.

This is a crucial point: our technologies define who we are. And how we relate to other people.

I followed the technical developments in America during the last half of the 20th Century. I had my own airplanes and flew them a lot. To my mind, this made me better than ordinary people, who were interested in other ordinary people (especially those of the opposite sex).

I didn't need a woman because I had my plane. People who are absorbed by their technology are asexual. My father was this way. When he had his photography studio he was completely absorbed by that. He also had a wife and children, but they were not nearly as important.

When we moved to Nauvoo, he tried to develop other businesses, but could not. This had a huge effect on him personally. It had a huge effect on other men at the time, who were used to being small businessmen, especially the family farmer, with his own plot of land.

The economy was changing from small businesses to large businesses, that demanded a different kind of person.

When I mention this to my siblings, all I get is blank stares. "What on earth am I talking about?"

I am talking about working in an office. A strange way of life that does not suit many people. Who feel they are being killed. They respond by killing the people who had been killing them.

This was the neoliberal (dog eat dog) economy. That Ann Rand espoused.

But that is another story.