Dime-store Psychology of our Energy Problem

One of the things that make peak oil/peak energy so difficult to comprehend is the inability of most people to visualize a radically different existence. This is perfectly understandable. Most people visualize their future quite similar to their current existence. The average vision of the future is perhaps a little more expensive and hectic than today with ever larger construction projects. Inevitably most people will expect ever more sophisticated technology. The key point however, is that whatever interpretation of the future one may have is based on past trends and personal experiences.
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Peak energy turns this understanding on its head. For if any given individual takes the time to understand the ideas of depletion and limits to growth and grasp their implications, they will arrive at an unsettling realization: everything they believed would occur was just an illusion or a false promise. This is a very powerful feeling. For many people it is simply too much to handle and thus you see the various coping mechanisms. Only after someone has taken this sucker punch to the psyche and accepted it, can true preparations begin.
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Of course that is my dime-store psychological overview of the problem. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist.
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What I am increasingly becoming convinced is occurring, is a collective distraction of most people from the hard issues that affect the human race. I don’t think this is intentional for the most part. It is just that these days, there are so many ways to distract oneself that scant attention is often paid to these issues in the first place. Then, with so much conflicting opinion out there, no wonder so many people are confused or mislead.
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Add this distraction and confusion to a typical person’s background of expecting the future to be somewhat like the past but better and no wonder it is so easy to ignore the increasingly prevalent warning signs.
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Signs such as “OPEC says no more spare capacity” or “Chinese demand continues to surge.”
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This ignorance (intentional or not) or acceptance of a countervailing theory are themselves coping mechanism, alleviating cognitive dissonance. This can occur whenever people sense two different possible explanations to a bothersome event. My sister solved her cognitive dissonance over peak oil (and by proxy, her future) by believing that energy company profiteering and a pro-oil president were behind the continuous price hikes. After accepting that fact, she was able to plan for her future which would include purchasing a house. An overvalued one at that…
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Over the long haul, I could envision most of humanity lurching from one simple explanation to another in order to explain the obvious everyday events. Last year’s terror premium yields to the hurricane excuse, then to China and now our booming economy. Never once is serious consideration given to depletion on a macro level. Why? Because then you would have to begin to accept that oil (or natural gas) will never be able to relied on a resource as much as it is now.
Of course, lurching will only get us so far. We might actually start asking those hard questions once the food trucks stop showing up at the grocery store or the lights keep going out. But by then it is too late.
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On a personal note, even I really am unbelieving of all of the ramifications at times. I’ll start thinking, gosh there’s no way the grid will come crashing down and stay down, or that gasoline will cease to be available in sufficient quantities that would stop the continued easy motoring. Maybe, I’d think that Ghawar really won’t collapse anytime soon.
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But then I go and read the statistics. That’s were the hard truth lies. The truth (and our future) is in the numbers. And when it comes to energy production, I am afraid that nothing adds up to a solution. Cognitive dissonance solved.