Petro-Masculinity and Moral Fiber
An example of petro-masculinity and, basically a symbol of the lack of mental health care in the U.S.
Why is this a self-sufficiency issue? Self-sufficiency and responsible efforts to steward the environment should go hand in hand. How was this politicized?
I'm honestly a little bit incredulous, because it seems like something everyone could agree on: We've got one planet. We need to take care of it. It's wise to be able to take care of yourself and your loved ones because modern life is fundamentally built on thin ice. Computer systems will always crash. Data will always be leaked. There will be disasters, wars, floods, economic recessions, depressions, pandemics.
If there's one thing COVID-19 taught me, it is that you will be swept up in the events of your time, and you are nothing but a drop of water in an ocean. If there's going to be a wave, you are going up or down in it and you've got very, very little to say about it.
Because supply chains are so fragile (again, something that was brought home by COVID); because governments can suddenly manifest weird powers you never knew they had (lockdowns, National Guard troops actually on the streets of Minneapolis in fatigues with military vehicles and carrying automatic weapons in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, etc.); because the power grid is fragile; because you never know when some madman in control of a nuclear armed state is going to start a war for no reason which will end who knows how? All of these and more are reasons why you need to have some food and water around, a way to keep warm, a plan to keep safe.
So I recently ran across an article that offers a pretty good explanation of this: Cara Daggett's Petro-Masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire. It's a little dense, but it makes good reading. I'll just share her abstract here:
As the planet warms, new authoritarian movements in the West are embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny. Rather than consider these resentments separately, this article interrogates their relationship through the concept of petro-masculinity, which appreciates the historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule. Petro-masculinity is helpful to understanding how the anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene can augment desires for authoritarianism. The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit; fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics. Moreover, through a psycho-political reading of authoritarianism, I show how fossil fuel use can function as a violent compensatory practice in reaction to gender and climate trouble.
I think that Sigmund Freud was on to something when, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he theorized that besides Eros, the pursuit of pleasure as a human drive, there was something else - Thanatos, the death drive. That's what's in charge when you've got people who base their identity on patriotism, religion, and the control of others: the death drive. Toxic religion doubtlessly has a role to play here, too, as it represses sex. The energy comes out one way or another, either in paroxysms of violence, child rape (as in the Catholic church)
This is why you have these loonies driving around in giant trucks "rolling coal" on people in fuel efficient cars. This is why you have people pushing back against their own interest, clinging to their gas stoves, or spewing fossil-fuel company talking points in the comments section after every review of an electric car.
There is so much ugliness.
What we have here is a suicidal culture, as Motorhead put it in Suicide:
Stay clean, be true
Do whatever you can do
Make it soon, or we all die
Ten thousand years, and all we got is suicide
We do what we can.
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