Slowly, Then All At Once

Chris Martenson March 6, 2024

This is the presentation I gave to open up our annual seminar. It’s important and needs to be shared.

Our view, my view, at Peak Prosperity is that the world is full of increasingly large risks and there’s nobody really in charge who either grasps it or, even if they did, could realistically do anything about it.

There’s too much complexity to manage.  Things are speeding up.  In the words of Hemingway, I expect all this to proceed slowly, then all at once.  We’re pretty much there.

The root of it all is energy. We’re at the tail end of the age of oil. That’s winding down. Most of what has been pitched as oil’s replacement is vapor-ware, an unseemly assemblage of fictions and fantasies that cannot possibly coalesce into the promised pain-free transition.

Worse, there seems to be even less awareness of or appreciation for the fact that our entire system of money is geared to the fantasy of endless exponential growth that oil and natural gas, and coal afforded us for an all-too-brief window of time.

The changes, when they come, will be shockingly fast.

So, what do you do?

My model for orienting ourselves to that involves (1) education, (2) being open to the idea that actual change is more of an emotional process than a cognitive shift, and (3) that our most important assets are the people with whom we surround ourselves.

This video lays out the case.