Ancient peoples often thought that any calamity natural or otherwise was the work of displeased gods. Today, we are more enlightened. When we suffer misfortunes such as rising energy prices, some of us immediately imagine small secretive groups in high places involved in intricate conspiracies. In fact, it is an excellent thing to have a skeptical view of these in power. And, one doesn’t have to invent motives of greed or a desire to have domination in such people, but only read the headlines. However, it is a particular turn of mind that endows a tiny cabal with fantastical powers to control every major facet of world culture.

Historian Richard Hofstadter described this mind in his famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It really is a style, he admits, which is available elsewhere and which stretches back considerably in time. It isn’t limited to people that have disturbed minds but expresses itself broadly rather, in societies under stress especially. And, it isn’t confined to those who lack intelligence for most very bright people succumb to it.

It continually finds new locations for manifesting itself. Therefore, with oil prices rising lately and reaching all-time highs now, one of those new venues is peak essential oil. So we are counseled that unnamed “social architects” have first industrialized the United States and now intend to starve the excess people using peak oil as a cover. This is a more mild version from Peak Oil is Snake Oil!

I do not here plan to defend the world’s essential oil companies. They are guilty of many misdeeds, and there is credible evidence that they have on occasion tried to use their market capacity to manipulate prices, especially in the refining market. The point I wish to make would be that the paranoid style in this case appears to have reverted to a mature style described by Hofstadter in which vague, shadowy villains lurk in the backdrop.

• Process Flow intricacy: number of splits, joins, loops
• Size of Closed Deals Per Representative Report-
• New York, NY (335)
• Hh: means the hour and ranges from 1 to 12
• Other plane tickets in the itinerary must be promoted by United Airlines
• ► May (10)

Here all oil companies are lumped collectively leaving out the key distinctions between your gargantuan government-owned businesses that are mainly part of OPEC and therefore explicitly seek to manipulate prices, the publicly traded international essential oil companies, and the small independents. A 3rd characteristic made clear from the examples above would be that the danger will not result from without so much as within.

It is the product not of an attack, but of the betrayal. The villains aren’t invading our country; they already are in place. A fourth component of the supposed conspiracy is that lots of agents for the conspirators are hard at work. In cases like this these realtors are planting stories about peak oil to keep carefully the open public supine while their money or even their lives are taken. A fifth component is exactly what Hofstadter refers to as the renegade.

These are people who have once been area of the conspiracy in some way but have finally seen the light. A recent example is a bit entitled Confessions of the “ex” Peak Oil Believer. Such revelations give intended “inside” confirmation of the conspiracy to a skeptical world. And, the conversions themselves provide examples of a way to redemption, an important feature of conspiracy narratives. The 6th element is the paranoid style’s obsessive concern for evidence. Not all who engage in this style do this without looking to change many thoughts. But these advocates do often marshal substantial selective proof which on its face can appear quite convincing.