Having a delusional story that’s at odds with reality can be harmless. Or it can be fatal. Or somewhere in between.
If Covid has taught me anything, it’s the power of a delusional story to bend otherwise intelligent people away from the truth. In the case of the ivermectin “horse dewormer!” saga, a perfectly harmless drug was withheld from dying patients “because it might not work.”
Meanwhile, drugs such as Remdesivir that were both harmful and did not work were greased right through the approval process and into people’s veins.
This is why I am ever on alert for the next big delusion that could cause harm. The biggest one I’ve ever come across is the delusion about energy – oil specifically.
A lot of people who should otherwise know better have deluded themselves into believing we really don’t need oil anymore. It’s simply a matter of deciding we don’t want to use it anymore. We have electric cars after all!
But this line of thinking is painfully detached from the realities of where we actually are in the energy story. Electric transport is practically non-existent on global energy consumption charts. I’ll post a chart in the comments below that you can expand to see what I’m talking about.
At any rate, the dangerous delusion in play gathers its potential harm from the gap between itself and reality. The reality is we have an exceptionally over-leveraged, debt-based economy that is not even remotely positioned for rapidly spiking and much higher energy prices.
by cmartenson 
