Are we witnessing slow collapse, in Tainter's sense? Is the population rejecting the structures of established civilisation, and adopting savage modes as tokens of resistance, in order to improve their condition, by reducing differentials in income and wealth between individuals, rather than increasing wealth per head or aggregate societal wealth? Is opting-out, dropping-out, stopping the world to get off, refusing to compete in the rat-race, in spite of all appearances in fact a rather well-calculated, self-serving act? Yes, it probably is.

What is it that people mean by term "energy independence"? The resemblance to the term 'political independence' is relevant, and the second term, with all its rich history of personal sacrifice probably warms the first by near proximity. But these terms are very different, or must be, since energy and politics are themselves so different. Energy is something consumed (or at least used; the low entropic state is used and lost, so perhaps we can say consumed). Politics, on the other hand, is something that people do. Independence has very different senses in relation to these terms. In relation to politics, it suggests action free from outside influence. A citizen can be said to have political independence when they are free to choose any course of political action available; a population may be said to be politically independent when its government, however arrived at, is able to act freely without taking orders or being in any way constrained by another power. Energy independence cannot be analysed in the same way. A private consumer can never be independent of the producer unless he or she is also the producer and is independent. A household that grew food, wood, generated off-grid electricity, and perhaps also made biodiesel or used horses pastured on their own farm, might be said to be energy independent, but the criteria are very strict and it is not absolutely clear that the degree of independence is complete, since the equipment bought to assist in the growing, generating and converting of the energy would be the product of energy consumed in other places.

A population, say that of the United Kingdom, might be said to 'energy independent' if it never imported energy from producers outside its jurisdiction, though the question might be raised with regard to the energy rendered as the complexity of imported goods. But the UK is not the importer, individual companies are; and the consumer engages with them simply as the most proximal element in the production chain. From the consumer's point of view the origin of the energy has no significance, except that one source may be cheaper and the other more expensive, and there is no evidence to suggest that imported energy is necessarily dearer than indigenous energy; it will vary from place to place and time to time. To put the point demotically: the consumer doesn't care where the energy comes from; they care about price, quality and reliability, and there is no intrinsic benefit to indigenously produced energy on any of these metrics. Indigenous energy could well be more expensive, poorer in quality, and less reliable than imported energy. British wine is all of these things. Or, compare electrons from British wind power and from the interconnector with France.
From the consumer's point of view, energy independence is an empty concept, and its use is purely rhetorical; indeed it is suasive marketing, probably intended to cover disadvantages, such as high cost.

The only benefit arising from indigenous energy is that it introduces further competition into the market. External producers will already be competing, but if there are also internal producers then there will be more competition. This is good, but additional competition can also be found externally. It isn't an intrinsic and exclusive property of indigenous energy.

Marx's prediction of alienation and immiseration was perfectly correct and came to pass exactly as foreseen, though not in those economies where he believed it would occur but in places where the state expropriated the ownership of the economy in the name of the people and according to the plans laid out by Marx himself. 

Advertising is a poorly understood commercial activity, and most would assume it to be obviously to the disadvantage of the consumer, who may come to buy a more expensive or an inferior product simply because it has been advertised. We know, after all, that advertising can defend as well as extend markets, and it is tempting to see such defense as the employment of suasion to compromise the interests of the consumer.
However, it is conceivable that advertising in fact supplies a very considerable benefit to the consumer, who comes to know of a utility or a good without having to make any considerable effort. The valure of this service should not be underestimated, least of all by anyone, surely most of us, who have had to spend hours on the internet searching for a product that will address a particular need.
Advertisers are or can be seen as saving consumer time, and this may be considered to compensate them for any shortfall in quality or premium in price (to pay for the advertising for example), though I would suspect that these deficiencies are more often imagined than real. Producers able to sustain a significant and costly advertising campaign are very probably competitive.

Natural selection has left its signature on mind and behaviour in the statistical tendencies across populations and individuals over time: Humans accumulate resources to secure reproduction (doing much else besides and having many adventures along the way), and in order to do this they tend to ensure their survival, whilst also tending to support relatives as they work towards similar outcomes. All other activities tend to support these activities.

In situations were one is manifestly surrounded by more or less near kin it is genetically adaptive to be collectivist; in situations where one is encompassed with others only very distantly related it is adaptive to be an individualist. Thus it is probable that "individualism" as a widespread behavioural characteristic emerges as a result of of an influx of population from several sources, diluting kin-density, or a major shift or mixing and relocation of the population. Indeed, it may be taken as an axiom that mobile populations will tend to become individualist over time.

Fear of salient relative wealth, incurring disapprobation and intimidation, is and has always been widespread, and most acute over narrow social intervals and short geographical distances. In the present democratic phase this has produced reverse sumptuary self-regulation, where it is socially unacceptable to dress in ways that are perceived as claiming relative advantage. Cars are a partial exception to this rule, partly because so few are actually owned by the drivers, and partly because the owner is shielded from attack by the velocity or potential velocity of the vehicle. The rich dress down, but drive up (and park in a secure location).

We should not sniff at the recourse to authority agreed to be common amongst the early medievals. They were writing at a time of relative societal, indeed intellectual simplicity; the writings of the past, particularly the classical past, were evidently from a time when men had such resources at hand as could only be dreamed of in 1100 or for some centuries after. Books to read, the conversation of an experienced intelligentsia of a size quite remarkable to one writing in the depopulated middle ages. And most important, the present had so little in the way of equipment and instrumentation to allow them to make empirical observations. In such a situation is it surprising that they preferred to take the word of those who had all of these things?

The standard view is that without public support via state subsidised universities and other organs of research there would be much less of this work. In other words, it is held to be a classic public good. However, an alternative view can be taken; namely, that the public is frightened of private knowledge, just as the public, by which I mean each individual member of that public, fears the power and success of every other member. In such a situation the attractiveness of university supported research is that it prevents knowledge falling into private hands. In other words, those who invoke the 'crowding-out' effect as a persuasive argument against public funding of science are being psychologically naive. The crowding-out of private knowledge construction is regarded as a benefit rather than a disadvantage; indeed, it is the whole point of public support for scientific research.

Science is a network of propositions that are more or less interconnected and consistent in spite of having no single author. It is a collective process, and though many individuals are involved at any one time and over long periods, and they are not always in communication, there is a goal in common, namely the description of the world. The approximate mutual consistency of the network gives it the appearance of a designed output assembled by many and easy to mistake as intended by many to serve a shared desire for knowledge.

This misleads scientists into thinking that there is or must be a collective economic output, which misunderstanding explains the almost universal collectivism of that profession.

However, the networks of science were unplanned, and result not from the intention of a , single collective will but from trial and error, with mutual consistency resulting from many discrete decisions regarding each individual proposition, permitting this one to stand, or condemning that one to fail. Similarly, the network of manufacture and exchange that we see all around us is co-ordinated as the result of a multitude of individual decisions, not because of some collective or socialised will to production to serve some collective requirement.