Informant38

It's presented as an addiction to oil but it isn't that, not really. It's an addiction to the sensation of sitting on your ass and flying down the road at 80 miles an hour surrounded by a ton or two of steel armor. That's the high, how the addiction starts.
People get high driving their cars, it's a powerful rush, but they do it all the time so they don't notice it, usually. Like with heroin, which starts with feeling very very good, then becomes something that the body says it needs, has to have, and kind of does, but not really.
We aren't addicted to oil so much as that feeling. But getting to that, getting people to see that's what it is runs into the same obstacles and barriers you run into when you try to get to the bottom of the smoking epidemic that hung like a fog over the 20th century.
People aren't smoking nearly so much now, it's been successfully marginalized, but the reason they stopped is they were subjected to the same mind control techniques and technologies that got them or their parents and grandparents smoking to begin with. And getting that talked about, that that power is still there and still operating in all kinds of aspects of our lives, including political decisions, runs into a big taboo. An artificial one that protects the machinery - trivialized as "advertising" but actually a complex and powerful set of brainwashing tools - and conceals the men who run it to their own ends in their own interests, too often to the detriment of everyone and everything else. Sort of like the banking system.
Getting people to stop smoking, pretty much an unqualified good thing, without getting people to consider what made it so powerfully attractive and socially central in the first place, is a compromise - doing what you can with what you have.
Talking about oil, even as an addiction, without talking about the powerful high it delivers, is another compromise.