- Warning – to protect your mental health, please be sure to watch a funny cat video after reading.
I’ve got a confession to make. I’m freakin exhausted! The gas-lighting, it’s never ending. We know what we’re doing is all caps f*cked up, yet we act like everything is normal. It’s not. The cognitive dissonance is killing me. Ok, that’s hyperbole but our reckless ways of living are leading to our demise. And fellow Americans, we’re mostly to blame. If you questions this, take a look at historical CO2 emissions by country and get back to me. Alternatively, go to the nearest parking lot and look at the ridiculous size of our cars.
A man’s capacity to ignore the truth is directly proportional to how well he is paid to do so.
Derrick Jensen
For most of us, our work life is set-up around unrealistic growth goals based on the whims of executives. Our companies, they must grow, at all times, forever. For fear of losing our livelihoods and health insurance, many of us don’t dare ask how this compounding growth is meant to be possible in a world of finite resources. In weak attempt to starve off questions, or should I say ‘build culture’, our companies provide meaningless slogans about making a positive impact. Reflecting on this, one might notice that growth always has metrics tied to it, while the positive impact slogans cleverly avoid specifics. Make no mistake, under capitalism, profit is all that matters. If you’re not growing, you’re dying, even if you’re making a boatload of cash.
In my mind, I’ve always tied the ‘need’ for endless growth to capitalism, but never quite had the words to describe it. In his book, Less is More, Jason Hickel provides a clear explanation:
“What makes capitalism different from most other economic systems is that it’s organized around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption, which we have come to measure in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Growth is the prime directive of capital. Not growth for any particular purpose, mind you, but growth for its own sake. And it has a kind of totalitarian logic to it: every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point.
Further:
It can be difficult to grasp the implications of this. We tend to take the idea of growth for granted because it sounds so natural. And it is. All living organisms grow. But in nature there is a self-limiting logic to growth: organisms grow to a point of maturity, and then maintain a state of healthy equilibrium. When growth fails to stop – when cells keep replicating just for the sake of it – it’s because of a coding error, like what happens with cancer. This kind of growth quickly become deadly.”
I don’t know about you, but cancer scares the shit out of me. Being the cancer, well, it just makes me feel bad for the earth and all other matter that doesn’t have a say in our destructive ways. Speaking of which, many of us do recognize what is happening, at least on some level, yet feel helpless in making a change:
“Capitalism is fundamentally dependent on growth. If the economy doesn’t grow it collapses into recession: debts pile up, people lose their jobs and homes, lives shatter. Governments have to scramble to keep industrial activity growing in a perpetual bid to starve off crisis. So we’re trapped. Growth is a structural imperative – an iron law. And it has ironclad idealogical support: politicians on the left and right may bicker about how to distribute the yields of growth, but when it comes to the pursuit of growth itself they are united. There is no daylight between them. Growthism, as we might call it, stands as one of the mot hegemonic ideologies in modern history. Nobody stops to question it.”
So under capitalism, not growing has dire consequences, leading to situations of gas lighting I started this post with.
“It is because of their commitment to growthism that our politicians find themselves unable to take meaningful action to stop ecological breakdown. We have dozens of ideas for how to fix the problem, but we dare not implement them because doing so might undermine growth. And in a growth-dependent economy, that cannot be allowed to happen. Instead, the very newspapers that carry harrowing stories about ecological breakdown also report excitedly on how GPD is growing every quarter, and the very politicians who wring their hands about climate breakdown all call dutifully for more industrial growth every year. The cognitive dissonance is striking.”
While perhaps painful to implement, the solution to this is an economy that doesn’t extract more than the ecosystem can regenerate and doesn’t pollute more than the ecosystem can absorb. At this moment in time, we’re like a business man trying to get to a meeting 150 miles away, however, our car has a very small tank that will allow us to travel 90 miles, while the closest gas station is 120 miles from where we began. The math doesn’t add up, it’s that simple. Let us move to a steady state economy so we don’t become stranded alongside the road.
If this topic concerns you, which it should, then I recommend you read Jason Hickel’s book Less is More. It does a tremendous job breaking down the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in and provides alternatives, for immediate action is required if we have any hope of maintaining lifestyles similar to the one’s we’ve become accustomed to.
