The end of endless growth

What are you most excited about for the future?

Endless growth is the mantra of wealth funds, publicly listed companies and well-to-do boomers and aspirational designer clothing wearing millennials. It’s the catchcry of neoliberal flavours of capitalism. The only problem – and it’s a significant one – is that we live in a natural world with finite amounts of resources that are able to be exploited. You can pop into the catergory of “resources”, yourself and your loved ones too, because the philosophy of endless growth doesn’t care about moral and ethical obligations that people have to their fellow human beings or our planet. 

Endless Growth exists in the present moment and future tense only and will hysterically talk about what the future might hold, if we all worked a little harder, had another child for the country, paid a little more taxes, send our best and brightest off to fight in a war and so on.

No amount of greenwashing about carbon credits, or “sustainable” meat, palm oil or seafood, or “green” energy etc. actually addresses the underlying problem, which is late stage capitalism’s obsession with growth. At any cost, even if it means blatant lying and deceiving citizens is a means to an end, in order to streamline growth.

Endless growth in living organisms = cancer. Endless growth is economic systems = cancer but of the cultural, economic and social kind l. Nothing that’s living can go on growing indefinitely.

As our ancestors in every culture of the world noted, nature, our bodies, seasons, music and everything that exists naturally exists in undulating rhythms, cycles  circles and ultimatebalance.

All sounds really depressing right? We can console ourselves, although we may not be here as a species to witness the mea culpa moment of collective realisation. That eventually endless growth will need to slow down. This will force an equilibrium one way or another and the organisms that remain here, homo sapiens or other beings, will develop the requisite cognitive skills over many generations to decide what happens next and they may opt for another way of seeing the world, not endless growth.

If we are lucky, another scenario might present itself. Where people who remain here might be able to foresee the folly of endless growth and stop it before it’s too late.

What do you think of how we run our world? I would like to know…