“We are not approaching a collapse. We are experiencing the symptoms of a collapse that has already happened long ago.”
But of course, none of our politicians have the guts to tell us that, if emissions were to decrease at the rate they need to, the government would need to take our toys away. Instead, they promise us that we can continue to live wastefully, while they put up some wind turbines to “cancel it all out” – then tweet about it on their next social media political campaign, with lots of images of solar panels and wind turbines against beautiful blue skies with white cumulus clouds. The only change which a Green New Deal brings is that instead of our cash going to fossil fuel tycoons, it goes to the renewable industry tycoons. The “green” CO2 emitted by the manufacture, installation and construction which the Green New Deal plans would be no less harmful, and in fact no different chemically from the CO2 produced by fossil fuels. And if carried out, the last nail on the coffin of this planet.
The inconvenient message of downsizing is already being diluted, corrupted and weaponised by a new mind prison. The new buzzword to describe this economic contraction which we need is “degrowth”, which is obviously an oxymoron. It was the best which its originators could do to create an intentionally jovial synonym for shrinking, downsizing, downscaling, without actually saying it. They were hoping that this new terminology would scare people less than “contraction”. And they were right. Many of those naively and prematurely jumping on the increasingly fashionable bandwagon of degrowth don’t even realise what contraction demands of us. They are claiming they can shrink this civilisation with the same confidence that the renewable energy industrial complex claimed many decades ago that it could shrink emissions. Hmmm. Not so fast.
Yes, contraction is indeed where we should be heading. But it will never happen if we put our trust into the usual suspects: investors, businessmen, and politicians. But most of all, if we assume that degrowth will be delivered by the current society, institutions, and psychonomic appparatus. It will take, if ever attainable, much more than that. It will take a new human race, with new values. Power and capital are overwhelmingly and disproportionately concentrated among those who insist that the Earth is greening, the planet is cooling, and population is decreasing – precisely because these people have every bit of personal gain to draw from the planet’s destruction. As long as this continues to be the case, Earth is on course to become a wasteland with 100% accuracy.
Fearlessly Embracing Contraction
You will notice one common attribute across the main survival strategies of civilisations: they were all growth-based, which is of course why they would not be applicable today as part of an economic contraction plan. We cannot grow ourselves out of problems, when the problem itself is growth. What goes up must come down. Growth leads to collapse. As tragic and unlikely as civilizational collapse may sound, it has happened before to every single human civilization. It is the most natural, predictable and most probable outcome for an exponentially overgrown economic system, simply being brought back down to size by its own physics.
But scaling back our presence on the planet is an action contrary to everything our civilization has stood for, during the entirety of our history. Our skills, our intuition, our brain, are all geared towards “building” themselves out of problems: our knee-jerk reaction has always been the same: inventing, constructing, innovating technologies. This highlights the impossible conundrum we find ourselves in: how do we contract without “making stuff”? How can we learn to take a step back from time to time?
The answer would seem obvious, but somehow the message is not getting through to the right people. Many are still thinking of degrowth in “growth” terms, because they simply cannot process the concept of doing less. It is a taboo in our work-obsessed, growth obsessed-psychonomy. It is counter-intuitive not only to the mainstream business paradigm, but to our entire civilisation as we have come to know it since its beginnings. Denial of what real degrowth means is rife, pointing to challenges that have much less to do with our current economic system, and much more to do with our mindset. The concept of contraction simply does not seem to compute for most people. Hint: it is not meant to. We are not balancing books here, we are saving the planet. Contraction may not have immediate benefits to humans in terms of GDP or making the tycoons richer. It has benefits to the entire planet however, and its 8 billion species, which includes humans. Economic contraction is the biggest investment humanity can make right now. It dwarfs any technological development or invention, because it safeguards the very existence of all of the above.
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