With any economy, the faster you grow and expand, the sooner you die, just like an obesity patient. There is, however, one economy in the world who has got it right. It neither grows nor dies, and actually manages to stay the same, or at least it did, until recently. It is the oldest economy that exists, having been around for billions of years before humans arrived: the economy of Earth. The real economy of this planet is its forests and oceans. Its currency is water, food, oxygen, sunlight. Its stock market is the ecosystems and climate systems which balance the allocation of these resources, and its stakeholders are the 10 million species that live here. They all contribute to this economy, each of them in their own unique way.
Humans are under the impression that they “invented” the concept of an economy. What they have invented is a series of extractive Ponzi scheme systems which parasitize the natural resource economy of the planet. On the outside human economies may look vibrant, diversified, and healthy, and they deceptively behave as balanced systems. There are three criteria, however, which they fail to meet, and which are the giveaways that, as a matter of fact, they are parasites.
The first giveaway is that their balance sheet is constantly negative. Human economies are parasites that die once they’ve killed their host, because their very existence is wholly dependent on outside resources from Nature. They depend on Nature’s rains and rivers to water their crops and produce potable water and energy. They depend on Nature’s energy, stored as fats, carbohydrates and protein, to survive. Even oil is chemical energy that was carefully captured by billions of plants through photosynthesis and stored in the ground. Humans never generate Earth currency. They steal it.
Human economies have always run a negative balance: their debt towards nature exceeds their GDP by several hundred multiples, and this gap has continued to widen through recorded history. All human economic systems are fundamentally unhealthy, much like a gluttonous pre-diabetic patient unable to control themselves. Their driving force is greed, and this is what puts them at risk for a variety of ailments. They will easily falter, succumbing to inflation, deflation, and all sorts of malaises. They often have to cut their own limbs off, go to war or endure starvation, issues which are very rare in the only real, sustainable economy of the planet: Nature.
Humanity’s parasitic economies always run back to the CBE (Central Bank of Earth) for a bailout: a new rainforest to destroy, a new river to reroute for human consumption, and so on. They always run back to the only healthy economy that can fund them. Unlike the dysfunctional human economy, the real economy of this planet until very recently had never suffered from inflation, deflation or economic boom and bust cycles. With the exception of rare extinction events, the CBE has always boasted a solid, steady performance and a stable balance sheet. The value of the trees, the food, the oxygen stayed pretty much the same for millions of years: priceless, yet renewable. It was an immortal economy built to last until the end of time, founded on the concept of sharing and recycling, as opposed to greed and destruction.
In the CBE there are no tellers, no bankers and no cash machines, because they are simply not needed. Everyone is expected to take only what they need and bring back what they haven’t used. Yet human economies have all made a run on the CBE, taking out personal loans way beyond their means. Humanity is always that one, super-obese customer you see in an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant: they sit by themselves, getting up every ten minutes only to refill their plate. They continue to eat without measure, without any sense of when or how to stop.
The second criterion human economies fail to meet is the concept of output. They don’t actually produce anything for Earth’s economy. Sure, they produce lots of consumer products for humans, but this is only one of the 10 million species on the planet. Human economies are parasites because they give nothing back to the host they have infected. All other 10 million species on this planet make contributions to the CBE, and therefore to humans, and take loans from it as and when they need to. The human species is of absolutely no use to Earth and its billions of other inhabitants, because it offers literally nothing to the ecosystem anymore. Any species operating this way is normally expected to go extinct fairly quickly, as the dynamics of the ecosystem always protect keystone species and eliminate freeloaders. The reason we have not gone extinct yet is that we are still able to extract resources, even from a decimated planet. As this extraction phase comes to an end, we will find ourselves completely cut off and unable to re-integrate into the ecosystem even if we wanted to. We have made ourselves unwanted by this ecosystem, and this makes us far more vulnerable to extinction than we may initially assume.
Devoid of sound business principles, human economies are based exclusively on theft, exploitation and the permanent depletion of resources. Despite contributing to a net negative “output” within the bio-economy of the planet, businessmen are always quick to brag about what they have “produced” or “achieved”, as if it was a difficult feat. It is in fact the easiest feat for any business, economic system or individual to become successful by stealing from Earth: all business set up by humans is nothing but an organized operation of “smash and grab” ecological fraud, employing colonialism, slavery and exploitation even within our own species – yet we insist on describing this theft operation as “the economy”, hailing its performance as an incredible success story which “only humans could have achieved”.
Indeed. If Earth’s age was compressed into a single year, modern humans don’t arrive until approximately 11:36 pm on December 31st. Only a terrorist can do so much damage, in such little time.
The Central Bank of Earth, the sole big lender propping up the bogus human economy, has already declared bankruptcy hundreds of years ago while servicing the massive debt humanity accumulated. The current collapse is nothing but a long overdue default against this debt. The CBE will be run down to the ground, down to the bricks and mortars of its foundations until there is nothing left, because nothing and no one can bail it out. Its assets cannot be “leveraged” or “quantitatively eased”, because these are economic instruments only human mobsters know how to use. This bank will continue to be depleted, as long as the human economy follows the main principles of capitalism: Exploit. Destroy. Leverage. Accelerate. Monetize. Grow. Inflate. Today’s predominant global business model can be summed up in nine words: fuck up the Earth, exploit the people, make money. As long as this planet continues to be run as a for-profit business than a self-regulating, all-inclusive socialist commune of 10 million species, everything on Earth will end up in a car boot sale.
The third reason why human economies are not economies is that they worship death, in the literal sense of the word. We live in a death cult. For capitalism to function everything must die and end up in a dumpster, just so that demand can continue and factories can keep churning out useless products. This civilization has expanded by converting almost everything into a single-use commodity with a finite expiration date. Only if products and life-forms become “consumables” can the production machine maintain itself. As long as the glass remains half-full, we will fail to recognize that this civilization has rested its entire existence upon its frightening ability to exhaust, rather than to sustain.
Money has been central to the destruction and devaluation of the CBE’s assets and equities. Earth’s assets are systematically turned into “products”, price tagged and placed on supermarket shelves. Their assigned numerical price is of course nowhere close to their real value, which goes beyond the concept of money and is eternal: the molecules of these so-called “consumable products” are meant to go on, to be re-incarnated into other useful things into eternity, literally until the end of time. This of course is not taken into consideration when pricing them. In the human economy everything is de-valued and placed on the shelf to wait for its death as its expiration date approaches. Earth has already become one big supermarket and all of us are working at the cash register until the fire sale is over, and this civilization calls it a day. Everything now has death programmed into it, and we are all participants who have been forced into this death cult. We are made to believe that products, once “consumed”, become worthless and need to be replaced by new products. The old products simply vanish into a black hole we call “waste”, where everything has zero value in the capitalist marketplace. Humans think they have invented the concept of an economy, when they have in fact invented a death cult that worships waste, monetizes worthless things, while devaluing anything that was actually worth something.
Of course, an expiration date-based economy can only be short-lived. If you treat natural resources and people as consumables, it follows naturally that one day they will be exhausted. If you treat the world as trash, then trash is what it will become. Ever since Earth was hijacked by business, all life forms, including humans, have reached their lowest value on record: we have become single-use commodities, just like the products we buy. Everything is bought, sold, used and then made extinct in anticipation of Earth’s final, closing-down sale.
But nothing was ever meant to be “consumed” on Earth. Everything is eventually recycled, including civilizations. If every time we used the word “consume” in a sentence we instead replaced it with “borrow”, which is more accurate, we would perhaps realize the massive debt towards Earth we have amassed, and the predicament we are in. Go on, try it.
All institutions within our civilization were built with the aim of supporting, organizing and streamlining this death cult of accelerated growth and natural exhaustion. The unsustainable nature of these institutions means that they will undoubtedly collapse, taking civilization down with them. This is a natural process that can only be halted through the radical and complete redesign of these institutions and the societies that operate them. The entirety of humanity has already become one big business, and each of us is, willingly or not, part of this ever-growing, destructive, polluting, utterly pointless corporation. Our civilization has become a monster that destroys our environment and uses each and every one of us individually to achieve this goal.
As a result, almost all humans on planet Earth have a vested interest in seeing this planet destroyed: whether to keep their jobs or maintain their lifestyle, they are hostages to a system of natural destruction they can simply never unshackle themselves from. This profit-driven civilization renders us consciously unconscious to its self-destructive destiny: we diligently go through the motions of a mechanical existence where we may have an abundance of purpose, but very little meaning.
But the accounting department has no clue how to run things. It is staffed by a bunch of mafia mobsters. In fact, the human economy is a Ponzi scheme holding the entirety of Earth’s economy hostage, making every single human participant a stakeholder who has everything to lose if it all goes south. These stakeholders then go on to devise the religions, lies and myths they need to keep telling themselves and everybody else, in order to keep the Ponzi scheme going.
As with all Ponzi schemes, exponential growth is always followed by exponential collapse. The human garbage party will soon be over, ending in a spectacular plastic bonfire.
“Sorry Humans, my records show that there are no funds left in your account” – Central Bank of Earth
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Tsakraklides is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist, and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter, @99blackbaloons, and enjoy his books, A New Earth: The Apocalypse Locus, The Unhappiness Machine and Other Stories about Systemic Collapse,
Beyond The Petri Dish: Human Consciousness in the Time of Collapse, Apathy, and Algorithms, and others.
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