The foundational myth of modernity is that infinite economic growth can be sustained on finite energy. This isn’t science—it’s faith in a technological miracle, a sacred narrative that defies physical reality.
Nowhere is that disconnect clearer than in projections like those from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which forecasts a 54% increase in GDP by 2050 while total energy consumption declines by 7% (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Real U.S. GDP is expected to increase 54% by 2050. Energy consumption will decrease 7%. Source: EIA & Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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Modern economies aren’t just growth-oriented—they’re growth-dependent. Without growth, the system doesn’t bend; it breaks. Yet the progress narrative runs so deep that even our brightest minds remain under its spell.
The drive for perpetual expansion has ancient roots. It didn’t begin with capitalism, fossil fuels or free markets, but with a much older way of organizing societies toward collective control. Lewis Mumford argued that modern civilization wasn’t born with the Enlightenment, but with the fusion of religion, science, conquest, and power in early Egypt and Mesopotamia. These civilizations pioneered what he called the “megamachine”.
Figure 2. Lewis Mumford’s megamachine. A vast, hierarchical apparatus designed to organize people, tools, and knowledge toward centralized, mechanistic goals.
Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc. Click on the image to enlarge.
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These early civilizations weren’t bound together by tools alone—they ran on belief. Rulers claimed divine status, their authority sanctified by the rhythms of the cosmos which were mysteries to the masses but not to the royal mathematicians. The sun and stars offered a model of order—fixed, hierarchical, eternal—which became the basis for political control.
Human labor was forced into massive, disciplined systems, with people reduced to interchangeable parts to build pyramids and monumental cities. It was outwardly about religion, but the real aim was power projection and domination. The pyramid wasn’t just a tomb—it was the blueprint for a mechanized society.
The megamachine didn’t vanish with the pharaohs. As civilizations rose and fell, the core pattern endured: organize people, legitimize power through a progress narrative, and direct collective effort toward ever-larger ambitions.
Today, it’s become what Nate Hagens calls the “superorganism”—a self-organizing, energy-maximizing system that channels human behavior toward growth without conscious direction. It’s not just that we want growth. We’re wired into a system that demands it.
Figure 3. The superorganism is Nate Hagens’ model of a global web of humans, machines, institutions, and systems acting as one. It’s not conscious, but it behaves as if it is. Source: ISEOF and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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In the West, the superorganism took hold as early as the 10th century when Europe began expanding. Vikings founded settlements as far west as Newfoundland around 1000 AD, and the first Crusade begin about 100 years later. The magnetic compass and gunpowder from China arrived by the 13th century, setting the stage for global empire. The Portuguese exploration of Africa under Prince Henry the Navigator in the mid-1400s led to slave trading before Columbus ever sailed to the Americas.
During the High Middle Ages, Europe made significant advances in navigation, agriculture, urban growth, and technology—much of it driven by monastic discipline and feudal expansion. The Enlightenment caricature of the Middle Ages as a time of darkness and ignorance overlooked how deeply modern Europe’s path was rooted in the innovations and frontier-building of this era.
The discovery of the New World in 1492 was the catalytic event that launched the modern global order. The discovery and colonization of the Americas gave Europe access to vast new supplies of land, labor, and resources. Silver, sugar, slaves, and speculative credit powered an unprecedented expansion of wealth and centralized power.
Figure 4. The discovery and colonization of the Americas gave Europe access to vast new supplies of land, labor, and resources. Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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Europe’s geographic expansion was driven by ambition, greed, and the desire to escape old constraints. It was the AI of the 16th century.
“From the beginning, this subjective faith in a New World that would transcend all past human achievements, took hold of the most sober minds.”
— Lewis Mumford
The parallel current of scientific exploration investigated a different kind of power by deciphering the heavens and natural laws. It sought mastery through abstraction: to map the stars, measure time, and reduce nature to predictable formulas.
Most narratives about the present begin with the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th to early 19th century, as if history before steam and steel were merely a prelude. But the first half of the 16th century was just as transformative. In 1543, Copernicus displaced the Earth—and with it, humanity—from the center of the cosmos. That same year, Vesalius dissected centuries of dogma by revealing the body not as a vessel of divine mystery but as an anatomical machine. In 1545, Cardano’s Ars Magna laid the foundation for describing the world in terms of algebraic structure and mechanical law. And in 1546, Fracastoro proposed that disease spread through invisible particles—centuries ahead of germ theory.
Together, these breakthroughs didn’t just expand knowledge—they shifted the foundations of meaning. The world, once animated by spirit and governed by divine order, became a system to decode, measure, and control. The West crossed a civilizational threshold—from enduring within natural limits to seeking their systemic transcendence. In this framework, salvation wasn’t spiritual or moral—it was technical.
Science and the drive to conquer new lands fused into a single civilizational mission: to replace nature’s wild abundance with systems of control, precision, and extraction. Western expansion wasn’t just about reaching new places or gaining knowledge—it was about reshaping the world according to human—not divine—will.
Our modern predicament didn’t begin when we noticed the climate shifting or energy becoming more expensive. It began much earlier—with the ancient impulse to dominate nature, to centralize power, and to structure society around unending extraction. This isn’t a modern glitch but a progressive condition, at least five millennia in the making. It took on its distinctly Western form about a thousand years ago.
As thoughtful people wrestle with the delusion that infinite economic growth can continue on a finite planet—or that AI will somehow deliver us from the consequences of our own designs—it’s worth asking whether this mindset is not simply an error, but an adaptation. Perhaps it’s evolutionary—baked into the psyche long ago. The belief that technology can fix the damage done by previous technologies is not just misguided. It’s a faith. And one that must be examined with more than technical cleverness—it requires ruthless honesty.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Art Berman is Director of Labyrinth Consulting Services, Sugar Land, Texas, and a world-renowned energy consultant with expertise based on over 40 years of experience working as a petroleum geologist. Visit his website, Shattering Energy Myths: One Fact at a Time, and learn more about Art here.
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