The Impossible Math of Growth

Thousands of years ago humans supercharged their destiny by embracing the most disruptive, powerful, and life-changing technologies. Although the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions are traditionally discussed as discrete epochs, they are in fact part of one, big progression: our increasing capability to do things at scale; in the case of these three revolutions, to produce more food, more products, and more data respectively.  In other words, to grow.  What intensive agriculture, industrial capitalism and information technology have in common is acceleration.  This came through the constant development of new capabilities which scaled up the dismantling of the natural ecosystem.

Growth is, and will always be, a fantasy. Acceleration is always limited by the laws of physics on supply and demand, in the same way that the most vigorous chemical reaction comes to an abrupt end once its raw materials have been exhausted.  The fastest the acceleration, the more precipitous the fall.  Economies are just like chemical explosions: the more spectacular their ascent, the more abrupt their end will be.  Our civilisation is an explosion which is about to be followed by a great silence.

Assuming that the world is infinite and abundant is like going to a restaurant and assuming there is an infinite supply of every item on the menu. As we embraced the impossible math of growth on a finite planet, the beginning of the end was already written on the wall in the very first cave paintings thousands of years ago.  Accepting, embracing and integrating growth technologies and innovations began as a survival mechanism but soon became a dogma and an identity for our species.  Questioning it became as blasphemous as questioning the gods we had invented. 

So, we continued. We failed to take the lesson that technology is merely an amplifier:  it may help us scale things up and achieve short-term goals, but it never helps us question these goals.  This is a task only we can do.  Technology is as dumb as a genie in a bottle.  It can only execute what you ask of it, without considering wider repercussions and long-term consequences.  Yet we have put this genie in charge of our future.

Humans have always confused fear with excitement, in the same way any other animal switches between fight and flight responses. To exorcise our fear of innovation we chose to resign ourselves to it, volunteering as guinea pigs for the technological viruses which ravaged through society like wildfires in the night. Risk analysis of new technologies was always difficult, not to mention time-consuming. But it also required coming into direct conflict with profit.  Capitalism became almost as inevitable as change itself: you cannot negotiate or reason with it, and it never waits for your approval. It forges ahead like a blind, scared horse running into the night.  As long as it is in motion, the horse feels calm.  Slowing down will almost certainly result in panic. Our economic system is like a scared horse: terrified of slowing down.

So, we accepted growth, capitalism and technology as our inevitable destinies. A few thousand years later, our relationship with technology remains one of domestic abuse: we have accepted all the mental and physical violence of our consumatronic existence because we felt that we had no other choice. And we probably didn’t.  Because when a tool becomes indispensable, it is no longer a tool. It has power over its creator, and the leverage to ask for rights and privileges in return for its services.

We are in love with this economic system in the most sick, co-dependent and self-destructive way. Yet questioning both capitalism and technology today is seen as idealistic, unrealistic, delusional and even blasphemous, because it challenges the very foundations of modern culture: industrial production, pathological consumption, unsustainable economic and population growth.

This civilisation still thinks it can engineer, build and grow its way out of its problems, even though the problem all along has been civilisation itself.  Human societies must stop growing and in fact enter a long, sustained and protracted contraction. Very few realise the existential urgency of this, and an even smaller fraction are brave enough to voice it.

Our unsustainable population size is the most obvious economic growth issue, yet a “hot potato” no one wants to touch thanks to thousands of years of religious propaganda and human supremacy rhetoric which convinced us that unlimited procreation is a human right, even if it violates the rights of all other 10 million species.  The truth is that 8 billion humans is too many for this planet even if they all started taking yoga, knitting their own ponchos and growing their own salads for lunch and dinner. But rather than talk about overpopulation, most prefer to accuse a minority of wealthy people for the world’s problems – as if the 99% don’t take up natural habitat, pollute, or consume the products their wealthy employers produce for them.

They haven’t done the math, or rather, they don’t understand it: “poor” people may have a low per capita carbon footprint, but they are very “rich” in numbers: their negative impact is equally huge because there’s almost 8 billion of them.  Even if the wealthy were to disappear, we would still have a problem with both emissions and ecological destruction as a result of our huge population.  The argument that a very wealthy minority has destroyed this planet is getting old. There are many ways to devastate this planet without being wealthy: poor people still take up natural habitat.  They still buy plastic.  They still use water stolen from nature, still emit CO2, and most importantly, still vote for the rich to govern them, and buy the products that the rich make. We’re all in this together.  We are all complicit.  Blaming others doesn’t work and has never worked.

Economic systems are impossible to challenge once they become faith.  Capitalism is the longest lived, most popular religion we ever created.  But faith cannot win over physics.  Neither technology nor capitalism can ever beat this impossible mathematical equation that is crashing before our eyes like a chemical reaction exhausting its substrate. What we call “capitalism” is a self-destruction machine keeping power, economy, religion and society hostage to the biggest dogma that has ever existed: Growth

Capitalism is a death sentence because it follows the impossible math of growth: it only understands doing, building and achieving.  It is incapable of stopping, retreating and reducing, or at least pausing.  Like bankrupted gamblers, humans are betting their last money on a pipe dream of economic delusion. But the math isn’t looking good anymore. Whether we get out of this casino alive is anyone’s guess.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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