Revolt of the Consumatrons: Resisting Economic Growth

By now, it is becoming clear that capitalism is a death trap for both civilisation and the planet hosting it.  Yet most of us continue to go through the motions of “work, shop, repeat”, feeling like we have no choice but to pretend that “normal life as we know it” can somehow continue.  We struggle to admit the fact that our life, and this entire civilisation, have actually been anything else but “normal”, for as long as time itself has existed.  

What we consider a “normal life” is always nothing but a snapshot in time of our generation. Humanity has never stood still, constantly moving from one “normal” to the next for thousands of years, in the most “abnormally” exponential fashion.  If ever there was something constant in this journey, it is our lonely, treacherous walk into the wet, cold, night. We created “new normals” as we went along fumbling in the dark, sometimes risking everything, and losing everything, just so that we can have a change of scenery.  The level of risk-taking that this species has taken throughout its history is akin to that of a stock-broker:  it’s double or nothing.  If you get scared, you lose. Today, we are poised to lose everything; the actual planet.

Our remarkable journey through time has been sustained through extinction horrors and crimes most of us dread to fully come to terms with, as they assault our “normality”:  putting gas in the car, shopping for clothes, eating meat, adding more kids to a planet infested by humans.  We label those who question our “normality” as anti-human and depressed.  They are the doomers.  The more we strive to maintain a safe mental distance from the horrors and crimes responsible for our beloved “normality”, the more the doomers show up in our face, reminding us we are all living in a horror show.  

If only doom and gloom was an actual mental disease, but it isn’t.  The non-doomers are the mentally sick ones in this case.  The most difficult truth they have yet to reconcile themselves with is that all the horrors of today’s civilisation come down to one sick, perverted dogma: economic growth, of all shapes and sizes. 

Like all Ponzi schemes, capitalism depends on boom-and-bust economics: enlisting vulnerable people and stolen resources into an economic machine which reaps quick profits, then makes a run for it every time it all collapses.  It has worked a charm each time, but not this time.  After countless such collapses throughout our history, we are now in the first ever systemic, global collapse.  This one destroys the gear box.  Recovery back to “normal” is futile, simply because this time there is nowhere left for this civilisation to run to.  There won’t be another boom after this bust.  It’s just vignettes of different variations of a horror show as reality finally catches up with “normality”.

As corporations, politicians and the media increasingly put on their best “don’t look up” faces, it is easy for ordinary citizens to constantly double-check themselves and question their own spontaneous concerns.  “Am I crazy?  Am I missing something?  Maybe it’s all going to be ok.  Maybe I’m just panicking.  The world is still running after all, right?”. 

But the world is not running.  It is being run to the ground.  It is a corpse by now, being decorated, embalmed, disinfected and deodorized every few hours even as it enters its advanced stage of decomposition.  We are all living in this corpse of a world, most of us desperate to believe the lies this civilisation tells itself so that it can keep calm and overshoot.

It’s funny, but the more I speak with ordinary people the more I am pleasantly surprised to see the occasional brain waking up.  Ordinary people who are struggling through this interconnected polycrisis of inflation, inundation, desertification and the coming starvation, are much more observant of the climate crisis and daily atrocities of the system compared to the Don’t Look Up campaign marketing masters.  Those who still have good jobs and a good standard of living in this economy are the ones most likely to be completely oblivious to what we are going through, despite their so called “education”, which these days takes more of a form of indoctrination into the mantras of a cognitively bankrupt economic necrosystem.  These high-functioning professional zombies have never stopped smoking the entertainment narcotics of the necrosystem’s consumaverse. 

It comes as no surprise therefore that I’ve had more intelligent conversations about the climate crisis and global collapse with farmers and taxi drivers, than with delusional London School of Economics “scholars”.  This in itself should be testament to a system which is spectacularly collapsing.  It is proof of how global capital has pervaded and zombified all higher institutions of this civilisation: politics, media, academia, and the so-called intellectual figures and experts kindly leading this civilisation in an orderly fashion, towards the queues next to the “jump here” signs at the end of the cliff.  These intellectual leaders, of course, have been carefully selected by the necrosystem to begin with, tasked with the unbecoming role of being the final voices this civilisation gets to utter, to be blasted through its robotic media channels as it prepares to sign off for good.  Into the dark, wet, night.

But the crash landing into reality can be fatal for those falling from the highest levels of the pyramid.  They can eat their words, but they are too big to avoid choking.  The base of the Ponzi scheme is angry and hungry, and it will look to recoup its losses.  Will it end up creating its own Ponzi scheme?  Or will it realise that we need a system change?  It’s not enough to tax the rich if they are still operating an ecocidal sweatshop.  We can’t continue to grow our economy and population in a world already buckling under the weight of humanity.  We need to shut down huge parts of the global economy to manage emissions, overshoot, and slow down the extinction spiral.  

I know, it sounds extreme. But your children won’t survive this.  They will spend their short lives browsing through archived photos and videos of what forests used to look like, and the foods their parents used to be able to afford.  It is time to start discussing ways to crash, rather than ways to grow.  It is time to begin stepping down from the top of this Ponzi pyramid, before we become buried under the rubble.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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