Fearlessly Embracing the Contraction Taboo

Whether it was war, colonialism, slavery, or technology, this civilisation has learned to survive exclusively through unsustainable strategies of growth.  But we cannot grow ourselves out of our problems anymore when the problem itself has become growth.  What goes up must come down and growth has always led to collapse, as much as we prefer to forget it.  Collapse is the most natural, predictable and probable outcome for an exponentially overgrown system that is eventually brought back down to size by its own physics.  Rather than completely collapse, it is always better to contract.

But scaling ourselves back goes against everything our civilization stands for.  Our skills, our intuition, our brain, have all evolved towards “building” and “growing” themselves out of problems.  Our knee-jerk reaction has always been the same:  invent, construct, innovate.  We find ourselves in an existential, but equally, a cognitive conundrum: how the hell do we contract without “making stuff”? 

By simply learning to take a step back.  The answer would seem obvious, but the message is not getting through.  Even the term “degrowth” is an oxymoron, invented by some economist that was too afraid to utter the word “contract”.  Even many of those who have supposedly embraced degrowth can only process the concept in “growth” terms.  Contraction, inaction and idleness continue to be massive taboos in our work-obsessed psychonomy.  They are counter-intuitive not only to the mainstream business paradigm, but to our culture. 

The concept of contraction simply does not compute for most people as the benefits of contraction, although huge and lifesaving, are largely intangible in conventional, capitalist terms.  Contraction will decimate GDP but make humans happier.  Isn’t happiness what we always wanted? We are not balancing books here.  We are saving the planet so we can save ourselves.  Economic contraction is the biggest non-investment humanity could ever make.  It dwarfs any previous technology or innovation, exactly because it safeguards the very existence of everything we have come to know as Earth.  

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

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