The Biggest Tariff of Them All

In my book In the Grip of Necrocapitalism I introduce the concept of conflict as a narrative for civilisation.  Throughout human history we have viewed the world as a series of conflicts rather than mutually beneficial collaborations between humans and other species:  an unprovoked conflict with nature, an unprovoked conflict with other humans, and a self-destructive conflict with ourselves as we built a technological society which failed to serve us and now only serves necrocapital: a soon-to-be sentient incarnation of profit.

The Narrative of Conflict is now entering End Game stage.  As 8.2 billion humans fight over resources, things are about to go nuclear just at the point where we should be cooperating to share what is left, reduce our impact, reduce our population, and reduce extreme behaviours which bring on a reverberating chain of more extreme behaviours.  The world is well on its way towards a World War unless we challenge the narrative of conflict at its roots and start embracing completely new values: cooperation is better than competition, less is more, and degrowth is the only way to avoid the overshoot, civilisational and ecological collapse which are speeding ahead full steam.  Most of all, a global economic contraction is the only way to reduce competition for resources, and further conflict.  Just being realistic here, albeit arguably utopian.

The global tariff wars have begun, but they are only a repercussion of the tariffs which nature has imposed on humans: every vanishing resource is becoming more costly to extract because of what we have done to this planet, and this in itself is a tariff that we all pay.  Civilisational overshoot itself is the biggest tariff measure at play here: unlike the Ponzi human economic systems, the natural economy of this planet has its upper thresholds.  Once these are exceeded, everything becomes more costly.  The tariff being imposed on humans by this planet is otherwise called “physical limits”, and nothing can be done to overcome it.  A species which continues to ignore the physics of its environment and the concept of limits itself, is guaranteed a sudden, tragic, and well-deserved end.

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

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