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When greed and growth kills
The capitalistic system only has two modes of operation, either expanding or collapsing. That's why people are so obsessed with growth, because it stabilises the system. Capitalism is premised on the logic of never ending growth: debts are made on the basis that they can be repaid with future income, and profits are invested to gain future profits. It's the only super-exponentially expansionary socioeconomic system in the history of humanity. And its only made possible by consuming and depleting finite fossil fuels. But it's now coming to an end.
The absolutely religious idea that a nation must grow its economy by 2-3% and population each year only emerged over the last 100 years. The idea of social progress only came about because people attacked peoples spirituality and wanted to replace it with materialistic values and short-termism, viewing the world as a machine, nature to be dominated, and people of as slaves to the system. Taking away everything of real value to people meant it had to be replaced by something else, and that became economic structures, commodification of life. Instead of people's well being and survival focus shifted to financial flows.
Now we pray to the measure called GDP because we have no higher purpose than to be debt slaves until we die. A tragic fate that people strangely cling onto no matter what the costs. We don't even blink when 70% of insects gets annihilated, I mean we all have to make money so whatever….right? No, not if you want to be able to eat in the future. Fishing out the oceans, filling them with plastics, and eroding half of the Biospheres topsoil and people say we should not question material growth!?
The idea of perpetual expansion has taken over our language and infiltrated our subconscious, talking about “green growth”, “personal growth”, “smarter growth” etc. These oxymorons shows how desperate we are to continue lying to ourselves that “everything is fine” and we “only have to make small adjustments” to our way of life.
Under crude capitalism, stagnation leads to exploding debt, followed by a crisis and austerity for the people while the rich escape safely. And thats what will happen again and again as the world economy gradually contracts until it breaks abruptly and people really start to suffer. And then when you are dirt poor and could have really used a healthy piece of land with access to freshwater to grow food on and insects to pollinate those crops there are none, because you already destroyed them, and so you have to fight for the last remaining resources left to survive.
That's whats happening in Yemen right now, where millions of people are starving, because they are being bombed to pieces, there is no access to energy or water and people cant afford food. Of Yemen's population of 30 million, 17 million are in desperate need of food aid, and seven million Yemenis are at risk of famine, many children already starving, which the UN has warned would be the worst the world has seen for 100 years.
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