ISSUE #115: On our road to destruction, there is only one hope.
Whenever you highlight how capitalism is pulverizing the very ecosystem we depend upon for survival, the likelihood of capitalism stans filling your comment section with “you don’t understand economics bruh” kind of nonsense is as high as the falling down of a gravity-denier walking toward a cliff edge.
Me: Our ecosystem is dying because capitalism makes it profitable to exploit the nature.
Capitalism stan: You don’t understand economics. Read Mises.
Do you see how silly it sounds? Because you don’t have to be a master of economics to know that our biosphere is being killed by the profit motive capitalism enables.
You don’t have to “read Mises” to know that our oceans are being choked to death.
You don’t have to “read Mises” to know that the soil is losing its fertility at a rapid pace.
You don’t have to “read Mises” to know that extreme weather scenarios are increasingly becoming a norm.
Without any doubt, capitalism is a great way of attaining economic growth. China’s economy exploded after it introduced some elements of capitalism. Capitalism is great at making more stuff and generating breath-taking amount of wealth. If the success of a system was only measured by the percentage it can grow its economy with, then sure as hell, capitalism is the way to go, but that’s a biased form of measurement designed by capitalists to serve capitalism.
To fairly measure the success of a system, you have to consider quality of life, overall happiness, health, effect on environment, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and various other metrics. Once you do this, you come to the realization that the US, which is the biggest economy in the world, is a spectacular failure.
Capitalism can never provide an effective solution to the environmental catastrophe we’re headed towards. That’s why the capitalist worldview is built around the ignorance of the climate crisis. If you are a capitalist and somehow come to recognize the climate change as real, believing that capitalism can provide a solution to the mess we have created is like believing consuming drugs is going to take away all your life’s problems. Both are illusions designed to prevent the shattering of respective worldviews. Just like drugs are inherently not a source of happiness but depression, capitalism is inherently not a source of environmental protection but destruction.
Capitalists today argue, if we make it too hard for them to simply ignore/deny the climate crisis, that it’s not caused by capitalism but corporatism or crony capitalism or any other word-salad they like to use. Changing definition is every capitalist’s last resort to defend the exploitative nature of capitalism, because deep down they know that as long as human behavior is driven by profit, which is what capitalism is about, ecocide will continue.
THE HOPE:
What we need to have to avoid the climate collapse is not a billionaire promising to take us to Mars or manufacturing electric vehicles which do not pollute the environment, supposedly, of course.
What we need is a complete change in the ways we organize our society. Our current way of organizing values profit more than anything else, which leads to corporations making more of things, which leads to the constant advertisements by the corporations to convince people that they need this brand new product, which leads to more consumption, which leads to the economic growth capitalism depends upon for survival, which leads to the mess we are in.
Since the dawn of civilization, we have valued making things, inventing things, creating new stuff, and never recognized the importance and value of NOT creating, inventing, or making things.
Creating a new kind of machine which would make humans fly will bring you the money and fame everyone in today’s society run towards, while inventing a way to suck in all the pollution that the new machine would create won’t. Coming out with a way to kill everyone on this planet will put your name in the history books, while choosing to just sit on that invention won’t. Clearing forests will make you a billionaire, while leaving the tree alone for future generations won’t. Digging out the fossil fuels will make you the smartest person of your time, while choosing not to do that won’t.
“No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” - Justin Trudeau, the Canadian liberal PM.
It might also explain why the hunter-gatherers were predominantly egalitarian, and why the invention of agriculture made women second-class citizens. Because women were not able to do the fieldwork or conquer the land from other tribes, they had little or no say at all in the ways our societies could be organized. Traditionally, their main jobs have been clearing the house, resolving conflicts, taking care of the family; the things that we don’t value with money or esteem.
Thousands of years of conditioning has made us believe that making things is more valuable than the unmaking of things. That’s why the work women traditionally did - cleaning the house, building community, etc. - was and has been considered less important than traditional men’s jobs in factories or on the field, which mainly involve the making of things.
Similarly, whenever a conversation about climate change starts, most of us think we need to invent our way out of this.
“We have to replace the oil-powered vehicles with electric vehicles,” says everybody, and “We have to incentivize people to stay home, commute less, or use public transport when commute is necessary,” says nobody, because the latter involves NOT making of things and is unprofitable.
But the latter kind of thinking is what we need now. We have to start valuing the unmaking of things, consuming less, cleaning up the mess, instead of making new things, and creating the mess. Corporations that are willing to pollute the planet are worldwide famous and receive billions of dollars in subsidies each year, while anyone who thinks of cleaning the planet gets no recognition or incentive at all.
As a result, most of us feel hopeless and think that nothing can be done to steer humanity away from the climate crisis we’re racing towards, but the thing is we don’t have to. There are solutions to come out of this mess, but those solutions don’t involve making someone rich, hence, they are ignored.
Solutions are as simple as the degrowth of economies, not trying to look for infinite growth on a finite planet, producing less, making less, consuming less, but for that to happen, capitalism must be abandoned first because it offers no incentive to do such.
So, stop acting like Elon Musk is going to save the planet. He is just a capitalist who benefits tremendously from the current system by selling his cars in the name of “environmental protection.” Focus on the real and effective solutions.
Sure, capitalism has no competition when it comes to creating abundance, and I don’t think there could be any other possible solution to the climate problem if it could be managed by making more of things, but the problem is that making more and consuming more has got us to point where our planet has become a giant garbage bin spinning around an even giant energy ball in an even giant universe. You can’t keep beating the “capitalism creates abundance” drums while conveniently ignoring the fact that that abundance is killing our biosphere and making it uninhabitable. There’s nothing virtuous about that kind of abundance.
There’s only one way out of the road to destruction we’re on, and we are fast approaching that way out. Instead of denying the existential threat humanity is facing, let’s learn to say no to the very system that enabled it, and say yes to the well-being of our planet and it future generations before we bypass the only way out.
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