I keep thinking about the fact that we live in a finite space, a closed system, a sealed shipping container that floats through space. I keep thinking that the notion that we can slurp up resources and spew out waste forever in such a system is a ludicrous notion, that we can grow a consumer based economy forever without reaching some kind of calamitous edge when seven billion of us are working on the doomed project all at the same time.
Does it make sense that such a system will work forever without consequences?
For quite some time I’ve been interested in economic theories that understand those limitations and propose new notions of progress, notions that call for a radical redesign of the “robber baron” capitalist economy that has swallowed our sense of a democratic society and put in its place what I have called for some timed now the “economocracy.”
I would offer that many Americans haven’t noticed that our society is based on what we want rather than what we need. We need a clean landscape and education but we don’t “want” to pay for that. We need a healthy food supply, one that doesn’t kill us as we farm it and eat it but we don’t “want” to pay for that. I could go on and on.
I recently read a book called “The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System” by a fellow named Jerry Mander. Most folks of the New Conservative Neanderthal Party (NCNP) persuasion, formerly known as the Republicans, would likely set off the socialist siren and warn the women and children to stay indoors, away from such radical thinking.
All I can say is that it will take radical thinking to steer us away from a system that has the ability to create great wealth for a small minority of the population while leaving behind a great social and environmental mess.
Mander points out that while we may have created the richest society on the planet we also haved the distinction of being at the top of the list for rates of divorce, adult and childhood obesity, incarceration, murders, rape, armed robbery and wealth inequality. There is something keenly out of whack when we can claim such distinctions as great wealth and great social disfunction as cause and effect for a workable system.
I’m still convinced that we haven’t had a good old revolt, a rising up of the masses, simply because we’ve become so pacified by having the flotsam of a consumer society at our beck and call at WalMart prices. We’re hooked, nay addicted, to a wide array of happy stuff. We can stare at our wide screen TVs and gobble down synthetic foods until we’re blue in the face and wait for the next offerings of iPhones and whatchamacallits and thingamabobs. We have been acclimated to being loyal consumers in a wasteful economy without noticing that we show the classic signs of addiction. And like addicts, we don’t see the effects of our decisions in the long run.
Cows being led to pasture rarely start the barnyard revolt.
Mander simply states that the present economic system is based on the premise of limitless growth on a planet of ultimately limited resources. Globalization and the concentration of capital, along with the endless growth mentality, have combined to create a system of governance in which democracy has been held hostage by private interests; where militarism and war are viewed as mature economic strategy; and exploitation of the intellectual and natural commons has wreaked serious harm on the planet’s life support systems.
“It is the rankest absurdity to advance human-created economic systems that do not acknowledge the carrying capacities of the planet. Growth beyond carrying capacity is suicide and ecocide,” Mander says.
He proposes abandoning the core narrative of the society, the narrative of progress, one where progress defines human existence as a single great upward trajectory “from the caves to the stars, and insists that the present is better than the past and that the future will inevitable be better still, and that capitalism is the instrument for its achievement.”
Mander isn’t simply a naysayer. He cites proven and reliable economic strategies such as work-owned cooperatives, regional and steady state economies, the trend for greater localism, the continued private ownership of small, local businesses, autonomy for local economies, resilient economic planning and the effort to “redefine what we mean by prosperity, growth, and economic and social wellbeing.”

Forrest Johnson has been writing for over 20 years and was editor of the Lake County Chronicle in Two Harbors.