A few years back, Klaus Schwab, WEF’s head honcho, put it bluntly that in the near future, i.e., by 2030, “you will own nothing and be happy.”
This was seen at the time either as a media nuke, or an incendiary artifact meant to foster conversation around the nature of capitalism, environmental issues, social justice, etc.
Most people came up in arms against it. Some, like Noah Harari, were for it. In any event, it became a polarizing issue, like all issues nowadays, it seems.
What most people didn’t realize was that we are now nearer the timestamp for the implementation of this nefarious and far-reaching goal. And lo and behold, there are some distressing signs the future is bleak indeed.
Case in point
According to a Research fellow from the University of Melbourne by the name of Samuel Alexander, time has come to get off the train of economic growth.
https://theconversation.com/life-in-a-degrowth-economy-and-why-you-might-actually-enjoy-it-32224
According to the elucubrations of this spotless mind, given the “finite state of our planet, the economy can’t grow forever.”
This is a logically valid premise. It is also patently not applicable to our context. You see, nobody ever thought the economy will grow forever and ever, until the end of time. Everybody knows the economy is subject to boom and bust cycles. After all, what goes up must also come down.
But wait, there’s more. The man has other marvelous news for us. According to another AUS based outfit, some people are actually exploring a “steady-state” economy. And this is where the plot thickens.
The steady-state or “global predicament”
The article goes on to explain how the planet used to be devoid of humans, but how it is now “overflowing”. I kid you not, people. This dude actually used the term. He continues to pontificate how, if we keep this up, we will need 1.5 Earths to sustain the existing economy into the future. He also claims “every year this ecological overshoot continues, the foundations of our existence, and that of our species, are undermined.”
Strong words, eh. This man is animated by hyperbole, I tell you. But wait there is more. After a hot strike, he’s ready to give us some cold facts too.
Moving along, he argues that along with the haves, “there are multitudes who are under-consuming, and the humanitarian challenge to eliminate global poverty will increase the burden on ecosystems.” “Population is set to hit 11 billion this century.”
This is arguably unknown. At this time, population growth seems to be slowing down. I am strongly leaning towards a Malthusian outcome whereby we’d hit a demography ceiling well under 11 billion by 2050. Never mind, moving on.
The man also says economic growth is untenable under these conditions. He maintains that growth is governed by environmental constraints, and that we have already reached them. He calls for “rethinking growth.”
He’s saying that Humanity has got to stop growing economically. We must settle on a plateau.
Degrowth
Not content with the spectre of this economic plateau, he postulates a brand of economic paradigm lunacy that would call for the intervention of the people in white robes. In a normal world, that is. However, in this little and dirty finite ecosystem of ours, people like him are encouraged to spread and multiply their unnatural ideas.
As it happens, he suggests that in order for us to reach the plateau “the richest countries must downscale their resource and energy demands.” In other words,
Abandon all hope, ye who enter.
Dante’s Divine Comedy
The man is ominous if anything. He also argues that this sacrifice should be made in the name of and to “allow the poorest billions to attain a dignified level of existence.” Whatever that may mean. Notwithstanding that the poorest billions wouldn’t lose a second gutting you like a fish if their survival was on the line, and you were between them and survival. But that is such a mean thing to say, right. Mean, it may well be, but it is sadly all too true.
But in this Darwinian world of ours, survival of the fittest means just that.
Don’t matter. Moving on.
He concludes that this “realization”, btw I love how he calls his delusion a realization, that this has “given rise to calls for economic degrowth.” Furthermore “to be distinguished from recession, degrowth means a phase of planned and equitable economic contraction in the richest nations.” It’s all in the language, folks.
So, to unpack it all. They are planning to contract the economy of the richest countries in an equitable fashion. Equitable to whom? Who will decide who gets how much?
Apropos this ‘equitable’ planned contraction, I was speaking to an Air France air crew the other day and the man was a mine of surprising news. Mister P. who lives in Denmark but is based in Paris, told me how in Denmark if you want to purchase a vehicle, you must fork out a surcharge equivalent to 300% of its price. The idea was for people to start going green and walk or bike to work instead of polluting our pristine planet. We are talking about normal people with jobs who work for a living, not the rich who do not give a flying fig about paying three times more for their Ferraris.
That is insane, right? But wait, there’s more where that came from. He also told me that a few years back, the Danish government like most governments started to incentivize the marketing of EVs. First, they offered rebates and tax cuts. Nowadays, however, when more and more deluded people are jumping on the Tesla train with reckless abandon, because it’s cool to save the planet, Copenhagen pulled all EVs incentives, and started taxing them just like fossil cars.
The morale: they don’t want you to have a car, folks. And they are going to tax you out of it.
Jocularity aside, these people are preparing something even more nefarious. They will curb our travel enthusiasm by curtailing our freedom of movement. They mean to ground us literally. They say we must stop travelling for the good of the planet. Really now, eh?! That’s your play?
So, billions of people will stop travelling because carbon is bad, but if you have money to offset it, you’re good to go, eh. Motherlovers!
You see, people, you see how it’s only us regular folk who will end up grounded, bound to our lands just like medieval peasants were to their lords’ estates.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/carbon-passports-explainer/index.html
Sought Outcome
“Enough for everyone, forever”
Where have we heard this from before? Ah, I remember. From Papa Marx, why of course.
The man is anything but persistent.
“Degrowth would liberate us from the burden of pursuing material excess. We simply don’t need so much stuff – certainly not if it comes at the cost of planetary health, social justice, and personal well-being. Consumerism is a gross failure of imagination, a debilitating addiction that degrades nature and doesn’t even satisfy the universal human craving for meaning.”
Forget me for saying this bluntly. But there is a gulf, a monstrous gulf of separation between the likes of the Sultan of Brunei with his personal fleet of Gulfstream jets, or Jay Leno with his 50 collectible automobiles, and Madame Tout Le Monde who has a mortgage on a shitty 50-year-old house.
Greed is a Real Problem in Capitalism.
But the solution is not planetary health (what does that mean, is this guy a planet doctor or what?), social justice (i.e., neo-Marxism), and personal well-being (what does that even mean? you subjective mother lover).
If we the People don’t pay close attention to this nefarious trend, and we are lousy at keeping our Focus, We’ll end up trapped in these Poverty Economics.
You see, folks, the Traps of Subjectivity are Real, and they’ve been widely explored by the Bolshevik and Maoist regimes, with all the ill-effects some of us remember still. And the boo boo is the persistent little buggers continue to poke at them.
I hope sincerely that we won’t go back to a time when it was fashionable for all the people to collectively own everything but their underwear and toothbrush.
Both for his sake and ours.
Götterdämmerung 