Growth

The behavior of a cancer cell. You cannot grow forever. We are on a finite planet. The assertions against growth as an ongoing objective are known and clear. However, it is easier to sell discussion about the pattern than about the behaviors that drive it. Few want to give up driving their cars or taking their jet vacations. If you live in a suburb, you may not want to move into town. The idea of toil on a farm without petroleum and electrical powered machinery just seems untenable, politically and socially. It's not even on the political map. So, given there is a clear cliff we approach, how do we stop from behaving like we are simply insane?

First of all, the behavior of our age, of course, is the quick move away from making a bigger pie to simply not letting some people get a piece of the pie. It's not like we did not always behave this way, but we had patterns we followed, procedures we sometimes engaged in, morality we payed homage to, which made it look like we were not completely heartless and bloodthirsty barbarians. Our heartlessness was always there at hand. It was always an auxiliary attitude we seemed to have at hand for exigencies. Well, we now are arriving at a daunting set of exigencies, and that heartlessness conveniently allows us to keep denying the cliff is there. Perhaps we can go home and still have a calm dinner with the family. Still sit down and watch TV and shrug it off. We depend on our delusions. We vote for people who tell us the lies we like, and steal for us in ways they can make up excuses for. But the scarcity is still there; getting worse. The delusion is still our devoted friend, but it is requiring more and more energy in those collective self-deceptions and injustices to carry on.

Meanwhile there is an odd set of new corruptions that have arisen that seem associate with loyalty cults whose very social function, along with corrupt recreational distraction, is to cultivate a group that cooperates more efficiently to deny the pie to those outside the group. Perhaps we have, in the past, looked away at such evils because we were too busy getting that pie while the getting was good, only to find now that that group is efficient enough that perhaps our very survival depends on destroying it to get more pie when we are short. We clearly are, many of us who knew or could have done something, morally bankrupt ourselves by not having addressed these crimes before, when we had decided we were too tied up to worry about it.

So when it comes to growth as a problem pattern, it's not like we know there's not a problem. Rather, it is that we are always looking past the problem to individual solutions that make it worse. When we could be humans in a community, we instead make our selves like yeast cells in a bottle of grape juide, and then elect liars to tell us the bottle is fake, and is not really there. The old say, not in our stars, but in ourselves, is already well established as a useless cliche. we are so bound up into our harness of terminal plowing, looking to do anything about it except entertaining ourselves by mixing up more metaphors.

But can we do it then? Perhaps can we simply start listing out things we can do, and discussing these things? Perhaps we will simply be swept up as heritics and nailed to crosses, but mustn't it be done anyway as the only sane steps?

Okay then, well clearly the first thing to do is to address the distractions. In the very first step of making our list, our detractors, those members of the community who are perhaps more desperate, more imperious, more religiously tied to the steps of our unsustainable consumption, consume more. They walk away and do it especially when we bring up these issues of stopping it. They buy bigger pickup trucks. They get pizza instead of buying groceries. They give more money to their skydaddy projects, their remodelings and their paint jobs and take even more elaborate vacations. They build into their lives a pie share denying flow of looking not at the matters at hand which is regimented in its focus and regularity. It sees only that it requires leadership to do what it takes to keep the resources coming to keep the march in play. It creates a mindset which is less and less able to parse information it deems unsavory in its lack of support for the march, and it categorizes anyone seen introspective of evidence not supportive of the march as dangerous enemies. The behavior becomes a foundation for a new tribalism which can only be supported by a fiercely insistent unwillingness to see outside the objectives anything other than heresy and danger. It is a juggernaut of delusion that murders and destroys and sees itself as the only legitimate thing left in life.

Meanwhile, sane people do not want to be like these crazy fanatics, so their build their own fanaticism against the fanatics, defining them as a malignancy that cannot be negotiated with; that must be destroyed. So the situation no longer informs. It simply destroys. It is no longer a community. It is a civil war.

An independent observer might quickly lose hope. The evidence based detractors that have lost hope already, and become locked in this death grip with the cancer of growth seem to be correct in their assessment. How can anything persuade? It really seems like a tumor whose only alternative to killing the body is to extract and flush it away. The tactic of trying to survive with hopes the tumor will kill itself before it kills the entire body seems very obviously unrealistic. Then there is the fact that much of the consumerist delusion already has also matasticized into the "evidence based camp", so that they also find it partly difficult to do anything without it. Such an independent observer could deduce the only possible solution will be a crash that could convince these deluded souls, or their remnants, before they are all completely killed off by this cancer. However, the very act of communicating speculation on when this dieoff might begin could itself bring the wrath of both sides down on a communicator as a person against the very civilization we all live in. It is a very tight, hard to address, growth, effectively intent on itself, and protected from other things. It carries nostalgia for its horrors; for the things it has accomplished in killing off its own ecosystem; by the networks of progress it has made against the vitality of the life it parasitizes.

So instead we are all left to navel gaze; to introspect in the dark; to think in the circles to try to find a way out of the constraints when there is no way out, and then to lose the function of looking for such things as it atrophies because we are unable to do anything. If anything opens up as an opportunity for change, we may, by that time, all be unable to react.