The Alcoholic’s Solution: More and more Alcohol, and a Cheaper, Higher Proof!
Confronting Truth here is THE Most difficult! Everyone is Too Invested in The Un-Truth. So I expect readers to conclude I have lost if and really am a Buffoon! My only ‘hope’ is that what follows is read, and then allowed proper time to be digested!
Neoliberalism founded on capitalism requires economies that deliver ever increasing GDP to keep the whole socio-economic system healthy. “Healthy” implying full employment economies, with all having the opportunity to continuously improve their lot in life, that usually being in the pursuit of increased Happiness and Material, well -being.
The goal of all governments of the world is to avoid GDP stagnation or decline at all costs. As we know, central Bankers step in to stimulate growth whenever growth is threatened.
Historically this GDP growth has also resulted in a growth in demand of the critical bio-regenerative resources. One that quite closely tracks the GDP line.
The dominant belief driving Hope in society today, one that it will be possible to de-link these two growth lines, and so still have healthy, growing GDP economies, yet with declining natural resource usage. A concept widely marketed as the ‘Green Growth‘ solution.
Many Green Growth supporters go further in saying that moving Neoliberalism onto this trajectory will provide economic boom times, an abundance of employment opportunity, through ‘Green Profits’, that could never been currently envisaged. The Green New Deal, currently ‘on the table’ in the USA, being one based on these beliefs.
If we just look at Carbon Emissions: Despite all the carbon reduction efforts going on around the world, 2022 brought yet another new record high for Global CO2 emissions. Virtually every new year bringing increase on the preceding one.
The only times in recorded history that we have been able to reduce Carbon Emissions were in three time of significant global recession (one being Covid), and then those reductions were soon rapidly reversed on the economic recoveries.
It goes without saying that annual reductions have to be done consistently for many decades to wipe out our current huge current Emission Overhang. This all done in the context of the world population predicted to reach 10 billion by 2050!
In this impossible reality, one can see why Green Growth is the snake oil of the Hope salesperson!
However from my intense, disinterested exploration of the truths, I found that Neoliberalism and its digital revolution offspring, ‘Americanism’, are the single dominant contributor to why we are in the Climate Tragedy phase and ever more rapidly facing the Extinction reality.
“Americanism” isn’t about America, or Americans: Rather about a new ‘Way of Life’, that was born out of American values, which through the digital revolution of the past two decades, have been ‘globally shaped’ and now adopted in vary degrees, by virtually every nation on the planet. Essentially an ideology, it has virtual religion status, and as such is the dominant religion by far, in the world today.
In its largely organic, global, ‘ideology alignment’, Americanism’s global reach and its associated ‘success’ has significantly uplifted the world. In the process it has demonstrated the extraordinary ingenuity of the rational human being.
Fullowing a ath to Americanism success, Australia has recently knocked Switzerland off Top Spot on the ‘Global Wealth per Capita‘, rankings. Yet in that pursuit if everyone on this planet lived like the average Australian we would require more than Five Planet Earths to sustain ourselves. America has a similar devouring success. Read more here.
Without the constraints of a finite natural world, Americanism could continue its amazing path, and uplift more and more on the rungs of its clear ladder of Success. But these constraints are REAL, and being tested, and the tenets of Americanism success need a growing, consumption driven, wealth creating socio-economic system that is in fundamental conflict with Nature.
Finding the Americanism truth and understanding how it has entangled the world, has been the biggest single breakthrough for me arriving at my Hopeless conclusion.
That Hopelessness ratcheted up many times in intensity, when the exploring produced overwhelming evidence that most people are blissfully unaware of their enslavement to that conflict. That ensalvement through its addictive pecuniary struggle and promise of increasing happiness through ever increasing consumption and increased wealth, and material accumulation.
In that bliss people cannot, and do not want, to see another alternative success, occasionally buying the ‘Green Growth’, snake oil salesperson’s injection of hope to reinforce that state.
On a Finite Planet, we will need an Ideology that is rooted in The Finite, rather than Domination, and a Hope in, An Infinite.