Nevertheless, given capital's social supremacy, growth is never seen as the problem but, instead, is continually offered up as the only solution to every ill of our corrupt economies and degenerating environments.
Economics remains then, at best, a half-brained ideology missing essential concepts of factor and population balance, feminine values, qualitative measures, and right relation to nature's sinks and capacities. The very language of growthism also reveals a male-defined drive for dominance - wherein we speak of "expanding" and "penetrating" markets and "dominating" the resources of other nations and people.
Growthists speak of forcing open markets with the same cunning, and sense of divine right, as those who once spread the legs of virgins to make bloody sacrifices to male gods upon a cold stone slab.
"A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived." Paul Samuelson
The rise of this inherently self-defeating "economic" philosophy and its increasingly dismal social conditions emerges from enclosure, factor imbalance, and the unnatural ways in which we have come to live and work.
Nevertheless, many continue to believe we can neither survive nor prosper unless we grow by invading another's marketplace, securing their resources, and absorbing expanding populations. As a result, we seek to force trade, win economic contests by colonizing others, ever-increase our share of distant economies, and manufacture a global "interdependency" while labor's clout, democracy, ecology and balance are destroyed.
Today, no local autonomy, democratic decision, or national or cultural freedom is to interfere with capital's effectively-forced "interdependency" dictated by GATT/WTO and growthism. Not only is this dogma imperial in nature but it also admits no qualification to process or any measurement of the character and quality of what is growing.
Indeed, the quality of life is expelled from this obsession with numerical increase. Measures of real wealth, of per-capita space and freedom, remain taboo as they demonstrate the lie of what has become no less than a religio-economic theology of growth-to-ruin.
"Society must cease to look upon "progress" as something desirable. 'Eternal Progress' is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a 'steadily expanding economy,' but a zero growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous." Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn
As a process without limits, growthism has no relationship to the most important qualities in our lives, much less social equity, democracy, human rights, factor balance, or environmental sustainability. As a goal and good measured only by increases in widgets and beings, a short-term, quality-less, profit and per-capita ruin becomes an end unto itself.
Corrupt values and dismal measures drive a corporate need divorced from effective freedom, democracy, and eco-sustainability. Growthism has become the intellectual equivalent of perpetual-motion machines - i.e., driving a pseudo economics and feeding an empty ideology meant to give the illusion of progress as predation and per-capita ruin proceed.
With capital's mis-measures we then progressively destroy all real wealth and avoid issues of factor parity, natural freedom, and population balance. With empty statistics, we may then decline in real terms as we "grow" to profit stateless corporations.
By counting population increase as "growth" rather than per-capita decline, growth is not only synonymous with progressive ruin but devoid of reference to quality, purpose, justice, equity, natural right, ecology, and root estate. As a result, "growth" means incomes and disparities may increase, and societal power of capital expand, while the very quality of life, and per-capita space and freedom, decline.
"To hasten growth is to hasten decay." Lao-Tzu
As a quantity-driven faith without relation to equity, balance, or the condition of one's community and environment, growthism lacks context. As such, it is doomed to produce social and ecological ruin. After centuries of "growth," our enclosure, desperation, and disparities are greater than ever - a clear indication we are not only moving in the wrong direction but have no other motive force or ethic.
Despite its failures, growthism remains the dominant shibboleth of our time, one demanding genuflection from capital's economists and politicians. Yet Balance, as a principle motivating ethic, is sorely needed and still it remains outside the pantheon of economic virtues and goals.
Author, Exec. Dir. The Center For Balance. Websites: PanditPress.com, OligarchyUSA.com, PublicCentralBank.com, EditorFreedom.com,
FascismUSA.COM & more
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