A 'must read' book if you care about the future of the planet
For more than a decade, I've had an ominous feeling about our future and my feeling has gotten worse over the years. Our society has bought into the myth that the economy of human society must constantly grow to be successful. But forever growth on a finite planet at some point is societal suicide. A planet has finite boundaries and we are now staring in the face of many of them - pollution, resource exhaustion, etc. We are in a dark cave with no way out and most people are oblivious, content with distractions like meaningless TV programming and consumerism.
I recently read a book that if you care about the future you MUST READ. "Less is More" by Jason Hickel. I've never said that about a book before, but I don't think that's an overstatement in this case.
He observes that the tragedy of covid might be enough of a shock to get us to reevaluate whether we have a healthy society or not. Is GDP really a good way to evaluate the state of an economy that fails to value so much of what's important?
Get this book and read it. I'm so confident that you will feel it was worth the read, that I will commit to buying the physical book from you if you decide it was not worth your time to read it.
I usually like to include a quote from sources I find interesting, but in this case, I found so many quotes that I thought were profound that I can't include them all.
This book is a great companion book to the one I've mentioned before "The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible" by Charles Eisenstein. That book is more of a philosophical book, whereas "Less Is More" is practical and down to earth.
A friend said this:
"Less Is More" first makes it crystal clear how and why capitalism is failing, and then succeeds in doing something that most books do not... something that is very hard to accomplish... getting the reader to THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX OF CAPITALISM and see it from the outside looking in. The reason this is so hard to accomplish is because for generations our entire population has been taught from childhood that capitalism is a requirement for democracy.
But this book briefly and successfully explains how, in fact, capitalism is incompatible with democracy. It also rebuts (point-by-point) all the wishful thinking about how technology and other "alterations" to our current capitalist economy can make it democratic and sustainable. Finally, Hickel goes on to describe the components of an economy that will be truly democratic and sustainable.
1
