“Everything is about Super-sizing and growing...”
I think you and Ted Trainer are a bit naive. “Growth” cannot continue indefinitely, but to go to something else is not easy.
You and Trainer seem complacent to me, quite confident that “growth” is a moral failing easily set aside, as if a lapse of taste more than anything else, easily fixed by choosing some other alternative, say, life as the simple life.
What you don’t seem to appreciate is that the pattern of human life together called “growth” was itself a solution to other, older patterns of human life together ---- i.e. “feudalism,” “tribalism.”
The change from these older patterns to “growth” took the intellectual work of thousands of men, wars, vast amounts of political activity --- all required to get the human mental world re-structured in such a way that people would for the most part compete by accumulation rather than by armed conflict.
“Growth” has to come to an end. We are living out the process now. But don’t be a Pollyanna. Patterns of life together come as package deals. You don’t want “growth?” Fine. Here is your alternative: ethnic strife, tribal conflict, sectarian violence, the blurring of lines between business and mafia, war not as a monopoly of the state but the ordinary condition of ordinary men. |
