The Ideology of the Necessity of Economic Growth and the Inevitability of Extinction
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
May 23, 2010

            I often write about non-current issues.  I write about the deeper foundations, major institutions, and belief systems of our culture.   I write about the structures and systems of our culture.  I sometimes write about the timeless, universal, abstract issues faced by our species.  Now, I come to the rather commonplace conclusion that a central driving motif of our culture is the necessity for economic growth. 

I will be brief this time.

If in the unlikely possibility that the earth a hundred years from now is sustaining 18 billion humans and all continents have thriving free enterprise, growth driven, economies, then we inevitably will have used up all of the earth’s natural resources and thoroughly polluted all earth, air, and water.  Assuming that this is our trajectory from now into the distant future, at some time along that trajectory the human species will have ceased to exist.  There will be no more now. There will be no more economic growth.

The mindset of the necessity of economic growth is a mindless locomotive out of control plummeting down a very steep incline.  No one seems to understand.  No one can stop to consider.  No one can turn this headlong dive into disaster around.  It is better, I suppose, that people do not understand this inevitability or most of them would go stark raving mad.

Perhaps some new superhuman hero or heroes will arise soon enough to change our course, to invent a new course, with which our species can survive.  Otherwise, it would be such a pity that this species having so spectacularly evolved from a mere single-celled organism within this vast, otherwise lifeless, universe should come to such a tragic end.