By Jock Mulligan
Ive banged on about this before… but its worth banging on about. We’ve been swindled for going on a hundred years and it is, without doubt, the most dangerous and widespread lie ever told. It is not a secret plot or a whisper in a dark alleyway but a myth that sits right at the foundation of our modern world. I speak of the illusion of infinite growth on a finite planet.
We have been told that the ledger must always expand by three per cent every year until the end of time and we have mistaken this greed for a law of physics when it is really just the sound of a machine smashing itself to pieces against the biological limits of the Earth.
The Maths of a Dying World
The danger of this lie is that it looks like success until the very moment the cliff edge gives way… for worshipping the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) above all else. We have built a system that treats the destruction of the world as a profit on the page. When these titans of industry clear-cut a forest or drain the life from a well, the ledger records a gain in capital but ignores the catastrophic loss of the land’s own spirit and it is a simple math problem that a child could see through.
We are using the natural capital of our grandchildren to fund a lifestyle that the planet cannot replenish and beyond the ruin of the woods and the water this lie fuels a culture where nothing is ever enough and it leaves the common man burnt out and broken because he is being told to be infinitely productive in a world where the clock only has twenty four hours and his heart has only so many beats.
The enforcers of the growth myth will not allow anyone to look for a different road and the Trump shitheads in the American capital have become the heavy handed enforcers of this growth mandate. Under their banner of America First they treat any nation that tries to live by a different economic logic as a direct threat to their security: you only have to look at the renewed and aggressive squeeze they are putting on Cuba this year. They have declared a national emergency just to slap tariffs on any third party country that dares to send a drop of oil to the island and by starving them of energy they are not just fighting a political rival but they are sabotaging a state that refuses to prioritise the expansion of corporate power.
It is a shadow that has stretched even across the Atlantic to our own door, for Scotland has also found itself in the crosshairs of the American right wing. Because of the commitments made in Edinburgh to a wellbeing economy – where the health of the people and the protection of the glen are put before the raw numbers of the ledger- the enforcers of the old lie have begun to growl. They see a country that wants to measure success by the smile on a child’s face, or progress towards true equality, or the purity of the water rather than the expansion of some billionaire’s portfolio, and they treat it as a heresy to be stamped out. It is economic warfare plain and simple and a signal that the master of the house will not tolerate any experiment in living within our means whether it be on a Caribbean island or in the Highlands.
But fortunately there is a growing chorus of folk who are beginning to challenge this mandate and they say the cure for the lie is to stop looking at the quantity of the pile and start looking at the quality of the life. There is the talk of the Circular Economy which is a way of living that stops the take make waste madness and ensures that everything we use is refurbished and recycled in a closed loop. There is the idea of Doughnut Economics proposed by Kate Raworth which suggests we should meet the needs of all folk without overshooting the limits of what the planet can bear and staying within the social foundation without breaking the ceiling of the world.
Even places like New Zealand and Iceland are moving away from the old ledgers and using Wellbeing Budgets that measure success by the health of the mind and the reduction of poverty. We must find our way back to a moral law that respects the boundaries of the earth for if we keep chasing the ghost of infinite growth we will find that the only thing left to grow is the size of the graveyard.
