The Elephant in our Minds: Growthism
Across the world, our modern lives are mostly defined by or at least operate within the boundaries defined by a set of ideologies and the institutions that materialize them. From nation-states and their governments to money, banks, and multilateral organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, these are just some of the imagined constructs that we have designed as a species to more efficiently organize ourselves, be able to enforce the rule of law and create stable social contexts, and efficiently produce the goods and offer the services to one another that we require and desire collectively in order to survive and to thrive.
To survive and to thrive are two steps in the same path, as is exemplified by Maslow’s pyramid of hierarchical needs, which contains elements such as access to food and shelter at the bottom which are taken as pre-requisites for elements higher up in the pyramid such as the pursuit of self-actualization. From a biological standpoint, human beings are animals like any other but gifted with cognitive abilities that allow it to construct shared imagined realities, therefore allowing us to simultaneously live in the physical world and in the imagined world through which all physical experiences are interpreted. Once the most basic animal needs are met, a safeguard against pain and harm, access to food, and opportunities for mating, what humans seek remains a pure result of how other non-essential primal instincts translate themselves into our imagined realities.
Our closest animal kin, the primates, exhibit needs such as that of socialization with others, maternal affection, and obtaining high status within the group, which all served an evolutionary advantage for their survival and reproduction. These behaviors existed on their own before we cognitively were able to name them and they exist on our own species independent of language, cultural origin, or race. That is to say, the acts and the human biological need for nurturing, for socialization, and for status exist in our bodies even if we don’t name these concepts “nurturing”, “socialization”, and “status”, but we have learned to intrinsically attach the imagined part of these concepts to the actual things they represent (i.e. the idea of nurturing to the actual feeling of nurturing). What humans have done in creating ideas and institutions such as the nation-state or money is simply to take this principle and expand it to a higher meta-cognitive level. So much so that, our bodies react biophysically to these higher concepts of money and patriotic pride, for example, just as it does to actual experiences of orgasm and nurturing. This happens because we are deeply and from an early age socialized to link these concepts with what they represent in mind, believing, for example, that money is intrinsically tied to access to food, shelter, opportunities for mating, and high status, or that patriotic feelings towards your country allow you to see commonalities with those around you and yield a sense of belonging in “one great family”.
To understand the imagined nature of these concepts requires one to also understand why they feel so real. Yes, money gives us access to resources that favor survival and self-actualization, but it only does so from within a framework that conceptualizes money, within a society that accepts money, and for people who have deeply incorporated money into their psyches. It is a hard task to fully uncouple our imagined realities from the physical realities, if only for the fact that we have no other access route to physical reality except through the projections of the outside world in our minds cast by our senses and perception organs. Our cognitive processing spontaneously gives rise to our imagined realities on their own, one cannot exist without the other, and therefore we are stuck to experiencing physical reality through imagined ones.
What remains to be done then, are two things: first, we can train our minds to perceive the disconnect between reality and imagination. In my interpretation, this is what many East Asian spiritual traditions refer to as reaching enlightenment or nirvana. It is something that can never be fully achieved, but that we can and perhaps ought to strive towards if we are to gain clarity and therefore sovereignty over our minds and lives. Drawing the distinction between imagined and objective reality also aids in achieving the second point, which is to create alternative imagined realities to the ones currently in place.
Out of all the possible imagined realities whose premises and incentive mechanisms are aligned with the biological-emerging drivers of human behavior, how did we decide upon collectively accepting, sharing, and building our lives around a particular set of beliefs? The philosopher Daniel Dennett would say that these ideas compete for mass adoption in the realm of shared imagined realities, which is our collective intersubjective. The ideas that can bring the most advantages to the group of people who adopt them end up being the winning ones, and therefore becoming the status-quo ideologies, or the orthodoxy. The process of competition of ideas, however, depends greatly on the context in which they emerge, relevant factors including: who has the monopoly of violence, what are the current status-quo ideas, how fragmented or unified is a population in terms of their beliefs, what are the means of communication and discussion of ideas (i.e., mass media, social media, local government forums, congress), among others. Thus, there is a constant struggle of ideas between the status-quo and the innovations, the orthodoxy and the heterodoxy.
The massive global idea that dominates our world nowadays is capitalism. Amongst all largely adopted ideas (i.e., monotheism, nation-states, humanism) it is the most relevant one, the alpha of alphas, because it is the most commonly accepted of them all. In the grand capitalist global market economy both Muslims and Atheists trade, both citizens of globally recognized nations and of unrecognized one's trade, both peaceful hippies and brutal dictators trade, both pro-democracy and pro-anarchy activists trade. The power of capitalism, in many ways, comes from its agnosticism regarding almost everything, regardless of who you are, where you come from, and what you believe in, as long as you believe in the power of money, capitalism is open to you.
Furthermore, capitalism has achieved such a massive success in the idea competition because it is actually extremely useful for society as a system. In its inception in the late 18th century, given the technological and social context at the time, it truly represented the most efficient way to collectively allocate resources, divide tasks and drive technological innovation. Capitalism has obtained utmost success, however, by attaching itself to other ideas, most importantly that of a central power with the monopoly of violence and with internal mechanisms of self-adaptation, such as the nation-state. An institution that monopolizes violence can more easily enforce security and its policies upon the group of people over whom they have influence. A mechanism of self-adaptation is essential to keep the status quo in place while progressing it, incorporating innovative ideas as they emerge. An example of this is the United States’ constitution and its institutions, which allow for the preservation of the core tenants of the constitution while leaving just enough ideological leeway for new ideas to be introduced via bills and judiciary rulings that incorporate new ideas that have emerged in a new socio-technological context. Striking this balance between conservation and the progression of ideas has been one of the many reasons for the success of the American nation-state.
This combo of capitalism and a strong but adapting nation-state has obtained tremendous success in permeating the majority of human minds and lives and has been instrumental in the achievements of our species in recent centuries regarding multiplying access to good health, safety, material comfort, and prosperity, the basic needs of which the absolute majority of humanity had been historically deprived of. However, just as Maslow predicted on the individual level, once the basic needs are met on a societal level, the goals are shifted towards self-actualization[1]. In this point, we have started to realize as a society that the current form of the ideology of capitalism + nation-state, and the framework that they embed in every individual to perceive their life through, which is to say, the framework through which they see the objective reality and construct their imagined reality from, is failing us.
What exactly is failing us?
What is failing us, is not, however, capitalism per se, but a particularly nasty type of ideological interpretation of capitalist ideas called Economism, or more specifically Growthism. To understand Economism and Growthism we must first define two key concepts: The Economy and Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The Economy is a much talked about the concept, thrown around here and there, but that most people cannot precisely define when asked to do so, although they can and almost unanimously do agree that 1) it is real; and 2) it is important. That it is perceived as important is merely a consequence of it being one of the major constructs of capitalist thinking and of the relevance and dominance of capitalism in the world’s collective imaginary. That it is real, however, is a consequence of the bi-partite nature of the concept of The Economy, which pertains both to the physical world and to the imagined world at the same time. The physical part of the economy includes the Ecological, that is, the actual goods that are physically produced, mined, harvested, transformed, sold, consumed, and disposed of, which all have their material origin in some ecosystem on Earth[2]. The imagined part of the economy are the meanings, relations, and ideas attached to the physical part that imbues them with “economic value”, this includes a dollar bill, an employment contract, a bond, and a stock. In between the physical part of the economy are humans, the social aspect of it. It is only because of humans physically interacting with the world around us while thinking, talking, and conceptualizing their actions that we have the imagined part of the economy. We are the interface between the physical economy and the imagined economy.
Gross Domestic Product is defined by the OECD as “the standard measure of the value-added created through the production of goods and services in a country during a certain period”. It was created in the US in the post-depression 1930s to serve as an aggregated economic production indicator that would rise during “good times” and fall during “bad ones”, serving as a kind of thermometer of success. It only came to prominence, however, with the outbreak of the Second World War and the government takeover on manufacturing, serving then as one of the main indicators for the government on industrial output. During the Cold War it was further cemented as an indicator of the success of the American economy over the Soviets, and massively divulged and weaponized as so, burying itself deep in the collective imaginary as a sign of collective success and that “things are good”.
It was this propagandization of GDP during the cold war that allowed for what economists have dubbed “The Great Decoupling”: the fact that since the 1990s, a set of policies (mostly passed with the lobbying influence of large corporations and high-net-worth individuals) together with the socio-technical context of America at that time allowed for the decoupling of the growth rate of labor productivity and median income. What that meant was that although the productivity of each worker kept growing in the same rate or faster than ever before, the average worker’s income has remained basically stagnated. This was allowed and accepted by the general public, in many parts because of the continues positive growth in GDP exhibited as a proof that “things are good” or at least that they would get better, which had enormous convincing power given how deeply and entrenched the concept of economic growth, represented by GDP, and collective prosperity were entangled in our minds.
Besides the propagandization of GDP, another interesting factor that allowed for the great decoupling was the entanglement of the concepts of happiness and material wealth in our minds. This had been on the rise since the late 1930s with the rise of first public relations and then marketing, leading to an increasing awareness by companies that they could not only supply the demands of the market but could also create new demands by use of advertisement and by influencing popular culture. During the great decoupling, this allowed for maintenance of the perception of prosperity through access to cheap consumer goods, while access to affordable healthcare and education, elements much more significantly tied to quality of living, were jeopardized by the privatizing and deregulating encroachment of the market ideology.
The specific market ideology that represents the great decoupling and the processes that led to it is a two-fold one. First, it is one of Economism, a belief that the economy is independent from and has primacy over all else, out of which more and more aspects of our lives become products and services. Second, it is one of Growthism, the belief “that [economic] growth is the costless, win-win solution to all problems, or at least the necessary precondition for any solution”, as defined by Herman Daly. Let’s take a look into what Economism and Growthism really mean.
Economism states that the imagined part of the economy is independent and autonomous from both the physical part of the economy (nature) and from the social part of the economy (humans). Therefore, a belief in Economism works against obtaining clarity between the division of the imagined and the real that I had alluded to (“enlightenment”). Furthermore, not only does Economism see the imagined part of the economy as autonomous, but it sees it as the master of the other two and in fact of all other imagined institutions such as the politics, religion, education, or the family. It is the primacy of the economic over everything else, or as Erik Swyngedouw eloquently puts it:
“[Economism is] the de-politicisation of economy (i.e. the fact that economic matters cannot be disputed within the existing registers of politics) and the economisation of politics (i.e. the fact that every domain of public concern is subject to market rule and economic calculus). It is a deferral of responsibility for injustice to an abstract, semi-natural entity (the economy), which is, in fact, a socially-constructed system whose function benefits certain groups over others.”
Therefore, Economism creates the ideological foreground for the economic takeover of all other matters, it takes away power from other imagined institutions and puts it into the economic realm. With this power, Growthism defines the specific direction towards which to apply it: maximizing economic growth. It sees economic growth (measured primarily by GDP) as the central objective of the human race and a necessary path to all other objectives, demanding that all assets, institutions, and human minds be put to use towards achieving this goal and even considering immoral when they are not[3].
However, the ideological centrality of Growthism makes it, therefore, a very important lever that ought to be pulled in order to achieve systemic change over our physical and imagined realities. At this point I can now correct myself in saying that it is Growthism, not Capitalism, that is the “alpha of alphas” of ideas that have captured the human collective imaginary. In order to exemplify why, Thimotée Parrique writes:
“Productivism is broader than capitalism because the pursuit of an ever-increasing production can be achieved either via markets or planning and thus productivism can also occur in non-capitalist systems, as most famously evidenced by the case of the Soviet Union. Likewise, neoliberalism and its nemesis, Keynesianism, are equally productivist. But productivism only focuses on the supply side of the issue and leaves out the demand, namely consumerism. Moreover, production is not as strongly anchored in the collective imaginary as economic growth. This is evident from the fact that one rarely encounters headlines using the words “production” whereas those about “growth” abound. I focus on growthism and not only development because it is “economic growth,” at least in the global North, that is at the centre of political attention. I would go further and say that all the problematic features of the development discourse have been integrated into growthism, to the point where a critique of growthism inevitably includes one of development.”
Thus, if we want to think of proposing alternative ideas to replace Growthism and its correlates, we must not only understand why have they become commonplace as described, but also what are the indications that this ideological framework and economic system have failed us.
Why exactly is it failing us?
There are three main points here. The first main reason why Growthism is failing us as a driving ideological force is environmental. Growthism as an imagined economy presumes a unidirectional flow of interaction between humans and nature as agent and object, respectively: we extract, we produce, we consume, we dispose. This linear view is completely non-sensical from a systemic perspective as it assumes an infinite amount of resources to be extracted from, and an infinite number of sinks to deposit our waste, while in fact, we live in a planet of finite resources and finite sinks. This artificial unidirectionality stands in stark contrast to the circularity of natural processes, which presumes that all resources used by living beings today to form their bodies and give them energy will be eventually re-utilized via decomposition of their corpses and excrements and serve as raw material for other lifeforms and so on in a self-sustaining and self-regulating cycle.
The problem with Growthism is that it took disproportionate scales both in terms of the amount of resources being used and in how fast we use them, besides creating types of waste that the natural forms of sink and re-cycling (fungi and bacteria, for example) are not equipped to deal with. This is why since 2015 we “celebrate” Earth Overshoot Day, the day every year in which we collectively consume and dispose of Earth’s resources faster than it can replenish itself in one year[4]. Furthermore, man-made substances, from Styrofoam to enriched uranium, cannot be easily broken down into processable elements by the ecosystem and therefore will remain for thousands to millions of years in nature as a byproduct of Growthism and the unidirectionality of the production flow, most likely outlasting humanity and most life forms on Earth.
The second main reason is that Growthism is in fact threatening the stability of the systems and collective institutions put in place that have, so far, being able to negotiate status-quo with innovation and ensure adaptation and evolution of human societies. The exponential increase in the speed of economic and technological innovation have outpaced the speed of social innovation translated as political institutions. This is perhaps best exemplified by the trivial political manipulation put in place by Russian agents in the 2016 American election through the malicious use of individualized messaging and content targeting through Facebook. Our current form of representative democracy and its tools were not designed for a society as fast-paced and as widely connected as our own. Furthermore, neoliberal policies and the great decoupling have led to extraordinary economic power being put in the hands of corporations and ultra-high-net-worth individuals, which has made the institutions that were meant to represent the people and safeguard the interests of the average citizen to now rely on and be subject to tremendous influence from financial interests through lobbying and campaign donations. This also helps to explain the public dissatisfaction with the political class and the rise of populist politicians such as Donald Trump (which in fact is a hypocritic demagogue and represent the exact growthist interests that have caused the issues he claims to address), and Bernie Sanders (which actually sees the issue of growthism and aims to tackle it, with dubious approaches, perhaps). Growthism, then, has led to the weakening of the institutions that were put in place to ensure the continuous functioning of a social contract and that are needed for efficient collective cooperation.
Finally, Growthism has also failed us as a path towards self-actualization. As mentioned before, now that we have made so much progress already in dealing with the foundational problems humanity has faced for millennia (hunger, disease, and war), we seek to summit Maslow’s pyramid, to reach self-actualization. It is not that we have ever forgotten about self-actualization, indeed, from time immemorial humanity has been asking the same three questions over and over: Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?
The origin of life, the meaning of life, and our destiny have always been at the center of the human psyche, and have been historically addressed by religions who were ideological frameworks that did not only attempt to respond to these three questions but to encompass scientific-cosmological, political, social, and economic factors as well. Historically, more often than not, the political ruler was at the same time a God, creator of the universe, the minter of coins, and the instiller of social status upon others. While other ideologies have competed with conflicting and excluding answers to these questions, in modern times, Growthism has become so pervasive partially because of its “agnosticism”. To the three questions, it responds: “Where do we come from? It doesn’t matter. Why are we here? It doesn’t matter. Where are we going? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, as long as you understand that the tool to achieve whatever you believe in lies in endless economic growth, profit-maximizing, and an increase in productivity.”
This ideology has also become prevalent because it was indeed extremely effective in helping to bring material wealth and comfort to large swaths humanity who had from time immemorial lived in extreme precariousness and vulnerability. These gains in prosperity and in access to goods and services are so significant that obtaining them has infused our lives with meaning and brought us happiness, but it is only able to do so up to a certain point. Our human psychology has the tremendous capacity to adapts to new realities, in a phenomenon psychologists call the hedonic treadmill. Our happiness and life satisfaction levels tend to stabilize after major positive or negative life events. Research shows that marginal increase in life satisfaction beyond the point of financial stability is drastically reduced for every further increase in income after that, which goes against the main claim of Growthism that endless accumulation of wealth is the path to happiness, translated collectively to believing infinite growth in GDP is the collective path to prosperity. And although GDP per-capita seems to be mildly correlated with life satisfaction in surveys, the relationship is much stronger for poorer countries than for richer. This relationship between GDP per capita and life satisfaction also fits a log-type function when plotted, indicating the gradually decreasing influence of wealth on life satisfaction, and supporting the hedonic treadmill’s influence. Lastly, some studies have shown that income inequality, the same one being caused by Growthism and exhibited by the great decoupling, is a significant moderator of the relationship, meaning that the more equal a country’s income distribution, the more likely GDP growth is to impact life satisfaction.
The God of Growth has failed us philosophically, it is destroying our planet and our sustainable livelihoods, and it is destroying our social institutions. Having understood now what it is, and why it has failed us, we can finally ask ourselves the big question.
Now what?
First and foremost, I believe raising awareness about Economism, Growthism, and the distinction between the real and the imagined Economy (and other institutions) are fundamental in order to produce meaningful change. Let’s discuss Growthism with our friends, may it become a topic of political debate, may the next presidential candidates run on a platform of anti-Growthism. I don’t see that as impossible, and I believe that sowing the ideological seeds of clarity and of critiques to the status-quo are necessary for us to collectively drive progress in society and achieve meaningful change.
The issue at hand becomes one of time.
In a 1930 essay, John Maynard Keynes, one of the fathers of modern economy foresaw: “When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.” However, he also warned: “But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” If Keynes was to be absolutely right in his prediction than we must wait at least until 2030 for the moral shift away from economism and growthism to happen.
The problem is that we might run out of time before that. In ecological terms, scientists have warned us over and over about the approaching deadline where our extractivism, our trash-ism, and our emissions will drag the planet’s geo-climatic systems into unstoppable self-reinforcing feedback loops towards an Earth of diminished living conditions for all species. Furthermore, our institutions are eroding year by year, bill after bill, nomination after nomination, as the growthist financial interests both broadens and tightens its grip on our society. These institutions (our courts, political representation, the free-press) have historically represented a tried and tested way to achieve collective change, but as time passes by the effects of the great decoupling keep increasing, giving more power to the few and diminishing the chances of a progressive shift away from growthism through gradual reform. The ever more likely alternative is a more radical approach towards change, the downright fall of current systems, and institutions to allow for the space necessary for the emergence of new ones. However, this is probably neither desirable in terms of the possible cost in material terms and in human lives, nor feasible if we are to attempt to achieve change on time for the pressing ecological deadline. We are thus, stuck at an impasse.
But we have been given a once in a lifetime opportunity to break free from this impasse. What if we could “shake things up” just enough to allow for some parts of the current institutions to break down while keeping the larger framework and ensuring an easier transition into new political and economic systems? The current social and economic crisis caused by COVID-19 represents just that kind of opportunity. From the midst of the tragedy of many human lives lost to this pathogen and of many businesses, projects, events, and plans that no longer exist, there might lie the ideological and institutional space for alternative imagined realities to populate our minds, and hopefully to materialize in our societies. As Milton Friedman, the father of neo-liberal thinking, that was indispensable for the rise of growthism, once said:
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
I believe that time is now and is one we might not encounter again in our lifetimes. What remains then is to make sure that the ideas lying around now are not Growthism or hyper-Growthism ones, but alternatives that can address the fundamental failures that Growthism has handed us all.
Some of these alternatives have already been extensively discussed in the realm of economics, like Kate Raworth’s Doughnut model which proposes the safe and just space for human economic flourishment to exist between the boundaries defined by our minimum social needs and the maximum bio-capacity of the planet. More ideas include Herman Daly’s Steady-State Economy or Timothée Parrique’s Degrowth, but while they all focus on and theorize very well how to overcome the first and second failures of Growthism (ecological catastrophe and social erosion, respectively), they might attempt to but do not quite adequately address the third failure: to answer the three fundamental questions on life.
I don’t claim to have the answers myself, nor do I think anyone does indeed. But I do think we ought to be talking more about it. The rise of Growthism has also been accompanied by a rise in a blind sort of objective scientificism. By this, I do not mean that we should listen to the pseudo-scientific or a-scientific ideas of the like of Trump’s on vaccination causing autism or drinking disinfectant to kill coronavirus. What I mean is that, increasingly, when presented with the three fundamental questions of “Where do we come from”, “Where are we going”, and “Why are we here” many people rush towards the claims of the “religion of science” by saying “We come from a random combination of RNA’s in the primordial soup that originated life which has evolved slowly throughout billions of years until the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens, aka, us”, “There is nothing after death, pure darkness, game over”, and “There is no meaning to life, but we as individuals perceiving life through our private lenses are entitled to imbue meaning to our own lives (and therefore I choose to make money)”.
Perhaps a little naively, I hope we might be able to seize this opportunity for change, capitalize on the incredible material progress that technology and human ingenuity have provided and will keep providing us, and attempt first to seek our individual paths towards enlightenment (clarity in the distinction between objective and imagined reality, and resolution and closure of past traumas) and second to collectively imagine and co-create more agnostic and humble answers to the fundamental questions.
I dream a world where the average citizen says: “I’m not sure where we came from, but I have some thoughts on it. I’m not sure where we’re going, but I’d love to hear your opinion. The meaning of life? Maybe to take care of ourselves and of each other, ensuring we all have our basic needs met, the freedom to keep looking for purpose, for love, and for the answers to these three fatidic questions.”
PS: This text was originally written in April 2020 and, however the situation might have already changed in these last few months, I decided to publish it sooner rather than later or not at all.
[1] This is not to say that all material needs in the world have been solved, quite on the contrary, we are seeing now with the COVID situation that many parts of the world, still the majority in fact, lacks the secure access to food, shelter, and of self-protection, be it against disease or violence. But from within the framework of the world we currently live in, power does not reside with the masses of underserved, but with the elites who have the economic means. Thus, we have reached not a complete eradication of material needs, but we have crossed a threshold already where enough people have had their basic needs satisfied and are seeking self-actualization, while sharing this experience and having clarity as the amount of others living the same situation, which is allowed by the massive adoption of technology and peer-to-peer communication.
[2] The existing niche market for meteor relics and jewelry and the planned future market for massive scale asteroid mining are left aside.
[3] Think here of the power of the legal concept of “fiduciary duty” that allows companies to take actions that might even go against their stated mission because they are legally obligated to maximize the profits of their shareholders, or the international courts that rule against countries that try to support local communities and localization of the economy by labeling such policies as anti-free-trade.
[4] In 2019 Earth Overshoot Day was July 29th, the earliest date to record. In 2020 experts predict it will be later than that due to the reduction in production, consumption, and transportation caused by the COVID-19 lockdown and consequent economic deceleration.
