This guy’s guess is as good as any.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
When I started writing this blog nearly two years ago, I thought that the reason I was doing it was to help educate people about degrowth, and that by doing so, I would broaden the conversation about climate change, overshoot and collapse. I thought that this would help show people that there was a better way to live and think about our purpose in life. The idea was to help build a community that was degrowth aware, and that those people would help build that community until we reached a critical mass where enough of the population realized that degrowth was the answer that we would start moving to a post-growth society.
That hasn’t happened yet, but I’ve been pleased to see this community grow. I’ve seen more people writing about degrowth, collapse, overshoot, a well-being economy and other related topics. That is gratifying to see, but I don’t think I’ve fully succeeded, because I feel I have learned more from the people in this community than I have taught them.
I have tried to help teach people about degrowth, and I think I have, but I have received so much knowledge from the people of this community, that I don’t know that I can ever catch up. That was part of the point of joining this community, I thought I would get more out of it than I put it, and I feel I have.
I’ll give you one example that led me down a road of further discovery.
Frederik Lodewijk Polak
In my conversation with Andy Hines from the Houston Foresight Center, (and reading his book), I came across the work of Dutch Sociologist, Frederik Lodewijk Polak (Fred Polak if you want to Americanize it). Polak is mostly known for ‘The Image of the Future’, a study of the relation between images of the future and the dynamics of culture.
Polak emphasizes our ability for imaging the future, which shapes the dynamics of the historical process that shape the future. He emphasizes the importance of imaging in determining of developing our future. Although the future does not come about in a neat, tidy, planned way, what comes has to be imagined, before it can become a reality.
I’m no expert on Polak. I wasn’t familiar with him, so I have only scratched the surface of his ideas. If anyone out there is a Polak expert tell me where I’m wrong, or what I’m not emphasizing enough in the comments below.
What I take from his work that I have read is the great importance of imagining a future to help shape it. Events such as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions and many other significant changes in the way mankind lived, interpreted the world and governed themselves began because some people somewhere began imagining a different future and eventually worked with those ideas to bring about monumental changes.
History is messy, and those changes were never a simple formula that those thinkers originally intended. For example, Marx didn’t imagine the Soviet Union as the perfect test case for communism, but that was the laboratory that history provided - imperfect as it was - and history of the 20th century changed a great deal because of it.
What does this mean today?
I’ve seen some version of the following phrase/thought a number of different places, and generally believe it to be true:
“The most successful societies often have a shared vision of the future, which fosters collaboration and unity.”
This doesn’t mean that everyone agrees on everything, or that I am advocating or expecting a utopia. I don’t believe utopias exist. We are human, we screw up, we disagree. But it does seem clear that the most successful societies have a shared vision of the future. In such a society, most everyone is pulling in the same direction for a common goal. In extreme situations, such as World War II in allied countries, the goal seemed clear and just and most people in those countries were moving in the same direction.
If most people believe in a future and can imagine it - getting to Polak’s “images of the future” - they know what they are fighting/sacrificing for and will do so for the greater good. They do so because they believe that the greater good” means a better life for them and their families, not just some abstract other.
I don’t know about where you live, but that is not what I am seeing today.
Where we are today?
Our societies today are not pulling in the same direction. This is quite clear in the United States where I am sitting, where we have been cordoned off into the red team and the blue team, who aren’t supposed to work together on anything lest they be seen as traitors to the cause.
I don’t belong to either team, and question the sanity of joining either team because it just perpetuates a broken system.
Currently I agree much more with the blue team on issues because they actually admit that climate change and overshoot are real - but they have perpetuated this system as well. If I had my way, I would get rid of both clubs and choose our leaders through sortition, but that is a separate essay.
I can’t see America sorting out this “blood feud" anytime soon. If the collapse of civilization can’t make people put aside their differences to save themselves … well, they just aren’t going to save themselves.
Our system is cracking, collapse is coming. We need to have images of the future that we want to help breathe life into.
Politics is of course only part of the conversation. A good barometer of optimism about the future is a country’s fertility rate. Of course environmental factors also play a role.
Having a child is rarely a political statement. Sperm counts for men around the world have dropped precipitously around the world, which of course makes it harder for people to have children. Even where the population is growing such as Nigeria, the fertility rate has steadily fallen (from 5.5 10 years ago, to 4.94 today).
A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control in the United States showed that the fertility rate in the US has dropped to 1.6, the lowest reading ever. The replacement rate - just to keep a country’s population from falling - is 2.1.
Having children is partially an exercise in optimism about the future. As more people decide the future is not someplace they want to have a child due to economic, environmental, social, or other problems, it is often because they can’t see a positive future to bring people into. A declining fertility rate shows us that in many places around the world, people are collectively saying that the future just isn’t worth investing in.
Degrowth is the answer.
Systems collapse eventually. Whatever replaces capitalism, which I would advocate is a post-growth system of some kind, will eventually collapse if we ever get it to come about. But the elites in any system always fight to the bitter end to keep that system going.
Trump (or your local authoritarian leader) isn’t the disease, he is a symptom. Can you imagine Trump getting elected in America 50 years ago? I cannot. Not that America was perfect then, or better and needed to be made great again, but those in power at the time would not have tolerated such a figure because he would have threatened their power. They had ideas and policies they wanted to implement, and he would not have signed on to that ideology. Now, the leaders in the Republican party feel they have no choice but to back Trump. They have no core beliefs other than just holding on to power through lying and intimidation. That is not a position of strength. The people in the Republican party don’t even believe in the system anymore, they are just signing on to the grift so they can get theirs in the short term.
This degrowth movement, well-being economy movement, doughnut economics movement, bioregional movement - call it what you like - is about building something better - acknowledging that the current system likely isn’t savable. It’s rather clear that those that run the system don’t want to be saved.
This movement is about building those images of the future that people can eventually see as a viable and desirable alternative to the current status quo.
The work we do is all about building those images through reaching out to people and building community. That work may seem unglamorous and proceed far too slowly. But that is how systems change.
They may not change on the timescales we want them to, but they do change.
Likely more than half of you reading this will eventually live in a new economic system - one that is vastly different from the one today, because the one today will have collapsed. That is either a terrifying or inspiring thought, but it is going to happen. So you might as well get started talking about the future you want and working to make it so.
What are the images of the future you see?
I see extinction
This invitation just begs me to haul out my soapbox. To make two points.
The lesser is that if we are neatly divided into the Red Team and the Blue Team in the US, at a time when inequality is surpassing levels that in the past brought out the pitchforks and guillotines--but now we're all throwing rocks at the other team--is that coincidence? Did the ruling class just get lucky, with the Culture Wars? Or did they use their ownership of the legacy media and the digital monopolies that now act as gatekeepers, along with all the psychological and PR expertise money can buy, to engineer this arrangement?
Main soapbox is this, something I've been saying for decades: working for a better future is much more likely when people can picture, believe in, a better future and right now all that's presented as possibilities are dystopias (funny how this administration is trying to move us TOWARD an amalgamation of all the dystopias) or more-of-the-status-quo with minor changes in slang and fashions. And--due to too much screen-watching, people's imaginative faculties have atrophied--so they need to have images of that better future presented to them in living color, DEPICTED, not merely presented in academic language. I didn't see anyone doing this so I wrote three novels set in the future--didn't get anywhere with publishing them and I've given up on fiction writing, but this is still needed. Unfortunately, by now I don't think there is a realistic path to a much better future, short term--things have gone too far, especially environmentally--so much damage has been done and it's still ramping up, even if the break comes soon, our children will be picking their way to that future over a lot of rubble. Nate Hagens on his Great Simplification podcast, talks about a future that's "better than the default." I like that phrasing.
Are the Masters of the Universe just looking for short-term money and power? Quite possibly. But I also think it's possible that, seeing that the resources are not there for a transition to a clean energy future in which all 8.5 billion of us live like Americans, and they retain all their power and privilege,
they're working toward a future of Fortress America and Fortress Europe, where outsiders are excluded but from which corporate teams move at will to loot the resources of all those failed states...and likely within the fortresses, there will be walled enclaves for the rich, with the rest on the outside left to struggle for survival in a hot, dangerous, degraded landscape. Hence the changing of laws to remove rights from ordinary people, and hence the Cop Cities going up everywhere to "train" the young men desperate for decent work and willing to mow down their friends on order. Cops, soldiers, security guards, are all disproportionately people with authoritarian personalities, but it will take more "training" to get most of them to shoot into crowds that may contain old friends or cousins, people engaged in resistance for survival. I'm not sure I buy the more extreme doom scenarios with the advent of AI, but it will exacerbate the environmental crises and enable more detailed surveillance and targeting of those who resist. Which is why I see the fight against the huge buildout of data centers with no local right to input, as a Rubicon, acritical fight we must engage NOW.