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Let’s understand what’s really at stake.
The degrowthers themselves feed the fear and dismissal of their own ideas. They offer an unappealing nonreligious form of repentance, of fire and brimstone, of God’s revenge.
In their view, we must stop growth, stop producing, and learn to be humble and live with less. We have been too greedy, too demanding, and have engaged in too much hubris. We must sacrifice and live with less.
This isn’t, strictly speaking, false. Except the last part. Degrowth requires no sacrifice. It requires us to choose living life over sacrificing our lives to senseless work that often ends only with death.
The ideas expressed as “degrowth” are a terrible distortion of what’s at stake both materially and morally.
Slashing Production Is A Gift To Ourselves and Our Planet
Most of our work is demeaning and dehumanizing. We are servants in exchange for money. We have BOSSES who tell us what to do and when to do it and how to do it. We have the choice of doing what they demand—or risk poverty and homelessness.
In our current civilization—and this isn’t only under capitalism—we are not free people. We have no value except insofar as we produce wealth, most of which is taken by nonworking nonproductive elites. We are expected to be grateful for the opportunity to have a “good job.”
When they are done with us, we are discarded. Or perhaps we continue to be employed until our life ends and we die having never lived.
How effing crazy is that?
Ah, but what’s the alternative? We are so indoctrinated, and so exhausted, and so beaten down, that we see no other possibility. We find fatal flaws in every other system or idea or way to live. Even with Orwells’ warning, we love Big Brother.
But not all of us. Some of us are waking up, are finally seeing the insanity—and deciding to not cooperate with our abuse. We are slowly taking charge, reclaiming our dignity, our humanity and our lives.
We are learning to respect ourselves, respect others, respect Nature. We are learning to care. We are defying the soul-crushing values that are…
