We are Conned from the Cradle

Growth economics is a con into which most of us are born. We think that we cannot survive without growing our Gross Domestic Product. Furthermore, we believe we need more people to look after the elderly. In this way biodiversity is a martyr to consumerism and pronatalism. The Sixth Mass Extinction, climate change, and the ecosystems collapse all continue to accelerate. The human pyramid continues to grow, and our energy usage continues to grow.

Most of us are working hard on tasks that further degrade the environment and make the rich even richer. A rich friend of mine recently bragged how ‘green’ she was, because she planned to purchase a Tesla car. The transition to electric cars is a green-washing guilt exercise that is doing huge environmental damage. Tesla director, Elon Musk was recently in a conversation with Donald Trump in which they both revealed their ignorance regarding the speed and impact of climate breakdown.

Western societies groom their young into the ecocidal, and unjust cult of growth economics from the cradle. We also learn that maintaining military defences is needed for our security, we learn to fear Russia, China, and the Arab nations and to regard them all as enemies. This prejudiced mindset conflicts increasingly with the interdependent nature of global trade, and many are starting to question the motivation for this prejudice (ref. author Matt Kennard).

We pay lip-service to democracy, and the declaration of Human Rights, but our lived reality is an ecocidal, and unjust oligarchy. The asset-rich dictate our choices through their influence in the mainstream media (ref. authors: Matt Kennard, Yanis Varoufakis, and Grace Blakeley). Meritocracy is also a myth, because the people who plunder the planet most quickly are those who gain wealth and power. Once we stop believing the illusions that we are served through our education and media, then the expansionist mindset can begin to slip.

With the recent anti-fascist protests in the UK, there is a possibility of a new world emerging that is emancipated from racial prejudice and the hatred that prejudice generates. There are also voices emerging that are explaining the cause of ever increasing wealth inequality. The real threat of climate and ecosystems collapse is creating movements that cut across our racial and cultural divides. False fears focussed on Russia, China, and Islam still distract and delay any progress towards peaceful coexistence.

The contribution of affluent people to climate and ecosystems collapse is higher than that of the subsistence farmers who, in the past, have often survived outside the Capitalist economy entirely. Living off the land one has no need for money. The pie-chart shown below shows the proportion of emissions by affluence. The lowest 50% are mainly subsistence farmers, and the impoverished populations who living in slums near wealthy cities. The latter spend their lives slaving for and using the discards from the wealthy inhabitants nearby.

Since 1948, wealthy Zionists, and Western powers seeking a military ally in the Middle East, have been ensuring that Israel enjoys impunity from criticism for their violation of human rights. In the past, money has been all-powerful, but in ecosystems collapse it loses its power. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice judged Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories to be illegal. Global awareness has been growing steadily regarding the longstanding injustice that exists in the state of Israel, ever since the indigenous population were forcibly displaced in 1948. The Israeli education system instils into young minds a paranoid fear of Palestinians, and the desire to expand territorially .

Zionist Jews have successfully exploited the theme of victimhood and fear, based on those Jews who perished from persecution in World War II. With warped logic and arrogant stories of entitlement they have used the tragedy of the previous generations to justify the ongoing violation of human rights of the Palestinians. The idea that Jews have a right to the Palestinian land originates from Zionism, which is nationalist secular ideology adopted by many Christians as well as Jews. Many Rabbis argue that Zionism is in direct conflict with Jewish beliefs, as explained in this brief interview with Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss.

Eugenics underpins both Israel’s racial expansion exercise, and humanity’s exploitation of natural resources to dominate the natural world in which we are embedded. If you listen to commentators like Jordan Peterson you will hear an arrogant narrative that puts humans above other life forms, and implies that we can flourish and grow indefinitely, just so long as we adhere to the stories and predictions in the Judeo-Christian bible. Like the genocidal mindset in Israel, the global human mindset is sinking ever deeper into a frenzy and mania to overrun any life-forms that oppose us.

Humanity depend on biodiversity for survival, so our obsession with growth and expansionism is becoming increasingly self-destructive. In the same way Israel’s frenzied attempts to complete the land-grab of the Gaza strip and the West bank are now making it likely that they will lose the economic advantage that they have enjoyed up until now. Israel represents an example of how ugly and selfish our global behaviour to other life forms has become. What started as incremental encroachment has now turned into a mad slash and burn finish both for Israel and for the wider world.

Humanity are at a crossroads, we either continue to steer into a global fight over natural resources, or we decide to coexist peacefully with the natural world. We can adopt lifestyles that embrace minimal consumption, but that will require dismantling the military. We can empower and equip young adults to embrace a voluntary global birth-strike, we can offer help-to-die to those that would like an easy exit. In this way some of us may survive the collapse and one day witness a stable and sustainable future for both our new born and the rest of life on Earth.

The grooming that is necessary to sell the twisted moral paradox of Zionist ideology, is cleverly unpicked in this video by a gay Palestinian commentator. Naming himself ‘Indie Nile’, he plays cleverly on the homophone ‘in denial’.

There are numerous parallels between the methods used in Israel to maintain a mindset that is capable of genocide, and the methods that are used in the modern techno-industrial world to maintain a mindset that is capable of escalating ecocide. In both cases the conditioning desensitises us all to the suffering that we inflict on other people and other life forms. The ‘greening the desert’ program in Israel is heavily dependant on fossil fuels; their ecological footprint is as high as many of the oil rich Arab states, and yet they have no oil reserves. The screenshot below shows the data for the ecological footprint of Israel. The small area in white at the bottom of the graph is within the biocapacity of borders of Israel, all the red area is overshoot.

Israel survives solely on the good will from the outside world. There are oil reserves off the shore of the Gaza strip, and it is highly likely that the desire to control this resource plays a role in the escalating genocide.

In Israel, admiration and respect for the Israeli Defence Force is built up from a young age. Similarly, our young are encouraged to admire the armed forces in the USA and the UK. War has been glamorised for decades in our cinemas and on our television screens. Just like Israel’s 70 year land-grab project, global expansionism is encouraged and admired within our commercial enterprises. The most trusted business model involves thinking of an appealing and marketable idea then growing the scale, selling the idea worldwide and making lots of financial profit in the process. We never concern ourselves with the ecological costs. We teach neither children nor adults the insights from I=PAT. The insights from the IPAT equation challenge both the pronatalism, and the economic algorithms that we have relied on to expand in recent decades. We are so entrenched in the expansionist mindset we cannot let go. We are afraid to dig ourselves out of our addiction, simply because we don’t know any other model.

A conflict like the genocide in Israel constitutes a terrific boost to Gross Domestic Product. Not only do we profit from arms sales, there is also the emotional and physical trauma that creates increased demands for mental and physical healthcare. Our non-governmental organisations swell with supporters as they attempt to deliver soaring demand in medical care. Our social media and alternative media also swell as they scramble to report and analyse all the atrocities. There is a global ecological cost to all of this process, quite apart from the emotional and physical toll on all the life forms involved directly in the conflict zone. Human conflict and electronic global communication is always accompanied by huge ecological cost.

In the modern world we are encouraged from birth to believe that we must make money, have children, and use technology to succeed. We are taught that humans are somehow special, and superior to other life forms. The I=PAT insights warn us that this road leads to ecosystems collapse. Unpicking how the Zionist cult is nurtured and maintained, despite its clear conflict with the human rights of Palestinians, can provide us with the start of the understanding to dismantle the mindset that perpetuates economic growth. Like Zionism, growth economics colonises and expands, and remains for ever insatiable. These two ideologies are equally unjust, they both destroy whatever life forms stand in their way, not just human. They are both self-destructive, Israel depends on the Zionist diaspora to survive, but nowadays it is losing the Public Relations battle.

In the Indie Nile discussion, various anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis explain the challenges they face when they challenge the cult into which they born. One of the interviewees is from a high-profile Zionist family, she is too afraid to show her face; such is the stigma if one tries to stand up to any dogma that is shared between family and friends. Any Degrowth activist who dares to tackle pronatalism will risk finding themselves ostracised from movements like Extinction Rebellion and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. Most people find the message that we are engineering our own extinction simply too painful to confront, and they feel compelled to shut their eyes to reality.

A prerequisite for the equitable Degrowth mindset requires recognition that Human Rights applies to every human, it also requires the understanding that continuing to sustain a population of 8 billion will accelerate ecosystems collapse, because we are so far over the carrying capacity of Earth already. If we all settled for minimum consumption, and we all worked on eco-regeneration priorities, the Earth might be able to support 3 billion. This calculation is based on research that suggests that 2.14 global hectares is an adequate area for a human to live a fulfilled life. This is combined with the suggestion from E O Wilson that half Earth is needed to sustain biodiversity. There are about 12 billion global hectares available which means humanity must learn to subsist on half this capacity, i.e. about 6 billion gha. Therefore, if we managed to reduce our global average consumption per capita to 2 gha the Earth might be able to sustain 3 billion humans.

The biocapacity of Earth is suffering and falling as a result of unpredictable weather patterns. The Sixth Mass Extinction event is happening over a much shorter timescale than previous extinction events. In previous events evolution had a chance to adapt.

Those who do not see that Israel has been flouting the convention of Human Rights for decades, are still buried deep in the cult of growth economics and expansionism. They buy the story that is sold to us that ‘Arabs/Russia/China are our enemies. This is a false narrative. The two biggest enemies on Earth today are our own conditioning to sire children and chase after economic growth, and the freedom that we grant to the wealthy to behave recklessly with their money, their land, and all their ecologically damaging commercial projects. The death of the planet is our real enemy, and we are the cause. We cannot afford the ecological cost of warring amongst ourselves. We cannot afford the ecological cost of more children, more building, more technology.

Our global economy is built on trust, belief in the dollar. Money only has value whilst people still trust the financial markets. If that trust evaporates, global finance and commerce can collapse overnight. Money is not a solution, it is a tool, an agreement between a lender and a borrower based on trust. If our monetary system collapses then we soon realise that the most valuable assets on Earth are arable land and clean water; for these are the resources that are needed for survival. In a country like the UK we would be very exposed, because we do not have enough land mass to support our huge population. Like Israel, the UK only survives by extending our ecological footprint beyond our borders; see screenshot below from the global footprint network.

The author of the article above is Barbara Williams, she advocates radical, equitable, economic Degrowth. She is the author of Saving Us From Ourselves, which can be downloaded as a pdf from this link. Her work to date is covered on her website Poems For Parliament.

The book list below is recommended to anyone who is interested in thinking outside the box of growth economics. The first book talks about planned equitable economic Degrowth. The other books shed light on the fact that our democracies have morphed into oligarchies because of the ever-growing wealth gap, and they explain how our human rights frequently get trampled on in this process. The Americans are seeing their democratic rights eroded as billionaires like Musk are now pouring money into the sinister extreme right-wing Christian Ziklag organisation that is engineering Trump’s progress towards the White House.

The equitable Degrowth mindset could avoid the Totalitarian regime that Trump envisions. Unfortunately, the USA is already dragging Europe and the UK into the right-wing mire. Matt Kennard reveals how Keir Starmer was foisted on us by the right-wing Israel lobby who worked hard to label Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-semite. We are already seeing that the International Criminal Court is powerless to stop the genocide in Gaza. The UK government is certainly not even recognising that the atrocities in Gaza meet the UN definition of genocide. The UK and Europe are very likely to be embroiled in a World War before long, simply because most people are not aware of how we are being manipulated by the very rich. The recommended book list follows:

• ‘Slow Down : How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth’ by Kohei Sato
• ‘The Trading Game’ by Gary Stevenson; Gary hosts his own YouTube channel explaining the mechanisms whereby money is constantly transferred to the rich, and suggesting we need an economic model that does not work to increase wealth inequality. This most recent video explains that it is false to claim that the UK is a meritocracy.
• ‘Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom’ by Grace Blakely, this book goes a long way to revealing the malaise in our socio-economic structure.
• ‘The Racket: A rogue reporter vs the American Empire’ by Matt Kennard; Matt is one of the two founders of the media outlet Declassified UK, his book uncovers the way that the rich and powerful control politics in the USA and the UK, and facilitate the blindness to human rights abuses that result from global growth economics. He reveals how Islamophobia has been used as a propaganda tool to feed the global arms industry, and how Western militarisation has interfered in the politics of Arab countries to maintain trading advantages and access to oil supplies.
• ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’ by John J. Mearsheimer. In his book Mearsheimer reveals the political manipulations that go on in American politics with pro-Zionism funding.
• ‘Technofeudalism’ by Yannis Varoufakis. Yannis together with the two MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace are key figures in the Democracy in Europe movement 2025; the book reveals how democracies have morphed into oligarchies, hence the need for the movement; furthermore, they are challenging the injustice that we are seeing in Israel towards the Palestinians, for Zionism is one symptom of the way the Western oligarchy is controlling our political decisions.

The Degrowth movement has been evolving a long time. Some are better prepared for the collapse that is now underway. Steve Genco has two articles on mental models can help readers to think differently. Five mental models are considered, of which (Voluntary) Degrowth is one. Mr. Genco also speaks of the Equation of Change. Both of Steve’s articles start out with a photograph from Pigface Point, Ted Trainers example community. The mental model of Energy Decent Realism combined with the Vision and First Steps of The Simpler Way, the ideas for a Decentralized Civilization and Egalitarian Community, and the ‘eco-anarchist’ example from Rojava are significant and worth much consideration.

• Energy Descent Realism Part I
• Energy Descent Realism Part II