Degrowth Handbook - Part III

The pace of modern life makes it difficult for us to look around and take a stock-take every now and then. It’s strange that we, particularly in the West, don’t discuss a great deal about what our long-term objectives are for society, not just in one year but in one thousand years. What is the end goal that we’re working towards, and more importantly, are we on course to meet these goals?

We also rarely discuss what our collective sense of meaning is, more specifically what this sense of meaning might imply for the way we organize our society. If I asked you what you think our collective values might be, you’d maybe say things like love, kindness, fairness, prosperity, democracy, freedom, these kinds of things. Some very poignant events in recent history have laid bare the possibility that the way we organize our society is struggling to provide these basic values.

The promises of prosperity from leaders and the world’s billionaires may inspire hope in some, but it’s hard for us to really feel their optimism in a truly tangible way. Whilst billionaire promises of progress, hyperintelligence, and robots tucking us into bed are mildly exciting, the only ones seeming to benefit from our march to Musk’s interplanetary utopia are the billionaire class themselves. Our march towards global fuel poverty and ecological collapse on the other hand doesn’t seem particularly prosperous or fair considering fossil fuel company profits this year.

It seems that our values have become detached from the means we employ to realize them. Our values are not embodied in our political, economic, and social spheres.

What degrowth calls for is a rain-check. Undoubtedly, we’ve done some remarkable things since a few genes were shuffled around 300,000 years ago, and the maxims and mechanisms we’ve invented to embody liberatory values are to be treasured. Yet now, degrowth calls for a further shuffling, of our political, economic, and social fabric, one that is truly suited to the 21st-century, wherein we need to decide which parts of society are helping us embody these values and which are hindering us.

What does a society look like that provides the optimum level of human well-being for everyone, an abundance of hours for leisure and self-directed time, and an absence of lifelong drudgery? What does a society look like where we genuinely work to live rather than live to work?

Degrowth ...