World Markets, Planetary Consumption Rates and the Global Economy

This blog article is a more thematically specialized addition to the main and initial blog that follows below. Political balance should include our intelligent response to the impact of our societal interaction with our environment and a correspondingly appropriate modification of our collective behavior. Truly conservative principles in the highest sense should include conserving the collective wealth we inherit in our environment rather than conserving whatever policies and actions damage it, no matter how traditional these might be.

It should be a common sense understanding that the world population and the power of our technology combined are great enough to have a very significant impact for good or for evil on our environment. It is evident that even much less developed societies have damaged their local environments so badly that their civilizations collapsed. The conservative social psychology (in the worst sense) of this phenomenon clearly dictated their refusal to recognize the writing on the wall before it was too late. Such histories and the aforementioned common-sense observation should easily outweigh the simplistic interpretation of conservatism as maintaining foolish collective behavior that damages the environment simply because it is traditional rather than conserving the possibility of maintaining a decent quality of life for earth's inhabitants.

In the fifties and sixties, scientists were predicting technology would bring us 20-hour work weeks within a couple of decades or so. Well, the technology has been developed, but who's reaping the benefits? Ask yourself that one. Workers won the right to a 40-hour work week, but now we've been suckered into having at least two family members sometimes working 50- and 60-hour work weeks or even more so we can buy all the stuff the royal courts with their marketing expertise (essentially commercial propaganda using Freudian techniques for conditioning irrational associations, appealing directly to subconscious desires in order to subvert intelligent judgment) have suckered us into thinking we just have to have.
It is a clear, scientifically certifiable fact that our planet cannot support the level of consumption of the average U.S. citizen if everyone worldwide were to consume anywhere close to our rates. Water seeks its own level and that's what's happening in the world market. Everyone wants what we have. That's just plain impossible and ultimately we have to compete in the world market.

Human economies just articulate the flow of energy to restructure the environment. That's really all they do. Even taking oil out of the ground is just restructuring the environment. Then we use that energy to restructure it some more. So energy and the intelligence with which we articulate its flow to restructure our personal, social, and natural environments are all economies ultimately boil down to. Money is just a convenient medium of exchange we use to lubricate this process.

We're not being very intelligent in the way we do that. Worse, those with the most power to do restructuring are doing it in their own, selfish, short-term interests. We let them manipulate us with politics, their advertising, and finally their marketing influence on our very culture itself. This is not in the interests of people in general and certainly not in those of the planet. Worse still, most of the entities involved in distorting our economies in counterproductive ways for most of us even in the short term, and all of us in the long term, are not people, but corporate bureaucracies that even the individuals who run them cannot really control.

So what must happen for things to ultimately go well? Worldwide per capita consumption cannot imitate what we're doing. It just physically cannot happen. So we need to restructure our environment much more intelligently to recycle non-renewable resources and not burn them all up or put them in landfills, rivers, and oceans. Physical resources must be conserved to the highest degree possible because they are clearly not infinite as our past perspective has unwittingly assumed. Also, of course, energy must move ultimately to totally renewable sources.
What, then, is the inevitable conclusion? The ultimate, long-term success of the global economic system toward which we cannot help but move depends not on economic growth in our rate of consumption of physical resources, but the intelligence with which we articulate the restructuring of our environment to improve the true quality of our lives while preserving our finite physical resources to the maximum possible degree.
This is precisely the opposite direction from that in which we've been going. This is not rocket science. That this is ultimately true is so clearly unarguable that it takes very little, and very uncomplicated thought for all people with an open mind to confirm it for themselves.