Growth-based economics is really a recent phenomenon, its dominance is pervasive and has taken on a ‘structural’ quality in current societies, so called `growth lock-in´. Growth is perceived as imperative to stabilising modern societies as it provides employment, public sector provision through tax revenues, rising wages, the incentive of a ‘better life’ and hence social stability. In a co-evolutionary process, a range of institutions developed and are now coupled to a growth-based capitalist economy, including the nation state, representative democracy, the rule of law and current legal, financial, labour market, education, research, and welfare systems. The embeddedness of the growth-based capitalistic economic system in these co-evolved institutions and ways of thinking makes it difficult to transition to a degrowth system because changing the economic system also involves a parallel transformation of these coupled systems. Two examples which directly link to people’s wellbeing illustrate this point: the relationship between the welfare state and growth, and between growth and people’s mindsets and identities.

While economic growth supports the welfare state, in many ways this also works the other way round: the welfare state supports growth by enhancing the population’s health and education levels, providing a ‘safety net’ for the unemployed and disadvantaged. This helps to maintain social order, and increase consumer demand and productivity. In turn, the reduction in job security and shift to meritocracy leads to more individualistic and materialistic mindsets amongst the new middle classes, with competition, expansionism and overconsumption all contributing to continued economic growth and the subsequent systemic and climate crisis we are living today.

Today the era of globalization and development is crumbling. For the many, everyday life is more often about survival, not progress. The ‘age of austerity’ has eroded the ‘safety net’ of the welfare state in many countries. Yet progress is still defined through the monocultural Western growth and development lenses - the permanent accumulation of material goods, based on the assumption of infinite growth, driven by profit, and dominated by an individualistic mindset and extractivism model.

While fighting poverty has been successful in some places, it has been bought at the price of even larger inequalities elsewhere and environmental destruction. Progress is turning out to be regress, as the capitalist logic of the Western societies cannot but exploit nature. Extractivism and wasteful consumption are eroding wellbeing in society. This is particularly the case where there are severe impacts on nature and where people are directly reliant on local ecosystems, where communities and their livelihoods have been destroyed and their culture usurped. There are huge economic costs that result from natural destruction, but these are mostly not accounted for.

Today, in the name of globalization and development, we are witnessing:

• the emergence of free trade market agreements that prioritise corporate power and override government legislation that protects social and environmental welfare (manifested in Free Trade Agreements agreements such as CETA).

• deregulation in order to foster radical privatization and neo-colonial 'globalization' aimed at maximizing profitability and the accumulation of private wealth.

• the abolition of social security systems or welfare states and changes to domestic laws that diminish civil liberties and the protection of human rights, leading to an increase in social oppression, such as racism and classism.

• the dismantling of collectivism and the promotion of aggressive individualism, increasing individual and collective consumption and competition, which pushes heavily on efficiency in production chains as well as on an individual level, all leading to increased inequalities.

• high and increasing levels of poverty and social exclusion and violations of human rights, combined with aggressive advertising to influence consumer choices - while the dominant narrative puts responsibility on consumers and consumer demand as the driving force behind the operation of markets and the growth in overconsumption.

The lower and middle classes across the world are starting to realise that the expectations fed by this Western idea of progress are not going to be fulfilled. Many have been alienated from their traditions, aware of Western lifestyles through their smartphones, yet excluded from this modern world. While the promise of globalization and progress evaporates, it has ushered in an age of populist nationalism. Meanwhile, with humanity facing its own extinction due to the threat of climate change and biodiversity loss, fear for the future has become part of our collective mindset, a fear that life prospects are diminishing and that our children and grandchildren will be less well off. We are experiencing injustice, cultural turmoil, and ecological decline across the board. From the ‘Limits to Growth’ in 1972 to ‘Planetary Boundaries’ in 2009, the analysis is clear: development-as-growth leads to conditions on planet Earth becoming increasingly inhospitable for humans and the ecosystems we depend on.

Today the level of exploitation and destruction of nature is at a crisis point, clearly connected to the fact that divisions between the poorest and the super wealthy have never been greater. This situation is driving disastrous ecological impacts, because the richer you are, the more damage you do, yet the beneficiaries are insulated from the worst effects.

As analysed by Peter Philips in his book Giants, unprecedented amounts of finance and power are held by very few people. The 26 richest people in the world hold the same wealth as 3.8 billion of the poorest, while control of this wealth - amounting to $50 trillion - is determined by just 17 large investment management firms, in turn controlled by just 199 board directors. This is the global power elite - an extension of American imperialism - which makes policy decisions and has direct control of where to invest, which is mainly in the large corporations most responsible for CO₂ emissions, extraction of resources and destruction of habitats, for their mutual benefit. These investors need to keep growing their capital, but their wealth is so great that they are running out of places to invest, and are rapidly buying up the public domain, privatising everything from infrastructure, to water resources, to health care and education. They are behind the growing collusion between politics and the corporate world, as well as the rise in defence spending and privatised security corporations which protect the transnational corporate class and defend their capital. Big money also controls the message and the media, with 80% of TV news stories prepared or packaged by PR firms working for corporations or governments, to ensure no criticism of capitalism, and to build false narratives where it is threatened.

This corporate takeover of the public sphere is against the interests of the people and democratically elected governments – whether through interfering with regime change, or threatening debt collection. With little government oversight or public scrutiny, unelected billionaires are shaping public policy through “helping the needy” or alternatively, “Philanthro-capitalism”, effectively making sure that the money they put into their foundations, ultimately makes more money for themselves, while depriving citizens in their own country of their tax dollars. For the Gates Foundation, this philanthropy is a Trojan horse for enabling a centrally controlled digital network that amounts to the corporate capture of the food system, through imposing GMOs and digital dictatorship, and has led to strong resistance from Indian farmers.

As ever, neoliberal capitalism continues to reinvent itself, to continue the momentum of the Great Acceleration with its futuristic vision. But the plans of the corporate, capitalist mindset involve yet more massive growth and greater corporate control of our lives through "Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies”, fuelled by private investment in AI and a new space race to set up space hotels that would enable the extractive industries to expand beyond the Earth itself. While corporations are working non-stop to make this fantasy reality, they seem not to care about the unprecedented crises caused by this growth mindset, which could lead to the collapse of ecosystems and society here on Earth. No doubt their huge wealth will insulate them from the worst effects.

The psychological and spiritual impacts of this lack of balance in the world can’t be overstated. Excessive wealth also leads to unequal societies, where people suffer from an erosion of trust, increased anxiety - including status anxiety - and illness, which all impact on peoples’ wellbeing. The wealth of the Global North has been built over many centuries through this extraction and exploitation of nature and people in the South, as well as by creating division within countries in the North. Thus, together with an immediate halt to new plans for extractivist projects, there is a need for swift reparation, mainly from European countries and the USA, starting with their large corporations and wealthy elite, towards Latin American, African and Asian countries for the damages wrought by colonialism and its continued system of exploitation. And we need to call out the “big money mindset” that has evolved from these injustices and is posing such a threat to humanity today.

The resulting confusion and systemic crises have given rise to three different narratives - ‘the fortress’, ‘globalism’, and ‘solidarity’ (*1). The poster child of ‘Fortress thinking’ is Trump and his nationalistic slogans ‘Make America Great Again’and ‘America First’. Authoritarian leaders whip up pride in national and racial identities which leads to hatred of outsiders. In contrast, ‘globalism’ promotes an ideally deregulated, free-trade world, which brings wealth and wellbeing to corporations and consumers everywhere. ‘Green and inclusive growth’ paired with smart technologies is the path forward - yet this is a false promise because it is tied to destructive infinite growth.

Last but not least, we have the narrative of ‘solidarity’ which fights the idea of individualism and the culture of profit, puts human rights and ecological principles at the core of its value system and promotes market forces as means to an end. ‘Think globally, act locally’ redefines prosperity and acknowledges the importance of local politics and action; this implies that there is no magic bullet and there are many paths to a social transformation where all living things are prioritised.

(*1) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Wolfgang Sachs

The world is changing and transformation is already happening. There has been a huge expansion of renewable energy and jobs in the sector could rise from 9.8 million in 2016 to more than 24 million in 2030 (*1). On the other hand, the phase-out of coal, the combustion engine and the decline of oil is bringing uncertainty for the workers in those industries, who face having to adapt to radical change.

Coal miners, workers from other extractive industries, and power generation workers do not face the same challenges or have the same opportunities ahead. But they share the same anxiety and uncertainty. If they do not see a tangible future for themselves and do not feel they have a say in the process, they will resist and provide support to the `dance macabre` of the fossil fuel industry.

The renewable industry will not absorb all the workforce left behind by the phase out of fossil fuels. Even though positive examples of this exist, the skills required by the two industries are not fully transferable, and geographic locations often don’t overlap. Successful just transition strategies are very localized and usually consist of a fully-fledged, gender-sensitive development and regeneration plan for each region, including incentives to revive small- to medium-size businesses, diversification and tailor-made social plans for the retired workers and their families.

(*1) http://bit.ly/2rKtwfm.

The chaos and confusion of the COVID-19 outbreak has exposed some inescapable truths about how we live. It’s shown us how vulnerable, interdependent and interconnected we are. One by one, all the flaws of our current socio-economic systems are being revealed, in particular habitat destruction and trade in wildlife, combined with global travel, which has enabled the virus to emerge and spread. This crisis is also exposing inequalities across the world, as the disenfranchised are suffering disproportionately, making poverty and displacement worse. As a result, support systems, especially healthcare, are struggling. Our broken systems are proving incapable of coping with the COVID emergency, let alone the looming threat of social and environmental collapse.

Just as the oil crisis in the 1970s opened the door to neoliberal capitalism, the Covid crisis today has laid bare the critical weaknesses in the status-quo. This might be the opportunity we need to allow the alternative narrative of solidarity that has reemerged in the past decade to finally take off and over.

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