Dissecting An Economic Parasite: The Story Of The Greatest Fraud On Earth

The faster an economy rushes itself into growth, the sooner it will perish. All previous economies followed this fate except one: Earth’s billion-year-old natural resource economy has never grown, shrunk or collapsed, at least not until humans came into the picture. Humans think that they invented the economy, but all they did was parasitize an existing one. This civilisation may be vibrant, impressive, diversified and sophisticated, but like all parasites, it lacks self-awareness as to what it is: it does not know that it is a parasite.

There is little sentience in this economic system because it is driven not by reason, emotion or other self-reflective capacity, but by a single absolutist dogma that guides all its intentions: profit. The grip that profit has on this civilisation is so tight that it has become virtually impossible to imagine humanity without it. Without the dogmas of growth, profit and supremacy, it is impossible to narrate the story of humans through the ages. Those who try to question the profit dogma quickly discover that they are having an out-of-body experience into an impossible conversation: there is no place for them in this reality, this economy, and this society. Our civilisation is the product of a toxic cocktail of narratives which are so dogmatic that, the very process of questioning these narratives from within human culture itself requires an imagination so bold, so vivid, that it needs to transcend reality itself. Very few humans possess this ability, because our own sentience suffers from a long list of fatal cognitive handicaps.

Powerful human economies spectacularly collapsed countless times over thousands of years yet never learned the obvious lessons that could have helped them avoid self-implosion the next time around. The wrong lesson was learned each time: if you fall, steal harder next time. The harder we fell, the harder we stole. We never figured out that perhaps the solution was to stop doing certain things or at least do some things differently next time. Rather, we rushed into new and progressively bigger destructive binges each time we discovered a new toy to play with. The senselessness of this civilisation leads me to conclude that it has never been sentient.

There are certain criteria all healthy, balanced, fair and sustainable economies must fulfil, and the human economy fails to meet all of them:

One obvious stress test all human economies fail is that their balance sheet is consistently negative: goods and services flow in, but none of it is ever paid for. It is all written down as debt towards the planet. The debt of humanity’s economy towards Earth exceeds its GDP by several hundred multiples, a gap that has continued to widen throughout history. Humans depend on nature for raw materials, labour and even expertise to build their economies, yet pay nothing for these goods and services. In fact, most times they leave behind a trail of destruction and extinction as a token of appreciation. Every time it implodes, humanity’s parasitic economy runs back to the CBE (Central Bank of Earth) for a bailout: a new rainforest to destroy, a new river to reroute, and so on. There is no nice way of putting it: humanity is a global criminal network of planetary-scale ecological fraud.

Luckily some of nature’s stolen goods and services are renewable, which is what has slowed down the planet’s collapse. But most of them aren’t, which means that once they are destroyed, that’s it. This places humanity in a special, and very rare, class of parasites: those that eventually kill their host. Alternatively, humanity can be compared to a virus that is too virulent for its own good, what we biologists call a “failed virus”. There is an age-old scientific debate on whether viruses are living things or not. If humans behave like a virus, especially a failed one, do they still qualify as living beings? We may appear to behave semi-sentiently at the individual level, but the collective herd we call society is no smarter than a single amoeba cell looking for its next meal.

Unlike the dysfunctional human economy, the real economy of this planet until very recently had never suffered from inflation, deflation or economic boom and bust cycles. With the exception of rare extinction events, the CBE has always boasted a solid, steady-state performance and a stable balance sheet. The value of the trees, the food, the oxygen stayed pretty much the same for millions of years: priceless, and renewable. It was an immortal economy built to last until the end of time, founded on the concept of sharing and recycling, as opposed to ownership and waste.

Because of their Ponzi-scheme nature, human economic systems are fundamentally unhealthy and therefore easily succumb to various ailments: unequal growth, overheating, inflation, deflation and crash. It is no coincidence that these same exact economic terms are used by medical professionals to describe what happens to a patient with a metabolic disorder. Just like an advanced stage diabetic, human economies eventually have to cut their own limbs off: lay off millions of employees and send the rest of them to be killed in a war that gives the defence industry the vitality boost it desperately craves. None of this would happen in a healthy economy. Humanity is always that one, super-obese customer you see in an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant: they sit by themselves, getting up every ten minutes only to refill their plate. They continue to eat without measure, without a sense of when or how to stop.

Another criterion human economies fail to meet is the concept of legitimate output. All 10 million species on this planet make significant contributions to the Central Bank of Earth except for humans, who produce nothing of actual value in Earth’s economy. Sure, they produce a myriad of consumer products and technologies for themselves, but nothing for the life forms who produce things for humans. This means that humanity operates in full parasitic mode. Humans depend on nature’s rains and rivers to water crops and produce potable water and energy. They depend on Nature’s energy, stored as fats, carbohydrates and protein, to survive. Even fossil fuel is chemical energy that was once captured by billions of plants through photosynthesis and stored in the ground.

If Earth’s natural resource economy had an actual currency, then the role of humans within this economy would be to create counterfeit notes. This is because nothing humans produce can be used as actual collateral within Earth’s economy. Humans create currency but never generate any value: they embezzle it, but most importantly, devalue the natural resource economy itself by permanently destroying Earth’s wealth-generating assets. Every life form on Earth is set to become progressively poorer as our collective ecological inheritance is dismantled piece by piece and sold off to the capital markets before they too, shoot themselves in the head.

Despite thousands of years in existence, human business continues to lack any sound business principles. Every business set up by humans, however big or small, is part of a global operation of ecological fraud that has learned to rely on ecocide, genocide, colonialism, slavery and exploitation - yet we insist on describing this theft operation as “the economy”, hailing its performance as an incredible success story which “only humans could have achieved”. Businessmen are always quick to brag about what they have “built”, as if it was something difficult. But it is the easiest feat of all for any business to become successful by stealing from the planet. Today’s predominant global business model can be summed up in nine words: fuck up the Earth, exploit the people, make money. As long as this planet continues to be run as a for-profit business rather than a self-regulating, all-inclusive socialist commune of 10 million species, everything on Earth will end up in a bonfire.

The legal framework around businesses today unavoidably makes them undemocratic, oppressive entities which are out there to cause harm. Our concept of a business as a self-interested, self-motivated venture is not only fascist but grossly misplaced: as long as business interacts with society and the environment, it is part of that society and the environment and therefore needs to be led, managed and operated as a social and environmental enterprise collectively owned by all the stakeholders it affects, not by corporate entities given a full complement of legal rights.

The third reason why human economies are not economies is that they worship death, in every sense of the word. Capitalism accelerates the ageing process of everything: resources, products, and workers. The death cult we call capitalism operates at optimal level only when every resource, species or product is sold, used, destroyed and discarded as expediently as possible so that demand continues and production resumes. This civilization expanded by converting everything it could into a single-use commodity with a finite expiration date. Goods were renamed as “consumables” to indicate exactly this: that they are meant to be used, to “lose their worth” so to speak. A “consumable” is nothing other than the definition of death itself. We like to think that “consumed” products simply vanish into a black hole we call “waste”, where everything has zero value in the capitalist marketplace. But nothing on Earth has zero value, and nothing was ever meant to be “owned”, “consumed”, or “trashed”. Everything, including entire civilisations, is eventually recycled and returned to its only rightful owner, the planet. The capitalist idea of consumption aims to absolve the consumer of any responsibility on what happens to a product’s afterlife. But nothing is ever consumed or disappeared. It is borrowed and shared with the rest of the ecosystem, meaning that the state in which we return used products to the planet needs to render these products, by-products and emissions reusable by the ecosystem. If every time that we use the word “consume” in a sentence we tried replacing it with “borrow”, which is more accurate, we would perhaps realize the massive ecological debt towards the planet we are amassing. Go on, try it.

By inventing commerce, humans invented a death cult that worships waste, monetizes worthless things, and devalues anything that was actually worth something. It is ironic that a species which is so obsessed with owning things is at the same time so incredibly enamoured with the idea of parting with them and burying them under huge piles of so-called “trash”, as it desperately tries to make its guilt disappear. Humanity’s relationship with physical objects is tragically dysfunctional.

Money was central to the creation of the death cult of natural destruction. The pricing of any object immediately devalues it, as its numerical price never comes anywhere close to its real value - which goes beyond the very concept of money itself. Everything on this planet has multiple uses, applications, and even lifetimes as the molecules of so-called “consumables” are ingeniously recycled, upcycled, downgraded and upgraded by the ecosystem. Yet capitalism confines every product, life form or worker to a single purpose, condemning them to premature termination once that purpose is exhausted. In the economy humans have created everything and everyone is de-valued and placed on the shelf to passively wait for their commercial death as their expiration date approaches. They are denied any agency, sentience or sovereignty over their existence or purpose. Earth has already become one big supermarket and all of us are working at the cash register until the fire sale is over and this civilization calls it a day. Everything now has death programmed into it, including us: the forced participants to this death cult.

It is the greatest irony that an expiration date-based capitalist economy in the end only manages to place an expiration date on itself. Because if you treat resources and people as consumables, they will be exhausted. If you treat the world as trash, then trash is what it will become. In a world hijacked by capitalism everything eventually becomes a low value, short lifespan consumable: natural resources, products, and even the people who buy them.

All institutions of this civilization were built with the aim of supporting, organizing and streamlining a death cult of accelerated growth and natural devastation. Our economic system is a change management consultancy tasked with the shutdown of the planet. Willingly or not, directly or indirectly, all humans have a vested interest in seeing this planet destroyed: whether to keep their job or maintain their lifestyle, they are hostages to an automated countdown to collapse they simply cannot unshackle themselves from. Held at gunpoint through debt and sedated by the consumatronic dystopia, we diligently go through the motions of a mechanical existence where we may be given an abundance of purpose, but very little meaning. It is no wonder we have no bandwidth to care about “the planet”. As long as the glass remains deceptively half-full, we will fail to recognize that this civilization has rested its entire existence upon its frightening ability to exhaust, rather than to sustain.

The Central Bank of Earth, the sole big lender propping up the bogus human economy, has already declared bankruptcy hundreds of years ago while servicing the massive debt humanity accumulated. The current collapse is nothing but a long overdue default against this debt. The CBE will be run down to the ground, down to the bricks and mortars of its foundations until there is nothing left, because nothing and no one can bail it out. Its assets cannot be leveraged or quantitatively eased, because these are economic instruments only human fraudsters use. This bank will continue to be depleted as long as humans follow the main principles of capitalism: Exploit. Destroy. Leverage. Accelerate. Monetize. Grow. Inflate.

In ecological terms, the human species is of absolutely no use to Earth. Species that operate this way normally vanish fairly quickly, as the dynamics of the ecosystem’s economy always eliminate freeloaders. We have made ourselves unwanted by this ecosystem, and this makes us far more vulnerable to extinction than we realise. We have already been marked for termination. The reason we haven’t gone extinct yet is that we are parasitizing not a single host species but an entire planet. This slows down the process by which Earth gets rid of us. We will probably go extinct not because the disturbed ecosystem found a new predator to cull our population, as it normally does. We will simply vanish because we will have killed almost everything that lives, through the climate crisis and the ongoing ecological apocalypse. As extractive capitalism comes to a virtual halt, the parasite will be left without a host. It will shrivel, dry up and fall off. If these scenarios don’t tickle your fancy, there are plenty more, like an AI-instigated nuclear war for example. We are creating new non-DNA-based life forms that will be incredibly much more resilient than us within a destroyed ecosystem.

Thousands of years of social and economic evolution as a parasite have taken this civilisation to a place where it is now fundamentally unable to re-integrate itself into the ecosystem as a non-parasitic life form, even if it wanted to. Indicative of this dead end is the fact that there is much discourse about changing the system, but almost none about changing the human, by addressing the fundamental dogmas of growth, profit and supremacy. Few dare to touch the difficult subject matter of having a major spiritual and existential awakening of fairy tale proportions, which is more or less the only way in which humanity can avoid extinction. My readers know however that this is all I talk about - not because I think it’s possible, but because it is our only chance.

The accounting department of this economy is not simply clueless. It is corrupt and evil, staffed by mafia mobsters who devise the religions, fairy tales and myths they need to keep telling themselves and everybody else in order to keep the Ponzi scheme going. As with all Ponzi schemes, exponential growth is always followed by exponential collapse. The human garbage party will soon be over, ending in a spectacular plastic bonfire.

“Sorry Humans, my records indicate that there are no funds remaining in your account” – Central Bank of Earth