The Pseudoscience of Economics

Value comes in many shapes and forms. Gold and diamonds may be two of the most chemically and biologically inert substances on Earth, but they have immense value to humans. Conversely, things like dead leaves, mud, sea water or desert dust have little monetizable value in the human economy but huge importance for the planet. The human economy represents an inversion of the value hierarchy of the ecosystem: timeless natural resources become cheap, single-use consumables in our society, whereas expensive human consumer products have zero value for Earth. In this sense, human civilisation is a perverse aberration within the planet’s biology and ecology.

It is no surprise therefore that economics, the study of how resources, energy and goods are used and exchanged, suffers from the same inversion of value hierarchies. The problem with economics is that it is based on money: an abstract representation of value used exclusively by humans to describe assets valuable only to them, not the planet. All currencies are a distortion of value. Money perversely allows tangible value to be distorted, speculated, fluctuated and betted upon. The distortion of value we call “money” embodies the two main drivers behind civilisational collapse: human supremacy and growth.

In financial terms, this civilisation is the product of ecological fraud: stolen habitats, exhausted resources and exterminated species. Economic growth itself is an illusion given that it is merely the result of a series of heists that bankrupted the planet. What we proudly call civilisation is a shopfront for a money-laundering operation concealing the pillaging of resources, mass attempted genocide of 10 million species and chief fraud against the planet. If Earth’s age was compressed into a single year, modern humans do not arrive until approximately 11:36 pm on December 31st. Only a terrorist could do so much damage in such little time.

Economically speaking, we have been in debt since our very beginning, something which accelerated once we printed currencies to finance an unsustainable economic model. Every increase in GDP can be traced back to a resource exhausted and a bailout loan accepted from our one and only lender, the Bank of Earth. This civilisation has accumulated so much debt towards Earth that it is literally made of debt: everything we own is stolen and all human-invented currency is purely symbolic, because the only valid currency on Earth is the collection of tangible physical assets we call “nature”. The subset of Earth’s economy we call civilisation is nothing but a Ponzi scheme nested within the ecosystem. It is a business that has never turned a profit, has too many dependents on its books, and is prepared to take down everyone with it when it goes bust.

And yet, our approach to economics has been as limp as our approach to happiness. Metrics, currencies, profits and budgets can only quantify, they cannot valuate. How much is a planet worth? This is not a numerical question. What is happiness? This is also not a numerical question, because the value of life on this planet is infinite and way beyond what any currency can estimate or purchase. And yet we have placed price tags on ecosystems, on a flower, on a smile. We have devalued, in the cheapest way possible, things which were of infinite, immeasurable worth. This type of economics can only be described as necroeconomics: the monetization of death.

We know of no other way to exist but theft. It is our biggest cognitive impediment that we have only learned to survive as a species that extracts and exploits. We remain the teenagers walking up to the fridge and taking whatever they need, without ever wondering who went grocery shopping, how much it cost and who paid the electric bill. We never grew out of this phase, and it is looking unlikely we ever will. We are destined to die staring at an empty fridge, unable to put two and two together: understand where things come from, where our place is within The Vastness, and to make something whole out of human existence. As consumatrons we have prostituted ourselves to capital and even condemned the future of our children just so that we can have the iPhones, burgers and travel getaways they will never have. We have stolen from nature and bankrupted this planet thinking that we can continue to have infinite consumer choice while generating infinite waste.

Humanity’s future aspirations, dreams and ambitions are predicated on the foolish assumption that the ecological fraud this civilisation is built upon can somehow continue. But physics is physics, and the consumatronic human is a thermodynamic impossibility. The ecosystem is not a supermarket. You don’t get to have whatever you want, whenever you want it. The Ponzi scheme is collapsing and the planet will collect its debt one way or another. Liquidation of human assets is already ongoing given that there is little left to extract, exploit or exterminate. However fragile they may be, the planet’s resources will always have the last word for the simple reason that there can be plenty of resources without humans, but there can never be any humans without resources.

Economics is not a science. It is the art of presenting the decimation of nature as an act of creation when it is in fact an act of destruction. We are part of an economic system that bribes us every day so that we can turn a blind eye to the crimes that fund these bribes. But the planet punishes everyone whether they took a bribe, gave a bribe, or saw one happen. We are poised to go extinct before learning the most basic lesson in economics: that on Earth’s economy there is no yours or mine, predator or prey, weak or strong. We are all just molecules continuously converting into one another regardless of currencies, stock markets or other vehicles of ecological fraud. The real economy of this planet is its forests and oceans. Its currency is water, food, oxygen, sunlight. Its stock market is the ecosystems and climate systems which regulate the allocation of these resources, and its stakeholders are its 10 million species. The Bank of Earth is the only sustainable bank that ever existed. There are no doors, no tellers, no bankers, and no cash machines, because all transactions are free. There are no bank accounts or debt, because no one owns anything. Everything is either shared or loaned and eventually returned to the bank. No one is poor, yet no one owns “rights” to anything. Those who withdraw funds at the expense of others are punished by the ecosystem and the physical laws of the universe.

This may all sound revolutionary, dreamy and wild, but it is how this planet’s only solvent economy actually works, and how it has continued to work for the past 4 billion years. This is how our planet works. The human economy is the complete antithesis of this model.

Along with a sustainable economy governed by the laws of physics, the planet has its own intelligence service, the Earthnet of Things: a web of weather, chemical, metabolic and other energy processes which are equivalent to the most expansive CCTV system that can exist. We are being watched and monitored by this planet on a 24-hour basis. Humans naively call the Earthnet of Things an “ecosystem” as if this is another machine they can toy with. But in this machine, there is no opportunity for human control. This machine regulates itself and it can regulate human civilisation out of existence. Every action within the Earthnet of Things has a reaction: it is recorded and responded to, in real time. And with every extinction that happens, the Earthnet of Things changes forever as it readjusts itself, moving into a new steady state. No man-made magical technology, machine or system will ever outpower the power of physics, the power of the Earthnet of Things to wipe us out as long as we continue to wage war at the forces of this planet.

Civilisations collapse because they don’t even know what a collapse is. It is simply not in their DNA to understand it. Their very mode of existence and self-awareness are rooted in unsustainable expansion, ecological fraud and cannibalism towards the very people who have built that civilisation. This is the cognitive wall we are up against, which we have always been up against collectively as a society and culture. The collection of narratives which justified thousands of years of ecological fraud were enforced by power, religion and economic theory. It is incredible how a dystopia can dispute its own algebra: although basic math is a prerequisite for economics, most economists today idiotically advocate for a growth-based system which does not compute even to a 3-year-old. The power of the Mind Prison and the Civilisational Lie to corrupt even the most indisputable natural law is in fact most prevalent inside ivy-league academia.

The Civilisational Lie ignores the existence of the Bank of Earth, of which the human economy is only a discrete subset, much like a fungal colony on a petri dish is unaware that it exists within an enclosure, surviving on a food source that will soon run out. The only difference between a fungus on a petri dish and human civilisation is that while the former is genuinely unaware of its limits to growth, the latter is aware, but in full denial. Humans refuse to cognitively process the simple idea of a limit. Understanding and respecting the concept of a limit is a cognitive skill that was useless during the evolution of our brain and therefore failed to develop. As a species we are designed to thrive, then crash and burn.

If only we could extrapolate into the tragic future which awaits us, we could have avoided it. This civilisation validated its crimes against nature simply by repeating them. With each repetition these crimes were confirmed, affirmed, legitimised and normalised. In the process of defrauding this planet, humans convinced themselves that as long as the party drugs were in good supply there won’t be a comedown phase. But the comedown phase is already here. We are coming to the end of an economic hallucination which lasted thousands of years as the financial scam of human civilisation finally collapses into itself. The tables are turning as nature’s revenge begins, leaving us to steal from each other in an oversubscribed Ponzi scheme we have so far been referring to as “the economy”.

It is very likely that humans will come and go from Earth without ever discovering happiness or their true purpose. Our concept of prosperity and happiness involves committing so much ecological fraud and telling ourselves so many lies that, being honest at this stage would require denouncing almost all of our history and culture. This would be a great start. But exposing the lies this civilisation told itself requires the humility to enter introspection, the willingness to face the music, to be present, visionary, to want to do the actual work required to inaugurate a new multi-species civilisation with actual values and principles, not currencies. Our entire system needs to be replaced not simply by a different economic model but by a new concept of existence. We can only do this if we access our Infinity State.

We have been in constant war with nature for hundreds of thousands of years. This narrative of conflict has run its course and reached a dead end, leaving both Earth and us bankrupt. If we want to continue on this planet we have no choice but to replace conflict with cooperation, owning with sharing, and doing with simply being.

Our planet recycles everything, including civilisations. Those materials, nutrients or species which are of no use to Earth are always the first to be recycled. Humans have therefore become redundant to the ecosystem. The only way to secure their survival is to become useful to the planet again, and they can only do this if there is significantly less of humanity and significantly more of the natural planet. Our generation will be the last one on Earth unless it discovers a completely new way to exist: one which no generation before it ever achieved, especially at the 8 billion population level.

Listen to my brand new interview for the brilliant Post Growth Australia, a podcast I highly recommend. The interviewers have really taken the implications of my book Beyond The Petri Dish to another level