The game of eternal economic progress

We are now at a point when our civilisation has entered what John Kenneth Galbraith called “the twilight of illusion”. We are at a point at which the end of a forever growing industrial economy is nothing but a short historical process, clearly and visibly declining. To make this understood, we have to search for a realistic understanding of the troubled future ahead of us and a meaningful way of responding to it.

Our civilisation’s head-on collision with our planetary limits of growth is often, and unfortunately, treated as an economical/technical problem that can be corrected with a limited answer book. Well, doing so, we are following the same trajectory of overshoot that terminated so many other civilizations in the past.  What we are experiencing right now of escalating energy price and subsequent economic decline is precisely what many scientists pointed out about ‘peak oil” many decades ago – it will not necessarily be a  sudden collapse but, a slow decline for industrial societies (if we are clever that is).