The bullshit economy

Today, few people produce all that we need. The remainder have found bullshit jobs in the bullshit economy. In several advanced economies, 1-3% of the population works in agriculture. Previously, it was over 90%. Those 90% produced barely enough to meet their own needs, so that ancient societies could waste only 10% on merchants, governments, and other frivolous activities, such as jesters. Now these few per cent grow the food for everyone, and more people suffer from obesity than famine, while the world’s population has increased from a few million to over eight billion. The efficiency increase is astounding. But when a few people produce all that we need, the rest of us transform energy and resources into waste and pollution by producing non-essential goods and services. These activities may appear useful because they satisfy desires.

Economists have built an entire science around doing useless things to satisfy our desires. For most of history, nearly everyone was dirt poor, and many children died of diseases, and economics explains why that is no longer the case. Economic activities generate profits for investors or serve bureaucratic aims. You can’t simply terminate these activities and expect us to do all right. The economic system comprises parts and relationships. Actions have consequences, many of which we can’t foresee. But humanity has to adopt a sustainable path and live in harmony with nature, which means reducing consumption and population growth, which means cutting the bullshit. It is hard to say precisely what the bullshit economy comprises. Economists categorise economic sectors as follows:

• food production and the extraction of raw materials;
• manufacturing, utilities such as electricity and water, and construction;
• retail, healthcare, banking, education, tourism, and entertainment;
• software, scientific research, data analytics, and consultancy.

The degree of bullshit increases from top to bottom, but scientific research can improve food production, so it is not that simple, but overall, the rule applies. The same goes for the distinction between needs and desires. Psychoanalysis may seem like bullshit, but some people really need it. Still, people in the past survived without it, and poor people still have to. Psychoanalysis, however, requires little energy and resources, as you could do it sitting under a tree, nor does it generate pollution. That makes psychoanalysis a luxury we can afford. Yet, bullshit generates demand for bullshit. Smartphones and social media cause a lot of distress, so terminating them can solve a lot of psychological problems.

In current economic thinking, the debate often centres around the roles of governments and markets. Yet, governments and markets are the two main parts of the system. And framing the issue this way diverts attention from wasteful production and consumption, which, together with population levels and growth, are at the core of unsustainability. In ‘advanced’ economies, bullshit generates more than 50% of GDP, and it might be as much as 75%. And so a banker once noted,

A cyclist is a disaster for the country’s economy. He doesn’t buy cars and doesn’t borrow money to buy. He doesn’t pay for insurance policies. He doesn’t buy fuel or pay for maintenance and repairs. He doesn’t use paid parking. He doesn’t require multi-lane highways. He doesn’t get fat. Healthy people are neither needed nor beneficial for the economy. They don’t buy medicine. They don’t go to hospitals or doctors. Nothing gets added to the country’s gross domestic product. On the contrary, every new McDonald’s restaurant creates at least 30 jobs: 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 dietitians and nutritionists, and, obviously, people who work at the restaurant itself.

That is how the bullshit economy works. It is about making money, not providing needs. Returns in agriculture are meagre compared to those of tech giants. We could survive without tech giants, but not without food. And that is a most serious defect, as we waste energy and resources on non-essential items like social media while endangering the food supply. To illustrate the money-generating power of bullshit, you can compare the returns on an investment in the Chinese stock markets versus the US stock markets. If you had invested $1,000 in the MSCI China in 2011, in a real economy that produces things, you would have had $1,670 by November 2025.

Had you instead put your money in the S&P 500, in a bullshit economy of social media, lawsuits, unaffordable healthcare, Hollywood, finance, vampire capital scams, marketing and sales, you would have had $6,700. And that was the timeframe during which China caught up to, or even overtook, the United States. At least, the rich are doing fine. The latest hype is artificial intelligence. Soon, capitalists may no longer need workers. That vision of a coming capitalist paradise seems to keep the stock market going.

In the Financial Times, a fellow named Tek Parikh enthusiastically claimed that fifty years ago, the assets held by the top 500 US companies were mainly tangible, such as factories, equipment, and inventory. Today, most of their assets are intangible, including intellectual property, brand value, and marketing networks. In the US, spending on intangible assets has surpassed spending on tangible investments as a share of GDP since the late 1990s. The gap has widened ever since. These intangibles drive US productivity growth. Parikh excitedly asserts that this transformation helps explain the high concentration, exceptionalism, and bubble-like valuations in the US stock market.

Information technology unlocks value, a marketing term for marketing more senseless items or intensifying competition. Buying a widget for €10 and selling it for €20 because you own a brand generates more wealth than producing it for €8 and selling it for €10. A brand is capital that makes dirt look like gold to people willing to pay the price of gold for it, which you make them do by building a brand, so it is intangible, not a factory. Coca-Cola sells the same soda for five times the price to suckers who buy a ‘Coca-Cola feeling.’ And a brand owner can squeeze producers, make them compete to the death, so many brands do not produce their own items. They hire an advertising agency that hires a celebrity to tout the brand’s exclusiveness, and then they rake in the money. It may cost only a few euros to produce a Gucci bag that sells for €2,500.

Social networks, retail and financial services depend on physical infrastructure, such as roads and electricity grids. Without concrete, copper and fibre optics, there would be no data centres, no electricity, no internet, and no parcel deliveries. The bullshit economy still depends on physical labour and infrastructure. Yet the money is not in physical labour and infrastructure. A few mega corporations, such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon, reap the benefits, while nothing they do is something anyone needed fifty years ago. Bullshit is where the money is. In this sense, the US economy has become one of the most ‘advanced,’ leaving Europe to bite the dust.

And so, yet another Wall Street wiz kid developed the Degenerate Economy Index, which tracks companies enabling gambling, day trading, and memecoin speculation. By October 2025, it had returned 130% since its inception in May 2023. The index includes 13 public companies providing computing power, mobile devices, cloud services, and social networks, as well as Bitcoin. The 130% return over 18 months occurred during a period of market uncertainty, rising interest rates, the collapse of regional banks, and the flailing commercial real estate market. Bullshit is where the money is.¹

The current economic organisation squeezes producers of necessities to employ more people in the bullshit economy to make money for investors from transforming natural resources and energy into waste and pollution. Economists call it efficient and wealth creation. Genetic engineering may increase crop yields, benefiting farmers, but competition in farming keeps average returns low. The profits are for the corporations engineering the crops. In a typical bullshit economy, migrants do the hard labour at low wages, while the native population occupies itself with value-creating activities in the bullshit economy.

No limits to our desires

As an ancient Persian story goes, the inventor of chess once presented the game to the country’s ruler. The king, much impressed by the game, offered the inventor any reward he desired. If there were ever to be a top three stupidest promises in the history of humankind, any reward someone wants will surely make it on that list. The inventor asked for a single grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard. Then, two grains for the second, four for the third, until the last square. The ruler, baffled by this seemingly small price, agreed. His treasurer later made the calculation and regretfully informed him that it was impossible to pay the inventor. There wasn’t enough rice in the world. The ruler then did the only sensible thing and ordered this man executed for his greed.

Humans don’t lack desires. The Bible tells that Eve and Adam wished to acquire the knowledge of the gods. And there are no limits. Otherwise, we wouldn’t live in someone’s personal fantasy world. When we have enough, we want more. It could be a larger home, a sports car, or an adventurous trip. Had that not been the case, we could have worked a few hours daily, had all we needed, and been content with what we had. Instead of living happily in a utopian society, we work hard to turn Earth into a wasteland by converting energy and raw materials into waste and pollution until we can’t keep up, and robots and artificial intelligence will replace us. On the bright side, that already happened, and artificial intelligence has generated this world, including us. That opens up new possibilities.

More material wealth and new inventions haven’t made us happier, yet we still hope that they will. Between 1970 and 2024, income per person in the US rose a whopping 265%.² Still, about 40% of Americans can’t make ends meet. Many feel more miserable than their grandparents did fifty years ago. It is also a lifestyle problem that economic growth can’t fix. What was once a luxury or didn’t even exist has now become a necessity. It is not only that. The gains mostly went into the pockets of the rich, and many poor people are hardly better off. It is not the first time that humans have sacrificed quality of life for growth.

Our distant forbears switched from hunting and gathering to growing crops and herding cattle. That dramatically increased food production. Like us today, these poor suckers thought that if they worked harder, they would have more food and their lives would be better. Yet, more children survived, and they remained on the brink of famine. Even worse, their diets became less varied, leading to poorer health. They often ate tasteless porridge, while their forebears had nuts, berries, and fruits to chew on. They lived in unhygienic settlements where they contracted more infectious diseases. They suffered more from violence as farmers had to defend their crops and animals against thieves. And so, peasants were much more miserable than hunter-gatherers who lived before them.³

Since time immemorial, most people have had barely enough. Frugality was a virtue and wastefulness a vice. Parents taught their children to be satisfied with what they had. Few scraps remained unused. When my father wished for a toy, he would take a branch from a tree and turn it into one himself, at least when he had time to play and didn’t have to do chores on the farm. He didn’t know better and was quite satisfied with whatever toy he could create from a tree branch. His mother didn’t throw away food. And if his trousers had a hole, she would mend them. They were poor, but had enough. If they needed a costly item, they saved for it. Our virtues have evolved. In a time of excessive production and consumption, restraint and patience are impediments to growth.

It is grow or die. Without growth, investors lose trust, the financial system collapses, and the economy will follow suit. The excess production needs willing consumers to gobble it up. Investors should not lose their money. To prevent this catastrophe, consumerism became the new ethic. Businesses use psychology, advertisements, and the media to convince us to indulge ourselves. It is our moral duty to buy more stuff. That is what we want to hear, so the adherents of the religion of consumerism at least do as their preachers tell them. Today, many children have mountains of toys they never play with because they spend their time on social media.

Growth, including economic growth, is exponential. Increases come on top of previous ones. It is unsustainable. Economists argue that efficiency improvements reduce resource and energy consumption, but the opposite happens due to the Jevons Paradox. Efficiency improvements make products more affordable, allowing more people to purchase them. To add insult to injury, innovation brings new products to the market. The combination of efficiency improvements, innovation, and our unlimited desires will ensure we take as much as we can until nothing is left.

An extreme case is information technology. Since the 1970s, computers have become over a million times as powerful. Their capacity and numbers grew far more, perhaps over a trillion times, so computers consume over a million times more energy and resources than they did in the 1970s. And what for? We don’t need computers. Otherwise, people in the 1960s would have died horrible deaths from a lack of information technology. Had you studied history, you could have known that countless generations have survived without it. Here is where economic growth comes from nowadays. Somehow, influencers selling us more stuff and replacing us with artificial intelligence generate a productivity miracle.

Our inner drives

Since the Industrial Revolution, schedules and appointments have determined people’s lives. We work at designated intervals. Trains must be on time. Roads must have more lanes to prevent congestion. We save time by travelling faster, eating ready-made meals, utilising cleaning services, and buying new items rather than mending them. And still we hurry because of schedules, appointments, and long working hours. As nations become ‘developed’, more people get sucked in, join the treadmill, and become cogs in a system over which we have no control but that determines our destiny.

A 2025 report from Microsoft claims that employees are experiencing an ‘infinite workday’ of constant emails, meetings and notifications. They check their emails as early as 6 AM, juggle meetings through the afternoon and stay online well into the night. According to Microsoft’s data, employees are interrupted every 2 minutes by meetings, emails, or messages, and receive an average of 117 emails and 153 Teams messages each workday. Many are feeling overwhelmed.⁴ Humans can’t keep up for much longer, and artificial intelligence and robots will take over, as they are more dependable and never complain. And that will turn humans into useless consumers of resources and energy.

Why can’t we work for three days or for twenty hours per week? It must be possible. What is the point of working hard to turn the planet into a wasteland and let artificial intelligence replace us? What is the point? And why the hurry? It is how the system works. Time is money, so we live by the clock. A high standard of living requires capital, thus profits for its owners. Everyone must be present during working hours. A business can only be profitable when operations run smoothly. Corporations incur losses if raw materials, workers, or repair crews arrive late. Competitors will put them out of business. That is because operations have become optimised, so a few people produce all we need, while we entertain the remainder in the bullshit economy to generate profits for investors.

We work so efficiently that a few people produce everything we need, leaving a surplus of labour needing employment. That is why many of us work in bullshit jobs, working very hard to turn resources and energy into waste and pollution. Modern societies have become complex, so bullshit jobs make economic sense. You can become an influencer or trade crypto. Free-market proponents say that the market is the ultimate judge of usefulness. That is also an opinion, and a fatal mistake. Markets have no morals, and the ethic of the merchant is no ethic at all.

The system hooks into our inner drives, most notably our natural desires for security, comfort, and status. Squirrels gather and store nuts to get them through the winter. They pile up more nuts than needed. But they aren’t nuts. You can’t be sure what the winter will bring. A few more nuts can make a difference. Yet, as the nuttery increases, the likelihood of that decreases. We save for a rainy day, retirement, or to give our children a good start. Our desire to amass assets stems from our survival instinct. As you approach your destined appointment with that scythe-wielding fellow, that urge dissipates.

As a child, I had won over a thousand marbles. My gains came at the expense of other children at school. Yet, I sought to win more. What was the point? That I had never thought about. Having more marbles was pointless, except that I could marvel at them like Scrooge McDuck could spend time looking at his money in his warehouse. I was not that different from a greedy billionaire. And unlike most people, I haven’t lost my marbles, which is not a coincidence, by the way.

We are social animals, and we compare ourselves to others. If you want to belong to a group, you often need what others have as well. If you are a fan of FC Barcelona, you buy items from the fan shop and attend football matches to fund the outrageously overpaid players with your hard-earned money. Many of us seek status. For men, status gives mating opportunities. No matter how old, annoying or ugly a billionaire may be, he attracts good-looking fashion models. Those who can afford it buy Gucci bags, Ferrari cars, and Rolex watches, only to show others that they can. It would be a waste to give money to the poor. I also didn’t hand out marbles to those who didn’t have any, because that would amount to rewarding stupidity.

A capitalist might say that it is okay to be rich as it doesn’t go at the expense of others. Only that is a lie. The rich live unsustainable lifestyles. The capitalist fairy tale tells us that we deserve a reward for our excellence in ruining the world. After all, it is hard work. And if we buy these luxuries, some of that wealth will trickle down to the children working in the sweatshops that produce them. It is an inefficient way to end poverty and requires more resources than there are. Humanity’s current lifestyle already requires more than two Earths to sustain. And if everyone lived like the affluent, 80% of the people would have to die. But humans are not creatures of logic. We are social animals who cooperate through fairy tales like capitalism.

Ideally, you can achieve a higher status by being helpful to others or contributing to society. That motivates us to help and contribute. And we are thankful to those who bring food to the table. Businesspeople pay for our groceries. You wouldn’t have anything to eat if they weren’t busy squeezing money out of something, even when we could do without it, and even if that something is slowly poisoning us. We would be starving in the capitalist economy if we didn’t make and trade all that useless stuff. And not everyone is fit to run a business. It is why we value entrepreneurs. But where does it all end?

Tell me true, tell me why, was Jesus crucified?
Was it for this that Daddy died?
Was it you? Was it me?
Did I watch too much TV?
Is that a hint of accusation in your eyes?
If it wasn’t for the Nips
Being so good at building ships
The yards would still be open on the Clyde
And it can’t be much fun for them
Beneath the rising sun
With all their kids committing suicide
What have we done?

Pink Floyd, The Post War Dream

The Japanese have worked hard to get ahead, putting the British shipyards out of business, only to see their kids committing suicide. The Chinese are following suit. Why can’t we be happy? It is not that the Japanese didn’t have enough. When you have enough, you don’t need more. Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. The phrase ‘you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’ appeals to our deepest fears of a dismal future in which we starve while being fed propaganda. We prefer a fatal excess of material goods to the bliss of the needy North Koreans. Somehow, we think that the choice is between capitalism and socialism. Can’t there be something better?

Modernisation

You can only say that things are heading in the wrong direction if you expect disaster or when you have a vision of how things should be. Otherwise, there is no right or wrong direction. The ecological apocalypse may kill billions, and technological development could terminate humanity, but are these terrible things? It depends on whether you think humanity is precious, which is merely an opinion. Modernisation has had its critics in the past. They weren’t that stupid, except for believing that we have a choice and can change the system. We might if we are all on the same page, but that will never happen. It is not only that we accept the bribe. We also don’t know the future.

Mahatma Gandhi believed industrialisation wouldn’t solve the problems plaguing the Indian poor. He urged Indian villagers to remain self-sufficient in food, make their clothes, and avoid the temptation of mass-produced consumption goods. When Gandhi lived, most Indians were hardly better off than their forebears had been before British colonisation. Today, poverty in India has declined dramatically. The Unabomber claimed in his manifesto that the Industrial Revolution had initiated a process that would eventually destroy humanity through technology and end freedom by forcing us to adapt to machinery.

We shouldn’t romanticise the past. Poverty has declined. Yet, the Industrial Revolution created an engine of permanent change, driven by competition, economies of scale, and innovation. We have become cogs in a system over which we have no control. Communities disappeared, giving way to societies. And the competition never ends. Humans emerged as winners in a brutal contest between species known as the struggle for survival. They then turned into the destroyers of other life on Earth.

Humans innovate faster than other species. We have eliminated the competition, taken over the planet, and completely ruined it. The remaining wildlife lives in a few reservations. Artificial intelligence will soon outcompete us, turning us into useless consumers of energy and resources. The driver of competition is trade. Without trade, two countries can’t compete, not even two villages, for that matter. The result of unchecked competition is mass destruction. The alternative could be lower-quality products and poorer service. If it is a matter of life and death, you may have to accept that. There may be ways to regulate the competition so that quality doesn’t suffer that much, but setting the right priorities begins with admitting that poverty is preferable to death by competition.

Things are getting more evil

What we see as good benefits something, and what we see as evil harms something. And intentions may also matter. So if the whale dies due to your efforts to save it, that may not be good, but stupid. So what you think is good or evil depends on what you have in mind, what you believe is beneficial and harmful, whether you believe intent matters, and what you think the consequences of choices are. That allows room for debate. Intent is an interesting issue. You can make the same choice, such as euthanasia, out of compassion, out of cruelty, or based on a principle you believe in. Consequences are an even more interesting issue. Evil intent can have favourable outcomes, while good intent can bring disaster. That has been an argument in defence of capitalism, so greed is good. One can say that communism reflects the failure of good intentions. The capitalism-socialism debate also reflects divergent views on law and morality within the Western tradition.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, with the Common Law, individuals are sovereign, and ethical philosophy is pragmatic. It means that moral rules are matters of agreement, making good and evil a matter of popular sentiment. And so, freedom is the ability to do as you please, and outcomes matter more than intent. In continental Europe, with Civil Law, the lawmaker is sovereign, thus the king or the people in a democracy, and idealism dominates ethical philosophy, most notably in Germany. It means that good and evil are absolute, freedom means liberating yourself from your lower urges, thus becoming rational and morally upright, and intent matters more than outcomes. Adam Smith was a pragmatist from Great Britain, while Karl Marx was an idealist from Germany. When, during the Cold War, the fight for capitalism and individualism turned into a moral crusade, the United States imported its idealist philosophers from Austria. An example is Von Hayek.

Adam Smith, the founder of modern capitalist thought, argued in his book ‘The Wealth of Nations’ that self-interest in a market economy promotes overall economic well-being, as ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ In other words, self-interest rather than benevolence fills our stomachs. Conversely, socialist systems, despite being invented with good intentions and a moral appeal, led to poverty and famine, so they are evil. Traditional moral systems regarded self-interest as evil and benevolence as good. Capitalism thus comes with an inversion of that morality, ultimately making greed good. It reflects pragmatic moralism rather than an idealistic or absolutist take on ethics.

Capitalism has brought prosperity to many. Yet it mostly rewards individuals for their ability to generate money by transforming natural resources and energy into waste and pollution, producing things we don’t need. Whatever intentions the greedy may have, their efforts bring about an apocalyptic catastrophe that some major religions have long predicted. We can be pragmatic and judge the greedy by the destructive outcomes of their actions. And we can be idealistic or absolutist, arguing that markets have no morals. Individual market participants may possess moral values, but markets never do. There are always people willing to do the trade. When there is demand, there will be supply. The trader’s ethic is no ethics at all. That is why money corrupts everything.

Karl Marx wrote that capital is dead labour that, like a vampire, only lives by sucking living labour. In capitalism, the dead eat the living, eventually leading to a zombie apocalypse as predicted by ancient Christian prophets. The specifics of the events do not precisely match those in the Book of Revelation, but every sizeable inheritance or successful launch of a new corporation that gets us hooked on things we don’t need is the birth of a new zombie that is sucking the life out of us.

The innovation in blood sucking never stops. Vampire capital, or private equity, is the latest brainchild of capital owners to suck more money out of us. The giants, such as Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, and the Carlyle Group, control $8 trillion in assets. Over 18,000 private funds operate in the US, mainly investing in medium-sized companies. The figure grew by more than 50% in the last five years. According to McKinsey consultants, global private equity assets reached $13 trillion in 2023.⁵

Here comes just one example. There are countless others. About 70% of nursing homes in the United States are for-profit. They have increasingly merged into larger chains, often owned by private equity firms. Two-thirds of the nursing homes’ cash flow comes from Medicaid. The company Manor Care had 25,000 beds and was the second-largest nursing home chain in the country by 2017. A private equity firm, The Carlyle Group, acquired it in 2007 through a leveraged buyout.

Here comes just one example. About 70% of nursing homes in the United States are for-profit. They increasingly have merged into larger chains owned by private equity firms. Two-thirds of the nursing homes’ cash flow comes from Medicaid. Manor Care had 25,000 beds and was the second-largest nursing home chain in the country by 2017. The Carlyle Group acquired it in 2007 through a leveraged buyout. Carlyle sold the land on which the nursing homes stood to a company specialising in providing real estate to healthcare providers. Carlyle pocketed the proceeds from the land sale, using them to pay off the debt incurred while acquiring Manor Care. Manor Care then had to pay rent using its Medicaid revenues, while Carlyle took the operating profits. With this rent burden, Manor Care’s margins contracted. Carlyle then insisted on cutting positions and wages.⁵

The quality of care deteriorated as the chain struggled financially and laid off staff. In the wake of the private equity purchase of Manor Care, nurse staffing fell, and resident deaths increased by 11%. Bills, mainly to Medicare, increased by 8%.⁶ Code violations soared. Lawsuits from relatives spiralled, and Manor Care went bankrupt in 2018. There was a lot of money for lawyers in it, also. There are plenty of examples. When a private equity firm acquires a doctor’s practice, it starts employing profit-boosting strategies, including surprise billing. Private equity firms remove doctors from insurers’ networks, allowing them to bill patients for far more than insurers would pay.

Pharmaceutical corporations pay doctors for prescribing their drugs. Their marketing efforts contributed to the opioid crisis in the United States. An example is Purdue Pharma, which developed, manufactured, and aggressively marketed opioids for decades, causing addiction and overdose deaths. After the settlement, the Sackler family, who had long owned the corporation, walked away with billions. Many Americans don’t trust their healthcare system, nor do they trust pharmaceutical corporations. These feelings, the COVID-19 vaccine scare and conspiracy theories led to an estimated 200,000 fatalities in the US because of not taking these vaccines.⁷

Big Pharma funds healthcare research, so there is reason to be distrustful. On the other hand, ‘independent research’ and ‘independent magazines’ are a business model for quacks and snake-oil salespeople, who sell alternative treatments and sensational stories. Quackery is even more lethal and driven by that same profit motive. The death toll of not taking the vaccines vastly outstrips the number of people who died from them. It is a sign of something more troubling. Money has corrupted US healthcare, along with the rest of US society, to the point that not only is trust in healthcare collapsing, but trust itself. And with good reason. Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else, while they hardly live longer than Cubans, a destitute people suffering under a failed communist experiment. And now comes the skinny. If we can only choose between communism and capitalism, it is a choice between stagnation and poverty on the one hand, or the end of humanity, driven by the pursuit of profit, efficiency measures, and innovation on the other. Maybe we can do better, but that requires a wonderful fairy tale we can believe in.

We live by stories

Most of us wouldn’t be so depraved as to do what the private equity firms do. Still, if you are rich already, how can you make money out of denying the elderly their care or defrauding unsuspecting patients? Yet, if you own 1,000 marbles, why do you want more, leaving other children with none? I was a child who amassed marbles, but the people in the vampire capital business are adults. Markets have no morals, and the merchant’s ethics are no ethics at all. There is money in it, and it is legal, so it happens. Money is our highest value, so greed is good even if it comes at the expense of the sick and the elderly. We look at the returns of our investments, not at the consequences. So, how could we have ended up here? It is the destruction of moral values. So, how could evil have overtaken us in this fashion?

The famous sociologist Max Weber called it the disenchantment of the world, a long-term trend toward secularisation and rationalisation that reduces the influence of religion, magic, superstition, and traditional authorities. With the help of natural science, capitalism has been the engine of disenchantment. It greatly increased material wealth, but it left a void because we are religious creatures. We need to believe in fairy tales and magic to function optimally as human beings. Eugene McCarraher argued that capitalism eliminates sacredness from material objects and social relationships, at the expense of our well-being, leaving us without ethics. The environmental lawyer Gus Speth once put it like so,

I used to think the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science, we could address these problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these, we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don’t know how to do that.

He is right. Only religion can solve the issue. Jesus said that you can’t serve both God and money. The Dutch call this issue ‘the merchant and the vicar.’ You are either on the side of God or on the side of money. There is no compromise. So far, money has always won. To change our course, we need a new foundation for our culture, values, and way of life, but that requires a new world religion. Traditional peoples see nature as sacred. Likewise, we can see God’s creation as sacred. We are here to keep it rather than to destroy it. In 1854, the Native American Chief Seattle gave a speech when the US government wanted to buy their land. A redacted version of his oration became a rallying cry within the environmentalist movement. In that version, Seattle reportedly said,

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. We are part of the earth, and it is part of us. The white man does not understand our ways.

One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. He leaves his father’s grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care.

We might understand if we knew what the white man dreams, what hopes he describes to his children on long winter nights, and what visions he burns into their minds so they will wish for tomorrow. But we are savages. The white man’s dreams remain hidden from us.

Chief Seattle and his people had lived simple lives in their own Eden. He saw that the white man was on a road to nowhere. He dreamt, not much unlike the poor sobs who invented agriculture 10,000 years ago, that if he worked hard, his life would be better. It was the fairy tale he believed in. Today, the world follows the white man’s path and many work even harder than he does. Poverty is declining worldwide, but the Earth can’t sustain our lifestyles, and artificial intelligence may soon make us obsolete, so that it will all have been for nothing. Will we ride towards our destruction, or can we be content with having enough? How do we get there? That is not merely an economic question. It begins with the fairy tales we believe in.

Featured image: Bicyclists. By FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands – Buitenleven / Country Life. Wikmedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

1. Investor Insanity? The Degenerate Economy Index Up 130%. Boaz Sobrado (2025). Forbes.
2. Real gross domestic product per capita in chained 2017 dollars (A939RX0Q048SBEA). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
3. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.
4. American workers are stuck in an ‘infinite workday,’ according to Microsoft report: ‘People are feeling very burnt out’ Sophie Caldwell (2025). CNBC.com.
5. Private equity: vampire capital. Michael Roberts blog (2024).
6. Private equity: health care’s vampire. Steffie Woolhandler, David U. Himmelstein, Elizabeth Schrier, and Hope Schwartz (2024). Statnews.com.
7. Estimated preventable COVID-19-associated deaths due to non-vaccination in the United States. National Library of Medicine. Katherine M Jia, William P Hanage, Marc Lipsitch, Amelia G Johnson, Avnika B Amin, Akilah R Ali, Heather M Scobie, and David L Swerdlow.