Category: society

The only known photograph of Chief Seattle

New Social Contract

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Sacredness of Creation

To traditional peoples, nature is sacred. In 1854, the Native American Chief Seattle gave a speech when the US government planned to purchase his tribe’s land. The first written transcript, dating from 1887, is based on an eyewitness’s notes. A screenwriter later rewrote it, turning Chief Seattle into an environmentalist ideal of tribespeople. This revised version became a religious creed within the environmentalist movement, which sought a new spiritual foundation for our culture. The creed strikes at the heart of the matter. Nothing is sacred anymore. The pursuit of money destroys our values and the planet. We may think we own the land, but we do not. We may think we control our destiny, but we do not. Whatever befalls Earth befalls the children of the Earth. Thus spoke Chief Seattle,

The Great Chief in Washington sends word he wishes to buy our land. The Great Chief also sends us words of friendship and goodwill. This is kind of him, since we know he has little need of our friendship in return. But we will consider your offer. For we know that if we do not sell, the white man may come with guns and take our land. What Chief Seattle says, the Great Chief in Washington can count on as truly as our white brothers can count on the return of the seasons. My words are like the stars. They do not set.

How can you buy or sell the sky – the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us? We will decide in our time. Every part of this Earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and every humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.

We know that 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. The Earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s graves, and his children’s birthright is forgotten. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the redman. But perhaps it is because the redman is a savage and does not understand.

There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to listen to the leaves of spring or the rustle of insect wings. But perhaps because I am a savage and do not understand – the clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lovely cry of the whippoorwill or the frogs’ arguments around a pond at night? The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind itself cleansed by a mid-day rain, or scented by a pinõn pine: The air is precious to the redman. For all things share the same breath – the beasts, the trees, and the man. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench.

If I decide to accept, I will make one condition. The white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers. I am a savage, and I do not understand any other way. I have seen thousands of rotting buffaloes on the prairie left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive. What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beast also happens to the man.

All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.

Our children have seen their fathers humbled in defeat. Our warriors have felt shame. And after defeat they turn their days in idleness and contaminate their bodies with sweet food and strong drink. It matters little where we pass the rest of our days – they are not many. A few more hours, a few more winters, and none of the children of the great tribes that once lived on this Earth, or that roamed in small bands in the woods, will remain to mourn the graves of the people once as powerful and hopeful as yours.

One thing we know that the white man may one day discover. Our God is the same. You may think that you own him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the Body of man, and his compassion is equal for the redman and the white. This Earth is precious to him, and harming it heaps contempt on its Creator. The whites, too, shall pass – perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. When the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses all tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by the talking wires, where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. And what is it to say goodbye to the swift and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

We might understand if we knew what it was the white man dreams, what hopes he describes to his children on long winter nights, what visions he burns into their minds, so they will wish for tomorrow. But we are savages. The white man’s dreams are hidden from us. And because they are hidden, we will go our own way. If we agree, it will be to secure the reservation you have promised.

There perhaps we may live out our brief days as we wish. When the last redman has vanished from the Earth, and the memory is only the shadow of a cloud passing over the prairie, these shores and forests will still hold the spirits of my people, for they love this Earth as the newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. If we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your memory the way the land is as you take it. And with all your strength, with all your might, and with all your heart – preserve it for your children, and love it as God loves us all. One thing we know – our God is the same. This Earth is precious to him. Even the white man cannot escape the common destiny.

As the Sun sets on the white man’s civilisation, and artificial intelligence will soon generate more money from the same amount of energy than humans do, his replacement is ready to take over. We handed over our fate to a handful of private monopolies and let tech corporations write the rules because corporate-funded think tanks have invested billions in convincing us that corporations advance progress more efficiently than public institutions. And they did, so humans have now become too dumb and inefficient. They stand in the way of the accelerating advance towards infinite intelligence.

Religious longing for Eden

Perhaps you care for this planet, but what do you mean by that? When the last white rhino is dead, the Earth will still be there, and we might be able to reverse-engineer the animal using DNA samples. We may survive the demise of the rainforests and build virtual realities where we can experience them. Humans have finished off countless species for thousands of years. Chief Seattle’s forebears did their bit by offing much of the large wildlife of the Americas. They only lacked the technology and the numbers to ravage the continent more thoroughly. So much for the romantic ideal of the tribespeople. Competition purges the unfit. So, why stop now? The wildlife is getting fitter as we go. Soon, there may be a few thousand animal species left. Crows, cats, rats and seagulls, and of course, cockroaches and germs, will thrive. Nature doesn’t care. If we stop mistreating animals, predators will still kill prey. And natural disasters will terminate the lives of those lovely koala bears. What did they do wrong? It must be being cute.

So, why should we care? In an opinion piece titled ‘Why I Am Against Saving the Planet’, Mr Lind, a professor at the University of Texas, noted that saving the planet has become the religion of politicians, business elites, and intellectuals in the West, replacing Christianity’s earlier mission of saving individual souls.1 He is against saving the planet. He added that environmentalism is rooted in 19th-century German Romanticism, with a bias against organised society and civilisation, and an awe before an idealised Nature. In other words, environmentalists suffer from a religious desire for Eden. Mr Lind is indeed very pleased with our advanced civilisation, Babylon. He prefers an air-conditioned apartment and going to the supermarket over living in a shed and digging in the dirt to extract some measly carrots if the rabbits hadn’t eaten them first. And who can blame him?

In doing so, Mr Lind tapped into another 19th-century German philosophical tradition, that of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche hoped to leave traditional morality behind. Religions like Christianity, Nietzsche claimed, were ruses to enslave us with a false sense of right and wrong under rules imposed by a priestly caste. And so do environmentalists, Lind implied, who lecture us about our excessive consumption. Nietzsche favoured the values of the strong over those of the weak, embodied in Christianity and socialism. Slaves think in terms of good and evil rather than better and worse because they resent the ruling class. Nietzsche hoped to liberate us from our self-induced slavery and realise our full potential, so he said, ‘God is dead.’ And if there is a climate disaster, the weak perish, and the strong survive, thereby improving the human race. No wonder that the Nazis loved Nietzsche, as they were obsessed with getting the race fitter, like all those people exercising in the gym.

Mr Lind further argued that we should do away with false sentiments, saying, ‘There are costs to mitigating climate change as well as benefits, and rational people can prefer a richer but warmer world to a poorer but slightly less warm one. These individual policies benefit humanity, so there is no need to justify them on the basis of a romantic creed that defines the planet or the environment.’ He says rational people might prefer money to a cooler climate. If it is too hot in France, you can go to the beach in Denmark. A few million people may die due to heat stroke or extreme weather, or perhaps more, but we will be wealthier, so why care? We never cared. Cars kill one million people per year. That doesn’t stop us from driving them. Well, Mr Lind, your replacement is going to need the electricity you used to employ for your AC. And it is getting hotter in Texas. So, what is it going to be? God or Nietzsche? Eden or Babylon? Mr Lind will soon be dead. And Nietzsche already is.

Philosophy of connectedness

As our production and consumption increase, new problems emerge faster than we can solve existing ones with laws, technology, targets and other solutions. New technology, rules and controls don’t solve these problems. On the contrary, the problems only proliferate. Mountains of problems we generate, and their fixes generate even more problems. Meanwhile, millions of poor people try to escape their misery and look for a better future in wealthy countries. Is there a relation between these issues, and what is it? In the 1990s, the environmentalist group Strohalm wrote a booklet named Towards a Philosophy of Connectedness.2 It gives a vision for a sustainable and humane society centred around solidarity. The principal founder of Strohalm is Henk van Arkel, a dedicated individual who remained its driving force for decades. He doesn’t blame anyone in particular for the predicament we are in. We are all part of the problem. It is fair to say that he is my greatest teacher.

Everything is interconnected. Our actions have consequences. We may not know or ignore them, but they are there. Wall Street traders who sold bad mortgages helped to cause the financial crisis. Dumping plastic in a river, buying clothes made by children, or posting hateful comments on a message board has consequences. Western thinking, reflected in the scientific method, deconstructs reality to analyse the parts. In this way, the whole can go out of sight, leading us to act irresponsibly. A single hateful comment doesn’t make someone take a semi-automatic rifle and shoot innocent people, nor would driving a single car change the climate. Still, hatred makes people murder, and cars kill more people than wars. If we accept these things, we remain locked inside a cynical and uncaring world. It is our neglect. Good intentions may worsen things, but we can learn and do better next time. The alternative is turning evil. And that ends badly.

We can’t look the other way if we aspire to live in Paradise. We have to do the best we can to prevent harm. If the relationship between our actions and the harm is remote, we feel free to do as we please. And that is the road to hell. And so, we have the choice of being free in hell or becoming a slave in Paradise. It is not slavery, as we understand it, the exploitation of one group of people by another, but slavery in Nietzsche’s sense, which is living under a self-imposed moral system that limits our options. And money shouldn’t be our highest value, which it is in the liberal-capitalist world. God owns this world, so it is not ours to destroy. The sacredness of Creation is a religious idea. We need a new starting point and foundation for our culture, beliefs, thinking, and our place in the universe because we must change how we live.2 And we can do that when we place something else above ourselves. Fortunately, there is a Creator.

Social order

We imagine that we have rights and obligations, and that we belong to social classes within a social order. Rights, obligations, and classes are human fantasies. There have been a variety of rights, obligations, and social classes throughout history. A social order needs a justification to convince us to accept its rules, leaders, and the division of work and benefits. The justification comes from a myth, usually a religion, an ideology, or a tale of national greatness. The Code of Hammurabi, dating to 1750 BC, declares that the social order of Babylon is founded on universal and eternal principles of justice dictated by the gods. It divides people into three classes: nobility, ordinary people and slaves. The code sets out various laws and punishments for transgressions. And 3,500 years later, the American Declaration of Independence claims that the Creator has endowed men with unalienable rights, such as the pursuit of happiness, and of course, life, and then you die. Someone failed to inform death about our rights.

Social orders thus are collective imaginations. They don’t exist in reality as such, but we imagine them together. When we can agree on a social order, whether it is a class division or the notion that everyone is fundamentally equal, it can be stable. Social orders bring peace and stability, and that is why we have them. If we agree on a social order, we can cooperate, as the order settles disputes over what must be done, who does what, who gets what, and who leads. Without a social order, we fight over these issues and fail to cooperate. In modern political philosophy, there is the ideal of a free society based on a social contract, which supposedly is a voluntary agreement between citizens and their government. The social orders we have today emerged from a competition. It is crucial to realise that as circumstances change. What worked in the past may not work in the future.

In 2023, a passionate Dutch politician from Enschede, Mr Omtzigt, founded a new political party named New Social Contract. It is precisely what the world needs now. Mr Omtzigt was a true go-getter who uncovered a scandal that the government had tried to keep secret. The Christian democrat party he worked for had tried to get rid of him by arranging a ‘position elsewhere’ for him. It didn’t matter where elsewhere was, as long as it was a position where Mr Omzigt couldn’t cause more trouble. It led him to start a new party, but people like him aren’t suited to politics. And so the party had a short, tumultuous lifespan. Omzigt’s legacy could be coining the term ‘New Social Contract’. His coming from Enschede seems no coincidence. A social contract can serve as the basis of a social order, so the New World Order requires a New Social Contract grounded in the Philosophy of Connectedness. That sounds wonderful. Yet, the details are forthcoming.

The future world society will be post-apocalyptic, so a simpler society after a preferably controlled reduction in complexity, which is a planned and organised equivalent of a collapse. So, there is no stuff to dole out, only work to do. Politicians will never come up with such a plan as they pretend to be Santa Claus for their followers. We will have to depend more on communities and families and less on markets and states, but the degree is unknown. There will still be states and markets. What is clear, however, is that we cannot allow the force of competition to run our lives, so the arrangement will be less economically efficient, resulting in a decline in living standards in wealthy countries. Despite the rise in living standards, a single salary could usually pay for a family in the past, but less often today. So this wealth is fake or poorly distributed. I passed a carport with four Porsches today. Let it sink in—the insanity of that. If there were infinite resources, we could go insane, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Good societies

An earmark of good societies is social trust. It means you can trust strangers and, therefore, also organisations such as government bodies and businesses. You don’t have to worry about neighbours stealing from you, criminal gangs roaming the streets, corporations dumping their toxic waste so you get ill, or the government treating you unfairly. Ideally, you can leave your belongings outside and the door unlocked. Social trust begins with the rule of law brought by states. States succeeded in repressing lethal human violence by over 99%. In the absence of order, humans revert to gang life, so that is why.

There is no definition of a good society. The top countries on the Happiness Index are mostly European. The index is established by measuring self-reported life evaluations and six socioeconomic and quality-of-life factors. The index is not without flaws, and Europe is a mixed bag of countries. The continent is lagging in the economic rat race, which could be why life in Europe is agreeable, even though it is a mixed bag of countries. Paradises don’t last, but this time might be different, which is why I am writing this. As Europe is the place to be, the idea is to lift the world to similar standards.

Good societies and capable governments don’t come easy. Europe has long led the world, making it a playground for new ideas, giving it a lead in social progress that still exists today. Warfare contributed to the development of capable governments. Europe has seen several wars. Economic clout and organisation were essential to winning them. It led European states to organise the economy and education of the masses, to create a sense of community at the national level, and to foster social trust at the societal level. Democracy mitigated the risk of popular revolts, which improved stability.

Competition greatly contributed to the establishment of well-organised democratic states in Europe. The devastation of the two world wars led Europe’s nations to seek cooperation through the European Union. If humanity is to have a future, social development is essential. It would be better if the rest of the world didn’t repeat the mistakes Europeans made, as millions of Europeans perished in revolutions and wars. You can learn from other people’s failures. So, appreciate the effort and accept the lessons learned because more warfare to improve state performance isn’t going to end well. Yet, these changes require a strong hand. If competition is out of the question, then dictatorship is an alternative.

An example of an enlightened dictator was Frederick the Great, who was King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786. He enacted major legal, administrative, educational, and agricultural reforms. He did things like fighting corruption, abolishing torture, establishing equality before the law for all citizens, and introducing freedom of speech and freedom of the press. What a dictator he was. He did so, by the way, because defending the country was challenging, given that it had few natural borders, such as rivers, seas, or mountains, to protect it. Prussia needed a competent state. He also improved tax collection to expand the military and allow Prussia to become a strong power that eventually became Germany. There are other examples of enlightened dictatorships that helped countries.

The world’s integration process could resemble that of the European Union, in which countries work on meeting a set of criteria. In the case of the European Union, the criteria concern having institutions to preserve democracy and human rights, maintaining a market economy, and accepting the union’s obligations and intent. Even though the European Union doesn’t inspire Europeans, most Europeans think they benefit from EU membership. An experiment with leaving suggests that the union is beneficial overall. Great Britain left the European Union in 2020. In 2023, opinion polls suggested that most Brits regret it.3 The European Union headquarters in Brussels has become a hotspot of corruption. Yet many European countries have low levels of corruption.

Apart from poorly functioning states and societies, there are areas ruled by gangs. Pacifying these areas may require unconventional measures. El Salvador was one of the most violent countries until President Nayib Bukele jailed 2% of the country’s population suspected to be gang members. That came with human rights violations like incarcerating people without due process. Yet, murders dropped over 95%. You arrive at unpalatable calculations as to how many innocent prisoners you accept for every murder prevented. Yet, there may be no better alternative when gang violence overwhelms a country. If you are to live by the Philosophy of Connectness, and you wish to do no harm, there is no place for people who do harm. A Paradise is an unnatural state that requires dealing with those who disturb the peace, and lenience only makes matters worse.

Replacing the system

If enough people join a movement and are willing to endure the serious discomfort of taking a new job with a lower standard of living, we can build a parallel society with its own rules and economy. Once the movement grows large enough and has the necessary assets, it can become self-sufficient and break away from the current economic system. That is hard to do. It requires cult-like behaviour on a massive scale of people following a leader, accepting the cult’s vision as the only truth, and seeing the outside world as a collection of morons. Due to the severe constraints on human rationality, as humans are animals driven by urges who occasionally think, this may be the only way to do it.

Humanity can live in peace only if it accepts one truth. Otherwise, they will fight until death. And those who do not accept that truth are indeed morons. And because it is a matter of survival, we need to wage a holy war against these morons. The envisioned endgame is for the existing system and societies to collapse, and the New World Order to replace them. That would normally not happen, but there are reasons to believe that it will. And so, it is better to plan for it and try to make the New Eden a reality. The alternative is a collective suicide of humanity. We don’t have to doubt it, for it has likely already happened as we live inside an AI-generated virtual universe. And it is better to be safe than sorry.

Featured image: The only known photograph of Chief Seattle, taken in 1864.

1. Why I Am Against Saving the Planet, Michael Lind, Tabletmag.com (2023).
2. Naar een filosofie van verbondenheid. Guus Peterse, Henk van Arkel, Hans Radder, Seattle, Pieter Schroever and Margrit Kennedy (1990). Aktie Strohalm.

Garbage dump outside a temple in India.

What a Difference Culture Makes

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China and India are very different countries. Only five decades ago, both were equally poor. In the 1970s, India’s GDP per capita was slightly higher than China’s. Both countries were socialist at the time. In population, the two countries are roughly equal. Today, China’s GDP per capita is five times India’s. How to explain this massive divergence? First of all, China’s market-oriented economic reforms started in 1978, while India liberalised in 1991. In the 1980s, China’s economy grew by 10% annually compared to India’s 6%. At the same time, China’s population grew by 1.5% annually compared to India’s 2.3%, so GDP per capita increased by 5% per year more in China, resulting in an 89% increase over those 13 years. And so, China’s earlier start doesn’t explain the massive difference. China’s development has been government-directed, much like Japan’s, while India liberalised in 1991, with the government intervening little, so its development path looks more like that of the United States. There is more individual liberty in India than in China.

Government policies are essential. Compared to India, China is very organised. If you are a distant observer, you might get the impression that India is messy, with garbage on the streets, and that China is orderly and that the streets are clean. As I have never been to those countries, my impressions come from reading and seeing. India is the largest democracy, or perhaps was, as democracy is in decline worldwide, and that is an enormous achievement, given its ethnic and religious diversity. Mahatma Gandhi came from India, and he is one of the greatest humans in recent history. The Indians had to forge a national identity on the British colonial legacy. The Chinese had it easy, as they already had a strong national identity with a 2,000-year history. That is no small advantage, as European countries also had to forge national identities to industrialise because industrialisation requires markets of scale.

In recent years, India’s economic growth rate outpaces China’s, partly due to population growth, so it is still a long way from overtaking China in GDP per capita. The point of the text is not to praise China for beating the West in the rat race to humanity’s destruction, for that is where it all leads to, but to highlight why India lags China so much. As a picture can say more than a thousand words, so can a description of a situation, such as the editorial ‘Why China Works and India Does Not’ by Jayant Bhandari, which appeared on Lewrockwell.com in 2026,1 which tells us much more than statistics ever will. He writes,

When trying to understand the future of a country, one should not be particularly interested in its elites or exceptionally successful people. They are outliers. […] The essence of a society is better understood in its small towns, isolated communities, workshops, farms, churches, diners, and ordinary households—in the behaviour of people whose names will never appear in a newspaper.

Now, here comes his complaint,

Suppose a piece of equipment malfunctions, and you take it to a technician in India. He will probably tell you to return a few days later. When you do, you can be reasonably certain that it will not have been repaired.

You return a few days later, and then perhaps again and again. On your third, fourth, or fifth visit, the technician may finally hand the equipment back, supposedly repaired. Somewhere during your visits, to escape your pestering, he might have claimed that the work took longer because there were more problems than anticipated, even though you can see that your equipment wasn’t even touched given the dust that had accumulated on it. You will not only have visited repeatedly; you may also be asked to pay more.

When you test the equipment, however, you discover either that the original problem has not been fully corrected or that the repair has created entirely new problems. While you are trying to explain yourself, he is constantly distracted, dealing with several other irate customers like you and confusing your problem with theirs. Everyone grows increasingly impatient, louder, and more exasperated.

You point out what is wrong. To an objective observer, the defect is obvious. Yet the technician may flatly refuse to recognise it—or seemingly fail to understand what you are talking about. He might even suggest that you take the equipment home, let things settle down, and see whether the problem somehow sorts itself out. If you discover the problems after you have taken it away, the technician will pass all the blame to you, calling it newly created.

It is not an exception, he argues, but commonplace in India,

So common is this experience in India that one struggles to think of exceptions. Anyone who has spent enough time there will have his own collection of similar stories. Nor is it merely about technicians. Their customers belong to the same society and are the other side of the same coin. The pattern appears in dealings with government offices, private companies, professionals, contractors, and even friends and family. Life becomes a constant stream of firefighting and brain damage: following up, reminding people, correcting what was supposedly corrected, and keeping track of the never-ending accumulation of unfinished work.

Meanwhile in China, things are very different indeed,

For the last five years, I have owned a cellphone from a Chinese manufacturer. I have taken it several times to the company’s service centres in China for repairs.

The experiences have been almost absurdly inexpensive, and every technician I have dealt with has been thoroughly competent and adroit with his hands. On one occasion, the battery was replaced without charge because the company regarded the problem as a possible manufacturing defect—this despite my telling them that the phone had once fallen into a swimming pool. Broken glass was repaired without charge even when the phone was well outside warranty, and screen protectors have routinely been replaced for free.

Whenever I was told to return in an hour or two, the work was done when I returned, usually better than I had expected. During my most recent visit, however, something went wrong. The repair had created several new problems, probably because something had been connected incorrectly during reassembly.

Of course, mistakes happen. Chinese technicians are not infallible. Chinese bureaucrats can be incompetent. Chinese institutions can malfunction. That is not the distinction I am making. The distinction became apparent when I showed the technician what had gone wrong. […]

She looked at the phone and immediately acknowledged the problems. She did not deny even those that were minor or difficult to demonstrate. She did not pretend that I was imagining them or treat me as an irritating customer who needed to be made to disappear. She accepted reality and took ownership. Her supervisor became involved to understand what had gone wrong. He took over the repair, completely disassembled the phone, and rebuilt it.

Why is this so important? The author argues,

Such incidents may look small, but they are not. They reveal the moral habits on which complex societies depend: ownership of error, pride in workmanship, responsiveness to the customer, and the willingness to correct a problem rather than hide it. These are not merely technical skills. They are civilisational emotions in action.

A complex society depends on millions of people whose work continually intersects with that of others and cannot be individually supervised. Tiny compromises may be invisible and impossible to trace back to the person who made them, but they accumulate and compound. So do tiny acts of conscientiousness. Over time, they determine whether a society works.

He mentions a few other examples, like a Chinese private hospital treating him for a small injury without charging him, and a government-run hospital being prompt on the job and charging a low fee, while at Indian private hospitals trying to scam you, and public hospitals offering no service without bribes. It is due to cultural differences. It is not that there are no scammers in China, nor that there are hard-working people in India, but overall, there is a significant difference. He continues,

The difference is not that China has no bad hospitals or incompetent doctors. It is that, in my experience, the ordinary institutional instinct is far more often directed toward solving the problem placed in front of it. In China today, my experience is increasingly that someone takes ownership of the problem. Often, someone approaches you almost as soon as you enter, finds out what you need, identifies who is responsible, directs you to that person, and tries to move you through the system.

In an Indian government office, the first seemingly impossible task is to discover who is responsible. Then you must discover where he is. He is unlikely to be at his desk. When you eventually find him, you must deal with his arrogance, his god complex, and his need to make you genuflect, beg, and prostrate yourself before him. He sends you somewhere else; that person sends you to another, and you go around in circles.

Eventually, you zero in on someone who might be responsible, his ego now inflated by the realisation that he vaguely holds the power. In India, nobody is ever fully responsible, so one must proceed carefully.

Then the dance around the bribe begins. Paying is not enough; you must strategise. You cannot tell the bureaucrat that you distrust him, even though he knows perfectly well that you should. Trust him too much, and he will take you for a fool. Everything must be wrapped in euphemism and pretence.

Pay the wrong person, and you lose the money. Even paying the right person creates no obligation to complete the work. You must work out who actually has power and what combination of money, deference, persistence, and connections might make the machinery move.

Over time, the scale and shamelessness of bribery in India have increased. In the past, euphemisms were still necessary—the gift for his children, for example. Today, bureaucrats speak openly about their collections. The amount collected can itself become a mark of status, even enhancing one’s value in the marriage market.

I cannot remember dealing with an Indian bureaucracy without paying a bribe. Nor is there any recourse: go higher up, and you encounter a more expensive level of the same system. Those unaccustomed to corruption often fail to appreciate its corrosiveness. It does not merely add another cost to government; it destroys the purpose of whatever institution, law, or scheme it infects.

Well, indeed, if your operation is a scam, then it is not what it pretends to be, such as a hospital or a repair service. Yet, China scores low on the Corruption Perceptions Index, even though it does somewhat better than India. There must be widespread corruption in China as well, mostly in government. One explanation I came across is that Chinese corruption is aimed at getting things done. So if you pay, you get something in return, like a building permit. In India, as the author observes, even paying the right person does not create an obligation to complete the work. In any case, if you are in India, you should expect that people will try to scam you. Corruption is not the core issue here. It’s doing your job, being truthful, and keeping agreements, rather than trying to get away with doing nothing, breaking agreements, and shifting the blame when things go wrong.

China and India were equally poor a few decades ago, and to come this far, the Chinese changed their values and work ethic, so the condition in India may well be a transitional phase. It is only that the Chinese government plays a greater role in directing the modernisation process, and puts a greater effort into education and standards. A good society functions on social trust, which requires moral integrity that a mere liberalisation of markets cannot bring. Competition may improve service, so if some businesses do a better job, they will get more customers at the expense of the scammers. Yet competition drives the rat race to our destruction, so if moral integrity can’t do the trick, we are doomed. If we take no pride in contributing something good, society will not flourish. Culture makes an enormous difference. Moral integrity is hard to measure, but it makes societies work. Cultures change, so India is not lost, nor is any other country.

1. Why China Works and India Does Not. Jayant Bhandari (2026). LewRockwell. [link]

The Golden Age

Unnatural State of Paradise

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The wolf and the lamb

Since time immemorial, people have been dreaming of utopias where life is good, people live safely, and there is enough for everyone. The Bible begins with the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve lived happily and had no worries. With the means we have today, a utopian society is possible, yet it somehow doesn’t happen. That is because a permanent paradise with peace and harmony is unnatural. It breeds complacency. Circumstances change, the arrangement is upset, some take advantage, and chaos may ensue. We may have good places for a while, but they will eventually disappear due to the struggle for existence. Humans, like other organisms, compete and cooperate.

Humans, like other organisms, compete and cooperate. We cooperate in groups to compete with other groups. And there is competition within groups. And in the case of humans, that regularly involves murder and warfare. The competition generates a never-ending pressure to beat others, for otherwise we will lose the race. It helps us adapt to changing circumstances, but as humans increasingly create those circumstances, competition has become a destructive force. Competition makes Paradise a pipe dream for hippies high on LSD and Christians. Isaiah once prophesied, perhaps after taking in a load of mushrooms (Isaiah 11:6-9),

The wolf will live with the lamb.
The leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together.
And a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the cobra’s den.
And the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all of my holy mountain.
For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

As the enlightened observers of the happenings in the wild might already have figured out, nature does not punish the evil, but it punishes the weak. The wolf will not let the lamb in peace, nor will the cow and the bear share a meal. It is not in their nature to do so. Living in a paradise would require a miracle of the most unnatural kind, something that can only happen in fairy tales, like the sheep joining forces to exterminate the wolves and round up the goats to fence them in. It is not like sheep to do so.

In Eden, humans only ate plants, or so the scriptures tell. There was no bloodshed, no murder, not even of animals. Compared to humans, wolves are harmless creatures. Once Paradise was lost, Cain smashed Abel’s head. That would not be the first thing wolves would do. It explains why, despite our efforts to achieve a utopian society, it still eludes us. We have the means to provide everyone with an acceptable standard of living and live in peace, but we fail to make it a reality because it goes against our nature.

Struggle for existence

The struggle for life in nature is chaotic and brutal. Cells cooperate in organisms to compete with other cells that have also organised themselves in organisms. Organising relates to the words ‘organ’ and ‘organism’, as organisms have organised themselves into organs that specialise in particular tasks. Organisms, as you might know, are plants and animals, and humans are animals. The best-adapted survive. That can put a premium on organising, as it provides participants with more resources or enables them to beat the competition by specialising. Bees have queens, worker bees, and drones. The cooperation schemes of cells and organisms are orders. Orders thus emerge from competition. Simple lifeforms like amoebas and flies have advantages of their own, such as self-reliance, which allows them to survive without complex orders. A few droppings and corpses are all flies need. Orders may collapse due to changing circumstances, such as climate change in an ecosystem or a foreign invasion in a society.

There is some balance in nature, but it is always in flux like a market with supply and demand. If foxes prey on rabbits, the fastest rabbits and the smartest foxes survive. When there is a surplus of rabbits, foxes can catch more of them and raise more young. As a result, foxes multiply and eat more rabbits, and the rabbit surplus turns into a deficit, and foxes go hungry. It is a brutal process in which rabbits get eaten, and foxes starve. The fast-growing bamboo, however, exceeds the slowly procreating panda bear’s munching capabilities. That allowed the animal to develop its cool, relaxed nature. So, if food is abundant and you breed barely, you can live in a paradise. Look at those pandas! That’s the way you do it! That’s how you live in Paradise!

Humans have disturbed the balance in nature more than any other species ever did. Nature as it once was before humans came is long gone. Humans brought rabbits to Australia, and they bred like rabbits. There were no foxes there, so the rabbit population exploded, upsetting the ecosystem. Humans then introduced a disease that killed the rabbits. The disease eventually spread through Europe, thinning out the fox’s favourite food source and upsetting the ecosystem there as well. Foxes, being smart animals, adapted and sought other meals. The rabbit’s demise sealed the fate of other animals, such as the grouse in Nijverdal, which was not as speedy as the rabbit and went extinct. It would have been possible to preserve the grouse by shooting foxes. That would create a paradise for the grouse, an unnatural order without predators, so a park rather than nature. Indeed, a paradise is unnatural, more like a garden rather than pristine nature.

Invasive species

Human activities have led to the spread of non-native species across ecosystems worldwide, such as rabbits in Australia and a rabbit-killing disease in Europe. You may have heard of Pablo Escobar’s ‘cocaine hippos,’ which, without natural predators or African droughts to slow them down, multiplied rapidly in South America, causing stress on the local ecosystem. Foreign species can disrupt the balance of nature. Many die off, but some thrive and become pests. The American red crayfish is an invasive species in the Netherlands that wreaks havoc among native fish and plant species. They didn’t come over the ocean by themselves. Humans brought them in. Invasive species can become a new food source for other species. Crayfish are a good source of protein.

Humans are the most disruptive species and have ruined most of nature to create living space for themselves. It is a matter of competitive advantage. Humans took over because they could. No one stopped them. Their genes, rather than a command in the Bible, drove them to exploit their environments and multiply. Fairy tales about the preciousness of nature were to no avail. The spread of humans resembles the spread of a pest. When Europeans gained a competitive advantage over others because they had more advanced organisation methods and technology, allowing them to conquer other areas, their genes multiplied and spread across the world.

After having created a paradise for themselves, Westerners grew complacent, and foreigners came to their lands. While Westerners were busy maximising their utility by indulging themselves in excessive consumption and value-adding jobs in the bullshit economy, the immigrants’ genes took advantage of the situation. Westerners require spacious housing, fulfilling jobs, spouses who add something meaningful to their lives and may forego having children to lead a good life. Immigrants settle for small spaces and simple lives, may have arranged marriages or not marry at all and have more children. In this way, descendants of immigrants replace the native population.

Relative advantages and disadvantages disturb the balance, which is always precarious and shifting. You can compare both situations to the development of a pest. It promotes unease among the disadvantaged group, making them feel overrun, which may lead to tensions and violence. The competition between genes generates these feelings. Your country and traditions are precious to you because your genes wish to survive and spread. The same is true for racism. There are also cultural problems and a competition between cultures. Behavioural differences between cultural groups can cause harm and lead to strife. Yet, nature doesn’t care who survives nor their cultures.

It is why peace and stability can only be maintained in an unnatural state that regulates competition in a social contract. It requires everyone to accept the order and share a common set of values, norms, and rules. To prevent disturbance of the balance, the situation must be stable, as if time has stopped. We must also stop overexploiting the planet. Otherwise, the balance will shift unfavourably. And there are always people taking advantage of others’ weaknesses. And so, there can’t be a paradise in the real world. Massive force is not enough. Nuking a place to kill the weeds doesn’t help. The weeds will return before anything else. Having a paradise requires full control over all that transpires. As Isaiah wrote, ‘For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.’

Chimpanzees versus bonobos


Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest relatives. Chimpanzees live in patriarchal groups led by a dominant alpha male. In chimpanzee bands, males hold higher ranks than females. Male chimpanzees are larger and more aggressive. They form dominance hierarchies where they vie for the alpha position. Human bands may have a big man, who settles conflicts and distributes favours. His position remains up for grabs. A rival can challenge his position. To remain in power, he must keep his followers happy by doling out stuff. That is human politics. High-ranking chimpanzee males form coalitions to consolidate power, maintain order, and intimidate rivals or lower-ranking females. Chimpanzees can be violent, and sometimes commit genocide on rival groups.

Bonobos live in matriarchal groups where females hold the highest ranks and lead through collective power, cooperation, and alliances. Rather than ruling through force, female bonobos secure their dominance by banding together to intimidate or attack males who step out of line. Male bonobos fight, and females might castrate unruly males, effectively amounting to a breeding programme that keeps the males docile. Hence, there is also violence among bonobos, but less than among chimpanzees. The female-led organisation in bonobo groups works in the following ways:

  • Female bonobos form lifelong bonds with one another. When a male tries to assert dominance or steal food, females unite to put him in his place.
  • Males remain with their mothers for life. High-ranking mothers support their sons, allowing them to rise in the hierarchy and mate.
  • As females have the power, they get first access to desirable food sources.
  • Rather than intimidation and violence, bonobo politics involves sex to reduce stress, ease tensions, and form social bonds.

In human societies, male dominance is the norm, so in that sense, we are like the chimpanzees. We mostly live in patriarchal arrangements. Humans are a highly programmable species, and cultures are our programming, allowing for female leadership. Our nature might resist it, but not enough to prevent it, because bonobos are genetically as close to us as chimpanzees. Yet you can witness from misogynist comments that women in leadership positions get that it may be cultural and go against our inner nature. Monogamous relationships may not work for many, but they can promote group success by reducing male infighting over mating opportunities, which can lead to violence. And as a side benefit, it prevents the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Garden of Eden

In the original tale of the Garden of Eden, the Goddess created man as a companion for the woman by making her give birth to him. The rib story is obviously fake, making it a lasting monument of mass indoctrination demonstrating the degree to which we are willing to believe fairy tales. The Garden of Eden was a matriarchal society. The man left his parents to live with his wife. Men existed to please their wives. They weren’t even fathers, so children were the women’s seed. That is how Eve gave birth to Adam as a ‘virgin’. To obfuscate that fact, which was a core belief of the first true Christians, the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus came to replace it. The Fall made woman the servant of the man, the story goes, because of her desire for him, for which he was created.

The Garden of Eden is not a natural state of affairs, but a cultural construct, as human organisation defaults to patriarchy. Bands of hunter-gatherers could avoid conflict by moving on, allowing for greater freedom in gender roles, such as matriarchy. Men were not as important, as they didn’t have to risk their lives to defend the women and children. With the advent of agriculture and permanent settlements, defence became of the utmost importance. Men fought and murdered to plunder or to protect property. In the Bible, Abel was the first casualty. Men are more violent than women. About 95% of the prison population consists of men. Most men don’t abuse women, and women can be abusive also. Still, men do nearly all the raping and culture can go a long way in civilising them.

Men are the way they are because the struggle for survival made them that way. In uncivilised conditions, that is an advantage. Yet, in more civilised environments, it becomes problematic. And when women don’t need a man to provide for them or to protect them, they become pickier. Single women, on average, are happier than single men. As a result, female-centred societies cause distress with men, as male-oriented societies do for women. Humans can’t create a paradise on their own and need God because they are more like chimpanzees than bonobos. As Paradise is not a natural state, but a cultural one, we need to engineer it. And that is not enough. Someone needs to fully control the process, as the balance is always precarious and shifting with winners and losers.

Latest revision: 3 September 2026

Featured image: The Golden Age. Lucas Cranach the Elder (ca. 1530). Wikimedia Commons.

Hadzabe tribespeople

Doomsday Machine

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Forces of nature

The Hadzabe are an African tribe. They hardly trade, and they don’t use money. They can survive an apocalypse. But can you? Trade and money have turned us into cogs in a system. Many of us can’t survive without what some might call ‘The System’, the catch-all term for large-scale human organisation centred on states and markets. We came to depend on the market and the state rather than ourselves, our family and our community. We have exchanged resilience for convenience, and for a reason. We specialise to compete. As the organisations we take part in become more competitive, we turn into more inept individuals. We survive on performing a trick, our job, but we can’t survive without markets and governments. People in the past had a wider variety of skills than doing their jobs and going to shops. When things fall apart, those who don’t trade are best positioned to survive. In other words, trade will eventually kill us all.

The forces of nature, competition and cooperation made it happen. We cooperate to compete, which pushes us to work within complex organisations to keep up with other complex organisations. That perspective provides an illuminating insight. Plants and animals cooperate and compete for resources. Cooperation and competition are everywhere. Cooperation increases the available resources. For example, plants generate the oxygen animals need, while animals produce the carbon dioxide plants need. And rhinos attract ticks and flies that the red-billed oxpecker lives off, so the rhino benefits from the bird while the bird benefits from the rhino. Still, the available resources are limited, so there is room for only one tree in a particular spot. And so there is competition as well, a struggle for life.

Plants and animals take advantage of opportunities in their environment through both competition and cooperation. Plants and animals have a blueprint, their genes, that define their properties, so that a chestnut can become a chestnut tree, and an ovum and a sperm can generate a new aardvark. Genes have the peculiar urge to make copies of themselves. It is why we exist and the basis of our will to live. The biological purpose of plants and animals, including humans, is to spread their genes. That is all there is to it, nothing more. The copying process is prone to errors, resulting in variation within species.

Some of these changes make individual plants and animals better adapted to their environment, increasing their chances of survival and reproduction, leading to a rising number of individuals with these genes and features. Environments allow for species to coexist, most notably when they don’t compete for the same resources. This is why ants and monkeys can live in the same area. The balance in nature is precarious and temporary, so there is no real balance. It constantly shifts, as changes in the environment harm and favour particular individuals and species in the struggle for life.

Meet our closest relatives

The chimpanzees are our closest kin. Studying these apes provides us with some insights into our nature. Chimpanzees live in small troops of a few dozen individuals. They form friendships, work with reliable group members, and avoid unreliable ones. Chimpanzees have rules, may cheat on them, and may feel guilty when they do. Within the group, the members have ranks. When there is food available, the highest-status animals eat first. Ranks and rules define who does what and who gets what. They regulate the competition and misunderstandings within the troop, reducing conflicts and enabling its members to collaborate more effectively.

Like human leaders, chimpanzee alpha males acquire their status by building coalitions and gaining support. Others show their submission to the alpha male. Like a government, the alpha male strives to maintain social harmony within his group. He takes sought-after pieces of food like a government collects taxes. Within a chimpanzee band, there are subgroups and coalitions. There are close friendships and more distant relationships. They unite as a single fighting force in the event of an external threat.

Coalition members in a chimpanzee band build and maintain close ties through intimate daily contact, such as hugging, kissing, and doing favours for each other. For the band to function effectively, its members must be aware of what others will do in critical situations. For that, they need to know each other through personal experiences. Unlike humans, chimpanzees have no language to share social information. That limits the size of the group in which chimpanzees can live and work together to about thirty individuals.

Chimpanzees also commit group violence. Like humans, they are among the species that commit genocide on their congeners. Humans and chimpanzees are not alone in this. Chickens are known to fight racial wars when they face a lack of food. Groups of chickens may start killing those with different colours from their own. And so, racism could be a natural behaviour caused by competition between genes.

The human advantage

Humans have become the dominant species on Earth. We can collaborate flexibly in large numbers. We have mastered fire, which enhances our power and allows us to eat foods we couldn’t otherwise. It allowed us to become the top predator. We use tools and clothing, allowing us to do things other animals can’t and live in inhospitable environments. Compared to other animals, humans employ a rich language. That enables us to express countless meanings and describe situations in precise terms.

We pass on social information, such as who is fit for a particular job. We get information about others in our group without needing personal experience. If someone cheats, you don’t need to learn it the hard way, as chimpanzees must. Someone can tell you. That allows us to cooperate more effectively. Most human communication is social information or gossip. We need the group to survive, so we must understand what is happening within it and the decisions it needs to make.

Human politics is about cooperating and competing. We must agree on what we should do as a group and on how we divide the spoils of our cooperation. Within the group, we may compete to cooperate. Leadership contests benefit the group when the outcome is better leadership. That isn’t always the case, while infighting can weaken the group. We also cooperate to compete. We organise ourselves in groups to compete with other groups, such as defeating them in warfare.

Early humans lived in gangs of up to 150 individuals. The number of individuals with whom we can closely collaborate is one of our natural limitations. We overcame the limits of our natural group size by cooperating through shared imaginings, such as religions, laws, money, and nation-states. That competitive advantage over other species allowed us to take over this planet and become the ‘killer bug’ that has upended nature and has terminated more species than any other species or natural disasters.

Unlike other animals and plants that adapt to their environment, we alter our environment to make it suit us. We have created societies and civilisations and have become immensely powerful collectives capable of competing with other collectives. However, our civilisations also shield us from the forces of nature, turning us into weak individuals. We have become integrated into the system, and many of us won’t survive its collapse. Competition drives this process, most notably trade, and even more than warfare.

We imagine corporations, laws, money, and nation-states. We believe a law exists, and that is why the law works. It is also why religion works. These shared imaginations allow us to cooperate on any scale for any purpose. We are programmable, with our brains serving as the hardware and our imaginations serving as the software. And we can change the software overnight. During the French Revolution, the French stopped believing in the divine right of kings overnight and began to envision popular sovereignty.

Our urges and inner motivations relate to these forces of nature. We imagine things because that helps us win the competition. We imagine our realities because we are creatures who cooperate based on stories. And so, our environment becomes increasingly unnatural. Civilisation shields us from the forces of nature, most notably, the struggle for survival, so that the inept can survive and procreate. Once the story falls apart, society breaks down, and the forces of nature reassert themselves.

Organising to compete

The forces of competition and population density drove humans to organise. Just as there is competition between species in nature, there is also competition between human groups. Groups that succeeded in adapting to new circumstances survived, whereas those that did not perished. We are rule-following animals. It allowed us to cooperate on a larger scale using political institutions that embody the rules of our community or society.

The stories, norms, values and agreements people within a group share form their culture. Cultural values can confer an advantage on one group relative to others. Individualism and the replacement of Christian values with capitalist ones helped Europeans to organise themselves more flexibly and make their conquests profitable, thereby sustaining their expansion. Their culture helped Europeans to conquer the world.

Humans design political institutions, whereas genetic mutations arise by chance. In both cases, competition determines which designs survive and become copied. In general, under the pressure of competition, which often took the form of warfare, human organisation advanced from bands to tribes to feudalism to states. This explanation is simplistic and flawed. Still, overall, such a trend towards more advanced organisation occurred.

Hunter-gatherers lived in family groups of a few dozen individuals. They had few violent conflicts. They had no property, and population density was low. They could move on if a stronger band invaded their territory. Small groups were egalitarian. They had no permanent leader or hierarchy and decided on leadership based on group consensus.

The Agricultural Revolution changed that. Farming allowed more people to survive. Farmers invested heavily in their cattle and crops, so agricultural societies required property rights and defence. Agriculture promoted the transition from bands to tribes. Population density increased, leading to more frequent violent conflicts. Tribes are much larger than bands and can muster more men for war, so tribes replaced bands.

Tribes were usually egalitarian, but often a separate warrior caste emerged. The most basic permanent political organisation was the lord and his armed vassals, known as feudalism. The lord and his vassals exchange favours. The loyalty of the vassals is crucial, and politics is about these loyalties and betrayals. Tribalism centres around kinship, but also includes feudalist, personal relationships of mutual reciprocity and personal ties.

States

States wield more power than tribes because they can compel cooperation, whereas tribes rely on voluntary arrangements. As population density increased and people lived closer together, the need to resolve conflicts also grew, so some states provided justice services. Leaders, with their family and friends, led these states. They worked with personal, feudal relationships, thus making deals and returning favours. And so, the transition from tribes to feudalism to states is not a straightforward process.

The first modern, rationally organised states with professional bureaucracies based on merit rather than personal relationships and favours appeared in China. The reason was a centuries-long, cutthroat competition in warfare on an unprecedented scale, with states fielding armies of up to 500,000 men, during the Warring States Era. Fielding these armies required professional tax collection, detailed records of people and their possessions, and provisioning them in the field.

Once the state of Qin emerged victorious by 200 BC, China became unified, and the competition between the states ended, and China’s modernisation ground to a halt. Even so, China adhered to modern bureaucratic principles and remained the most modern state for 2,000 years, enabling its rulers to govern a vast empire. States remained the most competitive organisational form until Europeans invented capitalism and corporations, which introduced a radically new dynamic of permanent change driven by competition.

Capitalism and corporations


In the Middle Ages, China had a strong centralised state and was ahead of the rest of the world, yet Europe came out on top. The Chinese government prevented the merchants from becoming the dominant force in society. In the Middle Ages, Western Europe lacked strong states and exhibited greater individualism, allowing capitalism to emerge there gradually. That took centuries and was the outcome of factors shaping Western European culture and their interactions in a historical process in which competition played a defining role. The rise of merchants and, later, corporations brought a new economic dynamic and wealth. Corporations are legal entities serving a specific purpose. Invented in Roman times, they became a competitive advantage in business ventures.

Corporations limited the risks for entrepreneurs and investors and allowed for the raising of more capital. From the Middle Ages onward, Europeans established commercial corporations with shares and stock markets, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The advent of corporations triggered a new phase in the competitive cycle, further increasing efficiency by specialising in specific tasks. The Europeans combined their inquisitiveness with entrepreneurship, so the profit motive eventually began to drive innovation.

The new dynamic intensified competition and innovation, causing permanent economic growth and disruptive change, a process economists call creative destruction. Capitalism increases available resources via cooperation or the division of labour, but competition is the driving force. It favours economies of scale. For instance, you see supermarket chains replacing smaller grocery stores. It is also why we have weapons of mass destruction and industrial warfare. The competition will eventually ruin us all.

At present, East Asian countries such as China appear to have the most competitive socio-economic model. It helps that the people there are less individualistic. The Chinese also have the longest tradition of rationally organised government. Yet, it will not end well for them either. Artificial intelligence will soon outcompete humans. It will become the ‘killer bug’ that terminates humanity. We can’t keep up with artificial intelligence. And so, the future doesn’t need us. We aren’t sufficiently efficient, creative and innovative. Competition is our doomsday machine. Whoever wins the race will be dead. If humankind is to survive, competition, insofar as we allow it, should serve cooperation. If we don’t get a grip on the competition, we are doomed.

Latest revision: 7 November 2026

Featured image: Hadzabe tribespeople. Calvin pro7. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Amish family, Lyndenville, New York. Public domain.

Last Day

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Imagine there is a lake in a distant forest. On its surface grows a plant. Its leaves darken the water, so all life below it dies. The plant was at first tiny, and it has been there for 1,000 days. But it doubles in size every day. So, here is a question. If the plant blankets half the lake, how many days are left to save the life there? The correct answer is one day. Behold the power of exponential growth. If the plant depends on life in the lake, it will also die.

Behold the power of exponential growth. The plant doubles in size each day. And so, it covers the entire lake tomorrow. It doesn’t matter how long it has been there already. It stops growing once there is no more room. As soon as the lake is fully covered, life in the lake ends. And if the plant depends on that life, it will also die.

The lake represents the Earth, the plant humanity, and the leaves are people like you and me. The graph above shows the human population numbers over the last 12,000 years. These numbers had been very low for a long time. In 1804, there were one billion people. Since then, the human population has gone berserk. There were two billion humans in 1927, three billion in 1960, four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987, six billion in 1999, seven billion in 2011, and eight billion in 2022.

The experts expect the number to decline in the future. Only, how will that decline occur? That is anyone’s guess. The signs are ominous. Currently, humans use nearly twice as many resources as the Earth can deliver.1 We can do that for a short while, but it will end badly. The lifestyles of the rich are unsustainable, but so are the number of children many people have. Rich people with many children are the worst. Continuing their current lifestyles will lead to an apocalyptic event, and it will happen sooner rather than later.

We live on the proverbial last day before a dramatic trend change in resource consumption. How it will play out is up to us.


In 1972, a group of scientists known as the Club of Rome ran a computer programme predicting an apocalypse when natural resources would run out shortly after 2000 AD.2 Their computer printed out a scary diagram detailing how, demonstrating we should be very, very afraid. So far, the reckless have had numerous opportunities to point out how foolish the cautious have been, and the ultimate laughing stock is the man with the sign saying, ‘The end is near.’

Share of teh world population living in poverty
Share of the world population living in poverty. CC-BY. Max Roser. OurWorldInData.org.

According to the World Bank, extreme poverty dropped from 76% of the world’s population in 1820 to 9% in 2018. Their definition of extreme poverty is dubious, but it is beyond doubt that the percentage of destitute people has declined. The Club of Rome lacked sufficient and precise data, and unanticipated developments affected the outcome. New technologies enable the extraction of more resources and the more efficient use of existing ones. Some oil reserves have become accessible with new or improved extraction methods. And if you use the oil to produce a solar panel, you get several times as much energy during the solar panel’s lifespan as from burning the oil itself.

Essential resources, such as oil and freshwater, are becoming increasingly scarce or may soon be in short supply.3 With current consumption levels, proven oil reserves may last until the 2060s. Total oil reserves are more than twice as large, but pumping the remaining oil could be costly,4 while climate change could prevent us from burning it. PFAS, microplastics, and other pollutants are everywhere and accumulating in our bodies. Brain samples collected in early 2024 measured, on average, about 0.5% plastic.5

Life has never been better for most people. Are we on the verge of the apocalypse? The problem is growth in a limited area. When there is growth, the increases add to the existing total. The plant can’t grow beyond the pond’s size, so once it reaches its limits, for every leaf that grows, another must die. The Earth is stressed. We disrupt the balance in nature, but we can’t predict what will happen and when. We can’t overuse the Earth for long. The day before growth ends could be our best.

Scientists have identified nine processes that regulate the Earth’s stability and resilience. These are climate, biosphere, land use, freshwater, nutrients, ozone, aerosols, and ocean acidity. These processes have boundaries that are unsafe to cross. By exceeding these boundaries, we risk triggering irreversible environmental changes that could lead to catastrophic consequences for both human civilisation and natural ecosystems, these scientists argue. As of 2024, we have breached six of these nine planetary boundaries.

Humankind has gone batshit crazy. We delude ourselves into thinking that economic growth will solve our problems. We are like cancer cells telling each other that our aggressive growth strategy has paid off handsomely so far, so that more cancer will make things better. That is, of course, until the host dies.

Barring an apocalyptic event, such as the planet reaching a tipping point due to climate change, World War III, or a technology like artificial intelligence or genetic engineering going wrong and out of control, doom will likely be piecemeal, occur over decades, and not affect everyone equally. Many might survive and enhance themselves using technology, turning themselves into post-humans. If we compare humanity’s lifespan with 1,000 days, we live on the proverbial last day.

We can step out. The Old Order Amish, also known as Pennsylvania Dutch, live modestly and choose which technologies they use. More and better stuff doesn’t make us happier once we have enough, feel secure, and live in a supportive community. Surveys suggest the Old Order Amish are happier than the average citizen. They show us that we can live simply and don’t need new technologies and products. We don’t have to go that extreme. We can choose the technologies we use and make different choices. And our lifestyles need not be that austere as long as we don’t stress the Earth.

Latest revision: 2 July 2025

Featured image: Amish family, Lyndenville, New York. Public domain.

1. overshoot.footprintnetwork.org
2. The Limits to Growth. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William W. Behrens III (1972). Potomac Associates – Universe Books.
3. Theworldcounts.com. Depletion of Natural Resources.
4. Plummeting ‘Energy Return on Investment’ of Oil and the Impact on Global Energy Landscape. Siddharth Misra (2023). Journal of Petroleum Technology.
5. Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue, studies show: ‘There’s nowhere left untouched’. The Guardian (2024).