Ceteris Paribus

Do not eat of the the tree of life and knowledge for the day you eat of it you shall know what it is to die.

In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

To know of the word is to know of death.

In the souls of men, and proportionately in those of all animals, they are inseparable, because excellence of soul implies great capacity for knowledge, which in exposing to men the unhappiness of humanity may be termed unhappiness itself. Similarly, a life of greater intensity involves a greater love of self, manifested in different ways. An increased desire for happiness is a consequence of this self-love and increased unhappiness, because of the impossibility of satisfying this desire, and as the unfortunate condition of humanity becomes realised. All this is decreed from the beginning of creation, and is unalterable by me.

Freedom From Human rules, Collossians of all things:

16 Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. 17 These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. 18 Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind. 19 They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.

20 Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: 21 “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? 22 These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. 23 Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s.

Without constant energy input, money embedded in concrete, glass and steel can only show a return if more money (energy) is constantly added to resist the ultimate certainty of entropy.

The system burns energy at an unsustainable rate
the poor indentured labour
the middle debt based servitude
the rich play fiddles

gonna buy me a fiddle

can always burn it to stay warm

We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.

Economists spouting ceteris paribus do not even begin to glimpse the future their consumptive growth is causing.

We who see the effects of the cause are subject the same entropic constraints as the economy. Only we choose not to disregard the ecosystem that gives us life. The economy seems to think it can exist without life, who knows, maybe the future really is digital.

Privatisation of the means of producing capital is a tenet of capitalism, private owners make decisions based on higher profits, business growth, and market share i.e. returns to shareholders.

There is nothing inherently efficient about that other than that the decision making criteria rarely takes into account, let alone compensates for, the resources, energy and lives wasted. If these do not effect private profit then these are known as externalities and the cost is borne by society at large and the environment.

It is worth noting that as the global energy return on energy invested continues its long decline, the average standard of living only rose during the last two or three generations because of rising household debt.

The only thing capitalism is really any good at is consuming the resources of the future today through fractionally reserved debt arrangements. I think you will find that while mainstream politicians preach jobs and growth, schools are teaching about mountains of plastic in the ocean, mass global coral deaths, accelerating species eradication, global warming, ERoEI, and the impossibility of infinite growth based on the consumption of a finite natural resource stocks.

Maybe read some shit before spouting that stupid party line that the market will fix everything through efficiency. The market has effectively and efficiently gotten us to the brink of system collapse while espousing every known social corruption as a virtue.

It is really worthwhile to look at the first and second laws of thermodynamics and whether one should consider the biophysical reality of entropy in the context of economic growth.

But, generally speaking, economic growth is a human construct that uses the theory of infinite substitutability to deny any Liebig type limit. Not only that, but the prevailing economic theories ignore the externalities of production through a very liberal application of ceteris paribus as well as discounting the value of the future.

While much of this seems patently ridiculous in terms of the physical, chemical and biological laws of nature, infinite growth is a hypothesis that has a lot of appeal at a political level. To decouple from the growth paradigm would almost certainly immediately cause a global economic recession that would have very similar impacts to the actual effects of non-substitutability. There may simply no other way to sustain the wants of the current population.

The other part of the answer lies in the ability of capital to promote the interests of capital and pevert our social and cultural value systems. Modern propaganda, tries to teach us that the seven deadly sins are in fact virtues, that fiscal profit equates with social profit. Greed is good and economic self interest is the new political capital.

Because of this, and a number of other factors, the individual will to self sacrifice for future generations and to acknowledge limits to consumption simply does not exist in an enlightened democractic majority. The majority prefer to believe that everything will keep getting better and this is the message the political class sells.