I was on the phone with someone recently and they stopped in mid-sentence to tell me, breathlessly (with the TV blaring in the background) to “TURN ON YOUR TV, one of those rich guys is about to blast off into outer space.”
I politely demurred, dismissing it in a few words as a “publicity stunt” and this burst my friend’s bubble, I’m afraid. They were so caught up in the showmanship.
Later, I wondered about my reaction to this recent display of the “mine is bigger than yours” back and forth between our public-hero billionaires—Musk, Bezos, Branson and I’m sure there are others I’ve managed to avoid knowing about. What was it that I found offensive about this ostentatious self-promotion? It was bigger than just the repugnant ego trips involved.
And, ouija board fashion, a day later, my mouse cursor found a link about the billionaire space race. It could have been a so-so article easily dismissed, were it not by UK economist Tim Jackson—a name that has its own years-old folder in my repository of useful knowledge.
Along with a few other New Economists over the decades to whom I’ve been paying attention, Jackson advocates articulately for the end of the GROWTH economy, and offers what I esteem as wisdom about how we do this. Following, a few comments on excerpts from his recent article:
The billionaire space race epitomizes capitalism’s destructive obsession with growth
Undeterred, the rocket men gaze starward. If resources are the problem, then space must be the answer. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is pretty explicit about his own expansionary vision. “We can have a trillion humans in the solar system,” he once declared. “Which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization.”
So with sufficient technological innovation we can slip the surly bonds of Earth and send trillions to Mars to start the limitless growth process over again. This reminds me that I have a friend with a T-shirt that reads….
But there exists an increasing number of nature-aware, future-focused, post-pandemic survivors who want, not to start over in space so much as to start over on Earth; to find anew for themselves and their families a resilient state of health and well-being that leaves them free of fear and privation without destroying the planetary systems that sustain us. To know when we have enough, and be content. But how will we define the new posterity? Not in dollars alone.
Prosperity is as much about health as it is about wealth. Ask people what matters most in their lives and the chances are that this will come out somewhere near the top of the list. Health for themselves. Health for their friends and their families. Health too – sometimes – for the fragile planet on which we live and on whose health we ourselves depend.
And yet, our billionaire heroes and their corporate wannabe’s can’t stop needing more, bigger, faster, better, whiz-bangier lifestyles.
I imagine a parallel here: Our society is predominately obese because we choose the wrong foods, and eat too much and otherwise neglect our diets so our health is seriously compromised. So too, western economies drive us to crave not just enough but MORE than enough STUFF, sucking profits from Nature and leaving the planet broken. Maybe it’s time we pushed away from the table while there is still a table left.
Jackson goes on to talk about our present flurry to colonize Mars as motivated by “terror management” in which we turn to the things (like capitalism at full throttle) that make us feel good rather than addressing the “inconvenient truths” of our crisis state.
He ends by pointing out our existential discomfort in our own skins, bound by our feeble senses and abilities on a befouled planet. But he agrees that we do need a final frontier, but Earth first:
Let’s dream of some “final frontier” by all means. But let’s focus our minds too on some quintessentially earthly priorities. Affordable healthcare. Decent homes for the poorest in society. A solid education for our kids. Reversing the decades-long precarity in the livelihoods of the frontline workers – the ones who saved our lives. Regenerating the devastating loss of the natural world. Replacing frenetic consumerism with an economy of care and relationship and meaning.
Thanks for the link to Jackson’s article.
I've been enjoying all the proclamations from the right about how the billionaire space race is triumph of capitalism over communism.
First who really spends any brain power on the communists in 2021?
Second, the communists neat the.ro save by 60 years.