The behavioral crisis driving ecological overshoot.
Barbara Williams is the activist voice of the Anti-Growth Alliance from the UK. Her work is shared with organizations who share the aspiration to eliminate global ecological overshoot and has written much on the subject. Recently she shared this article World scientists’ warning: The behavioral crisis driving ecological overshoot. “ It aligns with her view that “commercial advertising drives peer pressure to approve and indulge in non-essential consumption.” This certainly the case as the fossil fueled economic system produces tons cheap junk that gets shipped all over the world eventually ending up in a land fill a few years or even just months later. Human behavior is an important factor and it is worth looking at the existing influences on human behavior.
I liked this article very much except I think it misses the most influential of all human made systems on human behavior, the monetary system, which is rarely ever examined closely. Its influence is largely subconscious. The paper rightly blames the corporate media for promoting conspicuous consumption and bad human behaviors. However, the corporate media is a creation of those who control the money system and is designed to do that, not only to promote consumptive behavior, increasing profits, but also to manipulate the public’s perception of the political machinations of power. The system is designed to concentrate monetary wealth to the top and money is power, it is the governing factor. Money controls public policy and greatly influences human behavior.
The article states, and I agree that, “…overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behavior.” Yes, I have been arguing for years that “symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe” because as any physician can tell you treating just the symptoms only masks the disease. The disease is the monetary system, climate change, war, poverty, criminal behavior etc. are all symptoms of the profit-motivated, debt-based monetary system.
The western value system stems from a mechanistic concept of the universe (it’s not living so we can treat it like a machine) and a 400-year-old monetary system based on usury, the sin of sins, the progenitor of the 7 deadly sins. Such a money system has negative psychological consequences for society focused on profits, not care, producing problematic human behaviors. We have a debt-money system that demands growth to pay the interest on the debt when all money is created and issued as debt.
The good news is it is a matter of law which can be changed, but it will require a citizenry informed of this problem and how to fix it, which is no secret, it’s just that it has been suppressed for over 100 years. We must allow money to fulfill its proper role as a government issued debt-free distributive mechanism for society. As Nobel Prize winner Frederick Soddy wrote: “To allow it to become a source of revenue to private issuers is to create, first, a secret and illicit arm of the government and, last, a rival power strong enough ultimately to overthrow all other forms of government.” To allow such power to be in the hands of a few unelected men is why we are in this mess.