A provocative piece, but with a well-supported title by one of the most interesting and life-affirming writers around today, Herve Kempf. The lucidity of his analysis is all-too-rare in our discourse today. Here is just one sample from these insightful tracts…

The comfort in which Western societies are immersed must not conceal from us the gravity of the moment. We are entering a time of durable crisis and possible catastrophe. Signs of the ecological crisis are clearly visible and the hypothesis of a catastrophe is becoming realistic.

Yet, in reality, people pay little attention to these signs. They influence neither politics nor the economy. The system does not know how to change trajectory. Why?

Because we don’t succeed in relating ecology and society.

However, we cannot understand the concomitance of the ecological and social crises if we don’t analyze them as the two sides of the same disaster. And that disaster derives from a system piloted by a dominant social stratum that today has no drive other than greed, no ideal other than conservatism, no dream other than technology.

This predatory oligarchy is the main agent of the global crisis - directly, by the decisions it makes. Those decisions aim to maintain the order that has been established to its advantage and favor the objective of material growth: the only method, according to the oligarchy, of making the subordinate classes accept the injustice of the social situation. But material growth intensifies environmental degradation.

The oligarchy also exercises a powerful indirect influence as a result of the cultural attraction its consumption habits exercise on society as a whole, and especially on the middle classes. In the best-provided-for countries, as in developing countries, a large share of consumption answers a desire for ostentation and distinction. People aspire to lift themselves up the social ladder, which happens through imitation of the superior class’s consumption habits. Thus, the oligarchy diffuses its ideology of waste throughout the whole society.

It’s not the oligarchy’s behavior alone that leads to deepening of the crises. Faced with opposition to its privileges, with environmental anxiety, with criticism of economic neoliberalism, it weakens public freedoms and the spirit of democracy.

“Ideology of waste.” One of the better descriptive terms I’ve heard in awhile.

A highly recommended read