Every construct humanity has conjured up to manage itself is based on sustained growth, as if evolution and the future of humanity depend on it. We could not be more wrong.
All You Can
In the United States, a country with finance eleven times the size of production as a contribution to GDP, pursuing unending growth by investment firms determines how humanity evolves. Those firms, playing with other people’s money, directly or leveraged, are considered lousy if they cannot produce consistent growth. As a result, their managers invest in anything under the sun.
They were heavily invested in the tobacco industry, and its wrath sixty years later is now the cause of the third leading cause of death to Americans. They invested in gun manufacturers who, in support of our Constitutional rights, keep Americans fighting “wild-west”-style for their desired personal freedom to the detriment of collective freedom left so poorly defined. They invest heavily in the pharmaceutical industry, keeping 70% of Americans alive in apathetic denial of their responsibility to wellness. Never mind, 40,000 Americans die every month(!) of apathetic obesity.
Virtually anything goes when it pertains to keeping growth alive for the sake of growth.
Ideology
American environmentalist Edward Abbey said it best, astutely describing the danger of laissez-faire governance. In Abbey’s words, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell,” communicates exactly the disease we suffer from that will eventually kill its host, the American empire, and those who copy it.
A manmade ideology violating nature’s doctrine has already come back to haunt us. We do not have the longest life expectancy of people in developed countries. Our average age has been in decline for three years in a row. We are the second most obese country in the world. Could more than 50% of Americans with no more than $500 in their bank account be enslaved to the master of an ideology of hope to keep them there?
Sustained growth is the ideology of a cancer cell and cannot exist in a universe subject to entropy, the decline of available energy.
Save Ourselves
We must take the reins back from finance, stuck in the false promise of sustainability ruling our roost. Our leaderless leaders have failed to establish the hierarchy required to protect the collective interest of humanity and the role of finance in it. We cannot blame the players of finance for the humanitarian game left undefined. But we must change it.
Finance must begin to adhere to the first-principles of nature that dictate the strength of renewal that preserves the excellence and longevity of humanity. Finance can no longer be allowed to dance to its own tune. Or be left to reinvent itself around sustainability programs (such as ESG, PRI, etc.) incompatible with nature. Finance must be subjugated to a proven evolutionary theory helping humanity renew its strength for future generations.
Arbitrage From Above
The arbitrage of humanity is determined by nature. Therefore, the quest to improve the strength of human renewal is subject to our compatibility with nature.
We must establish the first-ever and best proxy of our evolutionary theory to determine the merit, policy, and rulebook under which finance must operate to support the future of humanity and protect its dynamic equilibrium with the change entropy imposes on all things in nature. The renewal principles change the vector of human expansion and add a whole new dimension to how we evaluate the contributions humans can make to support the collective interests of humanity.
We will remain free in the same way players in a game of soccer can explore and expand their gameplay merit. But this time, instead of leaving human gameplay undefined, we must adhere to nature’s gameplay to explore and value human excellence.
