Disepiphany

The heartbreak of my life wasn’t from a failed romance, though I have had my share of those. For me the greatest defeat I ever experienced happened the day I realized that my chosen field of study, Economics, was a big lie.

It was in February, 1974. I was in graduate school, pursuing a master’s degree in Economics at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. My undergraduate major was also Economics, and I had been inspired by the prospect of making a contribution to the field, as well as to the lives of many around the world. These ambitions were perhaps a bit too lofty.

My focus was on Economic Development, which explores theories and methods for transforming poorer regions and countries into advanced, prosperous participants in the world economy. I had some success in my undergraduate studies with things I had written and presented in Development coursework and seminars. Graduate courses delved into the history and theories of Development more deeply, and I toyed with the idea of earning a Ph.D.

Then it turned sour. My undergraduate coursework didn’t include statistics, econometrics, and higher-level mathematics as it relates to economic theory. After a year and a half of it in graduate school I was getting tired of it. It seemed increasingly irrelevant and false the farther into it I got.

By early 1974 the end was in sight. I had almost enough credits for the master’s degree, and figured I could just plow ahead, get the degree, and see what came next. I didn’t need any more theory classes, but audited a class in growth theory – the study of increased economic output over time. It was the power specialty that outranked all other areas of economic study. I can still remember vividly how the faculty member who taught it dominated the room. His name was John Cornwall. He was a Harvard Ph.D., had a booming, stentorian voice, Hemingway-esque with a grey beard, and wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. He was a transcendent archetype of a college professor, and he taught growth theory, the most macho specialty in economic thought.

It was all mathematical equations of a high order, a lot of pi, logarithms, E=MC² type relationships. It was pure theory, meaning it had a nominal relationship with what actually went on in the world, but unlike, say, theoretical Physics, there was no grounding in observable reality, no hypotheses to empirically prove or disprove. It was pure mathematical masturbation.

A few weeks into the quarter (SIU was on quarters, not semesters) I had what I call my disepiphany. It has been said of Mozart that whole symphonies came to him all at once. The entire body of economic theory came to me all at once – except it came fully revealed as complete bullshit. It was so perfect. John Cornwall, Harvard, tweed sport coat with the leather elbow patches, and pure bullshit. Endless growth of output – pure bullshit. Man is a creature of unlimited wants – pure bullshit. The planetary ecosystem is exogenous (external) to the market – pure bullshit. We can always grow through services – pure bullshit.

It wasn’t just disillusionment with economic theory. I had a growing awareness of the destruction of the planet’s ecosystem, and the cause of it being mankind’s increasing intrusion, contamination and depletion of the natural world. The imperative of economic growth, encouraged and rationalized by economists with their theories, gave – and still give – intellectual cover to this intrusion, smothering the conversation with arcane, elaborate arguments. The physical world was already telling us endless growth was unsustainable, but there was too much momentum for rapacity for economists and society at-large to even think of slowing down.

I was devastated. All the years of inspiration, effort and dreams of a meaningful life came crashing down in one instant. I dropped the course and never returned to class, but I stuck around to finish my master’s degree. After graduation I made some half-hearted attempts to find employment as an economist, but half-hearted is really no-hearted when you are looking for a job.

I spent over a year after graduation floundering, and eventually found my way to an ashram in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I stayed with the group for eight years, living in affiliated ashrams in Houston, Hawaii, the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, and in India. Eventually that went sour too, but by that time I had learned a variety of construction trades, and at least was able to stay meaningfully employed. Without a belief in the system I didn’t put much stake in it, and just eked out an existence, until I retired a few years ago with enough income to live frugally in my remaining days.

Endless growth of output is still the predominant focus of Economics, and of governments and business elites, but it doesn’t have the panache it used to. Climate change, homelessness, the worldwide migration crisis and the rampant destruction of the environment caused by resource depletion and industrial poisons have made the religion of infinite growth seem like a barbaric group psychosis.

And a doomed one as well. The entire power and money structure of the industrialized world is dependent on endless growth. The planet is finally in full revolt. It has gone way too far. We may be on an irreversible path of mass extinction – including our own.

Human society worldwide is having a disepiphany, similar to what I experienced decades ago. It is an unbearable reality to face, and even after all these years it still isn’t easy. We are all facing immanent death squarely. Economies will fail, including those the U.S., China and Russia, as well as all other industrial countries.

This is the context within which all other considerations take place. For example, the malevolent presidency of Donald Trump. As of now, the power structure of this country grants him legitimacy, though he is a usurper. Especially complicit in this are our mass information media. Some are critical, but very, very few will say that he is a deranged criminal sociopath, though that is exactly what he is.

What both supporters and critics of Trump fail to include in their arguments is that there will be no room for a leader like Trump in a zero-growth or negative-growth economic system. There will be no one to promise pie-in-the-sky when it has all fallen down. They can’t say this because it is not yet acceptable to question the orthodoxy of infinite growth.

There will be no room for Vladimir Putin either, or Xi Jinping. Or Netanyahu, Bolsonaro , Mohammad bin Salman, Kim Jong-un, Bashar al-Assad, Erdoğan or any other tinpot despot. Since the worldwide infinite growth system will continue until it collapses, it will be much more difficult to avoid chaos than it would have been had we faced our predicament and taken steps to survive it. Autocrats, in this context, have an extremely tenuous grasp on power, to put it mildly.

Democrats, or even aristocrats, won’t have an easy time either. No one will. We will be lucky if any real leaders emerge. The closest we have come lately is Swedish school girl Greta Thunberg, and leadership is something she accepts reluctantly and by default. She clearly states the obvious when she points out that it is adults who should be providing leadership, but can’t or won’t.

It is easier to criticize the drive for endless growth nowadays, but I’m hardly gloating. I have been dreading what is coming for almost 46 years. It has been death by 16,790 cuts, one for each day. I have been very lucky. I have survived many harrowing situations, including one attempt on my life. I have done smart things and stupid things, and a lot of in-between things. I have great concern and compassion for what people I know and love will have to go through, and for the billions of people worldwide who face the same challenges. What we are seeing with mass migrations, wars, forest fires, floods, blizzards and hurricanes is a sign of much worse to come. Much, much worse.

One thing I can offer as a bit of guidance is that disepiphany is not the end of your life. It is just something to experience and move on from. People experience all kinds of disepiphanies, and most manage to survive and put their lives back together. The difference with this one is that there will be no moving on to what we had before. We will live in harmony with the natural world without a choice, if we live at all.
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Here's a song. Here's another. Spirit. Neil Young. Talking Heads. Hank Snow. Koerner, Ray and Glover. Los Lobos. The Rolling Stones. Bob Dylan. Talking Heads. The Rolling Stones. Cream. Jefferson Airplane.

To read a transcript of Greta Thunberg's speech to the U.N. last September, click here. To see a video of the speech, click here.

Nearly a half-billion animals are feared dead in Australian wildfires.