Exponential growth devours and corrupts
During the dying days of calling myself a libertarian (I think the last permutation was "realistic geo-libertarian") I read a blog post kinda like this, but less concrete. It was by a guy who made up a word, something like "Mazolith", and he was trying to describe how letting these forces unchecked was this hyper system that we were failing to recognize.<p>One of the lines was<p>I got to about there ^ in the comment before I remembered more of the quote. The article I trying to find was this:<p><a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/" rel="nofollow">https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/</a><p>It is extremely good and it plays well after DHH's intro. I know some of the arguments there against libertarianism are strawman arguments, but overall it's a great article and about a day after reading it and thinking about it I started just calling myself a Liberal (it's more complicated than that, but it's the closest fit).<p>DHH touches on exponential growth specifically, but more generally what is needed is to recognize the world as a system of forces and feedback functions, and to take actions to limit the consequences of those systems.<p>For example, democracy is a system to establish which people run our country. If media is allowed to be funded by foreign forces unchecked then it can subvert our democracy. We must now make a choice, do we do something or allow it? For a time we allowed it because our propaganda works better than theirs (mostly because ours is the truth and we live in free societies) but with the advent of social media we may need to make a different choice or change our systems to adapt.<p>It is this type of thinking. It's a superset of what the Canadians and others call "good government". It's a way of managing systems to enact our ends: a more peaceful, prosperous, sustainable existence.<p>Capitalism and growth have a place, but that place needs to be carefully considered and guarded.<p>It's that or we perish in a nuclear holocaust or melted, polluted planet.