The older I become the less I view #capitalism as a terrifying idea. Wondering why that is so I ponder to acknowledge my becoming reactionary due to age as a factor, and indeed there may be some justification in this. But I guess the main reason why I and my former, younger, self disagree on capitalism's nature and value is that today I see far less its negative impacts than I did when I was younger.

It circles around the old saying that was en vogue the past 50 years that there cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet. I don't want to bring decoupling into play, the suggestion that somehow and magically the old correlation of resource consumption and GDP growth ceases to be valid and instead "the" "world" being the finite place that it presumably is, can stay "finite" whereas the "growth" of GDP can continue all along. There seem to be anecdotal evidence in favour and against this but I am not sure how to judge these.

Rather, I think the question whether there "really is" (or "can be") a decoupling of resource consumption and GDP growth is not the relevant issue. With one exception, though. Given our weak ability to forecast resource needs in future developments, the rise and fall of future trends, as well as the possible progress in health care, environmental care, cultural care, the question really no longer is one of "do resources keep being enough for future GDP progress" but rather (or: at most) "what resources may we need in case we have this or that need, including GDP progress?" That is, even as a species, on a collective level (in contrast to all of us pondering indivdually), I don't think we can manage to have a sense of, an understanding of the finiteness of resources and their correlation to whatever needs we may accrue. That is: Even after all the extraction and exploitation, we do not have any sense or feeling how much is left and how much is already spent.

The idea of earth being a closet or a pantry from which we blindfoldedly take out stuff without knowing what's still left inside is a double-edged sword. It can yield to the panic that all is consumed in the near future and man-ape will starve to death, as to the confidence that whatever the ape does, there'll be still plenty of stuff remaining.

Timelessness is not infinity. These are different concepts, although they share some characteristics. I guess the same holds for our sense of finiteness on a global scale. Like there may be an infinite line of points in time whose infinity is not relevant to the feeling of indefinite timelessness at any given point on the infinite axis, so even a (near) infinte amount of material resources doesn't tell us anything about scarcity and abundance in the availability of these resources at any given point in time. And as much as the talk about the infinity of time doesn't tell us anything about the timelessness at any possibly given moment on that axis, the same seems to hold with regard to amount of material resources and the sense of plenty or starvation. That is: Even if the material resources on the planet are finite, that doesn't say much about their availability in connection with determinate procedures of extraction, processing, and crafting into products to enhance GDP.

This does *not* say that the human ape can produce, pollute, and consume willy-nilly as much as he likes without regard to present and future environments. But it suggests that there is a fuzziness, a blur when it comes to us extracting, producing, pulluting, and consuming stuff. We have no sense, or understanding, when some borders may be reached or crossed. The slogan "no infinite growth on a finite planet" is thus an expression of the cautionary principle, but not much else.

But if we do not have a sense of how much "we already consumed", then the capitalist creed of expanding GDP is not something that is bound (or that we can bind) to material limits but to moral ones. And then some may prefer to extract even more while others don't. But if that is the case, then capitalism loses one of its main negative attributes: that it somehow destroys the foundation on which it is based to prosper. Not because it somehow doesn't do that (we cannot sense that either) but because – above some levels of generalisation – cannot make sense of the alleged finiteness of the world. And if we cannot sense either way, then we cannot determine whether capitalism is indeed that different from anything that nature purportedly does in her circles of exchanges.

It is along those lines that I came to find capitalism less frightening than when I was younger. And the main reason for that (as with regard to #hope) is that coming to age means getting a feeling for (or developing a sense of) the world and one's own fears and delights as being quite different issues. Which means that the world can now not only appear but *be* far larger than my individual fears and delights may have permitted me and her to be.

#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten #resources #infrastructure #energy