Living in a cul-de-sac

I'm a trial and error type of guy. If I see something that attracts my interest I walk there. So I've been in many cul-de-sacs over the years and would like to say I'm quite good at recognizing them. And getting out again.

This makes me worried about the state of the world, because we are running, with ever increasing pace, into a cul-de-sac and the ones leading the crowd doesn't give a shit. There are many voices saying we should stop and think, or maybe just take it easy, but these voices are silenced or just ignored.

But if you think about it it's obvious: We use more and more of the world's resources. So far this has worked because only a very small part of the world's population lived in this luxury. Now, even though neoliberalism is doing a good job making people poor, the amount of people who can afford excessive consumption is exploding and we have reach a point where we already use far more than the world can produce.

There is no second planet Earth, so we have to learn how to survive with the resources we have. The easiest way to accomplish this is to make sure the poor stay poor. That worked well for a long time, but then we got gready and still wanted them to consume our products, and we wanted them to produce our stuff cheaply. So they got it a lot better. The IMF, the World Bank and the USA have done quite a good job keeping them back, but they have failed and we now consume something like 10-20% more of the world's resources than the world can produce. And the consumers are us in the Western world, with the USA as proud leaders. We've reached the end of that cul-de-sac, we even burst through the wall at the end.

Another cul-de-sac is the superficiality of the Western society. How food is becoming ever more bland, without taste. Will we continue that until we all just have a pill a day? Or should we stop now and make sure we eat healthy natural food only? I'd say we should leave this cul-de-sac as soon as possible.

Actually the resource part could/should be divided into a number of sub-chapters: Energy. Water. Raw materials. Air. You name it... It's unbelievably childish and naive to think that some miraculous technical solution would solve all these problems - suddenly providing us with unlimited amounts of clean water, energy and raw materials. We can hope for it, sure, never give up hope. But now, right now, there are no such magic solutions. And we know we consume too much. Conclusion: Stick your head in the sand? Ignore it? Claim it's all evil anti-market, anti-capitalistic, communistic or whatever propaganda? No, we have to change our behaviour. And with "we" I mean us in the Western world, the rich world, the ones who fucked up the world in the first place.

We can not sit on our fat asses and say the Chinese cannot increase their consumption. Their consumption is nowhere near to ours! They are still poor, we can't ask them to stay poor just so we can stay fat. We have to be the leaders, we must adjust ourself to a sustainable level. It's ok to say to somebody else she shouldn't use more than you. But you can't say she has to use far less. That is oppression. And that is something we should try to leave behind. Or would you like to be the one at the bottom?