To What End?

Photo by Christopher Sardegna on Unsplash

I was talking with journalist Masuma Ahua last week because I had seen her follow me here on Substack. I looked her up on LinkedIn and saw that she is working on a lot of the issues I talk about here (and we work on at Arketa Institute). We set up a quick introductory chat last week and had a nice conversation about the role building community can have in sorting out many of the problems we face.

This is also an early plug for her book coming out in a few months. I’ll stop my promotion of someone I just met a week ago now, but please check out her work on Substack and on LinkedIn if you are so inclined.

Something she said in our conversation got me thinking and sparked this essay. She said that she often asks herself the question “To what end?” when evaluating why something is done by a government, companies, societies, or individuals.

It is a good method to use when engaging your critical thinking to determine what is behind the actions of others in our lives and in our societies.

Asking “to what end” about an idea or goal is a good way to cut through the BS and see if there really is any good reason for doing things that way.

Our societies / culture / politics are organized around neverending economic growth. We learn at a young age that the purpose of society (or our economy) is to grow, and that growth is the goal of our society.

But to what end?

We may be told that growth is good for our economy and therefore good for us all individually. But it doesn’t take much critical thinking to see that such a line of reason doesn’t hold water. The end of continuous economic growth isn’t the wellbeing of a country’s citizens. We are facing unprecedented inequality in the present, environmental collapse in the present and near future, and societal collapse in the medium and long-term. Our younger generations can’t buy a house, can’t get a job and understand very well that their future will be worse off in most measures than the lives their parents had at a similar age.

The real “end” of a society focused on neverending growth is the concentration of capital into the hands of a small class of elites who control the “wealth pump” (in the words of Peter Turchin) that keeps concentrating wealth until inequality inevitably leads to the messy reordering of society.

Those aren’t the “ends” that most people want, so we are told a story that that isn’t really what is happening.

Many of the solutions offered to address climate change, overshoot, inequality and many of the problems we face today are also disguised as ways to continue the status quo a little while longer.

Think of the “sustainability” movement in products and investments over recent decades.

The proposed solutions of green energy, green products and green investing isn’t to solve the problem of impending environmental collapse. The “end” in this case is to keep business as usual going with a slight “green” patina attached to energy, products and investment. Yes, green energy, greener products and green investments are good in and of themselves. But as long as we continue to produce and consume more each year, those small “green” efforts don’t mean a damn thing.

The end of these “green” things (energy, products, investments) should be to make the world a better place. But these efforts only marginally improve things, and don’t address the real problem. They are simply akin to painting a house while it is on fire. The house might look nicer for a short time, but it will still burn to the ground in the end and look slightly nicer while it burns. These marginal “green” activities are ultimately just a waste of time, because we could have been spending that time and that energy addressing the root problems of overproduction and overconsumption.

We must ask the critical question “To what end?” of all the plans behind the futures we are promised?

To what end do we pursue economic growth? It is not to make the world a better place. It is to gain more money and power.

To what end is AI being developed? Those developing AI will tell you it is to serve humanity, but the real answer is again … to gain more money and power.

The “end” of many solutions offered by our leaders today are to keep the status quo humming.

If you play the “To what end?” game long enough and keep asking why the elites that run our economies and our governments do what they do - you always get to the same place. To keep the machine running a bit longer so that they can consolidate more wealth and power.

If you keep asking “To what end?”, you begin to realize the way out of deliberately or inadvertently serving the status quo is to build something outside the status quo.

You begin to realize that we should devolve power down to communities, and follow a degrowth path that leads us to an economy that operates within planetary boundaries? Those with the current money and power may say that this is a socialist plot to control you. Put on your critical thinking hat and ask how devolving power down to communities is more of a power grab than the elites trying to consolidate power. It is not.

The less power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, the better chance we have of building something better. Follow the path where “To what end” leads you down that road.