For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something…

For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in our societies, from which Covid was born. /1 https://t.co/PTXt2qrUPS

The most common explanation for that near vertical, sudden climb in economic growth in the 1950s is that humanity got super smart all of a sudden, and developed technologies that freed us at last from the burdens of existence. A miracle! But it’s not that. /2 https://t.co/75HFDuSXzD

For the two thousand years leading up to the 1950s, the amount of stuff or GDP we produced and the number of people alive pretty much balanced. No great accumulations of either. But then something happened just after WW2 that changed all of history. We were infected. /3

Infected by the exponential curve. There, in the green. The religious promise of infinite life, which the world wars beat out of us a bit, was replaced by the promise of infinity elsewhere. Not clever technologies, something else. /4 https://t.co/OoGY2PFgop

Sort of speaks for itself. Infinite wealth, ‘compounding interest’. Even basic compound interest, a child’s savings account, is exponential growth. We were infected by exponentialism, in the 1950s. Everything since, including Covid, derives from that initial infection. /5 https://t.co/LSXBhR6Tos

Massive population growth, for example, world ‘overpopulation’, began - have a look - at *the same moment*. Exponential economic growth, exponential debt, and now exponential population growth. Emerging at the same time. A miracle! For the numpties, maybe. /6 https://t.co/bIl66CxQNi

This shift in millennia of history? The birth of the ‘Economy’. When did people first start talking about the economy? *drum roll*…in the 1950s. Anybody still backing the coincidence horse here? The exponential increase in the use of debt, forbidden even in ancient times…/7

…suddenly transforms millennia of history, in a few short years. The financialisation of society and cultures. That’s what the ‘Economy’ is, literally. All the old restraints on life and work swept aside by the access to infinite, compounding interest. Exponentialism. /8

The reason major religious traditions had outlawed moneylending (usury) thousands of years before, was because they must have known what happens if you don’t. We’re now living what happens when you don’t. Fabulous decades of a feeling of God-like prosperity and freedom. /9

All the old constraints, environmental and otherwise, stripped away in the rush for exponential returns on investment. ROI. Whole ecosystems laid to waste, generating fun things like zoonotic viruses. We say people don’t understand the exponential curve with epidemics,…/10

…but exponential infection is a child of exponential society. We love our fat super returns, with their double-digit hyper-exponential growth returns, not even connecting the dots. The Economy and Covid are one and the same thing. Zoonotic pathogens from exponential…/11

…economic activity destroying habitats. A culture that won’t fight a pandemic for fear of destroying its economy is being entirely consistent with its exponential operating system. /end