Liberalism as the cause of planetary collapse!

HOW THE PROPAGANDA OF OVERCONSUMPTION CAN DESTROY THE PLANET

Much of the rhetoric of mainstream politics speaks of building a greener future in response to the climate crisis. Yet this discourse often overlooks a simple fact: before the age of industrialization, the planet was considerably greener.

It was from around the 1980s, when neoliberalism became the dominant economic ideology in Western societies, that global temperatures began to rise at an increasingly alarming rate. Since then, neoliberal economics has transformed the planet’s natural resources into commodities and encouraged corporations to pursue levels of production and consumption that increasingly exceed the Earth’s ecological limits.

Green capitalism appears to tell us that we can continue expanding production while minimizing environmental degradation. I will explain why this may not be a viable long-term solution.

To understand why neoliberalism has contributed to this crisis, we must first examine some of its fundamental principles. One of the central ideas of neoliberalism is that markets should be the primary mechanism for allocating scarce resources. This has been accompanied by extensive deregulation and the expansion of market forces into ever more areas of social and economic life.

The ecological consequences are profound: corporations have been given enormous freedom to extract and consume the Earth’s resources in pursuit of profit, growth, and efficiency. It is therefore hardly surprising that many of the world’s largest corporations also appear among the major sources of carbon emissions.

This, however, is not the only way in which the dominance of neoliberal ideology has influenced the climate crisis.

By placing markets at the center of social life, neoliberalism has increasingly transformed citizens into consumers. Individual identity is expressed through consumption, while material acquisition is often presented as a measure of success, status, and personal freedom.

This fuels competition, conspicuous consumption, and the constant creation of new desires — all of which accelerate the extraction of natural resources and, consequently, the production of greenhouse-gas emissions.

There is also a powerful argument that this extreme individualism has shifted responsibility for the climate crisis onto ordinary consumers rather than placing sufficient responsibility on the corporations, institutions, and economic systems that have enabled environmental destruction to continue.

THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF CLIMATE RESPONSIBILITY

Neoliberalism has increasingly encouraged us to fight climate change as individuals.

Martin Lukacs has argued that neoliberalism celebrates competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, while compassion and solidarity are increasingly stigmatized or weakened. In this sense, the ideology has contributed to the erosion of our collective bonds and has echoed Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration that “there is no such thing as society.”

Yet the climate crisis cannot be solved by individual consumer choices alone when a disproportionate share of environmental destruction is generated by large corporations and by the economic structures within which they operate.

This argument connects with Alan Schnaiberg’s “Treadmill of Production” theory, which approaches the ecological crisis from a Marxist perspective.

Schnaiberg provided a compelling argument that one of the principal forces driving ecological degradation is the seemingly endless expansion of production, accompanied by continual investment in new technologies, industries, and markets designed to increase productivity, resource extraction, and consumption.

The result is a system in which economic growth continually demands more extraction, more production, more consumption, and ultimately more waste and greenhouse-gas emissions.

THE TREADMILL OF PRODUCTION

The Treadmill of Production helped social scientists understand that high levels of consumption are not simply the result of individual consumer choices. They are also a consequence of an economic system built around the continuous expansion of production.

If we genuinely want to prevent ecological collapse, therefore, we need to consider systemic change, rather than simply encouraging individuals to buy slightly greener products.

Green capitalism may simply be a rebranding of the same fundamental system. New technologies and cleaner forms of production may reduce certain environmental impacts, but the underlying logic of perpetual economic expansion remains.

As long as our society continues to treat the Earth primarily as a resource to be exploited for economic gain, environmental and social concerns will tend to remain secondary to the pursuit of profit.

It therefore seems that, if we are to prevent ecological collapse, we must fundamentally reconsider our relationship with production, consumption, and the use of natural resources.

Any economic system that places profit and perpetual expansion at the center of its incentives risks encouraging the exploitation of finite planetary resources.

The belief in unlimited economic growth continuing indefinitely may ultimately prove to be one of the central drivers of ecological collapse.

Green capitalism does not necessarily abandon this principle. Instead, it may attempt to redefine it by finding more sophisticated ways to extract value from nature, while marketing products and practices with terms such as “sustainable,” “green,” and “eco-friendly.”

This is where greenwashing becomes particularly powerful: environmental language can be used to make fundamentally extractive economic practices appear environmentally responsible.

A DIFFERENT FUTURE

In the future, we may need a profound shift away from production driven primarily by profit and away from the assumption that the natural world exists simply for us to extract from and consume.

Only by developing a non-exploitative relationship with the planet can we hope to make a genuinely meaningful impact on the climate crisis.

And perhaps the answer is not entirely new.

The ancient Greeks had already expressed a remarkably different conception of wealth and human well-being. Epicurus taught that:

“If you would be rich, do not add to your money; subtract from your desires.”

The idea is simple but profound: true wealth does not necessarily come from possessing more, but from desiring less.

Perhaps, then, the return to classical education and philosophy is not merely a nostalgic journey into the past.

Perhaps it offers us a different way of thinking about progress itself.

Could a return to classical wisdom become one of the paths toward preserving both the planet and human flourishing?

The ancient Greeks had already foreseen this as early as 314 BC in the words of Epicurus: “To become rich, one does not accumulate money but subtracts desires.” Could a return to classical education be the only path to the survival of our planet—and of human well-being?

Perhaps the future of humanity will depend not on how much more we can produce and consume, but on whether we can rediscover the ancient wisdom of knowing when enough is enough.