In the words of the late environmentalist Edward Abbey, we all intuitively understand how the burden of two-hundred years of growth for the sake of growth has promoted the ideology of a cancer cell. Governments have not implemented a cure for that ideology yet, nor do many of us realize the ideology we promote today is self-inflicted cancer to the survival of our species.
If you believe the proclamations on social media, everyone with a heartbeat appears out to change the world by assigning higher levels of newfound morality to themselves. They inevitably promote more or better suboptimizations of an existing norm that makes them the priest of their religions aiming to be tithed. Again, humanity is busy redefining the script of its own excellence.
Sustainable investment strategies, as the arbitrage of the vector of human expansion, is a mindless religion that promulgates sustainability when no such thing exists. Indeed, sustainability is an evolutionary oxymoron that produces a vector of infinite growth amidst the decline of available energy stipulated by entropy.
Hence, anyone in finance, supporting the master of all arbitrage in the United States to the tune of eleven times the size of production as a contribution to GDP, promoting sustainability, is not changing the world for the better but instead moving it away from the relativity of renewal required to adapt to nature. The arbitrage of humanity, finance, is steering the excellence of humanity in a different direction from how nature evaluates our merit.
Changing the world is not necessary. Changing humanity is.
Humanity must learn that human excellence is predicated on our compliance with the first-principles of nature. The recognition of said new normalization of nature’s truth changes where the vector of humanity should be pointed at and how human merit should be evaluated.
People, who proclaim to change the world, are invariably the imposters of meaningful change. They are the ones who compound the problems from yesterday’s ill-conceived solutions. Until we implement a theory for humanity that revolves around relativity and obeys our best understanding of nature’s first-principles, the people who say they change the world remain the rebels without a cause we can do without.
The good news is we can and must improve human compatibility with nature to ensure the most intelligent species lives the longest. But in the words of Winston Churchill, we may only get there after we’ve tried everything not to.
