Uncontrolled growth within a system- sounds like nature to me.

Nature has existed at a relative equilibrium for billions of years. It changed, but there was never a single thing that could take over the entire system.

It took humans a few hundred years under the current system to start a mass extinction event and begin dismantling the ecosystem we rely on. And we are ready to go 10x further if it means someone somewhere else makes a few more dollars.

Cancer is the most apt comparison, actually. At a system level we don't care for survival or long-term viability, only immediate replication and exploitation.

▲

21asdffdsa12 16 hours ago | parent [-]

That is - a anthropomorphization of nature- assuming what is nice and "stable" to me, is not actually furiously attacking one another. Nature had buildup of warfare materials (the plastic that was trees before fungi digested it).

Nature had campaigns ebb and flow, due to iceages and warmspells, had island holdouts being wiped-out by systems adapted to furious combat on continents (invasive species).

Your picture of nature is very much distorted by a rejection of a rather cthullian reality.

What you mistake for peace is a coldwar equilibrium, where all sites furiously roll the dice of research for new war-tech- and then humans came along. Humans are very much a natural system doing natural things, very successful though.

	▲	tovej 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Cancer is natural, "natural" does not mean good. This focus on things being "natural" is very strange when we're discussing artificial constructs like the economy or technology. Technology and capitalism are not natural phenomena, they are political ones. You are conveniently ignoring the comparison to cancer. Capitalism and cancer both demand growth at the cost of everything else. This is what leads to them destroying the systems they inhabit.

▲

mikem170 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's the lobbyists and regulatory capture and monopolies that make it cancereous.

	▲	tovej 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, and the focus on growth in general. There is a sustainable amount of goods and services that need to be produced. Capitalism forced the economy to go beyond that many decades ago.

▲

tovej 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Growth is checked by balancing processes in nature. Every "exponential" in nature is actually a sigmoid. Growth is a means in nature, in shareholder capitalism, it is an end.

Shareholder capitalism explicitly ignores natural constraints in order to chase a constant rate of growth. That's what cancer does, it eats up resources from other cells in the organism in order to do nothing but grow, killing the organism in the process.