The basic worry is that our society requires unlimited growth, and yet, in the era of financialization, we see a sort of material degrowth. This fact should be a blessing, yet it creates a living hell. How to reconcile this contradiction? For one thing, finance - or the greater FIRE sector - is continually in a state of growth, or attempts to be, and this is at the expense of everything else. But there's more.
It may be that the real economy continues to grow weakly, or even deflate, but the prevailing issue is a greater spiritual requirement of constant growth. A loss in economic growth could be quite the blessing. We could all simply throw up our hands and stop "working" - work which in this society means something very specific and deliberately limited - and everything would be great. We would have more time to spend with our loved ones, and we could pursue our own interests.
But the moral imperative that insists we should be growing results in the overall destructive effects of this degrowth. As the economy deflates, instead of scaling down and diverting our attention to non-material and/or non-commercial matters, we see a diverting of resources to finance and a widespread punishment of those swathes of unproductive laborers, which we should remember, have been rendered unproductive by the very authority doing the punishing.
We're awash in material abundance, yet because growth is seared into the genetic code, we cannot face the slightest indication of degrowth, and so employment numbers are doctored, pro-growth policies are pumped, faux enthusiasm is deployed to claim we are back to growing, and those threatening any forward momentum are viciously punished.
The diversion of resources to finance is merely the consequence of this structural flaw. Now that the real economy is spread so thinly all over the globe, and its cannibalization of its own producers robs it of its own fuel, and it begins choking on its own fumes, the last possible avenue of expansion is into finance, where the smallest number can derive the greatest amount, all of which exists under illusion, an illusion that nevertheless manages to marshal the abundance of resources hitherto produced, in order to aggrandize itself.
