When a government wants to reform something to do with regulating the economy, you can be sure you’ll hear a few buzz words in the process, usually along the lines of ‘choice’ or ‘competition’. The reason we hear them a lot is because PR people know that they get a good response from focus groups, and if you keep hitting those buttons then eventually people think your reforms are a good idea. We think choice and competition is a good idea because who wouldn’t want more choice, and allowing competition means everyone has a chance of success, but it isn’t until you examine the deeper implications of such black and white reasoning that you realise there are a few problems with it, and politicians continue to be able to get away with this deception because the public lack the information necessary to make informed decisions and call bullshit when they’re being fed it. Governments can get away with a lot by using the right words, so lets have a look at ‘competition’.

I want to tell you a story of two islands. Island One is inhabited by a single tribe united by their situation, coordination was easy because there was s single hierarchy, and everyone had to play by the rules because there was no escape, the result was an island that was able to strike a balance with its environment and the resources that were available because they had no outside influences that were beyond their control that could forced them to behave in a destructive manner. The second island is larger and had more resources, enough for everyone, but on this island they had multiple tribes all in competition with each other. Each tribe competed with each other for greater status on the island, each tribe would think bigger and better, competition gave each tribe their motivation, but eventually they had created an economy that had outgrown the resources available to them and they started to consume the capital as well as the interest. Fuelled by competition, they were compelled to keep consuming and couldn’t coordinate an effort to save themselves because of the competing interests of the different tribes, it eventually lead to their extinction. You may recognise Island One as Anuta Island, and Island Two as Easter Island, both in the South Pacific, but only one population still exists today. When you observe these two case studies and ask yourself the question “which island most closely resembles the current situation on planet earth?”, I think you would feel compelled to say Island Two.

Competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but once you pass the point where your economy becomes too big for the resources available to you to support, then capitalism stops being constructive, and instead becomes very destructive. However, we don’t recognise that it has become destructive because we start to consume the capital to make up for the lost interest, and this mitigates the sense of peril which usually motivates us to save ourselves. It’s not until we have consumed all the capital that we then realise there has been a problem, and by then it’s too late.

If you imagine a glass test tube full of a sugar solution, and into that test tube you place a bacteria that consumes that solution. As the bacteria consumes it replicates and fills up the tube until there is no sugar left and only a test tube full of bacteria. What do you think happens to the bacteria once it has filled the test tube? Do you think it limps on until it can find a new source of food? No, it crashes, Immediately. With all its resources consumed, the entire population dies off, and there’s nothing they can do about it because it is too late. The difference between bacteria and humanity, is that the bacteria doesn’t know what it is doing, it at least has ignorance on its side.

Why am I telling you this? Well, beyond the basic lessons of consuming more than you make, it’s because we are already living through the greatest extinction events in our planets history since the dinosaurs, part of the Anthropocene. We have consumed the resources and habitats of so many other species that they are going extinct, and we’re next. The warnings that this might one day become a reality have passed, and we are now living through our own Easter Island reality. But everyone already knows about this, scientists and governments have known for a long time, the problem is that capitalism and competition is forcing us into a position where we are left unable to act.

When left unchecked by regulation, capitalism becomes a system that destroys itself, and us with it, because it allows a few rich individuals to make short term gains that conflict with the long term interests of the many. Once it creates an economy that has outgrown the resource available, capitalism starts to behave differently. This is what government is for, to take care of the issues that are too big for us to be able to handle ourselves. Government is supposed to put in place the necessary regulations and protections to prevent capitalism from getting out of control and becoming destructive, but the free market ideologies so prevalent in our governments are pushing us in the wrong direction all together, in favour of less tax and less regulation. In reality, it appears that our government has shown a fundamental lack of understanding and motivation to do anything about it.

Take, as a case study, the energy companies. The people of the UK have been subjected to ever rising energy prices for most of the last decade. The excuse for such behaviour is that rising oil prices have caused them to raise their prices, but when the oil price drop again they don’t pass that onto the consumer, but instead pocket the excess profit. The same process repeats itself each time there is a spike in the oil price. What’s causing this bad behaviour? The answer is that the CEO’s are not answerable to their customers, or even to themselves, but the stockholders that demand a return on their investment. They are trapped inside an infinite growth model that refuses to adapt or take a step back. A company can’t turn to its investors and say there is no more money to be made as the CEO would be instantly dismissed. Even though the population of the UK has remained steady for years, and all homes already have electricity, the energy companies must post 8% growth year on year. Even though the market is now saturated they must continue to find ways of increasing profit, left with no other choice their only option is to squeeze the customers they do have with annual price hikes, and because all the companies are in the same boat, they all rise together and compete over the minor fluctuations in between. The size of the energy economy has outgrown the resources that can support it (the customers) and is causing significant hardship to an already tight-belted population. It is just one example of a system that has outgrown this planet, and a government that is impotent to act because it lacks the necessary counter-systems to combat it.

The reason governments are impotent is because corporations and capitalism are like a petulant child that plays it parents off one another as they compete for its affection. If the government doesn’t do what the corporations want, then they just threaten to move their operations to another country who won’t try to impose ‘harsh’ environmental regulations or taxes. If the British government were to turn around and make the bold move of proclaiming that the energy sector had reached saturation, that the energy sector had grown to the limit of the environment, and they were going to prevent further growth to stop the economy becoming unbalanced, then this would have the adverse affect of sending a message to investors that the UK is hostile to business, putting at risk future investment. But if the same rules were put in place all around the world, then the playing field stays level and it wouldn’t be a problem. When corporations can so easily escape the rules that keep them from destroying us, then it becomes impossible to control them, and as globalisation has caused capitalism to become bigger than traditional national borders, no single country can solve this problem alone. Globalisation requires global rules.

Capitalism is not a bad thing, it is a great system for fuelling progress, but we need a government that understands that it has its limits, and global cooperation among governments to police it properly so that it cannot escape those limits. It must only be allowed to operate inside the boundaries set by the planets resources, and we must move away from a paradigm where the gutting and destruction of the environment is considered acceptable for the sake of a healthy economy. Competition, like choice, is good up to a point, but pass that point and you begin to cripple your ability to do anything.

It’s a message that has been said many times, but we are in our own Easter Island scenario, where systems of behaviour beyond our individual and tribal control are forcing us to continue on a path that will drive us to extinction, and during our time of need when coordination and cooperation is crucial, we find ourselves without the tools essential to preserving the human race. Capitalism has created a problem where our economy has outgrown the resources available to support it, and only a unified effort from all governments can fix it. Our only hope is unprecedented levels of cooperation and self sacrifice, but our island’s (planet earth) tribes (countries/parents, I’m getting lost in all these metaphors) are stuck competing with each other because of self-interest and greed. We have too many different tribes who are too concerned about the ‘unfair’ economic burden of combating climate change on themselves compared to others (think the US and China arguing over emissions targets) that we find it impossible to reach any agreement. Capitalism is forcing us to work in competition with each other, and competition is stopping us from cooperating.

The reason that Anuta Island survived whilst Easter Island didn’t is because they were able to share, coordinate and cooperate easily within a single unified hierarchy. We have to stop thinking of a world without borders and sharing resources as some sort of hippie bullshit and understand that it is essential to future human development and survival. There is a reason that climate scientists say that sharing resources should be one of the main steps in combating climate change. People who share have a different mindset, they’re happy to pay their taxes and help out others, they are more cooperative and are willing to be a team player and make sacrifices for someone else, exactly the mindset we need to help solve our current imbalances. We are competing tribes on the same island and our greed and self interest is causing us to compete ourselves into extinction, and unless we are willing to embrace our shared identity as the human race, we are powerless to stop it.

Tribal politics and capitalism won’t get us out of this mess without serious global reforms.