The toxicity of an economy based on credit-fuelled growth that benefits mostly banks and speculators, depleting finite resources and destroying much of the social fabric and the planet in the process. Some call it suicide. The paradox is that the logic we find ourselves in tells us that the system can only survive and thrive with more of the same: a perpetual machine based on an extract, exploit, deplete model, mindless of its impossibility and accelerated spiralling side effects that make problems worse.
M O S T T R A V E L L E D R O U T E S
Our institutions are systemically dysfunctional because of a propensity to travel and consolidate the most travelled and visible routes in terms of organization (hierarchies), business processes (best practices and winning models), communications(network effect), which are at the same time accu-mulative of power and robustness, and fragile because they nurture monoculture and mass behaviour by design, accumulating risk as well. Hierarchical structures are conceived for branch-ing out and consolidating exchanges along path-ways that solidify with time and size, as scale and activity of each node empowers the higher eche-lons, accumulating resources and power. Capital and power have been steadily concentrating in fewer hands since the beginning of the Seventies.This systematization and concentration bolster over exploitation, dominant positions and bureau-cratic paralysis in a self-reinforcing process.The fact that banks and global corporations,with the suppression of most limits on activities and concentration, have become too big to fail and to jail is an illustration. Dominant positions enable them to secure and reinforce their rights and power over potential new entrants and sover-eign rules globally. Global corporations have the power for example to sue nation states to enforce their right to exploit natural resources under multi-lateral trade agreements (such as Canadian gold mine against El Salvador under...