Chapter 14
Consumption and ecology
We saw in Chapters 7, 10, and especially 11 with operational control, how we can strengthen the consideration of all the consequences resulting from the strategic choices made by organizations, and therefore their ecological and societal responsibility in current terms. In Chapter 16, we will propose an activity financing system that makes this economically realistic.
Let us specify on this subject that the revision of the notion of property presented in the previous chapter gives a more concrete content to the sentence “the freedom of some stops where that of others begins”. Indeed, the system that we have described implies that ownership does not give right to irresponsibility. On this level, the current system is totally failing because we seek, in Marx's logic in Capital, to define irresponsibility in terms of law, which becomes more and more impractical as technology advances. The emergence of the need for the precautionary principle was the key moment when this system became totally inadequate. The legislation says that we have the right to develop a product as long as there is no serious proof of its dangerousness, that is to say that we take into account the product alone. Conversely, the precautionary principle presupposes a logic in which the level of risk that it will be reasonable to take with regard to the product in the event of uncertainty depends on the social utility of the product, but also and above all alternatives available. If we impose on companies a formalism of reasoned decision-making as we recommend, then we are de facto moving towards respecting the precautionary principle. On the other hand, within the framework of capitalism regulated by law, we are reduced to fiddling, because the moral demand of citizens is the principle of precaution, but this does not fall within the framework of Article 4 of the Declaration of Human Rights that we mentioned in Chapter 7, and even less in the logic of exacerbated economic competition. The only trick that we have found that produces an effective result is the system of very high fines in the event of deaths in American air transport which makes it possible to impose a certain precautionary principle indirectly, via insurance companies.
Let's now address the consumption aspect of the ecological transition. In this regard, unsolicited advertising must simply be banned. Indeed, on the one hand, cognitive dissonance shows us that the human brain is not capable of resisting the repetition of a message designed to please. On the other hand, we must stop pursuing a contradictory public policy where on the one hand we artificially give rise to needs in individuals that they did not have, and on the other we ask them to moderate themselves to protect the planet. Given the extent of the desired moderation, the happy medium on this scale is just a way of pretending to be ecology. Search engines are enough to find what you are looking for. They must simply be supervised to ensure their neutrality.
Finally, an effective ecology supposes a reduction in the birth rate. This requires support measures to avoid the under-representation of girls, in particular by first eliminating the notion of dowry where it persists, and by securing the pension system via new productivity gains linked to the second industrial revolution. and technological.
These last two points constitute nothing more and nothing less than the bases of degrowth. Let us recall at this point that, as we saw at the beginning of the previous chapter, in our current system, growth is necessary only because of Parkinson's law (chapter 2) which generates a progressive stagnation of the system that we does not confront, and which we therefore simply seek to compensate with growth.
What is remarkable is that once we combine the organization of production seen in the second part of this book and the two measures of this chapter, the decline falls like a ripe fruit. On the other hand, when we seek to implement degrowth directly, the subject remains inextricable at the practical level because it presupposes the emergence of a higher collective consciousness, a bit like in the case of communism. In other words, the real blocking elements vis-à-vis degrowth are generalized nepotism and cognitive dissonance, but they were not visible. On the other hand, once we have seriously taken them into account, and proposed an appropriate social organization, decline ceases to be a problem and becomes a predictable consequence of the new mode of operation.