Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

The philosopher Timothy Morton has likened our obsession with eco-facts to the nightmares suffered by people with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In PTSD dreams, you relive your trauma and wake up viscerally terrified, sweating and shaking. For some reason the nightmares happen over and over again. Sigmund Freud argued that this is your mind’s attempt to ameliorate your fear by trying to insert you into the moments right before the trauma happened. The idea is that if you’re able to anticipate the traumatic event, you might be able to avoid it – or at least prepare yourself psychologically. Morton thinks our eco-facts serve a similar function. By endlessly repeating terrifying eco-facts, on some subconscious level we’re trying to insert ourselves into a fictional moment right before collapse happens, so we can see it coming and do something about it. At least we’ll feel prepared when it arrives.30