Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

This way of seeing the world is known as dualism. We inherit these ideas from a long line of thinkers, from Plato to Descartes, who primed us to believe that humans can rightfully exploit nature and subject it to our control. We didn’t always believe these things. In fact, those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the sixteenth century first had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world, and either convince or force people to become dualists. Dualist philosophy was leveraged to cheapen life for the sake of growth; and it is responsible at a deep level for our ecological crisis. But this is not the only way of being that’s available to us. My colleagues in anthropology have long pointed out that for most of human history people operated with a very different ontology – a theory of being that we refer to, broadly, as animist. For the most part, people saw no fundamental divide between humans and the rest of the living world. Quite the opposite: they recognised a deep interdependence with rivers, forests, animals and plants, even with the planet itself, which they saw as sentient beings, just like people, and animated by the very same spirit.