“The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society; the stationary is dull; the declining melancholy.” Adam Smith
Light in New Zealand has its own quality. A fierce clarity that makes looking ache. Winter eases the harsh transparency with wind borne moisture carried over the massive oceans of the southern hemisphere. The sun hovers on the western horizon, delaying sinking longer with growing daylight hours. Lagging cold hugs the ground, and the surf churns with the frigid Antarctic southerly wind. Black sand tries inadequately to hold the daylight heat. Hints of spring leap in sweet smelling jonquils, their bulbs transplanted with colonising European families nearly 200 years ago. Native toitoi cuttygrass elegantly sweeps the carpark. The dark forest hums. Seasons swell, peak and sink. Summer and winter is inverted in different hemispheres and the seasonal rhythm is both planetary and particular to place. Here, the peace, cold and hibernation of winter is easing to longer days and dynamic spring growth. It will be followed by long hot summer as fruit ripens and life is easy and plentiful, then the blustery autumnal winds and rain, as the pace of life traces liminal upheaval before the cold drizzle and wet retreat of another winter. Wherever you are, the large planetary cycles continue with a rhythmic pace, the annual cycle resonating with shorter and longer time frames. The sun eventually lining up again with lunar cycles every 18 years. In the past, these small and large scale cycles regulated sowing, growing, reaping, storing (Irwin, Reference Irwin2018, Reference Irwin2024). Cycles have long governed politics, negotiations, trade, peace and war, they governed spirituality, and the cycles of life for the rocks, sand, ocean, the forest, the lizards, insects, birds, mammals, the fertility and the lifespan, the cycles of birth, death and humus (Tuwhare, Reference Tuwhare1964, Smith, Reference Smith2000, Irwin, Reference Irwin2022).
But a unique divergence from the cycles of life emerged at some point in the west, during the 16th or 17th century. The focus shifted from a species frame of well-being to the individual (Nietzsche, Reference Nietzsche1974). Time became abstracted and linear. It was metaphorically based more on an individual person’s life; the linear trajectory from birth to death, rather than the cyclic pattern of seasons, small and large. The understanding of the relationship between birth, life, death and community renewal was lost. Increasingly, society began to become alienated from the rhythms of the earth. Progress and growth was no longer seasonal, opening and contracting, but rather built on an arrow of time. As early as 1798, Malthus noted the further schism between linear time and geometric, (or exponential) time, as growth was not merely continuous, but compounding. The nature of knowledge and truth became more rigid and less intuitive (Irwin, Reference Irwin2003). The role of language as a representational mechanism that describes, delineates and defines became more artificial and enclosed in the circulation of signs (de Saussure, Reference De Saussure1966/1916). There are many ways to analyse the metacrisis (Rowson, Reference Rowson2021, Schmachtenberger, Reference Schmachtenberger2024, Reference Schmachtenberger, McGilchrist and Vervaeke2023, Hedlund et al., Reference Hedlund, Esbjörn-Hargens, Hartwig and Bhaskar2015). The concept of time from cyclic to exponential growth is illustrative of the shift in the conceptual apparatus of modernity, from earlier empires, indigenous and feudal communities, to something quite unique. From the land clearances, subsistence has given way to industrialisation and extractive economics. Heidegger called this shift the abandonment of BeingFootnote 1 (Reference Heidegger1999: 112). Jőrenen explains Heidegger’s concept of the abandonment of Being as “a tradition, a legacy of oblivion, that consists of eschatological course where be-ing withdraws to the point of its abandonment (i.e. to the total oblivion that concentrates only on planetary-wide ordering and efficient manipulation of beings; the machination” (Reference Joronen2012: 357).
Heidegger describes the “essence” of modern technological society as an epistemology focussed on seeing everything as a resource, waiting for the demands of consumerism. In other words, the shift from subsistence economies to market consumerism now dominates global society. Everything is set up to meet accelerating global consumer demand. In this article I look at how modern globalism differs from earlier global trade as exchange, and what levers produce exponential economic growth. Growth is justified by ideas like “progress” and an expectation of growing population and growing demand for employment. But in late modernity, resources are exhausted, population has hit a cliff as young women choose to remain childless, and generations under 35 cannot participate in expectations of progress in either employment of house ownership. For universal education to retain relevancy in this fast changing eco-political landscape, it needs to see through the enchantment of modernity which has dominated the field since its inception in the late 19th century.
This article makes use of history, philosophy and economics to examine how late modernity has arrived at this moment of polycrisis, where multiple strata of global society are breaking down, From resource exhaustion, deforestation, toxic pollution, forever chemicals plastic, climate emissions, ocean acidification, sea level rise, drought, flooding and social malaise, the polycrisis is showing up in all corners of the globe. Accelerating economic growth adds extra burden to the consumption of raw materials and production of pollution, every year. This article aims to understand the underlying, or meta analysis of the crisis. The polycrisis has a focus on the material and psychological limits of each branch of the crisis, whereas the metacrisis is the underlying forces that are bringing modernity to crisis point at all. Famously, modernity has created a schism between nature and culture, object and subject. This alienation, or bifurcation, has created an artificial sense of anthropocentric independence, dominance and control over the forces of nature. Various failures in specific ecological sites have not provided the opportunity for learning and modification, but have been swept under the carpet, so that the global consumer economy can carry on accelerating regardless. This obscurification and failure to learn from failure, is what Heidegger calls the enchantment of modernity (Reference Heidegger1999). Education maintains that modern enchantment by focusing on a particular kind of pedagogical subject; the individual rational utility maximiser. This type of subjectivity is not amenable to healthy embodied psychology embedded in an environmental context but rather is necessary for market consumerism and the neoliberal narrative of the Invisible Hand. This paper shows how inadequate are the modern assumptions about global consumerism, in the face of the polycrisis. Instead, if we are to clearly look at the way the metacrisis has emerged, in the philosophical, historical and economic underpinnings of modernity, we will have a better comprehension of what is worth saving and what is worth rejecting in society at large. With this clarity, we can consider how education needs to adapt and change its goals and values. A necessarily quick historical précis helps to unpack the metacrisis.
The origin of the alienation of modernity can perhaps be pinpointed to Captain Cook’s second voyage to Hawai’i to record the Transit of Venus in 1769. The science of globalisation got underway. Colonisation was certainly an important part of the liminal zone when the cyclic concept of fertile and fallow periods was replaced with incessant excitement about progress and exponential economic growth (Jevons, Reference Jevons1865). Or perhaps it was earlier, when banks learnt to move abstract money across nation states, with a promissory note, instead of relying on the vulnerability of coach driven sacks of gold galloping over national borders (De Roover, Reference De Roover1963). Freely available credit and an increasingly abstract denomination in private hands accelerated the economic boom necessary for the expense of colonisation, transport and far-flung mining. Perhaps it was the boom in coal mining after the steam engine began the industrial revolution. Certainly, land clearances, privatisation and working class precarity are a vital early stage of modernism (Marx, Reference Marx1887/1867) and an increasing reliance on trade instead of subsistence. That shift to trade rather than subsistence developed the faith in “progress” and economic growth. Heidegger tracks the roots of the metacrisis back further to an eschatological focus on rationality in Plato and then Aristotle. Nobody really knows, because alienation and the shift in the concept of time was emergent with industrial modernity rather than an overt philosophical motif, set up to guide it. Key texts describe, worry and often celebrate the shift to industrial modernity. Free trade is promoted in Adam Smith’s (Reference Smith1776/1904) The Wealth of Nations, the principle of comparative advantage in David Ricardo (Reference Ricardo1817) Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, and more critically Malthus’ (Reference Malthus1798) important text on population and finite resources, Jevons’ (Reference Jevons1865) book that celebrates the intensity of fossil fuel energy, The Question of Coal, and Keynes’ (Reference Keynes1933) The Means to Prosperity. Keynes notion of the money multiplier and his argument for spreading the benefits of growth through the entire community instead of merely the ownership class finalised the transition from earlier cyclic, agricultural modes of living, to a thoroughly modern consumer civilisation, extracting resources for consumer markets across all class, gender, ethnicity and nations. Predominantly, economic growth has been celebrated as “progress” and remained optimistic and utopian, claiming to promote egalitarian society and revoke the locking up of planetary wealth in the elite, feudal classes. A few lone voices offered important critique, including Malthus, Wordsworth and Arrenhuis. But mostly the Enlightenment has supported both the socialist and libertarian dream.
Progress
The metacrisis is buried deep in the governing ethos of modernity. It is embedded in the usual, taken for granted motifs that govern the morals and standards of modern institutions, including education. The polycrisis of resource exhaustion, pollution, forever chemicals, micro-plastics in the most remote ecosystems, changes in hormone profiles in fish, shellfish and humanity, toxic monopoly agriculture, climate change, ocean acidification, sea level rise, drought, forest fires, flooding, social malaise, homelessness and housing affordability, and the prospects of work transforming with AI and more are all a visible critique of those modern norms. Capitalism and economic growth are deeply implicated in the metacrisis, but somehow remain invisible to global and national state actors (Mitić et al., Reference Mitić, Fedajev, Radulescu and Rehman2022). Acceleration’s calculus and massiveness exacerbate the way that human interaction represent the world through language and art.
Alienation began with the land clearances and privatisation of the commons, and has substantive consequences for the nature of knowledge. Heidegger argues the abandonment of Being results in “divesting, publicizing, and vulgarization of all attunement,” and “the growing artificiality of every attitude” (Reference Heidegger1999: 123). Instead of an intimate understanding of the state of local wildlife, the health of the soil, the likelihood of rain, people are now attuned to the calculus and rationality necessary for large scale mobilisation of goods and services in a global regime. The mode of knowledge in modernity is no longer ecological kinship but mathematical calculation (Stone, Reference Stone2003, Joronen, Reference Joronen2012, Irwin, Reference Irwin, Jickling, Blenkisop and Morse2021). Large scale logistics dominates the modus operandi of globalisation. Heidegger characterises modernity as “acceleration, calculation, and massiveness” (Reference Heidegger1999: 119). As Heidegger writes, “everything must be adjusted to the existing state of calculation. From here on the priority of organization [reigns]” (Reference Heidegger1999: 120–121). Stone (Reference Stone2003: 78) explains, in “the mathematicization of the world, as highlighted in the Cartesian method, beings are thought of in terms of an order or enumeration.” Calculation informs the “logos” or logic of modernity. It underpins and gives a “rationale” for policy, economics, industrialisation and ultimately, education. But Heidegger regards this over-emphasis on rationality and calculus, at the expense of all other ways of knowing, as a type of nihilism (Irwin, Reference Irwin2003). Joronen paraphrases the logos of calculation as “the total oblivion of be-ing through the self-expanding drive of technological-instrumental manipulation and ordering of things as constantly present and manipulable reserves” (Reference Joronen2012: 357).
Weber’s famous anecdote about the disenchantment of scientific modernity is itself a disingenuous machination. “By disenchanting beings,” Heidegger writes, rationality, calculus, massiveness and acceleration “makes room for the power of an enchantment that is enacted by the disenchanting itself. Enchantment and lived experience” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger1999: 75).
Educated youth have the expectation that the merit of hard work and intelligence results first in good exam outcomes and later in a good job, house, mortgage, family and prospects. Their lived experience is not often in the fields, but more likely isolated from companionable real life socialisation, and alienated from the environment, on a mobile device. However in late modernity, the prospects of merit and progress are losing their shine. Education as a progressive strategy that makes possible social mobility is central to the justification of universal education. Progress is a core value of the Enlightenment ethos of equality, liberty and fraternity. Progressive liberal modernity is closely tied to economic growth, where everyone, including the working poor can expect to gradually gain more and more benefits from consumerism. Heidegger describes this as the enchantment of modernity (Reference Heidegger1999). This article makes an analysis of the metacrisis and its overarching problematic in scale, abstraction and alienation. With an eye to the housing crisis in particular, this paper focuses on the drivers of economic growth and its close correlation with the growth in carbon emissions as a key component of the metacrisis.
Progress is premised on the alienation of ecological constraints. Free trade assumes that globalisation alleviates seasonal and localised shortages, releasing communities from reliance on the local ecosystem. People will not starve if there is local storms, flooding or drought. They look to the global market to supplement or replace local shortages. Indigenous or peasant communities that are experts in local conditions, and manage their ecosystems, tend to have more eco-savvy types of education. Whereas modern educated expertise in measurement and control that is made possible by STEM subjectsFootnote 2 are a necessary aspect of the global, massive, calculating and accelerating economies of nation states.
The emphasis on rational individual freedom has a lasting powerful belief in the role of individual consumerism in fairness and redistribution (Smith Reference Smith1776/1904). Market choices are presented as politically powerful (Friedman, Reference Friedman1970). The Invisible Hand aggregates all those individual choices and organically generates an even or perfect distribution of market goods. This is why individual consumer decisions were the primary focus for reducing CO2e emissions and improving agricultural farming practices. The lack of impact that one person’s consumer choices really makes, and the role of infrastructure and global systems of supply were obscured by the narrative or rational consumer choice. The anomie and depression that the feeling of political powerlessness generates has become one of the vast underground wellsprings of the metacrisis.
Added to that, the promise of progress and continuous improvement that characterised Post War modernity are rapidly waning. Intensive population pressure, resource exhaustion, house prices and accelerating demand for productivity beyond personal capacity is compounding the polycrisis. They demonstrate in non-verbal but very visible ways that the motif of continuous exponential growth is looming to an end (Higgs, Reference Higgs2014, Irwin, Reference Irwin2015, Mitić et al., Reference Mitić, Fedajev, Radulescu and Rehman2022). The machinations of statistical bureaucracy to keep the myth of unassailed growth alive are more obviously flawed.
Progress as a lack of failure
Progress can be understood more accurately, as a lack of recognition of failure. The enchantment of rationality obscures the importance of failure as a moment to pause and reflect on how normative practices are impacting on selves or surroundings (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2018, Irwin, Reference Irwin2019, Irwin & White, Reference Irwin, White and Bradley2022). Failure is information. But the universalism of rational calculation assumes complete information is possible, and obscures the role of anomaly and failure in a totalising concept of truth.
Weber’s (1919/Reference Weber1948) faith in science as a means of disclosure that shows up the universal building blocks turns out to have a narrow focus that belies the complexity of intra-relationship (Barad, Reference Barad2007). Instead, rational deduction and calculus promise to “solve” all problems through deep attention to the most minute and the most gigantic. Nothing is “impossible.” Heidegger notices how “[t]here is in principle no ‘impossible;’ one ‘hates’ this word; everything is humanly possible, if only everything is taken into account in advance, in every aspect, and if the conditions are furnished” (Reference Heidegger1999: 136).
Alienation produces a lack of distress. A failure to notice failure. All the failures; the mine tailings, the invisible carbon emissions, the suicides behind closed doors, the quiet quitting are both visible and invisible. They are in the newspapers and on TV but nobody knows what to do about them, so hold them at arms length and hope they will disappear. Or we hope that technological progress will solve the issues. Stone (Reference Stone2003: 62) explains, “since the age of machination always refuses to accept the impossible, that is, refuses to allow the results to be a mystery, there is no questioning. Self-certainty eliminates distress.
Stiegler (Reference Stiegler2018) registered how failure is the opportunity to reflect and learn. Heidegger (Reference Heidegger1962) had examined the ways technical failure shows up both the value and utility of a tool – the broken chair shows up how easy chair sitting is, and how it has forged the modern body to sit inert for long periods. The broken tool exposes the particular utility and also the values of society. For Stiegler, the polycrisis are the evidence of a broken system itself. CO2e emissions show up the planetary impact of fossil fuel consumption on atmosphere, oceans and ecosystems everywhere. Climate change shows us that the continuous growth, or “progress,” of industrialisation and global consumerism is deeply problematic. The polycrisis points to a metacrisis in modernity.
A failure to fully notice failure is central to the re-enchantment of modernity (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2018, Irwin, Reference Irwin2019). The failure to ask questions, or to recognise the impact of conventional modern lived experience on others (other people, other species) is not innocent. It derives from a compounding of aphasia, the lack of will to act upon necessary decisions, and the machination of information and discourse which actively obscures the reality of large scale consumer impacts.
Enchantment
Enchantment was lost, according to the German sociologist Weber (Reference Weber1948/1919), with the advent of scientific rationality. Weber mourned the loss of mysticism and delight that inhabited the myths and legends of a bygone era. Indigeneity, whether European or elsewhere, were relegated to a historical past, full of superstition and fairytales.
Rationality replaced it with a world that could be completely “knowable” if the rigours of science were shone with enough effort and diligence, at any aspect of reality. This belief in scientific rationality emerges from the Idealist view, that privileges the human rational mind above all empirical or kin relationships (Descartes, Reference Descartes1980/1641). During the Enlightenment, the Idealist version of humanity was crystallised into a set of values, including individualism, freedom, fraternity, equality and progress. These ideas have underpinned modern democracy, progress and the philosophy of economics, along with universal education as key structures of modern civilisation. The technicity of modernity dominates non-reflective lived experience.
After the hierarchical, and often despotic, culture of feudalism, there are many elements of Enlightenment thinking that remain hard fought for, useful, and generative of a considered, cohesive and fair society. But some of these ideas also underpin the colonial expansion of feudal and capitalist economics throughout the planet. Enlightenment ideals are implicated in the multifarious polycrisis that is now overcoming the normative ideas of house, family and white picket fence that characterises the ideals of consumer culture. To understand the metacrisis, we need to strip back to those fundamentals, both in ideology and economic practice, to understand the pressures that are producing so many crises in so many aspects of global modernism.
Weber (Reference Weber1948/1919) mourns the passing of enchantment in the name of rationality, science, progress and individual freedom. But this obscures the role rationality has in “constructivism” and its invention of abstract ideas and categories to build the edifice of modernity (Baudrillard, Reference Baudrillard1994, Kant, Reference Kant1998, Humphreys et al, Reference Humphreys, Blenkinsop and Jickling2022). Rationality suppressed the individual’s inventory of emotions and bodily sensations (Descartes, Reference Descartes1980/1641). This meant that rationality could be considered objective, universal and abstract. Kant took the universal abstraction of modernity much further, as an essential element of individual freedom (Reference Kant1998/1796, Irwin, Reference Irwin2022). This reliance on individual rationality could then permeate the tempo of globalisation as progress and exponential growth. Individual rationality compounds the ideology of economics, democracy and demands for universal education, as the crucial building block of modernism. The focus on the individual gave the illusion that freedom and meritocracy carries the fundamental characteristic that each person is equal, and through the universal provision of education, has equal opportunity to succeed. Thriving was conflated with succeeding. Young people are inducted into the narrative of progress with the promise of secure employment, house, family and white picket fence (Irwin, Reference Irwin2026).
Critical theory in education has long associated pedagogy and curriculum with economic imperatives (Dale, Reference Dale, Halsey, Lauder, Brown and Wells1997, Marshall, Reference Marshall1994, Peters, Reference Peters2001, Snook, Reference Snook1982). Policy initiatives based on STEM subjects for example, tend to emphasise the development of rational skills for students, that contributes to students’ ability to thrive in the workforce, and make considered rational individual utility maximising market decisions. In other words, although few if any critical educationalists have directly associated STEM subjects with the reproduction of modernity, I consider this reductive conception of STEM as the keystone of “schooling” (cf. Ramaley, Reference Ramaley2001). Sciences can easily be conceived in much richer terms than reductive universalism. But it is too often the case that STEM subjects are framed in a way that is reduced to supporting the maturation of modern subjectivity only in terms of creative and industrious workers and skilled consumers. The economic growth model is hardwired into modern assumptions about education.
Rationality for Weber is essentially a disenchantment, which he regards as educational transparency.
There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. (Weber, Reference Weber1948/1919: 138)
But calculation, technology and rational deduction do not merely result in enlightened transparency. Instead, the technicity of calculation shape the way modern people think, narrowing down the range of awareness and funnelling what counts as “truth” to an instrumental relation with the environment. It “schools” people in the reproduction of modernity. Heidegger (Reference Heidegger1999) argues that there is a certain “enchantment” that covers and excuses the “machinations” of modern industrialism. The enchantment of modernity is imbued with rationality, abstraction, a faith in technical, teleological progress.
Technology helps to extend our reach, giving a powerful lens to understand the workings of materials much more closely. But according to Heidegger (Reference Heidegger1977), it does so at the expense of alienation from the physiological engagement with real things. The result is a sort non-reflective lived experience, alienated from eco-social reality. Rational technicity disembodies people from trusting their own sensory experience, their environment, their emotions and their intuition. It absolves the need for introspection, critique or responsibility. The lack of introspection and alienation from ecosystems are exacerbated by mobile devices, doom scrolling and AI. In place of embodied cognition, rational abstractionism reaches for universalism. Logic is assumed to have universal and objective status. Logical deduction is assumed to take place in the same way for each individual, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or culture. The only things that can get in the way of rational objectivity are mental health issues or a lack of education. The enchantment of modernity underpins education, economics and industrialism.
Machination
Heidegger argues in The Question Concerning Technology (Reference Heidegger1977) that the essence of modernity, as opposed to earlier civilisations, is that everything is understood as a resource, waiting in situ, to be called up by the machinery of consumerism. This means that both artificial objects, that are made by people, and the raw “natural” materials are all considered consumer resources. A forest is not an ecosystem, but rather wood waiting to be demanded by the building industry, the river is not a chuckling torrent, but a fresh water source, the motive power for electricity generation, or coolant for an AI “cloud.” Everything is enlisted into the machinery of consumerism, whether it is “made” or “natural.” Whether it is a cultural artefact or self-arising.
Lies, data manipulation or the machination of fake news all need to be understood as an element of this disclosure of everything as a resource. It is the artifice of figures of power, putting materials at the disposal of the machinery of production and distribution. And more fundamentally, and perhaps more innocently, it is the crux of the way everything comes to light in modernity. In one of his texts on Nietzsche, “Eternal Recurrence and Will to Power,” Heidegger makes the case for an epistemological shift from pre-modern to modern enframing of thought. Truth becomes “the securing of beings in their perfectly accessible disposability . . . The prepotence of being in this essential configuration is called machination” (NII 14/N3 174-175 in Stone, Reference Stone2003:49).
In §57 of Die Geschichte des Seyns, Heidegger explains the correlation between power and machination: “Power” is essentially only to be inquired into metaphysically . . . then power reveals itself as the essential swaying of machination, which is the hidden essence of “reality” (Wirksamkeit) in (Stone, Reference Stone2003:48).
On one hand, rationality should not equate to machination. But Heidegger argues that there is a strong connection between power, obscuring the non-rational, and manipulation in modern society. Heidegger asks himself “What does machination mean?” Machenschaft or “machination,” includes elements of intrigue, ploy, manipulating, plotting, scheming, organising. Modern machination enlists everything into representation and objective technicity. “Machination, even in its ordinary sense, contains the connotation of fleeing, subterfuge, and escape.” In short, machination is called “inauthenticity” (Stone, Reference Stone2003: 65). This is to define machination as a “‘deficient mode’ of Beyng” (“McQueen, Reference McQueen2020: 54). But it seems to me that Stone takes too simplistic a view. Machination or manipulation might be used in the service of eco-social relations as well as it is presently used to further alienation. Stone is prone to understanding the process of machination as bad, as though it must be placed on either side of a good/bad dualism.
In its ordinary meaning the word machination is the name for a “bad” type of human activity and plotting for such an activity.
In the context of the being-question, this word does not name a human comportment but a manner of the essential swaying of being. Even the disparaging tone should be kept at a distance. even though machination fosters what is not ownmost to being. And even what is not ownmost to being should never be depreciated, because it is essential to what is ownmost to being. Rather, the name should immediately point to making (πoίησις τέχνη), which we of course recognise as a human comportment. However, this comportment itself is only possible on the basis of an interpretation of beings which brings their makeability to the fore, so much so that beingness is determined precisely as constancy and presence. That something makes itself by itself and is thus also makeable for a corresponding procedure says that the self-making by itself is the interpretation of φύσις that is accomplished by τέχνη and its horizon of orientation, so that what counts now is the preponderance of the makeable and the self-making (d. the relation of ἰδέα to τέχνη). in a word: machination. (Reference Heidegger1999: 88)
Machination is an interpretation of the world which aims to enlist all that exists into objectivity and representation. Put in another way, Heidegger states that machination is how we experience the “abandonment of being” (Seinsverlassenheit)” (McQueen, Reference McQueen2020). It is how we experience the alienation of our relationship with the eco-social sphere. It is the holding apart of the artificial and the natural (as self-arising), while at the same time compounding them under the rubric of disposable resource, awaiting the demands of consumerism.
What does machination mean? Machination and constant presence: poiēsis – technē. Where does machination lead? To lived experience. How does this happen (ens creatum – modern nature and history – technicity)? By disenchanting beings, as it makes room for the power of an enchantment that is enacted by the disenchanting itself. Enchantment and lived experience. The definitive consolidation of the abandonment of Being in the forgottenness of Being. The epoch of the total lack of questioning and of aversion to any setting of goals. Averageness as rank. (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger1999: 75).
Through the lens of the illusion of modernity, economics and policy show up more clearly in their machinations. Its difficult to understand why the disasters of the polycrisis do not create more action. The machinations of economics and data presentation are becoming increasingly distorted. But when machination is understood as essential to the sway of modern consumerism, those distortions make more sense (even if they are still counter-productive). Surely the failure of current day production and distribution is evident in the pollution, the impact on ecosystems, the rabid working conditions of the gig economy, and climate change. Yet, the despair of the failure of modernity keeps becoming subsumed under the distraction of current events. Lived experience is more and more removed from subsistence for the majority of people.
Economic growth is usually positioned as a debate between “left” and “right” politics. Both want economic growth, but the left believe in government regulation and monetary stimulus, whereas the right believe in market deregulation and state austerity. Questioning the belief in economic growth at its root is never part of the question. As Heidegger (Reference Heidegger1999) puts it, in our lived experience, the enchantment of modernity enables machination to obscure the real issues.
Business as usual; BAU
For a long time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given civil society dire warnings that “Business As Usual” or BAU, will produce atmospheric temperatures 6 or 7°C above pre-industrial norms (IPCC Reference Stocker, Qin, Plattner, Tignor, Allen, Boschung, Nauels, Xia, Bex and Midgley2013, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai, Pirani, Connors, Péan, Berger, Caud, Chen, Goldfarb, Gomis, Huang, Leitzell, Lonnoy, Matthews, Maycock, Waterfield, Yelekçi, Yu and Zhou2021). The normative values of BAU were highlighted as an invisible worlding that produces excessive climate emissions. At the same time, while Pachauri was the director of the IPCC, these warnings remained deeply enmeshed in the enchantment of modernity. Reducing emissions paid lip service to scenario models outside of modernity (IPCC Reference Stocker, Qin, Plattner, Tignor, Allen, Boschung, Nauels, Xia, Bex and Midgley2013, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai, Pirani, Connors, Péan, Berger, Caud, Chen, Goldfarb, Gomis, Huang, Leitzell, Lonnoy, Matthews, Maycock, Waterfield, Yelekçi, Yu and Zhou2021 Annex III), and the policy all focused on neoliberal markets to achieve “net zero” by trading carbon offsets’ and “decouple” carbon emissions from economic growth. For 30 years, these market mechanisms have attempted to “decouple” emissions from the progress of economic growth. The fair distribution of the Invisible Hand in neoliberal market theory, meant that irreducible emissions were introduced to the market through offsetting. People can trade carbon capture through things such as forest protection. But decoupling has had only limited success (Mitić et al., Reference Mitić, Fedajev, Radulescu and Rehman2022). The rate of carbon emissions is not tending to net zero (United Nations, 2016). While some countries are making genuine progress in reducing emissions, globally, it continues to accelerate (Global Monitoring Laboratory, 2025, Hansen et al., Reference Hansen, Sato, Simons, Nazarenko, Sangha, von Schuckmann, Loeb, Osman, Jin, Kharecha, Tselioudis, Jeong, Lacis, Ruedy, Russell, Cao and Li2023, IEA, 2022). There is increasing machinations in the allocation of responsibility for emissions from the global north to the global south with no acknowledgement that the consumption occurs in wealthy countries, even if production (and emissions) occur in poorer ones.
“Decoupling” is a machination that obscures the process of global production and distribution and has trimmed a tiny fraction of the monumental increase in consumerism and emissions. Static electricity generation has made enormous progress through the “developed” world, where coal fired energy generation has largely been replaced with renewables such as wind, solar and hydro. But this is the easier part of CO2e reduction. Fossil fuels like petrol are energy dense and portable, and much harder to replace. The carbon intensity embedded in manufactured goods is often hidden through global manufacturing from a nations reporting. But consumerism is much larger in “developed” nations than “under-developed” ones, even if the manufacturing occurs in the latter. Governments with resources have put enormous effort to transition from coal fired electricity production to more renewable energy and this cleaner electricity supply helps companies in those countries use less emissions. Rather than consumer decisions on the marketplace, there is a tighter relationship between infrastructure and greener goods and services.
Data is being massaged in a variety of ways. “Gross” emissions are not often discussed, and instead “offsetting” or “net” emissions are normalised. But these are based on a very dubious strategy that trades forest planting, or vestigial technological carbon capture, for hard to reduce industrial or agricultural CO2e emissions.
In a classic case of economists massaging the message about climate emissions to excuse continuous economic growth, Freire-Gonzalez et al. (Reference Freire-Gonzalez, Rosa and Raymond2024) argue that “World economies’ progress in decoupling from CO2 emissions.” They claim that in 49 countries, emissions are successfully “decoupled” from economic growth, that is, the economy is growing but emissions are not. However a closer look makes these claims in-credible. The econometric kuznet curves find that advanced technologies in richer countries improves “elasticity” of GDP in relation to CO2 emissions (Freire-Gonzalez et al., Reference Freire-Gonzalez, Rosa and Raymond2024). The implication is better technology reduces emissions, resulting in comparison with poorer efficiency and lower technological development in poorer countries.
Results suggest that while the association between GDP per capita and CO2 emissions per capita is weakening over time, it remains positive globally, with only some high-income countries showing a reversed association in recent years. While 49 countries have decoupled emissions from economic growth, 115 have not. Most African, American and Asian countries have not decoupled, whereas most European and Oceanians have.
Oceania is made up of New Zealand, Australia and the small Pacific nations. Island nations have largely subsistence economies and low emissions per capita. New Zealand, as a high tech modern nation, has gone from 22,487 kilotonnes of CO2e in the Paris Accord base year, 1990, to 27,946 kilotonnes in 2024 (NZ Common Reporting Output Tables 2024). Clearly the increase in NZ emissions means no decoupling has occurred. When in power, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison massaged the numbers by making the 1990 baseline higher, so that there was more room to pollute later. The Guardian reported –
Australia’s official greenhouse gas records have been adjusted such that emissions are now significantly higher than previously believed for the years when Labour was in power, and no longer rise each year since the Coalition repealed the carbon price. (Morton, Reference Morton2019)
These revisions enabled Scott Morrison to claim that “emissions are now lower than when the Coalition was elected” and lower than in “any year when Labor was last in government” (Morton, Reference Morton2019).
During Cop 30 in Brazil at the end of 2025, global emissions have clearly increasing by 1.1% in the last year. New Zealand and Australia are the major emitters in Oceania, and despite the optimism of Freire-Gonzalez et al. (Reference Freire-Gonzalez, Rosa and Raymond2024), have some of the highest emissions per capita in the world. They are clearly not “decoupled” from carbon emissions in any meaningful way. This makes blaming the “third world” for continuing to increase emissions into the atmosphere unjustified and distracts people from requiring more action from highly developed nations. The way data is massaged is really concerning. The IEA and Statistical Bureaus are relying on a discourse that technological innovation will solve climate change. Countries in the “west” they argue, are successfully lowering emissions by “decoupling” economic growth from emissions. Instead of acknowledging the close correlation between economic growth and accelerating emissions, the discourse of decoupling justifies the continued enchantment with economic growth. Ultimately, this is a failure to notice the failure of growing climate change emissions and its close correlation with growth in consumerism. The discourse of modern progress continues to obscure the positive effect that millions of people are having by choosing to consume less. The efforts of millions of people to recycle, reduce and reuse gets swamped by the machinations of continuous economic growth.
Data manipulation in the economic sphere is a ubiquitous problem in the political arena regarding climate emissions. Data has to be carefully and critically analysed for econometric massaging. Freire-Gonzalez et al. (Reference Freire-Gonzalez, Rosa and Raymond2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and other statistical bureaus are creating confusion which is really unhelpful for analysis of how and what is creating greenhouse gases, and thus, what is at the core of the polycrisis. AI does not make the situation any better, as it regurgitates the dominant narrative with an authoritative synopsis of information, making it harder still for a critical lens to discover genuine information that has not been subject to the machinations of modernity. But there is still information that makes it clear that the excuses by economists who believe adamantly in economic growth and western technology as the solution to the polycrisis is not an accurate reflection of how to situate the genuine responsibility for creating the worst of either pollution, extinction or social malaise (Figure 1) (UNFCC, n.d.).
Greenhouse gas global emissions index.
Source: Greenhouse Gas Global Emissions Index (2025).
Despite endless discussion about how to decouple economic growth from emissions, or how to trade carbon sequestering to offset industries that are difficult to reduce, overall net emissions globally are rising. In fact, Hansen et al. (Reference Hansen, Sato, Simons, Nazarenko, Sangha, von Schuckmann, Loeb, Osman, Jin, Kharecha, Tselioudis, Jeong, Lacis, Ruedy, Russell, Cao and Li2023), the ex Director of NASA, argues that emissions are accelerating, and if you look at the Moana Loa emissions graph (below), you can see an exponential curve. The rate of emissions is increasing, and this is unlikely to be pollution from subsistence economies.
The narrative that the IEA, Freire-Gonzalez and green development companies such as Green Leaf (Anderson, Reference Anderson2023) are promoting about third world responsibility for emissions is disingenuous at best, and based on inaccurate machinations of econometric data. According to the OXFAM report on poverty (2025), the richest 0.1% (domiciled in wealthy Western countries) extract USD 30 million an hour from the “third world.” This is not reflected in any way in the narrative that decoupling works. Carbon trading has been demonstrated to contribute almost nothing to lowering “net” emissions. Improved technologies are definitely helpful and necessary. But they are not the full solution to meeting the requirements for zero emissions while economic growth absorbs all efficiency gains and continues to accelerate (Figure 2).
The global policy community do not seem able to contemplate any viable alternatives to classical or neoliberal economics and the nature of BAU has been obscured. For Heidegger, this lack of ability to squarely look at the most obvious failure of the polycrisis is the crux of the metacrisis itself. Lived experience fails to be distressed by the distress of the ecological impact and failure of BAU. The latest IPCC report (Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai, Pirani, Connors, Péan, Berger, Caud, Chen, Goldfarb, Gomis, Huang, Leitzell, Lonnoy, Matthews, Maycock, Waterfield, Yelekçi, Yu and Zhou2021) finally acknowledged that “degrowth” is necessary to avoid BAU. Economic growth is implicated in all the iterations of the polycrisis. But as yet, because the enchantment of modernity involves a commitment to economic growth, its role in the metacrisis has been invisible to critique. Market mechanisms such as technological innovation, decoupling or trading offsets are expected to do the work required to lower “net” emissions. Small positive effects have been massaged and manipulated to look like very big effects. The continuous overall growth in emission are blamed on developing nations, as thought they have not yet encountered solar panels and mobile phones, and somehow their traditional goat herding and cooking fires are the cause of the metacrisis. Economic growth has not been fully recognised as fundamental to the metacrisis. With one or two important exceptions, there has been too little work done on how and why modernity is so structurally committed to economic growth, and thus, what we need to do to emerge from these systemic premises (Meadows et al., Reference Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens1972, Escobar, Reference Escobar1995, Leff, 2009, Martinez-Alier & Schlupmann, Reference Martinez-Alier and Schlupmann1987, Hickel, Reference Hickel2020, Kallis, Reference Kallis2018, Onofrei et al., Reference Onofrei, Vatamanu and Cigu2022, Irwin, Reference Irwin2024).
Observing reality through machination blunts the force of the diverse polycrisis to impact our senses and moral outrage. It obscures who is responsible and how. This failure to feel the full blow of the failure of modernity means self reflection is laggardly, and the social institutions such as the media and education find it hard to disclose the facts beneath the machinations of modernity. The metacrisis is part of the enchantment of modernity (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger1999: 75). If everything is understood as a resource (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger1977), then critique of resource consumption is invalidated as outside the realm of lived experience. A change in direction requires genuine critical analysis of the planetary limits of resource extraction and pollution (Higgs, Reference Higgs2014, Hickel, Reference Hickel2020). But the reflective apprehension of what is taking place is hard to fathom in the plethora of misused data and discursive devices aiming more at dissimulation than clarity.
Given that economic growth is closely correlated with increasing – and accelerating – climate emissions, it is vital to understand the systemic commitment to growth in modern capitalism, and the catalyst that stimulates the economic growth cycle. For a long time, critics of globalisation and the polycrisis have looked to industrial fossil technology as the transitional moment that triggered modernity from sustainable “craft work” to extractive, mass produced global consumerism.
Heidegger analyses four stages of the machination in Contributions to Philosophy (Reference Heidegger1999): “the echo of the essential sway of Beyng, the abandonment of Beyng, the distress of the lack of distress, and the forgetting of Beyng” (Stone, Reference Stone2003: 53). Heidegger characterises the metacrisis as deriving from the alienation at the core of modern epistemology; metaphysics universalises truth and rationality, and covers over older authentic modes of knowing. As Stone neatly explains, “The age of metaphysics, is the result of the abandonment of Beyng, and machination is the echo of that abandonment” (Stone, Reference Stone2003: 54).
When we consider the implications of the enchantment of modernity and the abandonment of Being, it is important to realise that the majority of greenhouse gas emissions are cumulative because the half life is centuries long. Increasing the rate of emissions is cumulatively impacting the greenhouse effect. All nations continue to generate CO2e. Subsistence economies contribute the least. Developed nations contribute a significant amount, and middle Eastern oil nations, the most. Technological development and infrastructure along with culture change can solve climate change. But only when the model of overall economic growth is disestablished. This is not about decoupling consumer growth from emissions. Its about shifting away from the status and exponential tempo of mass consumerism altogether. That requires understanding what drives exponential economic growth.
Modern worlding, technology and resource
Heidegger (Reference Heidegger1977) argues that the shift from feudalism to modernity is technological. Modern technology has shifted our world view from the interconnected pastoralism of small sustainable villages, to urbanised, industrialised, and alienated consumerism, where everything is regarded as a “resource.” The intrinsic nature of the mountain, the river, the forest, the desert, the ocean – are all reduced to potential “resources” for later extraction at the demands of consumerism. Older, more intrinsic ways of knowing about ecological places are eroded and not observed. These important ideas illuminate the way technology has been positioned as part of the dualism that opposes culture from nature, and the subject from the object (Merchant, Reference Merchant1980). This alienation is a critical component of extractive economics, and the rationality associated with modern individualism is used to invalidate fuller, more intraconnected awareness of ecological and social relationships (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2013). Ideas about overcoming alienation from nature are more fully articulated by many of the other articles in this special edition on the metacrisis. Resource consumerism is accelerating exponentially, and it is already massive! (Higgs, Reference Higgs2014, Reference Higgs, Williams and Taylor2023).
The focus on technology is understandable. Technology provides obvious evidence of how developed modernity is, and it is closely tied to the narrative about economic progress, and economic growth (Keynes, Reference Keynes1933). Technological innovation is supposed to be stimulated by the perfect market. If producers simply keep producing the same commodities, then competition will reduce the price point until it is no longer profitable. This is supposed to benefit consumers and the distribution of goods and services. But it is not much good for making a profit, providing good wages, and keeping up with innovations elsewhere (so progressive innovation is required). Technological innovation is tasked with reducing the costs of production, finding alternative raw resources when the original is depleted, or generating new and appealing products for sale. Technology and innovation is at the centre of discussion and assumptions about modern progress. It is the reason that students are educated to high mathematical and scientific standards – so they can participate in the application of scientific creativity in this inventive and progressive enterprise. Technological innovation is the cornerstone of modernity, and makes modernity stand out above all prior civilisations.
When issues from the polycrisis make headlines, technology is assumed to solve the problems. And in some cases, this has happened. Better sustainable energy technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines and hydro-dams are certainly capable of producing electricity without creating so much carbon emissions as coal fired power stations. But despite these very promising technological innovations, the overall reduction in emissions has not occurred. There have been short term reductions in particular countries. But all nations are tied to global production, and rapidly, within the space of 12 to 24 months, emissions climb back and then exceed earlier levels. This is called Jevon’s paradox (Jevons, Reference Jevons1865, Hickel, Reference Hickel2020, Irwin, Reference Irwin2024). Jevons (Reference Jevons1865) argues that long term, in an energy rich context, all technological innovations result in expanding the economy rather than reducing resource consumption.
It is vital to understand why growth is so ineradicable. After years of focus on technology, I went back to economic first principles, and failed to find much more than technological innovation (Irwin, Reference Irwin2024). Hidden in plain sight, the stimulus from the finance industry has been almost entirely absent from economic theory, and has not methodically shown up in critical evaluations. The banking industry has enchanted the public into believing they are merely an intermediary between savers and borrowers, and thus a simple institution that needs no close attention. In the discussion that follows, I want to show how economic growth is stimulated by ex nihilo credit, in an escalating feedback system. The reliance on ex nihilo credit allows the alienation of ecosystems from the economy to continue. It finances inflationary pressure, that costs ordinary people the value of their labour, and at the same time produces immense profit for multinationals. Those huge profits can be siphoned off for new innovations such as AI, that consolidate power and resources with a very small elite. Ex nihilo finance, I argue, is the crux of the metacrisis. To metamorphose the modern system beyond the metacrisis, we need to first understand the role of banking in keeping nation states locked into the economic growth cycle. With greater understanding percolating through the global population, alternative modes of creating money, credit and the rules of economic circulation can emerge to replace ex nihilo credit and its commensurate economic growth and emissions profile.
The drivers of economic growth are obscured within the enchantment of modernity. They are wrapped together with the alienation and rational abstraction of humanity from ecology. Further questions remain about the relationship between the world view of everything as a resource, waiting to be consumed, and the motives of consumerism itself. How and why the inflated and alienated capacity for extra consumerism drives the metacrisis, rather than technology per se.
Finance and economic growth
The continuous increase in house prices over the last 70 years have outstripped increase in the average wage. From a price equivalent of 3.5 times the average wage, average house prices in New Zealand went to 10 times the average wage during COVID and have now reduced to 8 the average wage. Young people end up needing to borrow such immense sums that just servicing the interest of the mortgage costs about 50,000 a year. Twice what they would pay in rent. This makes the tradition of home ownership unaffordable for most youth, and that in turn, erodes the pressure of first home buyers on housing stock. The upward trend of house prices prevailed as a long term truism since WWII, but the fundamentals for that trend to continue are starting to evaporate.
At the same time, the impossibility of the progressive dream of home, family and job security means increasingly young women are opting not to have children. In South Korea, the pressures of over-population, sexism and the gig economy has transformed the approach of women to childbearing. The birthrate has dropped from a peak of around 6 children per woman to 0.72 children per woman in 2023. This is ageing the local population and will eventually shrink the overall demographic, lowering consumer demand for schools, sport, clothing, housing and so on. The population has been stable at over 51 million for a decade or so because the death rate is also lagging, with a life expectancy of 84 years. But as the lag in death rates fades (as the extended life expectancy becomes normal across all year groups) the impact of lower than replacement birthrates (2.1 per woman) will create a net reduction in population. Even the UN population bureau is now admitting that it is much more likely that populations will halve in most countries by about 2100 (UN 2024, Irwin, Reference Irwin2015, Vollset et al., Reference Vollset, Goren, Yuan, Cao, Smith, Hsiao, Bisignano, Azhar, Castro, Chalek, Dolgert, Frank, Fukutaki, Hay, Lozano, Mokdad, Nandakumar, Pierce, Pletcher and Murray2020). China, for example is now 1,419 million, estimated to shrink to 633 million by 2100. India remains stable, still growing right now from 1,451 million but peaking and beginning the shrinking trajectory with 1,505 million in 2100. Obviously, vast decreases in population will have a profound impact on consumerism and profit. The demand for housing will decrease and prices that have been continuously buoyant for over three generations will deflate (Irwin, Reference Irwin2015).
Finance is usually left out of narratives about economics. Money is assumed to be a commodity, like any other – which is stimulated or contracted through market forces, or the Invisible Hand (Smith Reference Smith1776/1904). Money is bought and sold through international exchange services, creating a “balance” that attributes value to a particular currency. However, this is complicated by the Reserve or Central banks leveraging some control over the value of a nations’ currency. They do this through the OCR (overnight cash rate) or Libor (depending on the country).
History demonstrates that excessive currency creation will create runaway inflation, and devalue a currency until it is almost meaningless. The value of the Deutschmark in the 1930s is a good case in point; where inflation ran so high that people took a wheelbarrow of banknotes for a loaf of bread. Physical cash is still minted by the State but since WWII, the bulk of credit creation resides with private banking. The rate of credit creation is leveraged by Central or Reserve bank interest rates.
Few people understand the mechanics of banking. The narrative of banking is that savers put money in deposit accounts, and the bank acts as an intermediary – using the deposits to loan out to borrowers. But this is not at all how banks operate. The connection between savings and deposits and loans are almost non-existent.
The enchantment of modernity obscures the way finance works, because it is so flagrantly outrageous. Somehow, over the years, private banks have assumed the power to create money out of nothing (Minsky, Reference Minsky, Arestis, Sawyer and Elgar1992, Reserve Bank of Australia, 1996). Banks do this by legitimating the borrower, when they walk through the door. The youth, employment status, quite probably gender and class, or prospects of the borrower, is what legitimates the bank loan. The borrower legitimates the bank creating credit “ex nihilo”; out of nothing. The bank writes a new line of credit into the electronic ledger of the borrowers account. A one million dollar debt in one account has a double entry, million dollar credit, in the seller’s account. Both lines are brand new money. The new loan has no relation to the deposit accounts of existing savers. Credit ex nihilo is an entirely separate system.
Banks do not have the right to create cash – that remains a sovereign imperative. But electronic credit creation is endogenous to the banking fraternity – the borrower’s bank credits the seller’s bank. At this point, the money is “nominal.” It does not yet have the actual value attribution of real transactions in the broad economy. The seller’s bank can go on to leverage the new credit on their ledgers with further borrowing requests on less stable minor assets, such as a car, boat, holidays or more usefully, business. The system is often called “endogenous” banking because large scale loans circulate primarily from bank to bank, only slowly leaking out to absorb the value embedded in buying and selling real stuff in the exchange of goods and services.
There is little or no analysis of the impact of endogenous banking on economic growth, but I argue that it is profound (2024). During COVID-19 the rate of house sales increased dramatically because people had extra time to peruse and decide on a change in home ownership. This has priced out a whole generation of young people from the house market which will have serious consequences for the growing disparity between classes. It also created a huge increase in systemic endogenous bank credit over that period. Its extremely hard to find information on this but in New Zealand I estimate the amount of new money created by banks is over 7 billion per year (KPMG, 2024) or 1.5% of NZ’s GDP. Inflation did not immediately rise because supermarkets and other staple goods maintained price stability during the pandemic. However, once pandemic conditions lifted, the effect of several years glut of new nominal money surging through the broad market meant global inflation skyrocketed to over 7%. The economic system is awash with new credit.
In the 1990s the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jim Bolger recommended a national 2-3% target for inflation to guide the Reserve Bank. This target is guiding governments worldwide. It kept economic growth expanding, uplifting new job opportunities by expanding consumerism 2–3% (Keynes, Reference Keynes1933). At the same time, it set an unseen cap on the proliferation of new banking credit ex nihilo. When inflation runs too high, the Reserve or Central Bank will increase the OCR rate and banks are obliged to adjust their interest rates accordingly. When mortgage interest rates go higher, people think twice about buying a new house. The rate of house sales slows down, and this means the amount of ex nihilo credit created by the private banks also reduces. There is less money pouring from the banks into the broad economy, and so price inflation steadies. Inflation rates slowly adjust lower. As inflation reduces, the Reserve Banks lower the OCR and banks reduce their interest rates, stimulating higher numbers of house sales. This is the dance that stimulates the exponential economic growth spiral.
The truth is, banks only adhere to the OCR rate as a “gentleman’s agreement” because they only need to buy cash to service the withdrawal of actual cash from accounts. This has almost nothing to do with endogenous nominal credit, which electronically circulates from one bank to another. Nor even electronic money via credit or debit cards which pay for goods and services. Banks only pay the OCR for actual cash, which remains sovereign money, printed by the Reserve Bank. But as a percentage, this is a tiny fraction of exchange value circulating in the economic system. In the UK approximately 3% of money is in cash. The rest is electronic.
As endogenous nominal credit passes through the banking system, customers take advantage of their big ticket loans and buy minor articles or services, along with the larger items such as a house. Gradually the endogenous, ex nihilo credit percolates out into the wider real economy. The wider economy is fairly stable; not much changes fast. From one week to the next, the population is roughly the same, the housing stock is the same, the number of loaves of bread sold remains the same. So, as large amounts of new credit percolate the system, it is possible for producers to increase their prices. Market theory does not accommodate this at all. According to market theory, any price increase is supposed to derive from passing on increasing costs of raw materials and production costs. The solution to increasing costs is new technology and efficiency gains. Efficiency gains can be new technology that reduces the cost of production, reduces the need for labour, improves the commodity for sale or replaces expensive raw materials with cheaper ones. This technological efficiency gain is crucial to the discourse of market progress and improvement. But I would argue that most extra profit is not gained through better technological innovation, but rather through ample liquidity in the economic system, making it easy for the middle classes to leverage their mortgages and increase the money they are prepared to pay for their consumerism. In other words, endogenous ex nihilo credit creates price inflation, as it exits “nominal” value within the banking system, and enters the wider real market and is attributed proper value. The value attributed to the newly circulating nominal credit is uplifted from the overall exchange value of goods and services. Value is provided by the labour of ordinary workers and their interactions on the market. This is the core of the “trickle down effect.” The extra money does not derive from extra profit from better technological innovation. This is profit as inflation from excess liquidity making its way from nominal money into the real economy. The extra access to money and extra profit for producers does stimulate genuine increase in consumer growth – creating more CO2e and extra jobs.
More jobs mean more youth employment and hopeful young people applying for mortgages. The growth spiral goes through seasons of inflated consumerism and new housing demand followed by high monetary inflation and consequent stress on waged households and constricted demand. This worked while we had large population growth, high house ownership and ignored climate emissions. The postwar generation did not mind inflation as long as the value of their home was also increasing. But the millennials and generations Y and Alpha have little hope of large scale home ownership. They are locked out of the system which rewards asset ownership, but are locked into paying for it through the loss of value of their wages.
We have had the opportunity to transform the banking system every time there has been a financial crisis. But we have never had a goal for transformation. Every financial collapse hitherto has been understood only as a setting to rights of the existing system; not as an opportunity to reform the system towards a postgrowth model. This is the work now in process. Questions need to be asked about what lies beyond this parasitic system?
Conclusion; Adjusting the tempo of education in a cyclic society
A metamorphosis involves dissolving the existing materialism and redeploying the chemical compounds into a new morphology. A societal metamorphosis requires examining reality, peeling back the enchantment and machinations, and consider the systemic ideals of the modern metacrisis and its fallout. The education system is the perfect institution for this level of critical acumen and honesty – if it can absolve the enchantment that is governed by politics and funding. There are plentiful “traces” of freedom that reside within and before the modern system.
In an immediate fashion, we all need to thrive within the existing system and to some extent, this means utilising the system as it stands. We all collude with the existing system, and at the same time, we can all emerge and transform it. Education is always thrown towards the future – our students are in preparation, and education is necessarily open ended and flexible for emergent unknowns. The bravest amongst us help to look clearly through the existing enchantment and bring to light what is failing. Recognising failure is a crucial educational moment, which allows us to learn and change (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2018).
At the very least the education system is responsible to protect – not scapegoat – educators that unburden students of the enchantment of modernity. These teachers are the midwives of a new transformation. A metamorphosis that will embrace nature and culture in intraconnection. The extractive economy may not grind totally to a halt. But a more responsive and responsible approach to global productivity is possible. Without the pump priming of ex nihilo credit, the whole system can calm down, the extremes of poverty and wealth will dissipate, and emissions will genuinely respond to the technological innovations that are flourishing everywhere. Ethical reduction in consumerism will finally begin to have an impact, as the economy no longer demands rapid acceleration to accommodate and absorb inflation. Other changes will need to take place too, including the abandonment of expectations that companies on the share market must necessarily grow every quarter. The accelerating busyness of late modern society will be able to slow its pace, to ease towards seasonal awareness and genuine sustainable resource extraction as the slowdown in population resonates with the stability of credit derived from within the existing circulation of money. The exponential acceleration of late capitalism can ease off, and the cyclic planetary patterns can again govern the rhythm, tempo and redistribution of communal life.
The narratives that inform the education system will also necessarily change. Onto-epistemology that is not alienated from place is much richer than strictly reductive rationality. Embodied, emotional and intuitive comprehension of how embedded humanity is in the environment utilises a plethora of relational and perceptive acumen (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2013, Ngata 1944/Reference Ngata2011, Mika, Reference Mika2014, Stein, Yunkaporta, Reference Yunkaporta2019). Indigenous cultures do not abide by a harsh dualism that delineates technological culture from pure nature. Instead, ecology is technology, and humanity is an integral part of the complex kin relationships in the ecological system (Ngata 1944/Reference Ngata2011, Mika, Reference Mika2014, Irwin, Reference Irwin, Jickling, Blenkisop and Morse2021). This shift towards intra-relationship (Barad, Reference Barad2007) can inform education as it helps to transition humanity from its modern extractive colonial global roots, towards a more equitable, peaceful and relaxed postgrowth planetary society. Instead of schooling students into the enchantment of progress and individual rationality, we might educate them on empathetic relational and embodied knowledge systems that are highly aware of the impacts and rights (for wont of a better word) of the larger ecosystem. Recognising the needs of other animals, fish, reptiles, insects, waterways, ocean, rocks, strata, and atmosphere lends itself to an embedded understanding of technological humanity (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2013, Irwin, Reference Irwin2022). Instead of linear progress, we might have larger and smaller seasons, thermodynamic entropy and quantum entanglement to inform the conceptual basis of a society aware of planetary limits (Irwin, Reference Irwin2024).
The metacrisis is stimulated by an enchantment that hides the basis of ecological alienation by prioritising individualism, rationality and progress clothed in neoliberal market rhetoric. The result of the machination of modernity is the continued ability of finance institutions to make money out of nothing. This extraordinary process is hidden away under a discourse that banks are mere intermediaries, and money is merely a commodity on the market, like any other. But the creation of billions in nominal credit, ex nihilo is the driver, I argue, for the “acceleration, calculation and massiveness” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger1999) that stimulates continuous exponential economic growth. With it, of course, is continuous exponential growth in climate emissions.
For Heidegger the metacrisis is describing the worlding of modernity as the abandonment of Being. This emerged with the dualism that separated the natural from the artificial. But ironically, the schism between the “self-arising” or natural, and the cultural or artificial, has broken down because everything is now understood as a resource, waiting to be demanded by consumerism (Reference Heidegger1977). The oblivion of Being, as Heidegger puts it, involves machination, not merely as bad players striving to obscure the impacts of modern consumerism (Reference Heidegger1999). But as a fundamental element of the creative interplay between poiesis and techne, or emergent events and technology. The freedom of humanity to act is within that interplay. Young women around the world are deciding to restrain from having children, and this, coupled with resource exhaustion, pollution and multiple other aspects of the polycrisis are showing up as a major obstacle for the ongoing unfurling of modern economic growth. Major political figures are distracting us from honest invigilation of the metacrisis in these big shifts in the pressures of globalisation. But instead of becoming scared about the collapse of modernity, it is possible to resurrect traces from ancient societies, to see linear time and economic growth as a failure and aberration, and embrace a return to cyclic time, where consumerism calms down, and the pace of planetary regeneration genuinely guides the ethos and intraconnection of humanity with the rest of the ecosystem.
Acknowledgements
I would like to give thanks to the Waitakere mountains and the West coast, especially Karekare, Piha and Te Henga where I have found the nourishment necessary for long engagement with the metacrisis, and the full awareness of just what is at stake.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Ethical statement
Nothing to note.
Author Biography
Ruth Irwin is an Adjunct Professor in Education at RMIT University. She was Professor of Education at the University of Aberdeen and the University of Fjij, and worked in Philosophy, and Ethics at the University of Auckland and AUT university. Her books include Economic Futures; Climate Change and Modernity (2024), Beyond the Free Market (2014), Climate Change and Philosophy (2010) and Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change (2008).
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