“The ‘economy’ became a god such as never before, and a happy, successful society was one that could please this god – sometimes by sacrificing beautiful things, to keep the deity from getting angry and harming people by withdrawing favours. And, of course, our political leaders are the priests who mediate with this god and make holy wars in his name.

“It is an increasingly devout culture. Each day must now begin with the ritual calling to people of the FTSE, the Nasdaq, the Dow Jones, the Hang Seng, the All Ordinaries, and so and so on – all the high and sacred indices must be sung to the world as surely as the Muslim muezzin would sing out the call to prayer from the minaret at dawn.”

(Leunig, M. 2009. More Greed and More Loneliness. The Age, May 23^rd. For full article see Section 1.1.3 ‘Articles’)

“In the second decade of the 2000s, economic growth remains the guiding principle for human endeavour…more than ever the prize, the goal, the indispensable foundation.”

(Higgs, K. 2014. Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet. MIT Press, Cambridge, USA. For full article see Section 1.3.4 ‘Books’)

“It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress, as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of it being improved.”

(Mill, J.S. 1848. The Principles of Political Economy. JW Parker, London, UK. See also ‘Books’ 1.3.2)

“About the Department: the Department is tasked with ensuring that Victoria has the right conditions to enable economic growth…”.

(Department Environment, Land, Water and Planning [Victoria, Australia] website, May 2017; my underlining)

In a supposedly secular age there has arisen a global religion and god like never before, a religion whose reach and power makes every other belief system before it seem pitiful and insignificant: the religion of capitalism and its god of growth. I am completely serious when I say this and agree entirely with Leunig when he identifies this modern form of worship as a type of cargo cult. Capitalism and Growth have all the characteristics of a world religion, despite their protestations of being no more than mere processes, a technical exchange mechanism without beliefs, morals, rituals and ‘priests’.

A good definition of religion can be found in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2019: “Religion is a social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements”. Putting this into list form, we can see it is all there:

• worldview: growth is good; the economy is all; consumption = happiness/purpose/meaning;
• designated behaviours and practices: shopping; consumption; procreation; advertising; trade ‘agreements’;
• morals: good = spending, profit, selfishness, greed; bad = thrift, modesty, selflessness, restraint, others, future;
• texts: neo-classical economics ‘bibles’, such as Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ and Friedman’s ‘Capitalism and Freedom’, as well as a raft of Treasury and other documents measuring growth, or lack thereof, such as GDP, Quarterly Accounts, Population Growth rates, consumer spending, etc…etc…;
• sanctified places: shopping centres, stock exchanges and trade centres;
• prophecies: obeisance will bring endless growth and rapture; heresy (low growth/no growth) will bring the wrath of the gods and misery and doom;
• organisations: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Forum, business councils, chambers of commerce, Treasury and associated departments (my neighbouring state – Tasmania – now has a Department of State Growth!), etc…etc…;
• sacrifices (my addition): quality of life, autonomy, social justice, environment, the future, the old;
• supernatural/spiritual elements: the ‘invisible hand’; TINA (there is no alternative), technology, the market, infinite growth and substitution.

The High Priests of the new world religion, dressed in their clerical robes of sombre suit and cropped hair, deny this latter supernatural element, but it is core to their power and they know it. Their nightly prognostications on what must be done for growth, what must be sacrificed, are so deeply entrenched in modern media and politics that they are hardly ever challenged, and the key to this is to present growth and capitalism as ‘natural’ states, natural laws, like physics, or gravity, that only a child would rail against. The fact that they are nothing of the sort – they are entirely man-made – doesn’t seem to occur to commentators or public alike, and these ‘laws’ are left, ‘out there’, numinously, operating like the gods of ancient Greece to reward or punish the saints or sinners of growth on earth.

The complete disingenuousness of commodifying and colonising everything on earth, while at the same time pretending to be doing nothing of the sort, of being a benign technical process for the good of humankind, seems to have worked, seems to have the modern human mind in a sort of vice whereby we can’t think ourselves out of this contradiction and deception; so much so that this modern-day god, religion, and its consequences, are rarely named, let alone explained. This zombie-like idolatory was brought home most starkly to me in the 1990s when my state – Victoria – elected a strident right-wing government, which promptly changed the car number-plate slogan to (yes, embarrassingly, we have these facile things, too; as if a state is some sort of breakfast cereal or kitchen appliance): ‘Victoria – On the Move’. On the move to where? You might ask, or even, why?, but no, the essential rightness and ‘logic’ of this call to mindless agitation – and surrogate growth – seemed to require no explanation or elaboration and was blandly accepted by all. Global religion indeed.

Just occasionally, this automatic acceptance of the Growth God is disturbed – perhaps even challenged or questioned, however minutely – such as when the Global Financial Crisis upset the delivery of ‘ever more’. At such times there is a mountain of resources that can be brought to bear on the insurrection to snuff it out. Perhaps the most powerful of these is advertising and one of my favourites is the following from fossil fuel company Chevron. It was a full-page (broadsheet page) ad in my state newspaper in 2008 and it says it all: growth is progress/progress is growth; growth/progress is infinite; technology is infinite; humans are gods, or at least god-like; more humans = more ‘gods’; energy growth and progress is inexhaustible and for the benefit of the Third World. Triumphant, glorious, optimistic faith – who could not believe? Who would not want to believe?

¹ Note: Australia introduced a Baby Bonus in 2004 to encourage people to “have one baby for your husband and one for your wife and one for the country”. It started at $3,000 and rose by $1,000/yr. The identified ‘problem’ was that Australia’s population was not growing fast enough, even though it was growing at 1.3%/year (www.macrotrends.net/countries/AUS), above the world rate of 1.25%/yr (www.worldometers.info), and would result in a doubling of the Australian population in approx. 50 years! (For more detailed analysis of the population component of growth, see Section 5).