to convince an individual to do what you ask of them, one needs to offer a delayed reward, with value based on their performance in a given task. to convince a society, one just needs to offer an universal truth.
before the advent of capitalism, one such universal truth was a deity of the society's choice. the society would converge on one deity, and anyone not in favor would be shunned. individuals who refused to be assimilated into the collective schizophrenia, would be throw away and would have no option to spread their views.
thankfully, the internet and the guarantee of free speech coming from western human rights, allow us to stand up to the current era universal “truth” and speak out against it. what is proposed here will be seen as insane, since it goes against the delusions of the masses, but at least will be seen by enough with some hopefully being able to act on this.
what i'm speaking against is the capitalist cult of infinite growth. societes all over the world, no matter whether democratic, capitalist, authoritarian, communist, fascist. no matter whey they are located, no matter what deities they believe in or what values they hold. the cult of infinite growth has been ingrained into the values of all the communities.
capitalism plays on our natural desire to hoard, since in the past hoarding resources would guarantee the highest survival rate. capitalism is the monstrosity that comes from allowing our dopamine to control our life choices and in turn creating a higher and higher threshold for being satisfied.
capitalism gave rise to something that is somehow accepted as an universal truth, that the markets will always grow, that the indexes will always go up. worse of all, we've accepted that the housing prices will go up, as messed up that is, considering housing is actually necessary to survival.
there is an expectation of the stock markets to keep going up. inflation forces people to invest their savings on the stock markets, companies are forced to maintain year over year profit growth. this leads to an infinite loop of anti-social profit margin increasing behaviors from individuals acting as the corporation. the markets that were supposed to serve the people end up fucking over people just to generate profit for the same people that are forced to gamble their savings by profit-seeking corrupt monetary policy. this leads to existence of socially useless greedy institutions, such as high frequency traders or hedge funds.
we've enslaved ourselves with our faith in this incredibly corrupt system and anyone who dares to speak against the cult of infinite growth will be punished by the cultists and considered insane.
organized religion and the cult of infinite growth both managed to convince people of its usefulness.