Industrial civilization doesn’t merely have cancer. It is cancer—self-replicating, ingenious, pathologically committed to its own propagation. Banks demand endless interest, democracies are hooked on GDP, and business sells us stories of infinite growth, even as the planetary body shows every sign of terminal disease.

Most of us know the prognosis. Boundaries are breached. Biodiversity is collapsing. The climate is destabilizing. Yet denial runs deep. We prescribe “green growth,” “ESG,” or “sustainable innovation”—aspirin for stage-four capitalism.

But cancer cannot be bargained with. Chemotherapy is not a gentle negotiation. It is a deliberate poisoning—a gamble with everything for a chance at survival.

STEP ONE: Disrupt the metabolic engine. Halt the endless churn. Ban advertising—the growth hormone of consumption. Outlaw planned obsolescence—the immortality serum for products. Shut down financial speculation—the metastatic spread of fictitious capital. Imagine the howls, the legal warfare, the op-eds warning of ruin.

STEP TWO: Accept collateral damage. Post-growth demands dismantling “good” institutions that have become complicit: universities optimizing for rankings and Ted Talks over wisdom, healthcare maximizing intervention over health, democracies bribing voters with their grandchildren’s future.

STEP THREE: Embrace metamorphosis. Just as patients’ lives must be reorganized, societal transformation requires entire professions to face radical reinvention. No more armies of growth-optimizing consultants, marketing gurus, or financial engineers; retrain for ecological restoration, or disappear.

STEP FOUR: Submit to discipline. Cancer patients live under relentless vigilance—measuring, restricting, enduring. Ecological survival will demand strict carbon accounting, resource auditing, consumption restraint. Therapy networks reconfigure around care, not productivity. So must post-growth societies—shifting from individual consumer choice to collective responsibility: work reduction, circularity, and repair.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

Here’s the hard truth: Unlike the cancer patient, society cannot “return to health.” There is no planetary baseline to restore, no roadmap for ten billion humans living within a finite Earth. Civilization itself is the experiment, and the treatment may be as dangerous as the disease.

So, of course, we will resist. We will shoot the messenger. We will build rockets to Mars. We will write clever academic essays to prove that doomsday predictions cannot work.

But the pain is non-negotiable. Neither is our responsibility. We are patient and pathogen, surgeon and tumor.

The drip is ready. The only question—as always—is whether we choose to act before time runs out.

#Leadership #Transformation #ClimateCrisis #StageFourCapitalism #SocietalChemotherapy