The sustainability agenda is failing. Not for lack of data—we have mountains. Not for lack of solutions—economists have designed them. It fails because it asks people to accept limits while offering nothing in return but a promise to avoid disaster. This is a losing proposition, and everybody knows it.

Here is what progressive economics misses: our increasing modern anxiety has structure. Anxiety equals “hope plus fear”. We hope because we cannot help it—our careers must matter, our relationships must count, the planet must survive. Yet these hopes attach to systems that produce fear. The more we invest emotionally in work, community, or climate, the more vulnerable we become. This isn't neurosis; it's the cost of caring deeply about things we cannot control.

Modern prescriptions compound the problem. We're told to care more while restricting the very mechanisms we use to manage anxiety: consumption, accumulation, growth. To those whose life and worth are measured by achievement, these limits feel arbitrary, punitive. They resist, and they're right to resist.

Medieval monks accepted material poverty without therapy. Why? The difference is ontological. Their worth was secured in participation with divine order, independent of worldly outcomes. Modern subjects lack such depth; all value is contingent, anxiety endogenous.

Plato knew this. When asked why one should be just if injustice pays better, he rejected the premise: worth is architectural, not additive. In The Republic, the soul mirrors the state, participating in an ultimate good. Human flourishing is harmonized, not accumulated. Life cannot be counted like money. Smith was wrong: self-interest doesn't aggregate into collective prosperity. Markets distribute goods but cannot generate the participatory worth that makes goods meaningful.

Our crisis demands recovering what secular modernity eliminated: transcendent grounding. Not religious nostalgia but recognition that worth measured through accumulation produces unsolvable problems. Climate collapse, nationalist backlash, mental health epidemics are symptoms of existential precarity.

Theological hope is not optimism. It is certainty. It transforms fear not by eliminating threats but by securing worth at a level threats cannot touch. Without it, every limit is deprivation, every constraint a cross to bear. With it, limits become right relationship—there is no cross.

We cannot mandate metaphysical transformation. But we can stop pretending institutional fixes can remediate a moral lack. The caring economy intensifies anxiety, deepening investment in fragile goods. Doughnut boundaries punish those already experiencing life as precarious. Until we address ontological structure, technical solutions will fail because they ignore the wound.

To save civilization, we must save hope. This is neither luxury nor idealism—it is material necessity. The joy of our lives and the future we create depend on it.

#leadership #Hope #Sustainability #Ontology #MoralEconomy #Transcendence

(Sunday reflections on the RAISING HOPE Conference 2025, celebrating the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si)