When I was in High School there was a popular educational TV science show called ‘Why Is It So?” that was hosted by Professor Julius Sumner Miller
(here is a clip from the show).

I remember in one episode he asked his panel of smartypants students why it was NOT possible to have a universal solvent.
After various creative answers from the group he proclaimed: “Because you could never find a container to keep it in!”

I remember thinking at the time…No, the real reason is that a universal solvent would dissolve itself!”
Feeling downright smug for outsmarting the professor, I felt my future as a particle physicist or an industrial chemist was assured.

How wrong I was.

You live in a deranged age – more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

The world is unhinged right now.
Our Western, modernist, capitalist, growth obsessed, egocentric society is proving itself to have a chemistry not unlike that of a universal solvent.

Over the ages it has broken down and dissolved so many other societies and cultures and worldviews.
We thought it was progress….but it turns out it was just chemistry.

Up until now it seemed nothing could contain it.
And now this universal solvent is dissolving itself.
For that is its nature.

Our chemistry.

• It took humans 250,000 years to number 1 Billion (sometime in the 1800’s)
• It took humans only another 200 years to number 8 Billion.
• Capitalism is organised around the imperative of constant expansion and growth. This is measured as GDP.
• Over the last 40 years 28% of the worlds GDP has moved to the richest 1%.
• GDP must grow 2-3% every year in order to maintain aggregate profits. The global economy needs to double every 23 years. Ad infinitum.
• Our planet can no longer generate the resources required to fuel this exponential growth.
• Nor can it buffer the human generated changes to its chemistry.