Grow -- Or Die; Get Busy Livin' or Get Busy Dyin'

Grow or Die as Applied to a National Economy

Under current leadership, Europe and America are busy dyin'. Dynamic innovative attitudes and thinking have given way to a stagnant, steady state, dieoff.orgy bureaucratic liquidation of western civilisation. We are being crowded by our overlords into a tight, descending chute, forced down into an abattoir of stasis where civilisations go to die.

Grow or Die Applies to the Living and Business Worlds Also
"Grow or die," is a natural imperative. " ...all living systems are either growing or dying, there is no sustainable stasis...There is accretive, replicative and transformational growth." (Source) We can choose how we are to grow, but we cannot choose not to grow. Not if we want our civilisations and our bloodlines to survive.

Respected science fiction author Neal Stephenson laments the loss of innovativeness in modern American society:

This summer, at the age of 51—not even old—I watched on a flatscreen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars? Until recently, though, I have kept my feelings to myself. Space exploration has always had its detractors. _WorldPolicy

An Unusual Situation from The Farsight Group on Vimeo.

Matt Ridley laments the fact that even today's innovative optimists appear to be contaminated with an overlay of "culture noir," a subconscious acceptance of too much of the modern gospel of stasis. Small wonder that our shrinking number of modern innovators sometimes appear schizoid about progress, when they are so beseiged by the culture of defeat that surrounds them in academia and society.

Obama did not set American culture down this greased rail of pessimism and malaise, but he has accelerated the rate of despair and futility. In Obama's America, there is very little reason to push for growth, when the bureaucratic culture of stasis is standing by to penalise any such efforts. Electing such a person once can be written off to frustrated desperation. Re-electing such a person is a certain sign of the impending death of the society as a going concern.

We are living on a finite Earth, which is floating in an infinite universe. The Earth is our cradle, the universe is our rightful home. Until humans shake off the infantile desire to remain in a comfortable sustainable cradle until it becomes a sustainable grave, stasis will have the upper hand.

But that mainly applies to the part of human civilisation that remains under the guidance of the mainstream, bureaucratic governments of steady state stasis. For those who choose to step outside the mainstream and make their own plans for the future, more positive choices can be made.