Jeremy Lent  ​Author and Integrator

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  • The Web of Meaning
    • Advance Praise
    • Explore Web of Meaning >
      • Introduction
      • Who Am I?
      • Where Am I?
      • What Am I?
      • How Should I Live?
      • Why Am I?
      • Where Are We Going?
    • Book Club Guide
  • The Patterning Instinct
    • Themes
    • Explore Themes >
      • Culture, Values, and History
      • Human Nature
      • Science and Religion
      • Power and Exploitation
      • Consumer Society
      • The Future
      • Sustainable Flourishing
    • Table of Contents
    • Praise for The Patterning Instinct
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    • Readers' Responses
    • Book Clubs
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    • Interviews >
      • Interviews | 2018
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Consumer society is consuming the earth

What are its root causes?


Explore more in
​Consumer Society

Book excerpts

"That forever empty"

The historical foundations of our consumer culture

The arrival of the Anthropocene

GDP and the hedonic treadmill

Video

Liology and Climate Disruption

Blog posts

"That forever empty": Louis CK and the modern malaise

You Get What You Measure: Forty years of decline in genuine progress

Mind Control: It’s Happening To You Right Now

A Price on Carbon: It Will Work Because It Doesn’t Change Everything

COP21 – Is the jubilation warranted?

Recommended
​ Reading

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The Patterning Instinct

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Are We In a Sorcerer's 
Apprentice Dilemma?
 


The Western capitalist model has enveloped the globe, catalyzing a dramatic increase in the consumption of natural resources, with its implicit promise that the future offers greater prosperity and happiness for all.

​In recent decades, this rampant consumption has begun to take a drastic toll, raising such specters as a massive extinction of species, a global freshwater crisis, and runaway climate change.


In “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a famous poem written by Goethe, an apprentice, left alone for the day, tries to use his magic to command a broom to fetch water from a nearby river for a bath. At first, things go wonderfully. The broom fetches water with a bucket and fills up the tub.

However, as the tub begins to overflow, the apprentice realizes he hasn’t mastered the spell to stop the broom. It keeps going back to the river, fetching more water with every bucket, bowl and cup available until the entire house is flooded.

In desperation, the apprentice chops the broom in half with an ax, only to watch, to his horror, as both halves continue to inundate the house, now at double the speed. Fortunately, the sorcerer eventually returns and recites the spell that puts everything back in order.

Goethe never suggested his poem as a metaphor for society, but looking back, it is tempting to see it as a compelling depiction of our current state of affairs. The apprentice, like so many of us in the modern age, is at first dazzled by his power over the natural world. However, at a certain point he begins to realize he’s unleashed a force over which he has inadequate control, only to discover that his desperate attempts to contain it actually increase its powers of destruction.

Has our global civilization found itself in a Sorcerer’s Apprentice dilemma? Has the technological magic unleashed by scientific knowledge placed us on a trajectory accelerating ever faster out of control? Or do we have it within ourselves to find the sorcerer’s spell that can restore balance in our world?

​These are the crucial questions of our era.


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