THOUGHTS FROM THE COMMUNITY

At the beginning of August, I went to the Gotthard region to visit my aging parents. The ride there was pleasant as usual, crossing the Alps from Northwest to South over the Nüfenen Pass. We arrived for dinner on a Sunday, and the nonno had prepared his epic risotto. The kids were tired but happy, and the nonni even happier. Then, while settling, we asked for news of the other villagers.

My parents, now in their 80s and 90s respectively, kept complaining about the heat and how some farmers can’t feed their cows on the high pastures anymore because the grass has dried out. We joked about the price of cheese going up, but also about how the Swiss subsidy system has kept milk production way too high and prices higher for some time now. Probably not a sustainable solution. Meanwhile, Zurich farmers found a solution through an online platform for fodder exchange. 

Persistent drought worsens situation in Swiss Alps – SWI swissinfo.ch

Drought: Zurich farmers launch online fodder exchange – SWI swissinfo.ch

A few days later, we went back to Geneva and were hit with 37 °C heat and swarms of tiger mosquitoes in the garden. The neighbors had even come by and asked if we were having the same problem. Yes indeed, but who knows how to get rid of them without poisoning our vegetables and fruits at the same time? So, I half heartedly looked for solutions on the internet. I couldn’t find much, so I went to finish reading a book because I’d already booked an interview with its author.

via shutterstock 

I sat down in my living room at 8 AM on a hot Saturday morning with my fan blasting and opened Jeremy Lent’s Ecocivilization. It begins by dismantling the TINA, the “there is no alternative” slogan we’ve been living by since the ‘80s, which chases productivity, optimization and GDP growth. That chase arguably brought us here to the overheated summer of 2026. Then, a quote from one of Robert F. Kennedy’s (RFK) 1968 presidential campaign discourses stops me.

I decided to put the book down. I needed to go for a walk and get some air before the heat became unbearable anyway. During my walk, I could tell that even the trees were stressed — some chestnuts didn’t even produce flowers and seeds; they were in survival mode. The streams had been reduced to nothing; they were puddles at best where mosquitoes nest, making the veranda unusable. Even the privileged who own a small garden in Geneva, one of the most expensive cities in the world, can’t enjoy summer anymore. 

After a stroll to the bakery, I search for RFK’s speech

I went back inside, and the fan was still on. I picked up the book and read the quote again, which basically says that GDP measures everything except what matters. It was said during the Vietnam War, when

[a]narchists threaten to burn the country down and some have begun to try, while tanks have patrolled American streets and machine guns have fired at American children. I don’t think this a satisfying situation for the United States of America.

— RFK, March 1968, University of Kansas 

The physical discomfort of the heat and the mosquitoes became almost a faint and ridiculous reminiscence in the face of the intellectual angst and the mirroring of the current situation in the US. A senseless war on Iran and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents attacking citizens, while other senseless conflicts scorch other peoples on the planet. 

The book by Jeremy Lent goes on to explain how the economy has been shaped, since at least the enclosure movements of the 1600s, to concentrate land and capital in fewer hands while externalizing costs onto the commons. That trajectory accelerated with colonial extraction, industrial finance and, finally, the post-war financial architecture that treated growth as sacred regardless of who bore the consequences.

This wasn’t inevitable. Prime Minister of the Cape Colony Cecil Rhodes made sure it became the “only way” a few decades earlier. And, at least since the Mont Pèlerin Society gathered in the Swiss mountains in 1947 — a private retreat of some 20 economists and philosophers including Austrian Friedrich Hayek and American Milton Friedman, worried that the postwar consensus was veering toward collectivism — a small intellectual infrastructure was deliberately built.

For 25 years, they seeded universities, journals, and think tanks (including the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the International Energy Agency in London and the Atlas Network globally) with their students and ideas. Then they waited for a crisis to install them wholesale. When stagflation hit in the 1970s and Keynesian orthodoxy looked broken, the alternative was already lying around, ready to go.

Here’s what actually broke. The postwar consensus rested on a simple trade-off: push more money into the economy, unemployment falls; pull back, inflation cools. Economists called it the Phillips curve, and for two decades it more or less held. Then in the early 1970s — oil shocks, the end of Bretton Woods, wage-price spirals — inflation and unemployment rose together, which the model said couldn’t happen. Governments kept trying the old lever, spending to stimulate a labor market that wouldn’t respond, and inflation kept climbing anyway. It was a theory that failed to predict reality in public for years, while ordinary people watched their savings and job prospects erode at the same time. That kind of failure creates a vacuum expert consensus can’t easily fill.

Thankfully, the Chicago-school monetarism walked into it with a specific answer — inflation was a monetary phenomenon, expectations mattered, demand management was the disease, not the cure — and it was the only fully worked-out alternative sitting on the shelf.  Friedman called it “the tyranny of the status quo” — but he was among those who spent decades quietly building that alternative. That’s the model we’re up against: It’s not a spontaneous belief system; it’s an infrastructure project.

Summer 2026: fires, lost harvests, wild horses sold to slaughter

As I listened to various news sources talk about the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and Swiss Re — which are still doing risk modeling, still protecting shareholder value, still treating “growth” as the fixed point around which everything else adjusts as if it were a law of nature — I got restless. 

I just saw Swiss Alpine farmers who can’t feed their cows, and beware, bankers won’t get their fondue at a fair price this winter! Edgar Hertwich, a member of the EU’s climate advisory board, says the bloc’s own agricultural policy still subsidizes the most greenhouse-gas-intensive farming it claims to be moving away from. Climate scientist Bill McGuire, sketching where Britain’s harvests are headed, points to the three worst UK harvests in a generation all landing between 2020 and 2025 — together, a year’s worth of bread lost.

The EU’s own climate advisory board found that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) “subsidizes the most greenhouse-gas intensive practices, including cattle farming and the draining of peatlands,” undermining the bloc’s climate goals. 

Kennedy saw this same kind of arithmetic 50 years earlier. Here are his words; read them out loud:

Our Gross National Product, now [March 1968], is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Now let’s translate that into worldwide terms.

From RFK and neoliberalism to Žižek

The holy GDP isn’t failing to predict this; it never was. It’s actively still, 50 years later, counting the crisis response as growth while the crisis itself scores zero. RFK saw it in 1968, and modern economists from Amartya Sen to Joseph Stiglitz have proved it mathematically ever since: GDP measures economic throughput, not human flourishing. It counts the timber cut and sold, not the forest which gives us oxygen and biodiversity; it books the hospital bill which will take you to your grave shrouded in debt, not the health to play with your grandkids; the power drawn by my fan blasting at 8 AM, not the stable climate we lost.

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek captured this fundamental absurdity by tweaking former US President Bill Clinton’s famous dictum: “It’s dignity, stupid.”

The neoliberal machine or system, engineered since Mont Pèlerin, assumed that as long as the market “wealth pump” kept moving capital around, mostly upward, human beings could be pacified by consumer options (remember panem et circenses? [“bread and games”]). But when the pastures dry up, when tiger mosquitoes reclaim your garden and when young people realize the future has been financialized away, the economic metrics reveal their total moral vacuum. Even Pope Leo in his 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas mentions “humans reduced to projects to be optimized.” The crisis of the 2020s isn’t just a failure of resource distribution; it is a revealing structural assault on human dignity. (We’ll talk more about this in the interview with Jeremy Lent; he uses this as an example to learn from, both positive and negative.)

The survivalist detour, and why it fails

On the worst days, when the heat hangs heavy over Geneva, and the news cycle feels like an endless inventory of systemic collapse — including the zenith of a New York Times (NYT) investigation that found that the Trump administration was selling wild horses to slaughterhouses because they are expensive to maintain —  the mind wanders toward absurd self-reliance extremes. Should I move to France where natural habitats are a bit wider? Hell no! They are burning right now. And then you catch yourself half-joking about piling 20 kilogram bags of flour and canned beans in the basement. But as a friend dryly reminded me: If things get bad enough that you need a bunker, the Wagner Group — or whatever local warlord fills the vacuum — will just come and take your flour anyway, possibly doing some damage so you can’t close your windows anymore. What’s best then? Learning to shoot or set up traps all around the house? What if a friend gets injured just because he was bringing a precious present, say a handful of seeds? (Most likely coffee in my case.)

As my colleague Cheyenne noticed, dark humor often carries some hard truths. Survivalism is an illusion — a hyper-individualized, consumerist reaction to a collective collapse. You cannot privatize a microclimate, and hoarding flour does not restore dignity; it just turns you into a target in a cellar. Individual lifeboats do not fix a broken ocean. Even the ultra-rich have hit this wall. Douglas Rushkoff — a media theorist — was flown out to a private resort to talk about “the future of technology” to five hedge fund billionaires, and the conversation drifted somewhere else entirely: one of them, mid-way through building his own underground compound, asked him how to keep his own security force from turning on him once the money stopped mattering.

Food is not enough

We won’t find security in a crowded basement, biting our own noses off. Security is built in community, in public planning, in shared resilience.

Žižek, working from French philosopher Louis Althusser’s old football analogy, makes the point better than I can paraphrase: Football (or soccer, as they call it in the US) underneath all of it, is the simplest and most dignified version of “communism” there is — everyone follows the same rules, no one takes advantage of anyone else. FIFA and other corrupt organizations grew on top of that. The corruption was never in the game; it was in the institution built to manage it.

GDP is our FIFA. Underneath it is the actual game — people growing food, raising cattle, keeping each other alive through a brutal summer and wildfires, playing by rules as basic and as fair as anything on a pitch. GDP doesn’t touch that fairness. It just counts what moves through the institution built on top of it, blind to whether the game underneath is still being played straight with sufficient resources.

The choice before us isn’t complicated: keep serving a framework that pumps wealth upward while the pastures burn and millions die of hunger, or start insisting on what actually keeps people whole. It is seemingly straightforward, but as history tells us, nothing is as simple as it seems. Let us know which choice you think we should make.

Roberta Campani

Communications and Outreach

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