Externalised Costs - The Effluent in the Room is not an Elephant.

All industrial production systems currently operating or envisaged rely upon externalised costs at every stage from extraction of raw materials through production, consumption and on to end of life disposal, as the primary source of their profitability. This means that toxic outputs from industrial processes are not mitigated, let alone prevented. They are accepted, normalised, hidden away until they impress upon us by presenting as problems, and they are integral to the profitability of the Industrial Competing Powers system.

Ordinary people, especially the low income workers, are the people who do the work that makes most of the real wealth in this system, largely through daily toil, and the wealth workers generate is extracted and accumulated, and withheld, often by force and structures of Power. We have direct evidence of this in recent times from an 1982 Cabinet Discussion Paper written post Falklands War, when the establishment was feeling particularly confident.

The poor are a permanent (deliberately so) externalised cost of Wealth Extraction. Poverty and homelessness are both externalised costs of the Wealth Extraction. Resources are deliberately withheld from those who genuinely need them, as part of driving people into low paid work (to maximise profit taking) and destitution is maintained as a cultural whip..

The destruction of indigenous pre-conquest culture was an externalised cost of conquest. Conquest is always a business proposition, in that it requires massive investment and a demand for returns greater than the investment, in blood and treasure.

Chronic stress of industrial extraction and business working practices  -  mining, deforestation, repetitive assembly work, boring work,low waged shop and hospitality staff, military service - is an externalised cost of the imposed work ethics that demand 'productivity'.

What does 'externalised' mean? It means that somebody else or some other organism outside the transactional economics of the extraction, manufacturing, production, sales, consumption and disposal dynamic pays the price, often with a degraded quality of their lives, or even often with their lives, in order that the maximal profits are generated, and hoarded.

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All the harms we see are - pollution, environmental degradation, air toxicity, climate change, habitat loss, species extinction, poverty, war fare, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, social and national divisions and hatreds - are the accumulated externalised costs of the existing Industrial Militarised Hierarchy of Competing Powers, a cult system and its behavioural dynamics.

It is a cult. It is a toxic delusion to call it 'civilised'.

It certainly does not have to be this way. This activity and this cult does not define the Human species. It is a cult, an aberration, an abomination. It is not natural, optimally healthy human species behaviour by any measure.

What ever your stance, unless you are willing to engage with this simple fact, and actively seek ways to resolve that problem, by understanding precisely what those externalised costs are, and how they impact us all, and what we must do to prevent those costs arising or at least pay for them to be resolved, in full, our work on these issues is futile.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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