These days, I hate “progressives” and degrowthers so very much. They are a curse, and a scourge.

Although I do not agree with some of the methods of those tech bros, this whole excremental utterance is emblematic of the entire superstructure of faux-progressive thought: smarmy self-assurance combined with unfathomable ignorance of history, science, philosophy, and the long-held dreams of human striving; the desire to defeat aging and death is woven into the fabric of our earliest known stories. Gilgamesh dives to the bottom of the sea for the plant that restores youth, only to lose it to a snake. Selene begs eternal youth for Endymion. Alchemists for hundreds of years strove in vain for it. Francis Bacon himself made the prolongation of life an explicit program for natural philosophy. Condorcet, hiding from the Terror and months from his own death, wrote that the human lifespan might one day extend without any definable limit. This is what people — rightly — have dreamed of for literal ages.

That was progressivism once: the conviction that nothing about the human condition is fixed, not even death. By the way, early econ bro Tommy Malthus wrote his Essay on Population specifically to rebut Condorcet (and Godwin). Thus, today’s degrowthers are Malthus’s heirs, all while calling themselves by the name of the very people he was arguing against.

But of course that is not the real issue here, though their disavowal alone of a very human instinct is itself deeply vile. It is rather that their answer to any form of striving is to amputate it before it can get a start, all the while smirking at their own (false) cleverness. Too much energy? Use less. Too much ambition? Desire less. Too much joie de vivre? Here’s a knife. The castration quip, thus, is not accidental. It is their entire horrid, despicable creed in miniature: vitality and ambition to achieve more are treated as a pathology. Enforced and artificial decline is treated as virtue. Though they’d claim to be faultless even as they cause it, they revel in the smug pleasure of watching someone else be humbled. Tall Poppy Syndrome is how they live and is the deepest core of their ethos. They want the worst for all of us as long as they can make fun of you in the shared pig sty.

They don’t want anyone to strive for the Moon, for the stars, for life eternal. Instead, they want to compete with the vulture and geld Prometheus.