Why We Must Stop Selling Post-Growth with Fear
There is a growing conversation about post-growth economics and degrowth methodology. But much of this discourse still falls into a familiar trap: using fear to sell the idea. The fear of climate collapse. The fear of societal breakdown. The fear of capitalist endgames.
This is understandable. Fear is effective. It creates urgency, it rallies people — it gets attention. But it's also everywhere. It's the dominant strategy of political messaging, especially in democracies, as the Deutschlandfunk radio piece recently reminded me. Fear, as thinkers like Corey Robin and Bärbel Frischmann (via netzpolitik.org) have pointed out, plays a central role in democratic decision-making — often more than we’d like to admit.
So why not lean into it, like everyone else?
Because that’s precisely why we shouldn’t.
Using fear to sell post-growth makes us indistinguishable from every other political movement with more money, more power, and more reach. It’s a competitive disadvantage to copy a strategy where others are already dominant.
Instead, we should do what no one else is doing:
Offer utopian imagination where others offer dystopia.
Embrace intellectual rigor and attention-worthiness rather than attention-hacking.
Sell a positive vision of the future — something people want, not just something they’re afraid to avoid.
The term "sell" is deliberate. Every big idea demands payment — in attention, in patience, in thinking. But let’s not charge people with anxiety. Let’s ask them to invest in possibility.
In a world of fear-based messaging, optimism is rebellion.
And rebellion is a good foundation for system change.
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