People who agree with me that to achieve sustainability, we have to change our culture, still struggle to see why making things more efficient not only doesn’t change our culture, it accelerates it. That is, it will lead us to create more of the results we get now.

Imagine going back to 1942. We are fighting the Nazis and imperialist Japanese. We know every German isn’t a Nazi nor does every Japanese want to conquer the Pacific. In fact, if we knew then what we know now, we’d know their culture would transform to make their nations’ some of our greatest allies.

If the exact people in question could become allies, we don’t want to kill them all. We want to change their cultures. Then the people currently working to feed their war machines would work to achieve goals we share.

Would you propose as a way to change Nazi or imperialist Japanese culture to help them become more efficient?

Of course not!

Making the Nazis more efficient wouldn’t lead them to change culture. It would help them conquer and kill. It would augment and accelerate their cultures. It would entrench their values, not change them.

It’s obvious when you look at other cultures you don’t like from which you aren’t earning your salary that making them more efficient accelerates them. How much more obvious can it be that if we make our polluting, depleting culture more efficient, we will pollute and deplete more efficiently?

What else could happen?

We aren’t promoting efficiency because we think it will help. We’re promoting it for the reasons we’ve been promoting it for centuries. We want more.

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