Conventional economics is a form of brain damage

Let's face it—conventional economics is causing serious cognitive harm. No, I'm not kidding. Our mainstream economic thought isn't just slightly flawed; it's a form of brain damage. It's rewiring our minds, crippling our ability to see reality clearly, and blinding us to the world we’re actively destroying.

We've built an entire civilization (to the benefit of 10-20% of humanity, exploiting the rest) on a handful of fairy tales masquerading as truths: humans are perfectly rational robots, markets magically self-correct, and infinite growth on a finite planet is not just possible—it's mandatory. This isn’t just wrong; it’s systematically insane. We’re betting everything—literally everything—on fantasies that sound smart in a textbook but collapse when they collide with real life.

And these fantasies aren't harmless. They're toxic. They've crashed economies, accelerated climate collapse, and created monstrous inequality. We’ve turned economics, a field originally meant to understand the world, into a religion that actively misunderstands it. The dogma of "homo economicus," the myth of perfect information, the delusion of market efficiency—these aren't just intellectual mistakes; they're a form of cognitive malpractice.

Take a breath here.

Economics was supposed to help us navigate reality, not ignore it. Instead, we built models more elegant than accurate, obsessed with mathematical beauty at the expense of living truth. Economics forgot its roots in ethics, forgot its connection to ecology, forgot its duty to human well-being. It started seeing everything through a twisted, narrow lens—markets over communities, competition over cooperation, profits over people.

Bernard Lietaer, who helped birth the Euro, saw this coming decades ago. He saw a system that rewarded extraction over regeneration, a system that celebrated debt-driven consumption and ignored real dreams and real needs. His dream—a "central bank of dreams," where every aspiration could generate value—was beautifully unrealistic. It missed the mark because dreams alone don’t rebuild ecologies or redistribute power. Dreams need atoms, and atoms are real.

Here's the thing: We already have everything we need. It's all around us, in our forests, rivers, and communities. The atoms that make up our bodies, our food, our homes—nature figured this out ages ago. There’s no shortage of what truly matters. We've just been taught to look elsewhere, mining distant lands and accumulating abstract profits, blind to the abundance right beneath our feet.

Conventional economics says more growth will solve everything. But more growth of what? Growth in plastic oceans, polluted skies, broken societies? Economics isn’t supposed to be a religion of growth-at-any-cost. It’s supposed to help us thrive, sustainably, equitably, collectively. Right now, it's failing spectacularly.

We need cognitive repair. And the antidotes to economic brain damage already exist. They're hidden in the margins—ecological economics, feminist economics, institutional economics, behavioral economics, and even some of the old-school institutional wisdom that never forgot humans were complex, emotional, interdependent beings. These perspectives remind us that economics isn’t about abstract markets; it’s about people, communities, ecosystems, life itself.

Moving from economic brain damage to economic sanity isn’t about tweaking formulas or adjusting models slightly. It’s about fundamentally rethinking what we value. From endless accumulation to regenerative abundance. From ruthless competition to meaningful cooperation. From simplistic extraction to sophisticated stewardship.

This isn’t ideology—it’s sanity. It’s acknowledging that humans aren’t calculators, ecosystems aren’t infinite, and life isn’t a game to win by hoarding resources. It’s admitting we got it horribly wrong, and courageously rebuilding a discipline that serves us rather than enslaves us.

And once we ditch the damaging myths and embrace economics as if life actually mattered—when we finally trust ourselves enough to remember what we've always known deep down—we can heal our cognitive wounds, repair our damaged worldviews, and collectively step into a future where thriving isn't an abstract metric, but a lived, everyday reality.

Let’s finally drop the dogmas and rediscover sanity.