Few dispute that the current socio-economic system is in troubles.
Sustainable development is running high – at least at the level of lip service. But we are
far from consensus in specifying why and how our current development path is
unsustainable. In this chapter I argue that the world is on the edge of a radical change of
values (as it happened already 4-5 times in our known history). And that the deep core
of the problem is our irrational (or rationalizing) adherence to the self-oversurviving
value system. I try to find this value system in the current paradigm, economism, which
has passed its competence to a drammatical extent. This I consider rather a quasireligion,
than a science. As an alternative I depict the recently less visible, but more
than two thousand year old tradition of moral economics. Two new economic
philosophies are also proposed, which are at the end.
Keywords: Crisis, danger, Earth’s carrying capacity, demographic degradation,
ecology, economic paradigm, economic philosophy, economism, environment,
footprint, history, humankind, moral economics, Planet Earth, planetary boundaries,
social responsibility, socio-economic system, sustainable development, unsustainability,
values.
