“It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”

Ever since the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” there have been marginal voices arguing for alternatives to the principal of growth that underpins Neo-classical economics and that dominates economics in education. Recently ‘Rethinking Economics,’ a student led movement, have campaigned for  a plural economics education with syllabuses that include feminist, marxist, ecological and complexity economics models. 

And yet change remains hard to imagine. Perhaps an end to capitalism will entail and end to ‘world.’ ‘World’ as a package of resources, ‘world’ as a foil to Cartesian man, ‘world’ as that separate, comforting, god-given place.

Timothy Morton, philosopher and ecologist, found that in order to teach his students deconstruction, he first had to teach them how to meditate; before working with ideas, it was necessary to work directly with the imagination.

What happens when we add meditation to the economics syllabus? What can the non-linear temporality of meditative experience bring to the project of ‘rethinking economics?’