A friend of mine has an excellent way of describing the excesses of the capitalist system: man wants to put everything in a box.

The more you think about it, the better it becomes. We exploit everything - natural resources, knowledge and, indeed, each other - simply to package products and sell them at a premium. Our cupidity is such that some biotech companies have gone so far as to patent microorganisms that have been used by indigenous peoples for millennia solely for financial gain. But what will happen when there’s nothing left to exploit? To get a better idea of what could be lying in wait for us let’s train our gaze to the other side of the planet, to Easter Island to be precise.

Also known as Rapa Nui, the remote island was settled by Polynesian mariners around 1 000AD. A few hundred years later, it had been depopulated, its last inhabitants having resorted to cannibalism (usually a good indicator that something’s wrong). So what happened? In Collapse, Jared Diamond posits that the islander’s exactions on their environment led to their disappearance. For reasons known only to themselves, its inhabitants developed an inclination for building huge stone statues known as Moai. In order to roll these behemoths from the stone quarries to their places of worship, the islanders cut down hundreds of trees. Over time this deforestation affected rainfall patterns and also used up much of the raw materials used to build the canoes needed for fishing.

This should hardly come as a surprise. After all, how were they to know about the causal link between tree cover and precipitation? Still, they must have realized that something was wrong. Yet rather than question their habits they hastened their demise by building even more Moai, perhaps in the hope that this would please the gods and make them clement. And this is exactly what we’re doing despite having the benefit of scientific knowledge. Take climate change. We know we’re contributing to the destruction of our planet but instead of altering our patterns of production and consumption we’re doing the exact opposite: producing and consuming even more while vainly counting on technology to save the smoggy day.

The same logic applies to the current financial crisis. Rather than using the recession as an opportunity to repair the economic system, we’ve put those responsible for the mess in charge of cleaning it up. And – surprise, surprise – they’re pretending that the quick fixes that got us here in the first place will magically get us out of this bloody economic purgatory. Cutting taxes for the rich, taxing the poor: it’s economic apartheid. They no longer even bother hiding behind the fallacy of the trickle-down effect. Oh no, the rhetoric has escalated, it’s all about saving the system from imminent collapse now. As long as the working and middle classes do most of the saving, of course.

We’ve learnt absolutely nothing from the cautionary tale of Easter Island. You see it’s not wrong to make mistakes. On the contrary nothing is more normal. Our mistake though is to try to solve these potentially cataclysmic global challenges with the same tired exploitative approach. So here’s a tip that may come in handy in the future: apparently our palms are the tastiest parts of our bodies.