The poison that keeps us alive

Rome, oil, cancer cells: when growth transforms the conditions of its own survival

An empire conquers new territories to increase its power, but every conquest lengthens the frontiers it must defend. A monarchy finances its modernisation through oil, yet to free itself from dependence on oil it must continue to derive substantial revenues from it. A population of cells proliferates, appropriates surrounding resources and even develops its own supply systems, but may compromise the organism that allows it to exist. Three very different phenomena. No universal law governs them. Yet, viewed from a certain distance, they reveal a disturbing resemblance: the process that sustains a system can also increase its vulnerability. We are not necessarily talking about self-destruction. Nor about success, a word whose meaning changes depending on who uses it. We are talking about growth and limits: quantities and relationships that we can, at least in part, observe, compare and measure. The question is simple only on the surface: what happens when a system must keep growing in order to maintain what its previous growth has made possible?

Towards the end of Chapter 38 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon writes: “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.” Rome’s decline, then, was the natural and inevitable effect of excessive greatness. Immediately afterwards, Gibbon offers an even more powerful image: prosperity had ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction had multiplied as conquests extended; and when the artificial supports gave way, the imperial edifice collapsed under its own weight. It is hard to find a more effective representation of the relationship between growth and limits. But we should be wary of that word “inevitable”. Gibbon was writing in the eighteenth century, and his portrait of Roman decline also belongs to the intellectual history of his age. We have no formula that allows us to deduce an empire’s collapse from the extent of its territory. We can, however, take seriously the mechanism he describes. Roman conquests generated booty, tribute, land, enslaved labour and new commercial opportunities. They increased the wealth of elites and the state’s capacity to maintain armies and infrastructure. But every newly acquired territory also created administrative, military and logistical needs. Frontiers grew longer, communications more complex, and governing institutions had to coordinate different populations and interests. There is no fixed proportion between what a territory yields and what it costs to retain. A province’s revenues depend on its wealth, its forms of taxation and its political stability. Costs can rise suddenly because of war, rebellion, epidemic or the need to reinforce a frontier. A conquest may therefore increase an empire’s power without increasing, to the same degree, its ability to preserve that power.

But Gibbon adds something that makes his argument more interesting still. The victorious legions, instruments of Roman expansion, gradually became political actors capable of constraining the very power they were supposed to serve. First they undermined republican liberties; later they intervened in the fate of emperors. The army was not merely a growing expense: through the empire’s expansion, it changed its own position within the system. It was not simply greatness that created problems; the instruments used to achieve that greatness transformed the balance of power. Of course, the Roman Empire did not collapse at a single moment or for a single reason. The survival of the Eastern Empire alone rules out any simple equation between territorial expansion and dissolution. But Gibbon’s problem remains: growth does not merely add resources to a system. It changes its structure, its costs and its internal balances. Two centuries later, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter addressed a related question using the tools of complex-systems analysis. In The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), Tainter interprets increasing complexity as a response to problems faced by societies. Administrations, specialisation, military organisations and infrastructure make it possible to solve difficulties that simpler organisations could not overcome. Complexity is not a defect: it is an achievement. But it has a cost. To address new problems, a society invests additional resources in its organisation. Under certain conditions, these investments may produce diminishing marginal returns: each new result requires proportionately greater effort. This does not mean that complexity necessarily leads to collapse. Technological change, a new energy source or institutional reorganisation can alter the balance between costs and benefits. It means that a society may come to devote an increasing share of its resources to maintaining the level of complexity it has already attained.

Saudi Arabia offers a particularly telling example of dependence on a resource capable of financing an extraordinary economic transformation. For decades, oil revenues have supported infrastructure, public services, urbanisation, consumption, investment and a fundamental part of the organisation of the state. The paradox is clear: oil wealth makes it possible to build a modern economy, but that modernisation generates expenditures and expectations that may require oil revenues to remain high. The Vision 2030 programme was conceived in part to address this dependence. Its aim is to develop economic activities less closely tied to hydrocarbons: industry, tourism, logistics, services and private investment. But diversification is costly. It requires capital, infrastructure, education and training, new institutions and, above all, time. To become less dependent on oil, the Saudi economy must also use the resources that oil continues to provide. Assessments by the International Monetary Fund allow us to measure this tension through indicators such as the non-oil primary balance and the share of hydrocarbons in government revenue. The question is not to predict the monarchy’s collapse, or to deny the progress of diversification. It is to understand what relationship between oil revenues, investment and public expenditure can be sustained over the long term.

The geopolitical situation complicates the picture further. An international crisis may damage trade, tourism and investment while simultaneously supporting energy prices. Conversely, a period of détente might reduce the geopolitical premium built into oil prices, but it does not automatically determine any particular price per barrel: global demand, OPEC+ production decisions, inventories and investment also matter. Peace does not imply the collapse of an oil economy. The more serious question is another: how much of Saudi Arabia’s transformation can now sustain itself through activities capable of generating independent income, and how much still requires the transfer of oil revenues? An economy can grow and diversify without yet having overcome the dependence that financed its growth. And a source of revenue can continue to sustain a system even as it makes the transformation of that system’s operating conditions more costly. This is not a verdict: it is a measurable problem.

In 1955, the American physician Alan Gregg published an article in Science entitled “A Medical Aspect of the Population Problem”, proposing an analogy between human population growth and neoplastic proliferation. The analogy is provocative, but it does not establish an identity between biological and social phenomena. In 1969, Edward Abbey formulated a remark that would circulate far beyond its original context: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” The image is effective. But cancer biology allows us to go much further. In a multicellular organism, growth is an indispensable function. During embryonic development, billions of cells multiply and differentiate, building tissues and organs. In adults, many cell populations continue to renew themselves, repairing injuries and replacing cells that have died. Growth is not an anomaly: it is a regulated process. Cells receive signals that promote or inhibit proliferation. They interact with surrounding tissues, respond to the availability of nutrients and oxygen, and can arrest their cell cycle or activate programmes of cell death. A tumour arises when a population of cells acquires changes that allow it, to varying degrees, to escape these control mechanisms.

But this is not simply a matter of cells dividing too much. In 2022, Douglas Hanahan updated the Hallmarks of Cancer framework, describing fundamental capabilities that cancer cells can acquire during tumour progression. These include sustained proliferation, resistance to growth-suppressing signals, evasion of cell death, metabolic reprogramming, access to blood vessels and the ability to evade immune destruction. Consider angiogenesis. A growing tumour needs oxygen and nutrients. As it increases in size, the simple diffusion of substances from surrounding tissues may no longer be sufficient to sustain all its cells. The availability of resources becomes a material limit. But some tumour cell populations can encourage the formation of new blood vessels through molecular signals that stimulate angiogenesis. Others can exploit vessels already present in tissues. A tumour does not merely consume what it finds: it can help transform the environment from which it draws the resources required for further expansion. Growth encounters a limit, but can develop mechanisms that shift it. It does not abolish the limit: it changes it. Increased vascularisation may sustain further proliferation, while new metabolic, immune and spatial conditions generate other constraints.

Metabolism changes too. Cancer cells can alter the ways in which they use glucose, amino acids and other substances, adapting to local scarcity or exploiting particular metabolic opportunities. The tumour microenvironment includes immune cells, fibroblasts, blood vessels and components of the extracellular matrix: it is not a passive space, but a network of relationships that influences the progression of disease. A tumour does not simply grow inside an organism. It grows through a continually changing relationship with that organism. It can exploit physiological processes to its own advantage, alter the distribution of resources and modify the responses of surrounding tissues. Yet its expansion can compromise the functions of the host on which it depends. Biology does not entitle us to conclude that an economy, an empire or a social class is a tumour. Such a transposition would be arbitrary, scientifically unfounded and politically dangerous. But biology allows us to pose a more precise question than the original metaphor suggests: what happens when one part of a system develops capacities for expansion that are no longer coordinated with the preservation of the whole? This question concerns not only the quantity of growth, but also the mechanisms that regulate it and the distribution of the resources needed to sustain it.

In 1966, Kenneth Boulding proposed another image that would become famous: Spaceship Earth. In his essay “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth”, he distinguished the cowboy economy from the spaceman economy. The cowboy inhabits a world that appears open, traversable and full of new frontiers. If a resource is exhausted or a territory degraded, it always seems possible to move elsewhere. The astronaut has no such option. Survival depends on maintaining a bounded system in which resources must be managed and materials recovered wherever possible. The Earth, of course, receives energy from the Sun and is not an energetically closed system. But it has neither unlimited material reserves nor an infinite capacity to absorb the consequences of human activity. Boulding introduces a fundamental distinction between stocks and flows. It is not enough to measure how much we produce and consume: we must consider the quality and preservation of the material, biological and human assets that make production possible. An economic system may increase its flows while rapidly consuming the stocks on which it depends. Conversely, it may improve living conditions while reducing the amount of matter and energy needed to provide particular services. This does not mean that every increase in production is harmful, or that efficiency automatically guarantees a reduction in total consumption. The astronaut’s economy does not simply demand that we stop. It asks us to distinguish what increases from what is preserved, what is consumed from what is regenerated.

At this point we must introduce a question that biological and systems-based analogies risk leaving in the shadows: who benefits from growth? And who bears its costs? They are not always the same people. Roman conquest could enrich commanders, landowners and political groups while imposing different burdens on conquered populations, taxpayers and soldiers. Oil revenues can finance collective services and investment, but the distribution of benefits depends on institutions and power relations. The growth of a company may create jobs and innovation, or increase profits by transferring part of its costs to the environment, workers or society at large. Here Marx’s critique of political economy introduces a dimension absent from purely quantitative descriptions. For Marx, capital is not simply a sum of money or productive goods: it is a social relationship organised around valorisation. Money is invested so that it returns as more money. Accumulation does not depend solely on individual greed. Competition places systemic pressure on firms, which must invest, innovate and raise productivity to maintain their position. Under certain conditions, growth thus becomes not merely a goal but a requirement for continued reproduction. The problem is that private profitability does not necessarily coincide with collective benefit. An activity may be advantageous to those who control it while imposing costs on people who receive none of its profits. These costs can take different forms: environmental degradation, depletion of common resources, health risks, insecure employment and public expenditure needed to repair damage caused elsewhere. They can be reduced, redistributed or prevented through technology, institutions, negotiation and public intervention. But their very possibility radically changes the question of growth. A system may appear efficient from the perspective of those who benefit from it and inefficient from that of those who bear its costs. The question of limits is not merely physical or economic: it is political too.

Rome, Saudi Arabia and a tumour do not obey the same law. An empire is a political and military organisation; the Saudi monarchy governs an economy integrated into global markets; a tumour is a biological process governed by cellular and molecular mechanisms. To confuse these phenomena would be to abandon the very precision that makes their comparison interesting. Yet we can put the same question to all three: to what extent does expansion transform the material conditions that sustain it? In Rome’s case, we can examine the relationship between revenue, military expenditure, administration and the capacity to control territory. For Saudi Arabia, we can measure the weight of oil revenues, the fiscal capacity of non-oil sectors and the cost of diversification. In cancer biology, we can observe cell proliferation, nutrient availability, access to blood vessels and changes in the microenvironment. There is no universal measure of growth. And there is no single limit. There are, however, relationships between measurable quantities that can change until a system becomes unstable. Growth can shift its own limits through innovation, adaptation and organisational change. It can also create new constraints that are harder to address than those that came before. It can improve a system’s capacity to preserve itself, or increase the cost of maintaining it. Most interestingly, these possibilities can occur at the same time. A process can provide the resources indispensable to a system’s survival while simultaneously contributing to unfavourable changes in the conditions of its existence. It is the poison that keeps us alive. But the poison is not growth as such. It is the possibility that one part of a system continues to sustain itself through a process whose costs fall on the whole, without adequate mechanisms to recognise and govern them. The final question, therefore, is not whether we should grow or stop. It is what should grow, within which limits, for whose benefit, and with what consequences for everything that makes that very growth possible.

References

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 38 (1776–1788).

Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

International Monetary Fund, Saudi Arabia: 2026 Article IV Consultation, July 2026; IMF reports and data on Saudi public finances.

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Vision 2030, official programme documentation.

Alan Gregg, “A Medical Aspect of the Population Problem”, Science, 1955.

Edward Abbey, statement on growth and the cancer cell, attributed to a 1969 publication; original source to be verified before publication.

Douglas Hanahan, “Hallmarks of Cancer: New Dimensions”, Cancer Discovery, vol. 12, no. 1, 2022, pp. 31–46.

Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth”, 1966.

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, sections on the transformation of money into capital and on accumulation.