7. Upward, lateral, downward: a holistic framework of growth

Let's talk about how white supremacy fuels the toxic "endless growth" mindset in business, and offer a healthier three-dimensional framework based on natural limits that transforms how we define success.

Listen to hear more about:

• How white supremacist business frameworks are built on endless, limitless growth - and why that's directly connected to histories of colonization and extraction
• The "cancer" metaphor that reveals why all healthy growth in nature has limits, and what this means for your business
• Three dimensions of ethical growth that create a holistic approach to business: upward growth with limits, lateral growth, and downward growth
• How anchoring into natural cycles makes sustainable business effortless (instead of a constant struggle against burnout)

It's not about forcing yourself into endless expansion. It's about tending to your inner and outer ecosystems and deeply aligning with natural cycles.

Transcript

Hey friends, you're listening to Liberatory Business. I'm Simone Seol, your host. Thank you for listening. Today, I want to talk about white supremacist constructs as they show up in business, at least one of them, and how to recognize it in the frameworks and languages that we encounter. I am sharing this because I believe we all want to create businesses that don't perpetuate harmful systems.

I want to talk specifically about what growth looks like and how we talk about growth in white supremacist business frameworks and what alternatives there are that we can embrace and lean into instead. In white supremacist business frameworks, there's only one end goal, one priority, and that is endless limitless growth. What does endless, limitless growth look like in real life? And why am I calling it white supremacist? It's not random, so let's talk about it.

Okay, so here's what it looks like. It's the startup founder who's not satisfied with a profitable company. They need to dominate the market. It's the social media group promising you can scale to seven figures while you sleep without any mention of what that growth costs in terms of resources, attention, or community impact.

It shows up in phrases like "If you're not growing, you're dying," or "10x your business" or "unlimited scaling potential." It's in the pressure to launch bigger and faster every time. To add more products, more offers, more team members. More clients. Always more with no concept of when is it enough. Look at fast fashion brands producing billions of cheap garments that end up in landfills. Tech companies mining rare earth minerals with horrific human rights abuses to produce new models every year that are not very different from last year's Model companies destroying millions of unsold items while their warehouse workers can't take bathroom breaks.

White supremacist business doesn't just promote endless growth. It demands sacrifice for that growth. It tells us to sacrifice our health, our relationships, our communities, and our planet. All on the altar of endless expansion. It treats rest as laziness. Contentment as lacking ambition and knowing when to stop as failure.

This is not an accident and it's deeply rooted in history. This is where I'm going to talk about why I am calling it white supremacist business. From the 15th century onward, European colonial powers established economic systems built on the violent seizure of indigenous lands, the enslavement of millions of African people. The exploitation of natural resources without any regard for sustainability and global trade networks that funneled wealth towards European powers. These systems were justified through white supremacist ideologies that portrayed everyone who wasn't European as less than human, and therefore expendable, exploitable. The plantation economy alone that built American capitalism that is still supreme today in this world was founded on the extraction of labor from enslaved peoples and extraction of resources from stolen land.

And today, most business frameworks out there are still built on, not just built on, but still promoting and championing this very legacy, unlimited, infinite upward growth with no consideration of boundaries. With no mention of human communal environmental costs, this is directly connected to white supremacy and capitalism and their histories of endless extraction from humans and nature, which is directly and disproportionately impacted people of color. And the nature in which natural environments in which they reside.

But as it is often said in medicine, uncontrolled, limitless growth is called cancer. All healthy growth in nature has limits. Think about it deeply. Can you name a single thing in nature that grows infinitely without boundaries? Trees reach their maximum height and then stop. Animals grow to their adult size and maintain it. Even the most successful species reach population equilibriums based on available resources, and then that's it. Stars expand until physics dictates that they then contract. Every natural system works through cycles of growth, stability, and renewal, not through endless expansion.

So nature teaches us that sustainability isn't achieved through constant expansion, but through finding appropriate scale and then focusing on qualitative development, resilience, and cycles of renewal. When any system ignores these natural limits, collapse inevitably follows. So limit isn't something to fear. Contraction isn't something to fear. There are things that guide us to help us create systems that can thrive in the longer term and in indigenous and traditional societies. And even in pre-modern European societies, this understanding was woven into so many of the cultural practices and economic systems, ensuring that communities were much more able to sustain themselves for generations.

So when modern business frameworks promote growth without caps as inherently good, they're not just misguided. They're working against the fundamental principles that govern the viability of living systems. So what's the alternative? Instead of focusing solely on unlimited upward growth, I want to offer three dimensions that when you take into consideration, you can have a more holistic approach to growth and business.

First I want to offer that we can think about upward growth with limits. This acknowledges that financial viability matters. We want to grow, but with boundaries, it's about setting explicit caps on how large you want your business to grow. Yes, I want to grow, but not infinitely. In order to do that, you have to define what enough means to you. I don't want endless profitability. I want profit up to here because that's what enoughness means to me. That means paying attention to your capacity and your wellbeing and the resources that you have rather than always burning yourself out and extracting from what's around you as much as possible to get more and more and more.

Respecting ecological limits, respecting your own limits to strategically create what is enough for you to flourish. It looks like pricing your offerings fairly to you and fairly to others, rather than just extracting every last dollar that you can just because you can. It means measuring success, not by how well needs are met, yours and other people's, not by endless metrics increases, and it means recognizing when growth should stop. Like, Hey, I have enough. Maybe I don't need to grow more. Or even when you might want to downsize in order to be able to better sustain what you have.

It's kind of like a healthy tree that grows to its maximum natural height and then focuses on strength and resilience, rather than endless, grow even taller when that doesn't even make sense. And your business can do that too. If your business hasn't grown to its full length, you can absolutely grow higher. You just will get to know when the maximum height is, and it's okay if you don't know what that is yet. If your business is making $10 a month and you want to be making several thousand, because that's what you want to live on, you can absolutely want to grow. Just like a little tree sapling wants to grow much higher. Just know that it doesn't have to be infinite.

And when you are growing more and you don't need to know exactly what your cap is, that's something that you can explore when you get closer to there. But I hope that it gives you peace of mind to know that it doesn't have to be infinite, and that limit and constraint can be your partner in creating sustainability.

So the second dimension of growth is what I'm going to call lateral growth. This focuses on how your business creates a wider positive impact, like sideways. Not just for you going up, but your positive impact spilling over sideways. So it's like building genuine, reciprocal relationships within your community, creating opportunities and pathways for others, especially those who are historically excluded or marginalized sharing knowledge, resources, and access, rather than just hoarding them or reserving them only for those who are paying you.

And it involves considering how your business affects your entire ecosystem. I always tell people that when I talk about marketing being community care, it means leaving everyone better off, everyone in your ecosystem, better off, regardless of whether they buy from you. If someone never buys from you and they're in your marketing ecosystem, they should feel like they are better off as human beings somehow because they were exposed to your marketing. So it's like measuring success by how many people benefit from you and how much they benefit from you, not just how much you personally gain. So practicing that kind of cooperation and mutual aid and community enrichment rather than extraction.

And of course this also includes supporting other businesses and organizations that are aligned with your values. I kind of think of it like in nature. At the roots of the trees, there are these networks of fungi, mushroom, underground mushroom fungi networks that cover the forest floor where all these organisms talk to each other from all across. And it's a really mysterious sort of thing that I think scientists are studying and it supports the entire ecosystem in really wonderful ways, not just individual plants. And I kind of think of each of our businesses as being able to plug into supporting the entire forest in that way. So that's lateral growth.

The third and last dimension that I want to talk about is downward growth. And this is really about how you grow as a person, as a spirit, as a soul, using your business journey as a vehicle. Because if you have worked on your business for even 10 minutes, you know that running a business can show you your deepest wounds, your patterns, the ancestral inheritances that need healing. And you deal with money, you deal with human relationships that bring up challenges. And all of these aren't just business problems to solve. It's an invitation to heal something within yourself. It's an invitation to step into the next level of your growth as a human being.

And business becomes this incredible mirror that reflects back to you exactly the kind of alchemy that is going to bring you to your next evolution. That means that the roots that you are standing on as a person grows deeper down. So these are thicker roots and deeper roots. And this third dimension of downward growth is about your relationship to yourself, your relationship with spirit, your ancestor, the land that you're standing on. And I also think that the more you grow downwards, the more you're able to support what is overground. The stronger the roots a tree has, the stronger what is visible from above ground. And the stronger the roots it has, the better it is able to support other living beings in the same ecosystem.

So when we talk about business growth, we can think about, if we're just talking about a tree, how high is the tree growing and how is the tree supporting other beings in the same ecosystem? And how deep do the roots go? How thick and healthy are the roots? So this is a much more holistic system. And when I think about the health of my business, I definitely think about all three dimensions. And I think that is such a richer and more useful way to think about it.

And in the dominant, much more common mainstream white supremacist business frameworks, like we talked about, the only real focus is unlimited upward growth. And even when that's not explicitly said it's implicit. And if any of these other frameworks are ever mentioned, like other forms of inner development, inner growth, and community care, it's usually an afterthought or it's considered like a bonus. Like, if you want to make unlimited money, you need to heal yourself. Or, one of the nice perks about having a lot of money is that you can help other people. As if it's just like a side benefit or it's something that's nice to do that makes you feel good, but it's never the center. The center is always unlimited upward growth. And all roads lead back to endless extraction, endless growth in white supremacist business.

And I say this because I want you to be able to recognize when that's happening. When we talk about business growth, what is at the center? What's a central assumption? What's a central priority? And when we are able to notice and interrogate these default assumptions and default priorities, then I think we can begin to filter what we consume and filter how we think for ourselves, and thereby be able to make more intentional decisions for our own practices.

So like I said, I am all for upward growth, if that's appropriate for you. If you are a little tree sapling, you should grow upward, and you also want to be growing laterally by supporting those around you. And you want to be a force that betters your community and leaves your community stronger. Because guess what? When you leave your community stronger, your community supports you too. And your business while you're growing upwards, should also be growing you downwards. You should be growing spiritually. Because none of that is separate. It all goes together. One thing supports the other, which supports the other. Not one of these dimensions is more important than the others. They all go together and if any of these is left out, then we have something fractured.

I hope that's helpful and I hope that offers you a new, more holistic way of thinking about how you want to do your own business. Thank you again for listening, and I'll talk to you next time. Bye.