Amongst the many lessons we learn from the school of life is the realization that our present reality only appears to be complex or difficult because we have not yet found the idea to adequately explain what is actually happening. This is a humble attempt to explain one such reality that has been assumed to be inextricable from the human condition.
It is the idea of scarcity.
It seems so basic that we have defined our economics, politics, technologies and societies by its seemingly immutable presence. Is scarcity still a valid construct? Especially since our history of progress shows us something quite different? Perhaps not.
Consider that at one point we thought food supplies were scarce, and now approximately 1/3 of all food we produce globally is lost or wasted. Why? The accessibility to creature comforts was once scarce, but then we created unprecedented production efficiencies of scale with the advent of the industrial revolution. Just the fact that we now spend resources to brand and advertise to differentiate products with identical production costs is a clear indicator of the fallacy of this assumed scarcity. Access to information was once scarce, now we have Google. The ability to connect and communicate with others while shrinking time and space was once scarce, but now we have social networks. The access to collective feedback, funds, and ideas were also scarce and now we’re crowdsourcing.
It’s a clear pattern no matter where you look. A former scarcity is inevitably transformed into an abundant resource when we solve for facilitating the flow of information in new ways. What may not be so clear is our logic of what actually drives this. In other words, the scarcity constructs that now define our social, political and economic activities. Or maybe not! We may just be reaching that critical mass of awareness that is challenging the game we find ourselves embedded in simply by playing the game itself.
A quick search will tell you that things we’d thought to be rare like diamonds are actually not so, and that not only are these stones abundant, their availability since the 80s has been systematically manipulated to create artificial demand in a multi-billion dollar market. The same is true of food, water and energy. Can we really have a water shortage on a planet that is mostly water, or is it because we are misusing water at unprecedented rates with big food, dirty energy processing and mass manufacturing even though far more resilient and sustainable technologies exist? Do we really have a food shortage, or are we misusing the land with petrochemical toxins to maximize GMO profitability? Can energy really be scarce, when all life is simply energy and that what falls from the sky everyday is enough to power the planet for over a year? Is it really because resources are scarce, or is it because scarcity as a driver for progress is the only explanation we seem to be comfortable with?
While these seem like broad generalizations and incongruous to most skeptics, I don’t know if they would argue with the clear evidence of former scarcities now made abundant with better explanations and innovations. Does the prime economic motivator of a scarce money supply tied to a scarce energy supply driving all activity still valid? Do those of us who claim to be the most intelligent humans who ever walked the earth still believe that it all adds up?
Seriously, just think about it.
We have solved for scarcities across the existing human condition for food, drinking water, creature comforts, information access and communication, yet somehow we still accept that we must engage in mass biospheric destruction to access our primary energy sources, and our current construct of currency valuation is directly tied to it? Really? How long will we bury our heads in the sand to describe most of the human activity and motivating factors on the planet as “intangibles” or “non-market” activities? Can we really deny the existence of the favor or relationship economies because we refuse to accept that things like Wikipedia and Time Banks exist, even though that’s how we’ve been exchanging value with each other all along?
This idea of scarcity in the age of unprecedented technical abundance, and the emergence of sophisticated digital value exchange services should wake us up, but it seems that we are still in denial. We still believe that the accumulation of money for money’s sake will somehow buy us security, even though we know that the value of a monetary system tied to scarce dirty energy is only going to decline, and that the multi-trillion dollar gap in our global money supply cannot ever be repaid under the GDP model.
Most of us seem to understand that what we really buy are access to experiences and most of the experiences that deliver the quality of life that we desire do not have a price tag, yet we think that market prices are the best solution we have for economics. We still hold onto ideas like margins and profits to drive market innovation, even though we understand that from a systemic perspective, they are actually market inefficiencies from a regionally scarce bygone era. Truly sustainable products like ink-less printers are shelved for throwaway cartridges that fill up landfills, bottled water that take more than 8 bottles of water to produce each bottle is still a booming business model and too cheap to meter energy technologies never get enough funding to be available to us past their lab demos. We still block off of true progress as breakthrough solutions get benched for more profitable ones.
It’s sad and ironic. My favorite explanation of this insane behavior is the one of our egos being invested in keeping things as they are even in light of new evidence. Leo Tolstoy described this beautifully: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
Yet, however true this false construct of scarcity to drive progress in the age of access and abundance may be, it is the simplest truth we are most ready to overlook. However, it may now be absolutely necessary to challenge this idea head on. If not for anything, but simply the survival of our species. While some of us are planning their escape from this impending biospheric collapse by dreaming of space, most of the inhabitants on this planet now existing in the manufactured scarcity and conflict to serve the interests of the ruling classes have little choice but to question this fundamental idea of scarcity.
The ecological footprint, or the ability of the land’s resources to sustain life of the planet is already at one and a half times the capacity. Mass extinctions and ecosystem collapses were never isolated variables, they are interconnected back to survival of all of us, including the ruling classes themselves. While most people may be oblivious to the systematized wage slavery regardless of their socioeconomic status to serve the dated ideologies of their parasitic masters, it does not mean that business as usual will not kill us. Everything has limits. Scarcity as a motivator is not just coming up against its limits, it may have surpassed it.
We as a species have been solving for our regionally constricted views of scarcity for as long as we can remember. Now is the time to question the biggest scarcity construct of all. We are not lacking in ideas or motivation to change the course of humanity towards prosperity and abundance for all, so why are still locked into the dated ideas of scarce food, scarce water, and scarce energy tied to scarce capital? Are we really that stubborn? Even when we know that when we kill the land for our survival, we are really killing ourselves?
For the sake of humanity, I sincerely hope not.
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