Psychology of Scarcity

Years ago I was talking with my very wise mother about the problems in the world. She looked at me and said, "Well, what do you expect on a planet where we evolved by eating each other?"

We are a predatory world. Survival of the fittest has been our mantra. It's an undeniable fact, except for those who think the world was literally made in seven days.

Our evolution has been based on a psychology of scarcity. We have fought tooth and nail to survive in a world of mammoths and tigers. No dinosaurs, thank you.

In the modern era we have entered into a world of technological abundance but have been saddled with a psychology of scarcity. That psychology of scarcity has dominated our thinking, created an adversary system of virtually everything. We think we have to fight. The sports we, and I, love so dearly are based on one person or team winning and the other losing, often not just losing but getting the crap knocked out of them.

We have an economy of scarcity. When something is scarce the price goes up. In fact, abundance is seen as the enemy of prosperity. There's an insane paradox for you. Too much gas and it drives the price down, lowering the profit, affecting investments, gas production, lowering incentives for healing the ecosystem with green energy. It gets complicated fast. And it's all engineered by a psychology of scarcity that only sees abundance at the expense of someone else. It's engineered to protect profits

So a premise of this blog is that we need a psychology of abundance. It turns out that the implications of unfettered abundance are positive and beautiful beyond our current comprehension. If we wanted to we could feed and clothe the world. But our psychology of scarcity,  fear, drives us to weapons and wars that stop our prosperity in it's tracks producing not only waste, death, and destruction, but creating a self perpetuating mind set of fear and hostility.

The future is coming (oxymoron alert) and we need to develop our psychology of abundance. It's a psychological, spiritual, physical, economic, and political healing.