The Currency of Scarcity

I've been wondering what drives us to be such indiscriminate consumers. Specifically, why my brother, when he was alive, seemed to think the world owed him everything. He never felt as if he had enough even though he lived in a country of abundance. Maybe that very abundance, if it's all you see, feeds into a scarcity mentality. Ultimately it was that scarcity mentality that took my brother's life. It always had to be faster and better. Faster, on a motorcycle, is deadly.

Fear feeds into the scarcity mentality. I feel it sometimes myself, especially when thinking of oil depletion. I'm very afraid of being cold, truth be told. I also feel a sense of scarcity being pushed upon me by politicians, namely Bush, in recent speeches about preserving our 'way of life', while at the same time destroying the American 'way of life' for many people, and while yet again, invoking the nonexistent 911/Iraq connection.

Fear.

Go buy stuff. Preserve your 'way of life'. Pacify your outrage of the horrors of the Bush administration by digging yourselves deeper in debt. Pretty soon you won't have time to notice that your 'way of life' has been taken. Your constitution, internally, and the one this country was founded upon, have been stripped.

We can get Beyond Greed and Scarcity

If a society is afraid of scarcity, it will actually create an environment in which it manifests well-grounded reasons to live in fear of scarcity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Also, we have been living for a long time under the belief that we need to create scarcity to create value. Although that is valid in some material domains, we extrapolate it to other domains where it may not be valid. For example, there's nothing to prevent us from freely distributing information. The marginal cost of information today is practically nil. (well, maybe not quite yet) Nevertheless, we invent copyrights and patents in an attempt to keep it scarce.

...) The biggest issues that I believe humanity faces today are sustainability and the inequalities and breakdown in community, which create tensions that result in violence and wars. We can address both these issues with the same tool, by consciously creating currency systems that will enhance community and sustainability.
Significantly, we have witnessed in the past decades a clear re-awakening of the feminine archetype. It is reflected not only in the women's movement, in the dramatic increase in ecological concerns, or in new epistemologies reintegrating spirit and matter, but also in the technologies that enable us to replace hierarchies with networks (such as the Internet).
Add to these trends the fact that for the first time in human history we have available the production technologies to create unprecedented abundance. All this converges into an extraordinary opportunity to combine the hardware of our technologies of abundance and the software of archetypal shifts.

More articles on dysfunctions of money and currency alternatives. posted by Cyndy | link | | |
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