The whole of our economic history has revolved around a single concept, scarcity. While we've supposedly evolved in our understanding of it from the time in which killed each other over fire, arable land, water and gold, we're still killing each other [literally and metaphorically] over fire, arable land, water and gold. Now, we're just interested in the derivatives we can profit from on those commodities. When the world started to transform into a global capitalist economy in the 16th century, or so, our social economy started to obscure that reality. It wasn't some vast conspiracy by the aristocracy, but the manner in which it evolved continued to serve their interests and continued to ensure that we still kill each other over fire, arable land, water and gold, while they take the spoils.
The crease in the fold, however, is that our technology has now conquered scarcity.
Signs of this pop up every day, like this diary that brightened my morning. We can power the entire planet with incredibly little investment. In fact, far less investment than developing new hydrocarbon harvesting sites with the mild side effect of destroying the surrounding environment and the future of a habitable planet for our species. Hell, if we'd followed Shuman in the early 20th century, the world would be a very different place today.
We have conquered food scarcity. There is no one on this planet that cannot be fed if we adopted a combination of the revitalization of local agriculture with some large scale farming techniques.
There is no shortage of space to house people. There is no shortage of medical care that can be offered to them, if we choose to offer it to them. There is no shortage of education that can be given - hell we don't even need schools anymore, there is access to everything on the internet - IF you have electricity, and IF you have a computer, and IF you have the time to study - as opposed to spending your days laboring for food, water, shelter and medical care.
There is nothing we can't have access to, but for the vested interests that require 'scarcity' to preserve their world. And that is a world that each and every one reading and writing on this site is invested in themselves. And that is where it gets complicated.
No matter how enlightened, all of us still ask questions based on our investment in that world. How do resources get distributed? Who makes the decision? I want to take a vacation, do I have to run it up the chain of central command? Who decides what work I do? Can I have a car? Will someone tell me I can only drive to Albany and back this weekend and that's it? What if I want my own private house in Sag Harbor? If I work really hard, shouldn't I be allowed to have that?
My question, if you have all of your basic needs as a human being tended to - food, shelter, medical care, energy [meaning you can travel wherever, whenever along with everything else], and your life is open to you as to what you do, would you seriously have those same questions?
Yes, of course we would still all have to do some drudgery here and there, as some jobs require human labor...
But in a heartbeat, I would trade my 'job' as an accountant for small businesses that I do 35 hours a week, for 8 hours of drudgery so that I could spend another 35 hours on music [which I already spend 40 hours a week on] or going back to school for a degree in physics...
Who among us wouldn't embrace unfulfilled dreams and lives in exchange for some shared chores?
But the task remains. We have conquered scarcity. How do we make the world realize it? How do we make the world ready for it? How do we traverse that revolutionary change?