Is it so that the greatest threat against individual freedom and prosperity is not the lack of resources – world poverty – but rather the opposite: abundance?
Stop to think about it before you say no.
Think about the vast amount of funds that are plowed into useless investments in every corner of the world.
Into arms.
Into corruption.
Into protection of status quo.
Into drugs.
Into the production of documents that no one ever asked for and fewer will read.
Into perverted manifestations of wealth.
Into monuments.
Into conservation of power.
Conservation of power… The key issue: the utilization of resources to increase the distance between power and the individual.
Would it be possible to spend so generously without abundance?
Panem et circenses. Bread and circuses. Diversions for the populace.
Public sector mushrooming. Flat screen television and a job created by government stimulus. Add reality shows, the demise of critical journalism, and political correctness and you’ve effectively conserved the ‘now’.
And fear.
Dissidents will effectively be washed away by means of IPRED, social security numbers and the harmful use of nepotism. Ultimately threatened by imprisonment or worse. Hell the armed forces!
A great circus indeed, kept running and cunningly orchestrated by those in control of the funds; ultimately those with the taxation privilege. A giant circus surrounded by weapons paid for by a huge proportion of world GDP, spiced with laws designed for the conservation of the present. Supported by state federations and international communities and ultimately protected by the white knights of the United Nations.
Status quo. I scratch your back and you scratch mine.
Layer upon layer of meaningless institutions. Military spending and panem et circenses… Doesn’t sound like lack of funds to me. If there’s enough money in circulation to bribe the populace to not revolt and topple totalitarian, or just useless regimes, resources are not scarce, only inefficiently used. Corruptively misused.
Someone once told me that ‘the [so called ethnic group that includes a billion odd individuals] aren’t ready for democracy’
Taste it! Chew it! Feel the texture. Savor the fragrances.
Racist prejudice, self righteousness, indoctrination, absence of free thought, and the compulsive need to conserve the present status quo were never more neatly packaged in one small statement.
Free will has never in history been more effectively contained. Free thought merely a Platonic notion of a property of an ideal world, safely unreachable for us deadly but spared for the divine über mensch in office.
Creative destruction works in Nature but somewhere along the line, humanity chose to put a lid on; chose to conserve the present in the foul paraffin of the nanny state. Or mammoth corporation, for that sake. Capitalism didn’t fail, it was stabbed in the back by corruption and ‘too big to fail’. (don’t worry, it will prevail…)
Now, take a look at your local congress man. Is it a person that you truly believe stands above Nature? Someone that will be capable of overturning laws that have been in place in the Universe for 15 billion years? Someone that will be able to defy the process of evolution (if you’re a creationist, you should have stopped reading a long time ago… Here! Stick! Fetch!) and redesign human nature and cleanse it from its curiosity and will to take another step forward?
All those who say Yes, please join the creationists. Off you go! Fetch!
Everyone still here? Good.
So, odds are that most of you (and yes, of course me too) are comfortably pampered by the ‘system’. Life’s pretty good on a day by day basis. Worst thing (not considering illness and death; some things even politicians can’t protect us from) that could happen is that you’ll have to buy unbranded products in your next shopping spree or, heaven forbid, skip your next latte. In rare cases you might need to sell one of the family cars or move to a smaller house.
Perspective: in France 1789, Russia 1917, Berlin 1938 or 1945, Baghdad 2003, or in Libya 2011, the loss of your fortune would have sent you to prison, Guantanamo Bay, concentration camp or straight to Madame Guillotine. 10,000 years ago, you’d have been clubbed to death by your neighbor because he wanted your wife and cave. 400,000 years ago, if you’d been able to formulate a thought, it would have been ‘damn those kids for chasing me away from the herd… where’s the respect for us elderly’
Nice and comfy. But not sustainable. The longer you keep the lid on to hide the bubbles, the worse the explosion will be once it blows.
World poverty is not poverty of the world.
And it will end, that is to say wealth will be redistributed, in small evolutionary steps or by means of revolution.
The question you must ask yourself is whether you will embrace change or succumb to it.
I seem to have answered my initial question. Abundance is not a threat against personal freedom but mixed with conservatism and unwillingness to think it may act as an explosive agent rather than to fuel prosperity.
May… or will.
