There is Enough to go Around
Start from first principles. This favorite quote of innovator Elon Musk is a commonly cited trope. We must begin at the beginning. If we want to build something, we must make it foundation-first and work our way up through extrapolation from there. To find this foundation, we must throw out what we think we know about the world or the thing we wish to build and start with a ‘beginner’s mind,’ ignoring any predisposed concepts or ideas about a thing.
This writing endeavors to find the foundations of the new world: to articulate in clear and straightforward language the revolutionary ideas that we must collectively embrace before moving to the work of changing our world. Nothing changes all at once. In my previous article, I laid out the conditions for revolution: precise planning, change through love, and non-violence. These are the first conditions of the revolution. They begin to build the foundation for how we move towards a new world in our time.
By embracing these three principles, candidates for political office, thought leaders, and culture in general can begin the work of moving our world in a new direction. But just embracing these principles is not enough. By definition, these principles require more work. The first principle calls for a plan. This plan will need to be a clear set of policies and actions that address specific issues. It will then require individuals to obtain political office to implement those policies and measures. Before we can outline the specifics of these issues, a foundation of thought is needed. Actionable solutions, policies, and plans need strong foundations upon which to be built. It is the work of this article to begin laying out this foundation.
Abundance
Abundance is the idea that there is enough in the world, and there is. Every person can and should have their needs met in the modern age. The only barrier to this abundance is planning, coordination, and organization. It will be the work of future writing to work out the details of this planning. In this essay, I aim to address the root cause of abundance and the mindset that it necessarily begets. We must learn to see the world differently if we are to change it. At this point, there has been a good deal written on the topic of abundance. This writing mostly comes out of new-age, manifest-your-dreams types of authors who believe that by believing in abundance, it will come to you. This article does not comment on the efficacy of this type of abundance thinking.
Regardless, this type of thinking has done nothing for the general population: for a public who mostly live in poverty or sufficiency, perpetual scarcity is their only reality. To a world of factory farming, fast food, endless consumption of media, gasoline, clothing, technology, and goods of every kind, it seems as though there is simultaneously too much and never enough. Moreover, it appears that a privileged relative few enjoy the spoils of this endless war of attrition waged upon our very planet: a one-sided war in which the earth is rapidly and increasingly losing. At the same time, the rest suffer the worst consequences of this endless consumption.
There is no single policy, idea, or action that we can implement to change this state of affairs. Modern western consumerism is has advanced to such a degree that it is impossible to disentangle it from any aspect of our culture, society, and personal lives. What we can do has nothing to do with making less; we cannot merely grind the machine to a halt. Those who are privileged rely heavily on the modern state of affairs for the comfort, joy, and convenience of their daily lives. Those who are less fortunate enjoy modern amenities to some degree and would undoubtedly prefer inclusion in the current state of affairs to an enforced equalization of those who already have them. We cannot merely make people give up the modern world’s ways for a so-called simpler life.
Today, we must embrace a new tool, a radical one, as suggested in the first principles of this revolution: this tool must be love. How do we create economic love? Through giving. The idea of giving may sound naive, baseless, and hopeful, but that’s because you’re reading this from a mindset of scarcity. The planning and policy of this giving begins with a universal basic income but does not stop there. To elevate people from poverty is to end poverty. The next thing we need to give is time: our society must give people their time back. In a world of abundance, there is enough time for everyone to live and enjoy life. We must shift our mindset from a work-oriented culture to one of play. There is much to suggest that modern technology is already making this culture a reality. We can only begin to speak of creating a better world; and designing the governmental, infrastructural, and economic bridges to that world once we recognize that this design must include everyone and must allow us to play with ideas and resources to create that world.
Top-down and Bottom-up.
gAbundance is, by definition, omnidirectional. It touches all things equally. Realizing this, we now have a design constraint for policies, governmental structures, and infrastructural projects that will help us in building the bridge to a new world. When we begin to talk about the new world: whether we are calling it the revolution, gameB, or anything else, it is natural that individuals will want to take it upon themselves to try something. To do something that seems to move us in this direction. These individual projects can work, but not in isolation. The revolution cannot be one of scarcity: small communes or smart villages popping up here and there are scarce and ultimately self -serving, which means they do not serve the whole.
These projects are undoubtedly crucial as proofs-of-concept for any future infrastructural project we wish to imagine becoming standardized on a society-wide level. As we are working on building these early experiments of the world we want to live in, we must simultaneously be doing the real work in the existing system to help get us to that world. The bottom-up solutions need top-down corollaries.
Paradoxically, the top-down solutions will have bottom-up results. Universal basic income, large-scale infrastructural and agricultural projects, and freeing people of debts will have real effects on the lives of thousands or millions of people. We need policymakers to engage at the highest levels of our current government and advocate for a world of abundance. The on-the-ground work of building new types of cities, communes, and self-organizing collectives is essential, but only as a model for what is to come; the real work of today is in taking command of the captain’s position on this massive ship in which we are all living: we must do the work to gain control of, and steer the ship, by degrees, in a new direction.
Building Bridges.
We are all people: just people, nothing more, nothing less. In abundance, we recognize each other not by comparison but by our shared humanity. Those who currently hold power do not wield it well because they live in a mindset of scarcity. They believe in their smallness, their ego, and the ineptitude of others, and therefore of themselves. These beliefs are, in turn, what they deliver to those whom they serve. The revolution must be radical, not through opposition, but acceptance.
We must seek to cross divides, build bridges, and understand one another from a human level. This higher-order understanding is the vital work of sense-making: and why we must seek a better way of managing our collective information ecology. The revolution must be all-inclusive. There are hairy political and ideological issues at play. We can and will resolve all of them through the work of giving through abundance.
To heal divides, they must be understood and relinquished. We can no longer hold on to prejudice or pride, and we also cannot dismiss anyone for being prejudiced or prideful. Bridges are built from one landmass to another, from one mind to another, and from one way of thinking to another. The revolution that must be is a bridge to a new world. Our work and practice is to build this bridge not only for ourselves but for each one of our brothers.
Human potential is boundless and endless. Humanity has demonstrated its capacity for innovative, sustainable solutions to even the most challenging problems time and again throughout history. It is upon the foundation of this boundless potential, this bridge-building, love-bringing abundance, that we must begin to work towards the world of tomorrow. In your own life, you can start to embrace this abundance: try to give a little more; time, energy, money.
If you feel yourself holding back, recognize what keeps you from giving; is it fear, anger, or pride? Do not judge yourself, just acknowledge it and seek to let it go. Let us seek to see in the other what is in ourselves, that we may build bridges to an abundant world together. May our world be one of love, peace, and joy. It might be too much to ask, but who says we can’t have it all? I say we already do. In future entries, I will begin to detail a political platform for an abundant future: the mechanism by which we can institute real political change to pursue an abundant world.