Scarcity amid Abundance ... ?
Sometimes the way we think about a thing makes not much sense. We live in a society which has produced "too much" for a long time - longer than some of you have been on the planet. My parents did not grow up with the wealth of things I have taken for granted. Even the way our society produces things has changed since it began producing so much. Used to be things lasted longer - now they are "programmed to self-destruct" so they can be replaced ... and in turn we have come to expect that we will replace something we paid enough for that it should have lasted years.
We throw away things that almost anyone elsewhere in the world would salvage and be perfectly happy to own - only because it is scratched, or cracked, or just "used" as in NOT NEW ... and god forbid we should be seen as so impoverished as to not be able to afford BRAND NEW !
In that way we do not recognize value of a thing once it has passed on to being used - even somewhat used, or slightly used, makes a thing "valueless" to us, and so we continue the hunt for more, for NEW, better, faster, louder things that will very quickly also have no value to us.
Nothing much there seems odd compared to what most of us seem to want most of all: MONEY. We want all the money we can get, and we do not care if it is real or virtual, crisp or wadded from the washer (or from a sweat soaked pocket), clean or germ-laden or drug saturated, new bills and coins or old are all the same to most of us - just never ever enough MONEY.
The things we throw away to replace with brand new often retain more VALUE than the money we cherish more than anything else.
If all the precious things which have been manufactured in the six decades of my life had been cared for properly, not replaced so quickly, and precious skills of repair been maintained, we would all have enough of those things to last decades to come WITHOUT making ANY more of any of them ... if people took more care and let go a lot more pride, they would not wreck so many cars and give up what still works just not quite as well as it did yesterday ...
... for which we would all have more, or at least enough, and not be driving so hard to get more and more, but that is the way our stupid economy works.
Not because there is not enough of a thing its price is high, but because we figure out how to make it harder, or seem harder, to get, or to keep. So we pay more and assume we will get more, and have more to pay for more - until we run out of time. While we still have time, we create artificial needs, and find ways to fill them while we find ways to pay for filling them, and in so doing we lose sight of what we have, or who we are and of what we are capable.
We have enough already. We do not value what we have. We have good health, which we use to work ourselves to death so we will have more time to enjoy our good health. We have good skills which we set aside to concentrate on maneuvering to get more money in exchange for our skills which eventually go unused because no one will pay enough to utilize them. We have a good team which, if encouraged and nourished, could do anything, but we impoverish and stifle it by focusing on how many dollars we can stuff in our own personal bank account.
Who factors into GNP the number of skilled hours which go unused every day ... ignored because a worker is "scratched, or cracked, or just "used" as in NOT NEW" - even though such a worker likely brings more dedicated knowledge and experience to a task, and could sometimes be employed for less than one "brand new" ... ?
Were we to stop and count up what we have among us, we would likely find we do not have enough money, but we have everything we need. We can do anything we need to do with the skills combined in our community, and one of those skills is matching the "haves" with the "needs" while another is the ability to keep records.
Poverty is generally a measure of having too little money, yet just about anyone you could point me to as being "in poverty" can do something, whether digging in the earth or pounding a nail, changing a flat tire or threading a needle, making a better soup or soothing a sick child - and for every one of those "haves" there is a "need" to be filled ... so is poverty no more than an artificial product of a monetary system ?
I ask you to put your own mind to work now in the post-industrial time and think whether the way you think makes as much sense as it could ?
We throw away things that almost anyone elsewhere in the world would salvage and be perfectly happy to own - only because it is scratched, or cracked, or just "used" as in NOT NEW ... and god forbid we should be seen as so impoverished as to not be able to afford BRAND NEW !
In that way we do not recognize value of a thing once it has passed on to being used - even somewhat used, or slightly used, makes a thing "valueless" to us, and so we continue the hunt for more, for NEW, better, faster, louder things that will very quickly also have no value to us.
Nothing much there seems odd compared to what most of us seem to want most of all: MONEY. We want all the money we can get, and we do not care if it is real or virtual, crisp or wadded from the washer (or from a sweat soaked pocket), clean or germ-laden or drug saturated, new bills and coins or old are all the same to most of us - just never ever enough MONEY.
The things we throw away to replace with brand new often retain more VALUE than the money we cherish more than anything else.
If all the precious things which have been manufactured in the six decades of my life had been cared for properly, not replaced so quickly, and precious skills of repair been maintained, we would all have enough of those things to last decades to come WITHOUT making ANY more of any of them ... if people took more care and let go a lot more pride, they would not wreck so many cars and give up what still works just not quite as well as it did yesterday ...
... for which we would all have more, or at least enough, and not be driving so hard to get more and more, but that is the way our stupid economy works.
Not because there is not enough of a thing its price is high, but because we figure out how to make it harder, or seem harder, to get, or to keep. So we pay more and assume we will get more, and have more to pay for more - until we run out of time. While we still have time, we create artificial needs, and find ways to fill them while we find ways to pay for filling them, and in so doing we lose sight of what we have, or who we are and of what we are capable.
We have enough already. We do not value what we have. We have good health, which we use to work ourselves to death so we will have more time to enjoy our good health. We have good skills which we set aside to concentrate on maneuvering to get more money in exchange for our skills which eventually go unused because no one will pay enough to utilize them. We have a good team which, if encouraged and nourished, could do anything, but we impoverish and stifle it by focusing on how many dollars we can stuff in our own personal bank account.
Who factors into GNP the number of skilled hours which go unused every day ... ignored because a worker is "scratched, or cracked, or just "used" as in NOT NEW" - even though such a worker likely brings more dedicated knowledge and experience to a task, and could sometimes be employed for less than one "brand new" ... ?
Were we to stop and count up what we have among us, we would likely find we do not have enough money, but we have everything we need. We can do anything we need to do with the skills combined in our community, and one of those skills is matching the "haves" with the "needs" while another is the ability to keep records.
Poverty is generally a measure of having too little money, yet just about anyone you could point me to as being "in poverty" can do something, whether digging in the earth or pounding a nail, changing a flat tire or threading a needle, making a better soup or soothing a sick child - and for every one of those "haves" there is a "need" to be filled ... so is poverty no more than an artificial product of a monetary system ?
I ask you to put your own mind to work now in the post-industrial time and think whether the way you think makes as much sense as it could ?
posted by JamesB at 9:00 AM
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