The Truth We Can’t Accept

There is a simple fact that people are unable to ingest. You can explain it with charts, graphs and documentation… and they may even like the sound of it… but it soon fades and is forgotten.

This truth is simply too foreign to us; it doesn’t fit within our mental universe. Most of us don’t particularly fight it, but we’re very slow to integrate it.

So please bear in mind that this may affect you too.

This truth is massively good news, by the way, which is strange too: Bad news people believe instantly; good news they doubt instantly. 

All that said, here’s the news:

Scarcity upon Earth has been fundamentally overcome.

We’ve been growing more food than we can eat for decades now, and we could grow much more if we needed to. Building houses for everyone would be no problem: we have the entire set of technologies and processes worked out, materials are available and there’s no lack of people who’d be glad to work as a homebuilder.

Likewise providing quality medical care to all is well within our reach, and of course cars and roads are no problem. So, before I get to support and objections, I’ll restate our main point: The doors to a golden age have swung open before us, but we’re having a hard time accepting that it’s real.

But Why Can’t We Believe It?

Before I get to the details of our disbelief, let me tell you were you can find all the documentation you’d like:

• • The Other Side of Scarcity. We cover many of the primary sources in this issue, and even studies showing an increase in intelligence from overcoming scarcity.

  • The work of Julian Simon, especially The Ultimate Resource and The State of Humanity. You’ll find lots of hard data in these.

• • The work of Stephen Moore and Johan Nordberg. Particularly It’s Getting Better All The Time and Progress.

And just to support this a bit, here’s part of a presentation from Norman Borlaug, the man who revolutionized modern agriculture (Nobel Prize, etc.) and saved a billion lives in the process. It was delivered in in September of 2000:

I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people.

You’ll find similar passages in the resources noted above. So, from a scientific standpoint, our main points are very solid, and on the production side, scarcity was overcome some decades ago. Why then is this non-believable?

First of all, we’ve been raised to believe in regimentation; to see it as the path to paradise and to treat it as a sublime invention. But regimentation is entirely focused on the bad: We believe that by suppressing evil we create a better world for ourselves. 

And so, anything that smells of a present golden age – a good age – is incompatible with our beloved regimentation. That means that our deep assumptions would have to be revised, and that’s uncomfortable. 

Beyond that sits the fact that scarcity is a psychological necessity to us. If we no longer need to fight over resources, how do we show ourselves superior? 

Objections to this discussion tend to be indirect, dealing with things like “human desires are infinite.” These, however, are paper arguments: we’re discussing concrete things like food and houses. And, of course, there is a difference between wants and needs. Wants are bounded only by our imaginations, and so are unfit for a serious and this-worldly discourse. A comfortable home, good food and reliable transportation are needs. Ferraris, mansions and caviar are wants.

Likewise, arguments over finite resources are distractions: We have plenty of materials right now (including fuels for both fission and fusion). Additionally, there are planets and asteroid belts waiting for us in the not-too distant future.

In actual fact there are fewer starving people all the time. Moreover, the cause of whatever starvation remains is almost wholly political, not technological.

So…

What we need is to talk about these things: To review the sources, examine the graphs and start working this into ourselves as an actual possibility.

We really are ready to step into a golden age, as impossibly foreign as that may seem. In fact, we’ve been doing precisely that, mostly by accident, for decades.

If we worked at it, we might go down in history as the generation that transformed humanity forever. 

**

Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com