your-greed-is-hurting-the-economyWestern World capitalism and it’s neo-liberal practices has a strong belief that progress comes based on scarcity-driven growth strategies. Even despite the fact that scarcity is in reality just an illusion. An illiusion we have invented ourselves because we thought it would ignite the fire in us and make us grow and innovate.

This scarcity thinking however stimulates a winner-takes-all mentality. And we all know winners create loosers. Why would we want to create loosers? I really don’t see the ‘Business case’ for that besides fueling one’s own egoistic nature. Looking more closely, this in fact could even be regarded a crime to humanity since those accumulating wealth at the expense of others can only do that by plain simply stealing from those others.

But it’s not only the increasing inequality that is troublesome, it is also the mere fact that by concentrating wealth into an increasingly smaller elite is an enabler for the collapse of capitalism itself. Because in the end, real wealth accumulation cannot come from concentration, it can only come from distribution! This is because a concentration-only strategy can be considered a forward-coupled control loop that has no ‘correcting’ feedback loop.

We should develop some kind of universal feedback mechanism that prevents concentration on the level that it becomes damaging to ecology or humanity or both. This could be done by combining continuous distribution of wealth with continous measurement of where potential new concentrations pop up. Keeping some kind of globally ‘acceptable’ balance. From winner-takes-all to winner-shares-all mentality.

Any experiment in towards this new collective, integrated progress should be heavily encouraged. Since we never really tried progressing humanity based on (a combination of scarcity-driven and) abundance-driven growth we cannot really say it will not work. So we should at least give it a try.

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