Michael Kelly
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

A post-scarcity society is possible, not even especially difficult to achieve technologically. Unfortunately, the native psychology of human beings is rooted in the immediate avoidance of scarcity. An old New Yorker cartoon captured this with a picture of a device covered with dials and switches all labeled “more.”

Achieving such a society would require that discipline and visionary imagination associated with the capacity to see the world in terms of systems rather than fiefdoms. Take the Chinese one-child policy as an example.

Deng Xiaoping (“Who cares if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice!”) Was such a visionary. The one-child policy was a systems intervention which redirected China’s tremendous human energy to support modernization. He also applied a Chinese re-imagination of modern capitalism (a Frankensteinian patch-up of mercantilism and laissez-faire economics) to the Chinese economy, another system-level intervention.

Now that China has achieved levels of prosperity previously unheard of for the country, less visionary leaders are abandoning the one-child discipline and slavishly pursuing the pyrrhic, zero-sum approach to economics that we see currently dominant across the planet; it’s not an accident that the world is coming apart at the seams.

Again, neo-rational, zero-sum approaches to economics are a choice rather than a requirement. Superrational (whole system cooperative) approaches to economics, such as Dr. Cazzel proposes are far more productive than zero-sum approaches.

Unfortunately, human beings tend to be systems-blind. This is like red-green color blindness only with respect to social organization. Consequently, it will continue to be “more, more, more” to system-wide failure. There is a reason all past civilizations have crashed and burned. This time doesn’t appear to be any different.

I doubt that this problem can be solved at the level, Dr. Cazzel seems to be working; although I can see her work contributing to a solution at a higher level of operations.