Additionally due to this physical abundance society may lose some of its
obsessive preoccupation with material possessions, meaning it could
become a post-materialistic era also. This is hard to see while sitting in the
middle of the current consumer culture and is a debatable point, but even if
people's taste for goods does not subside, old goods will be easily recycled
into new.
I predict that a large number of ordinary people will have a great deal of
trouble grasping the concept of a society filled with people using a future
technology that will permit them to create and own anything they desire and
enjoy it without working for it. So Jackson’s point about resistance to the
concept is well taken. If you can’t envision a thing, you will resist it.
Worse, from the perspective of any proponent of the abundant society, most
people will not consciously cooperate with you in any way. They will either
completely ignore you and the points you make, or will brush you off as a
crazy.
The above analogy is not meant to make slavery and “wage slavery” (a silly
term) equivalent. It is meant to illustrate the effects of the
incomprehensibility of a really new, revolutionary idea on the attitudes
toward it taken by ordinary people, and the deleterious effects that
incomprehensibility has on any desired progress. It’s a drag on progress.
But it’s a drag that can’t be wished away by Marxian scoffing. The belief in
the eternal nature of scarcity isn’t merely an artifact of “the consumer
society.” If it were, it wouldn’t have existed before the 19th century.
Considering the fact that we human animals have always had to gather our
energy from any available outside source (food) and work hard for it in order
to survive, the concept of a truly abundant society is a mind-blowing
paradigm shift—a shift that is in the process of shaking up hundreds of
thousands of years of hard-earned home truths. No wonder it makes no
sense whatsoever to most people.
Scarcity is the natural default assumption we take when considering how life
works, so naturally, it’s the planted axiom we accept unthinkingly for how
every economic system works.
I believe that the only way we can possibly help large numbers of people
make sense of the bewildering number of changes coming and how they
may well lead to abundance is to walk the reader through the concept step by
step. And the only way I can think of doing that job comparatively easily
and effectively is by describing one singularly potent technological model,
one that’s been in the news often: Nanotechnology. (The fact that I
personally believe that nanotechnology will be the master technology of the
21st century does no harm to my argumentation in its favor as a conceptual
device here.)
The idea of how “growing your own” anything in your kitchen or garage vat
with billions of friendly nanobots building your desired item exactly to spec
based on “recipes” compiled by nanobots that had previously taken apart
objects and recorded their precise molecular structure, is visual, is
understandable, is enjoyable and heartening, and can be a paradigm-breaking
and life-changing event (and has been) for many people (including me).
Once the basic concept is explained, the proponent for the Abundant Society
may continue to walk the reader through a number of insights that follow:
how this technology will utterly change his or her life…the life of the family
using that technology…and the neighborhood or small town…the
metropolitan area…the state…the region…the nation…and the world. How
this technology will transform economics, politics, the arts, culture, and
every single sector of society. And how it will continue to stoke the engines
of continual acceleration of technological, and thereby, societal change.
Obviously, I agree with the former. I also don’t agree with Jackson’s
contention that we have plenty now—that the plenty we have is not well
distributed because of the greed and incompetence fostered by capitalism.
We clearly aren’t yet capable of producing nearly enough so that every
human need and desire of every single one of 300 million Americans can be
satisfied, and certainly not for six billion humans world wide. If we were
capable, none of the systems of capitalism, socialism, Communism,
feudalism and fascism extent in the world would matter a bit. Actually, none
of them would exist. We would simply…produce. Unfortunately, the past
and present existence of those economies of scarcity is proof positive that
our current levels of productivity are very limited and unsatisfactory while
our very human needs and desires remain endless and deep.
We need raw materials and machine parts from widely separated sources.
We need extremely complex and extensive transportation infrastructures to
get them from where they are to where they’re needed soonest. We need
people to do a number of mind-numbing jobs dependent on rote skills
because we don’t have robots with programming and bodies flexible enough
and capable enough to take over that work load—yet.
You are part of Friedrich Hayek’s Extended Order, the first economic order
so deep and wide that it encompasses all of Earth. It is, bar none, the most
extravagantly bountiful economic system ever devised by humans. Actually,
it was never devised by anyone. Hayek and von Mises took great pains to
explain how such orders are never devised; we only participate in them. But
even with its bounty, capitalism does not and has never produced abundance.
It operates under the same constraints of scarcity that any other economic
system has ever operated under. But it harnesses the creativity of billions of
people with its digital system of incentives and inventory-control, better
known as money, and augments their efforts with machines of cunning
design, and so fortified, bends the constraints more each year.
http://groups.google.com/group/postscarcity
Check out my attempt to do what I was calling for—walking the reader step
by step through the concept of nanotechnology and its implications.
“Nanotechnology Explained” can be found here at Helium:
http://www.helium.com/items/1327783-what-is-nanotechnology