Our society prospers because it is based on sharing. We share our labor, we share our skills, we share our resources and our time... and from the sharing we get abundance and survival.
As I have stated earlier we are pretty pathetic without our tools and without each other. We are easy prey for larger mammals and make an easy meal perhaps, but together we are utterly formidable.
We have brilliant communication skills, we have incredibly clever, we have tools and we organize and thus we are no match for other large mammals. The main reason we are formidable is that we share.
Our whole society is about sharing. We share our skills, our knowledge, our resources, our labor, our time... whatever it is we have we share.
In exchange we receive these tokens that we use to exchange for other things we need. And thus we survive together in abundance to facilitate our survival. We get wealth beyond the tokens, infrastructure, people acting on your behalf all the time, picking the fruit you will eat, picking the coffee beans that you will brew your coffee with all brought to you with optimally recent technology and a maximally clean cup, no not sterile, because that'd be inefficient and unnecessarily clean. We know how to do good enough very well and we all benefit from it.
Except the problem is some of us see this as a model for scarcity. They do not see abundance, they see scarcity and as a result they try to take more than they share. Scarcity is one way to increase the value of in demand objects. This is why 'imperfect' potatoes are not sold in supermarkets for premium prices, they are often left to rot.
And this results in the tragedy of the commons. We pinch pennies by using bromiated flour instead of iodized flour, corporations do scorched earth farming to save tax pennies, corporations want to turn the DNA of food crops into royalties, and take from California its water while in severe drought to frack. Anything to make a few pennies.
Scarcity and abundance are perspectives. The Australian Aborigines lived in harmony with a desert environment for 40,000 years in abundance and westerns arrive and in 200 years decimate the continent with their scarcity farming techniques.
We are intelligent beings. we should be doing better with our farming techniques, and not continually see the commons as something to steal from to survive at the expense of others.
As I have stated earlier we are pretty pathetic without our tools and without each other. We are easy prey for larger mammals and make an easy meal perhaps, but together we are utterly formidable.
We have brilliant communication skills, we have incredibly clever, we have tools and we organize and thus we are no match for other large mammals. The main reason we are formidable is that we share.
Our whole society is about sharing. We share our skills, our knowledge, our resources, our labor, our time... whatever it is we have we share.
In exchange we receive these tokens that we use to exchange for other things we need. And thus we survive together in abundance to facilitate our survival. We get wealth beyond the tokens, infrastructure, people acting on your behalf all the time, picking the fruit you will eat, picking the coffee beans that you will brew your coffee with all brought to you with optimally recent technology and a maximally clean cup, no not sterile, because that'd be inefficient and unnecessarily clean. We know how to do good enough very well and we all benefit from it.
Except the problem is some of us see this as a model for scarcity. They do not see abundance, they see scarcity and as a result they try to take more than they share. Scarcity is one way to increase the value of in demand objects. This is why 'imperfect' potatoes are not sold in supermarkets for premium prices, they are often left to rot.
And this results in the tragedy of the commons. We pinch pennies by using bromiated flour instead of iodized flour, corporations do scorched earth farming to save tax pennies, corporations want to turn the DNA of food crops into royalties, and take from California its water while in severe drought to frack. Anything to make a few pennies.
Scarcity and abundance are perspectives. The Australian Aborigines lived in harmony with a desert environment for 40,000 years in abundance and westerns arrive and in 200 years decimate the continent with their scarcity farming techniques.
We are intelligent beings. we should be doing better with our farming techniques, and not continually see the commons as something to steal from to survive at the expense of others.
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