Scarcity-Mind
Description
By Frances Moore Lappé:
"Because every mental map is a culturally shaped filter, none can be complete. But that fact shouldn’t blind us from seeing that some are more life-serving than others. And, unfortunately, I posit, much of humanity is now trapped in a truly dangerous mental map, a worldview that fails to protect life because it is perversely aligned with nature, including with human nature. I say perversely because its assumptions elicit the worst in us while stifling the best, and they defy the laws of wider nature as well, thus bringing both human and environmental destruction.
From this profound mal-alignment, humans end up creating together a world that, as individuals, few, if any, of us would choose." (http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/22191)
Characteristics
By Frances Moore Lappé:
"What are the core assumptions of this deadly mental map?
- Separateness. We each exist apart from one another and from nature. To borrow a metaphor that I associate with Buddhism, we experience ourselves as distinct waves, unable to see the ocean of which we are part.
- Stasis. Reality is best understood as fixed and finished, everything from “human nature” to our capitalist economic system.
- Scarcity. There isn’t enough of anything—neither enough goods nor enough goodness. Lack characterizes everything from food to energy. And, within human beings, love itself is scarce—for, while we do have the obvious capacity for compassion, all one can truly count on is that humans are selfish, materialistic, and competitive.
These assumptions make up what I call scarcity-mind. Through it, we see ourselves in perpetual competition with other selfish creatures over scarce goods. The consequences are profound: Within cultures that today increasingly seem to whittle human nature down to “selfish sinners and shoppers,” we come to distrust our capacity for common problem solving. As a result, self-governance—true democracy—seems out of reach and we’re left few options: We come to believe we must give over our fates to those more powerful than we or trust in a magical market that responds automatically to our separate self-interests—able to sort out outcomes on its own, free of flawed human interference.
From these assumptions, however, we end up with a market that’s driven not by the collective power even of our short-term interests, but by one rule: whatever brings highest return to existing wealth. As wealth then accrues to wealth, we arrive at such concentration that it infects and corrupts political decision-making. Combined economic and political power enables secrecy that further erodes trust. (Think only of the financial crisis in which a slogan of those creating the risky derivatives was IBG-YBG, “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”3 I.e., the perpetrators knew their transgressions would only come to light after they’d departed.)
Disenfranchised citizens then feel ever more powerless and fearful, and are easily swayed to blame one another for their plight.
From these assumptions of scarcity-mind flow economic and political systems characterized by three features:
- Concentrated power
- Lack of transparency, and
- A culture of blame (“othering” as the cultural norm.)"
(http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/22191)
Discussion
By Frances Moore Lappé:
"But here is a really frightening part. These three conditions flowing from scarcity-mind are precisely those proven again and again to bring forth the worst in our species: what we see, for example, in our long social history as bullies and perpetrators of genocide as well as in laboratory experiments in which we humans have been the guinea pigs. (Think of the 1971 Stanford Prison experiment, for example, in which subjects so brutalized each other that Professor Philip Zimbardo had to abort the experiment.
Democracy is not a set system, but a set system of values. Democracy itself, says the author, is alive and always changing.
Here, let me underscore, these conditions are shown to bring out the worst, not in a few “evil” among us but in most of us. The Holocaust, after all, was not the work of a few mad men.1
Under these conditions, inequalities then widen and ecocide ensues, so more and more people actually experience scarcity—whether psychological or real—no matter how much we produce. The experience of feeling stressed by “lack” seems to have increased greatly in the United States since, say, the 1960s, even as my country’s GDP per capita in real dollars has almost tripled. And extreme, chronic undernourishment harms 868 million people today, even as food production per person has increased 30 percent since the 1960s—now supplying more than 2,800 calories for each of us daily.5,6
As a result, ambient fear spreads, the three false assumptions of separateness, stasis, and scarcity are reinforced, and we create the very world we fear.
I admit, a one-page rendition of an entire worldview is perforce a caricature. I risk it here, with the aspiration of evoking useful dialogue." (http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/22191)