For those unfamiliar with the economic concept of scarcity, the most simple way I can put it is this: it is the historical idea that there is an unbridgeable gap between limited resources and abundant needs. Now, I’ll leave the discussion of whether or not this idea should be taken seriously or not for another day. For now, I just want to briefly look at how the ideology of scarcity has been leveraged to make us do awful things to each other: to compete rather than cooperate, to hoard land and other resources (even those as basic as toilet paper), to be willing to fight wars over material things, to seek domination and power over others rather than fostering our collective capacity to care for each other. Continue reading What is More Scarce than Our Planet?