Scarcity Inferno

"Inferno" is a large, dangerous, out of control fire, or Hell. Our current economic paradigm, capitalism, produces both because the one thing it can't do without is scarcity.

It's quite simple really; the laws of supply and demand dictate that supply is low and demand high for profits to be maximized. If there's only one of a particular thing, and everyone wants it, that particular thing will be insanely expensive. Capitalism, with its coupling of markets and profits, does not allow for abundance. Let that sink in for a moment. Too few people realize fully the horrible consequences of this simple truth. Hunger, homelessness, climate change; these problems can not be solved under capitalism. In fact these problems are necessary for capitalism to function, they're not a bug but a feature.

I don't have a lot of time today, so I'll just focus on food and how capitalism perpetuates world hunger. You see, there's no real reason why anyone should go hungry in the 21st century; the below linked video starts by saying that, by some estimates, enough food is produced yearly to feed 10 billion people. I did my own calculation almost a decade ago, and I reached a number of 12 billion people. Regardless, there's more than enough food to feed any man, woman and child on this planet. It's not a problem of quantity, it's purely a problem of distribution. This distribution is shaped and dictated by for profit production and trade, and the profit-motive is present in each step of the chain starting with the farmers and ending with the consumers.

That means the scarcity-principle is present at each step in the chain. Staring with the farmers, they deliberately let crops go to waste as soon as supply reduces prices to the point where it becomes too expensive to pay for the labor needed to harvest the produce. In the global north we produce large surpluses of meat, vegetables, milk, corn and grain, of which much is destroyed and wasted at the very first step from farmer to grocery stores and supermarkets. Supermarkets must, for commercial reasons, always be abundantly stocked to give consumers freedom of choice; customers meticulously inspect individual apples and pick only the most shiny ones, without any blemishes or bruises, from a giant heap of apples. And no one wants to buy the last few apples left because something has to be wrong with them, they must be bad apples. So supermarkets re-stock them regularly; this is also a main reason why it's so difficult for some to realize that capitalism functions on scarcity instead of the abundance they're confronted with every time they go to the mall or the supermarket.

Then there's the expiration dates on food products; producers will set those dates as early as possible. This will make supermarkets throw away food as soon as possible, forcing them to restock as early as possible and to throw away perfectly good food. And when the food is thrown away, it's often destroyed by pouring bleach on it, or made inaccessible in other ways by placing the waste behind a locked fence or having it guarded by armed police; anything to prevent it from being consumed for free by the hungry and the poor. Scarcity must be maintained because abundance lowers prices.

Then there's us, the consumers. We've been raised in a capitalist environment of keeping up the false appearance of abundance. We're trained to be the picky consumer who only wants the shiny apples and is given the appearance of free choice from a giant heap of them. We're stimulated to buy and consume more than we need, more than is good for us even. Keeping up the appearance of abundance means that we want our refrigerators fully stocked at all times. It means filling our plates with more than we can eat. And it means that we throw away the food we didn't manage to consume before the expiration date on the package. At every step of the way, profits prevent us from living in real abundance, and the fake abundance we do enjoy exists only at a price: almost a billion people living with perpetual hunger, and thousands dying each day from malnutrition, many of them children under the age of 5 years.

The infernal hypocricy of this system reaches its peak when individual consumers are being made to feel responsible for wasting food in many social awareness campaigns. That's another flaw of the individualism that's at capitalism's core; everything is reduced to individual responsibilities. Although it is of course good to look at what we can do individually to reduce the problem of waste, these campaigns completely ignore the larger systemic causes that are at the root of this problem. The same goes for the endless campaigns making us aware of our individual environmental footprints. Or the veneration we have for individual billionaires who make individual philanthropic donations to the causes they individually deem worthy. Just keep in mind that there are no individual solutions for systemic problems. None. If we don't transition to an economic system that functions with the abundance we're clearly able to produce, we will stay where we are, in the scarcity inferno.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!