True culture
The only true cultures are of scarcity and abundance
Humans love to talk about culture. We all believe that we are part of one or more cultures and we often wear this membership as we would a badge of honor—as some indication of merit.
And we often try to restrict membership in our “culture” on the basis of some irrelevant characteristic, such as skin color, sex, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc.
But that’s all nonsense.
Cultures are defined by a set of characteristics—of beliefs and behaviors—common to that culture. Anyone, then, who meets those criteria is a member of that culture. Skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference—these are not cultures, although the majority of those practicing a culture might have similar characteristics.
By defining cultures in terms of irrelevant characteristics, such as sexual preference, we can both allow members of that culture to violate cultural norms at will while remaining part of the culture, and we can deny others entry into the culture despite that they may be a better fit than we are.
In this way culture is used as a weapon to determine who is worthy and who is not, who is protected and who is not, who is privileged and who is exploited.
As many as there are people
The truth is that all cultures are imaginary. Each of us is unique. We never entirely fit into any group culture.
Simultaneously, all cultures are poorly defined, with plenty of contradicting or paradoxical features, and they are all continually in flux. What is considered a key part of the “culture” today may be apostasy tomorrow.
These sorts of cultures are often controlled and manipulated by the “alphas” in a group—by the “Brahmin” class—for their own benefit. In modern society, these self-appointed arbiters are everywhere you look, sternly instructing us as to which beliefs and behaviors are “approved” and which are not.
The truth is that each of us is our own culture. We are syncretic, eclectic. We take from the various “group cultures” those beliefs and behaviors that resonate with us and leave the rest.
When called upon to perform for the group, we may exhibit behaviors with which we don’t truly agree or consider part of our culture so that we may avoid censure, but left to our own devices we revert to our preferred culture.
Hence culture isn’t really about who we are or what we believe and what we do so much as it is a means of social control, of coercion, as all forms of “identity” are. It’s a sort of prison that prevents us from going where the tribe does not want us to go.
True cultures
True cultures are different. They are collections of beliefs and behaviors that work to create specific outcomes. They are not simply badges of tribal membership.
There are many such cultures, but the most important for the survival of humanity are the cultures of scarcity and abundance. As with other cultures, they are models of reality—ways of looking at the world.
The culture of scarcity
The culture of scarcity is predicated on the belief that resources are scarce, and that if we don’t act quickly to secure them, we will suffer and perhaps die.
Not enough oxygen? We die. Not enough hydration? We die. Not enough nutrition? We die. Not enough rest? We die. Not enough love? We die.
At various times throughout history, and at various times for most individual humans, some or all of these resources have been scarce. Often, we have fought over them. Often we have failed to secure enough for ourselves, and consequently died.
In modern times, we have blown the culture of scarcity up to epic proportions, like an enormous balloon. And with that comes fear. Fear of lack. Fear of suffering. Fear of death.
The culture of scarcity is the culture of fear. Fear of not having enough. Fear of exclusion. Fear of suffering. Sound familiar? We are in a pandemic of fear.
Not having enough prestige. Not having enough recognition. Not having the right job, the right house, the right car, the right clothes—or the right kids, or parents, or friends.
And this fear is malignant. It is cancerous.
And rather than spur us to cooperation and sharing, it spurs us to competition and hoarding. It’s a dog eat dog world, right? Except dogs don’t really behave that way. But humans do.
Fear itself
But look around. Is anything truly scarce?
There is more than enough food to feed everyone. There is more than enough room to house and clothe everyone. If we work together, we can provide more than enough education, healthcare, rewarding work so that people are healthy, happy, and fulfilled.
But far from doing so, we do the opposite. We deliberately maldistribute resources. We heap them on our “alphas” (to whom we turn for protection). We are not impressed by careful and efficient use of resources. We are impressed by wanton wastefulness and extravagance.
When extreme and ostentatious hoarders of resources—you know their names—direct enough resources toward the construction and maintenance of garish and exorbitant mega-yachts and luxurious private jets to feed a small city while billions go hungry and tens of thousands of young children die needlessly every day for lack of basic resources, we do not shun the hoarders or reclaim those resources.
We celebrate the hoarders! We sing their praises! We wish that we could be like them!
And the suffering masses? The children dying of hunger and thirst? The poor? The homeless? The mentally ill?
We despise them. The remind us of our own worthlessness and precarity, and that intensifies our fear.
So it is that often the poorest neighborhoods, instead of banding together for the betterment of all, are riddled with crime and drug abuse, all of it self-destructive.
So it is, too, that we continue to feed our fear long after the reason for its existence has vanished. Not just feed it, but nourish it, enlarge it. The fear does not diminish—it grows.
The more we have, the more we want. And the more we fear loss of what we have, even though we could lose almost all of it and still be happy and secure.
We all know this, and yet we stubbornly persist in making things worse, both for ourselves and for all life on our planet.
The culture of abundance
The culture of abundance says that everything we truly need is here in abundance. We don’t need to hoard. We don’t need to possess. We don’t need to “own”, which is really just a word for denying others the use of a resource.
The Earth is plentiful and has been so since long before the first hominins walked its surface six million years ago. All scarcity—all of it—is created by us, by our deliberate maldistribution of resources.
If each of us takes only what we need, and gives back accordingly, then we can all live happy, healthy, and fulfilling lives.
If we work together, then we can create a surplus that, when shared, can improve life for everyone, those improvements accumulating and compounding with each new generation.
And for most of our history as a species, this is precisely how we lived. We shared everything, including the work and the product of that work. Individuals possessed what they were using, but owned nothing.
We stayed together in small groups—we are a social species. There was no maldistribution of resources because there was no possibility of it.
When we began to live in larger groups, then the efficiencies of scale meant that there was a much greater surplus, and the increase in numbers beyond the Dunbar number meant that we were surrounded by others who neither knew us or cared about us, nor we about them.
That surplus became a temptation, something to possess, to hoard, and a source of power. Soon the least social and most ruthless among us began creating artificial scarcities to enhance their own power and standing, and hoarding became the rule.
And with this came suffering on a scale never before imagined by human beings. This, then, was the true fall from grace, and the beginning of the end to the human experiment.
Our eternal fall
The further we fall, the more desperately we do the very things that accelerate our fall.
Resources seem scarce? Hoard harder. Result: greater scarcity. Better hoard harder still.
Round and round we go, not in an infinite loop, but a downward spiral.
And the most astonishing truth of this is that every one of us knows this to be true, and yet we only double down on our behavior.
What the fuck is wrong with us?
The only way we survive as a species is to reverse this behavior. We must embrace the culture of abundance. And the first step to this is to recognize viscerally that we all have far more than we will ever really need.
Those who do not are not in a position to read this essay. If you’re reading this, you’re living in abundance whether you admit it or not.
We could give away almost everything we have, and still be happy and healthy and fulfilled. People do it all the time, if not always voluntarily.
I have done this myself, living for years out of a couple of suitcases while couch surfing or living in serviced apartments, taking work as it came along, sharing with others who in turn took care of me during lean times.
Taking only what you need and giving back at least as much as you took—living the culture of abundance—does more than just eliminate fear and guilt in your own life.
It also helps to redistribute resources, and when people feel secure, we have fewer children. That solves the population problem and reduces the load on the Earth.
And if we use only what we absolutely need, then that, too, eliminates most or all of the deficit resource use, which makes ours existence sustainable. It stops the egregious waste of resources that fuels climate change as well and is driving the extinction of humanity.
So what are we waiting for? If we don’t embrace the culture of abundance ourselves, then how can we ever expect anyone else to do so?