One of the underlying myths surrounding scarcity, and thus how we culturally look at the past, is that scarcity is an objective reality, as opposed to a relationship we have with our environment and broadly speaking the World around us. Which is to say that although some people now look at hunter gatherers as living lives of utter poverty, and thus (implied) misery, my understanding is that their inner reality wasn't so. They viewed themselves as belonging to a flow greater than them, not as atomized people who had to struggle against a hostile world.
This isn't to say that they didn't feel much pain, and didn't have to engage in gruelling labor, they certainly did, a lot in fact, and anyone who denies that strikes me as a hopeless romantic of the past, who can only maintain those beliefs because they’re conveniently sheltered from painful work by the luxuries that the modern world affords them.
But instead, that such pain and labor weren't alienating, like they are today, where one must constantly compromise not just their time and energy, but also one's soul, in order to fit in the machine-world. Of course the whole game of the modern world is to pretend that souls and such don't exist, but it only takes a few minutes of honest observation of people—on the street, in public transports, in the office, in any public place really—to see that we live in a world where people are essentially dead inside. Phones conveniently allow people to distract themselves from their inner wasteland, but still, the face doesn’t lie.
So the myth of scarcity then is about asserting that alienation is a fundamental objective reality which humans must fix by creating material wealth through technological solutions, which ironically leads mankind deeper and deeper in alienation from the Universe at large. I would personally say that psychology is essentially the study of alienated man by alienated professionals within alienating environments, and that economics is not particularly different from that, because of the above discussion on alienation which directly informs all concepts of economics.
Go back to the list of blog posts
2024-10-27