The following contribution by William Brandon Shanley, The Age of Infinity and the Scarcity Matrix, places abundance squarely in the physical world.
I must admit that this type of thinking is a challenge to peer to peer thinking. I often argue that the peer to peer relational dynamic can arise out of abundance and/or distribution. What seems clear to me is that the sphere of immaterial production, with its nearly zero reproduction costs, is such a sphere of abundance, though human attention is a scarce factor within that sphere. It seems also the case though, that there are real and objective scarcity factors to be observed in the material world. Economics, as the science of supply and demand for scarce goods, reflects this. Our energy crisis, and the ongoing destruction of the biosphere as well. Thus I often argue that the basic political program of the P2P movement is to reverse the current situation, where nature is treated as an infinite resource, and the immaterial sphere is kept artificially scarce through IP legislation. Reversing it is therefore a priority: to have a political economy which respects the finitude of nature and the limitlessness of a free culture.
Now I’m well aware that scarcity is not just an objective characteristic, but also a subjective one. According to anthropologists, the tribal era’s culture was one of abundance (cfr. The book ‘The Original Affluent Society’); before the propertising of feudal land (with its set of mutual obligations of both nobility and peasants), land was considered to be abundant as well. Our current monetary system, is explicitly engineered to follow a logic of scarcity, and we often erroneously assume that something is scarce, when it isn’t.
But a language and ideology which says that no, nature ‘in itself’ is actually abundant, I find problematic, as it justifies (or may seem to, or seen to be) the current system view as nature as an infinite externality and a infinite sink. Until proven wrong, this means we have to move towards a throughput economy, where what is taken out, is put back in. This is not a recipe for stagnation, as technological progress would still allow us, through higher productivity in energy and other extractions, to take out more, as long as we put it back in.
Abundance economics (perhaps a contradiction in terms) for me then means: 1) treating the immaterial sphere (culture, intellect, spirituality) as a sphere of abundance; 2) removing artificial scarcities from the natural world; 3) recognizing real objective scarcity where it does exist.

The essay of Mr. Shanley seems to go counter that conviction. It argues that the very nature of the physical world, as revealed in quantum physics, proves that the physical world is abundant as well. But can the rules of deep matter, be applied without qualification into the emergent worlds of surface matter, of life and society? I’m not yet convinced that such a transition of fundamental laws is possible.
So, I will let you judge, and here’s an excerpt of the essay by William Brandon Shanley.
By William Brandon Shanley
[email protected]

“A paradigm shift is underway, and a bright, bold new post-material, post-scarcity era called The Age of Infinity is rapidly emerging.

The Age of Infinity will be characterized by infinite power and potential that mirrors that nature of the universe: quantum computing, unlimited memory, nanotechnology, digital universe, virtual reality, free energy (zero point energy and myriad others), genetic engineering, life extension, AI, elemental transmutation, teleportation, infinite universal-human mind/consciousness — and much, much more. All of these vectors are pointing to infinity. And it will be quite a ride. If only we can make through the next 15-20 years. I am confident that we will.

How can I make such claims about the future? Simply because these technologies and sciences are characteristics of the nature of nature and we need only unfold what is and make them tangible by “riding the horse in the direction its going.�

All science is an awakening to what already is. Our inventions and systems simply mimic what nature has already perfected with utmost efficiency through intelligent networks and least action principles. Through time, as our glasses become more and more refined, we’re able to see more deeply into the infinite fecundity, creativity, power, potential, and perfection of the cosmos and create successively more successful theories, maps, metaphors and meanings to represent it.

I was planning on a making a more thoughtful exposition on this subject for this space, but tonight Michel Bauwens invited me to respond to his comments. As a newcomer, I’m not sure I’m following the proper etiquette, as this piece will be more along the lines of an off-the-cuff presentation of an alternative view rather than a response to an evolving dialogue on complexities of which I have not been a part and am not particulalry familiar. I hope that’s OK.

So, I’ll discuss my views about the infinite power and potential of the universe and what I see to be the obsolete, inauthentic and deadly scarcity-based economic systems which are killing the planet. I say obsolete because we now know they are inaccurate thanks to quantum physics. I say inauthentic because they do not reflect what is and seem to be organized to maintain, create or increase the wealth of the haves. I say deadly, because they are killing us. This is not a point of view you’re likely to hear discussed in economic or political circles, so perhaps you’ll tell me if it’s fresh. In one discussion at least, I seemed to cause a Yale micro-economist to run the other way in a panic when my facts undermined fundamental tenets of his profession 1) that man “could never have enough” and 2) that nature was scarce. When I suggested it was only our thinking that was scarce, and after making point after point to support my view, he finally realized the absurdity of his claim that 100 million times 100 million stars was not enough! Such is the depth of the humanity’s belief in scarcity and our leading institutions’ commitment to it. As I will attempt to show, not only is this thinking wrong-headed, but it is a fantasy and an addiction.

As such, I expect more than a few howls of “foul” or claims of “fantasyâ€? to try to divert us from bringing into view what is cosmically apparent. Just as it took more than 150 years for people to accept the Earth was round, it will likely take at least that long for people to awaken to the facts like the universe is a coherent plenum overflowing with the physical and non-physical; Earth is an abundant whole; nature is an intelligent, interpenetrated faster-than-light network; the universe is a process of exchange that calculates, computes and is constantly taking in information about the whole when every wave returns to the ground state; it is an open system, everything effects everything else, there are no secrets and there is no place to hide; human intent changes matter and light seems to know our intent before we decide; the human mind/consciousness is unlimited; the universe appears to be a conscious, active, living hologram; and, it has a purpose.

My background is not in economics. I am by trade a broadcast journalist and documentary filmmaker. In the course of working with more than a dozen popular author-scientists over several years in the 90’s creating and editing a science novel for young non-scientists, Lewis Carroll’s Lost Quantum Diaries (DVA, Stuttgart: 1998; Tokuma-Shoten, Tokyo: 2003), it became quite clear to me that the major economic models that have been extant over the millennia are obsolete because they are based on a false belief: scarcity. In fact, they manufacture scarcity.

Now, don’t get me wrong, given our worldviews all these thousands of years of “civilization,” the world certainly looked scarce, and became even more even more so as perception becomes reality. Thought creates. Sustained observation creates persistence. Just as the discovery of the microscope revealed bacteria as the source of many diseases, and all kinds of hobgoblin superstitions and myths went the way of history, so too will our belief in scarcity.

Why? One of the chief reasons today is because the dominant economic model is supply and demand: the less there is of something the more it is worth. So, even in the face of abundance or sufficiency, businesses and entrepreneurs seek to control resources and production to create scarcity to keep prices high. We also know that abundance is a characteristic of the market economy, but not when it threatens to mitigate demand, prices or profits. Just look at what the interlocking oil and automotive industries did to the electric car in order to preserve the status quo (see What Ever Happened to the Electric Car? from Sony Pictures). The market economy also seeks to privatize and commoditize what is already free and turn it in profit, which makes what was once free to all, scarce (water, broadcast spectrum, healthcare, all commons).

· I grew up being taught that hunger was an inevitable fact of life. Yet, in 1999 we learned that the Earth produces 4.3 pounds of food for every man woman and child each and every day (Peter Rosset et al, Twelve Myths about Hunger). We also know that people over-populate when they are hungry and poor. So what are we doing to ourselves to and through them?

· We live inside a belief called “energy crisisâ€? yet the entire visible universe is energy. We also see the enormous background of energy that remains when all molecular activity is frozen, zero-point energy, wherein one cubic centimeter of “empty space” (quantum vacuum) contains as much as ten to the 94th power grams of energy — more than the energy in the entire visible universe. (See Hal Puthoff, Tom Beardon, and others, on ZPE, virtual particle flux in the vacuum, over-unity devices, etc.) Is this the dark energy/matter that constitutes 96% of the universe or is it something else? I don’t know. We’ll have to ask a scientist to see if he or she knows. Is seems that if we turn our perception around and work to develop free energy with some Iraq destined billions we’d lick the problem in a jiffy. But without even doing that, the news reports there are already experimental cars with fuel cells that run on sea water! (see GM’s “Highwireâ€?)

· We believe in the limitations of the human mind and creativity, yet the brain is capable of more possible associations than there are atoms in the universe (Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth). Moreover, we now have strong evidence that the universe is interconnected mind into which we are imbedded. As such, theoretically, we would have full access to all that is. (See Ingo Swann’s remote viewing of the surface of Jupiter — 52 million miles away – in SRI-CIA supervised sessions. More than 90% of what Swann “sawâ€? was confirmed years later by Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft fly-bys of the planet.)

Since these facts have not percolated into our awareness, we see very few ways out of the Scarcity Matrix. This pseudo-reality is held in place by everything from scarcity banking (short supply of fiat money backed by nothing, how could this nothing ever be scarce?); the work of governments (wars, arms production, budget gaps, taxation, interest on fiat money debt); charities, philanthropies and NGOs; Social Darwinism and worker-debt-enslavement; depreciatory concepts of self by corporations and society in order to market products necessitating the expenditure of enormous amount of time and human capital in psychotherapy, psychiatry and related health defects; the maintenance of starvation and the increase in global poverty in the face of abundance or sufficiency; malnutrition through the promotion and consumption of mal food products; the cynical tricks and lies favoring elites inherent in funding human development and poverty programs, as well as the exorbitant overhead in the delivery of said services; lack of access to adequate medicines to eradicate disease; etc. All of these, I contend, are held in place by a belief in scarcity whose purpose is to maintain, create or increase upward demand on prices for the haves in an incoherent mass illusion all the while telling itself it is doing otherwise. For knowing what we now know, what else could it be?

As you can gather, the problem is so pervasive, being embedded in language and meanings and evaluations of reality as it is, it is impossible to even address the issue without using scarcity terminology!

As a result, we have manifested a global dominion through thought in which half its inheritors live on less than $4 per day, one in six on less than $1. Ten per cent of the human family takes a 55% cut while the bottom 40% lives on 5%. Such is the nature of the Scarcity Matrix and no number of wars, terrorist acts, studies, laws, regulatory committees, fines, training programs or moral arguments can ever overcome it, change it or fix it because these activities are all predicated upon this false, undistinguished reality existent within the invisible Big Lie.

In my view, the belief in scarcity is actually a deep seated meaning and hidden operator installed in the neurophysiology of virtually all people. Perhaps gurus and mystics are otherwise, but I have never met a person, no matter how rich or poor, talented or beautiful that didn’t have a fundamental, hidden, negative belief about themselves that served to create a limited context for their lives from which their thinking, behavior and actions flow. Adapting maverick physicist and philosopher David Bohm’s insights (Thought as a System, On Creativity, and other books), this hidden operator in the thought system installs in the function of thought. Bohm’s point is that even in the face of changing contents, the hidden meaning/context/function remains unchanged unless and until it is brought into awareness and seen to be inauthentic or false.

Bohm on the fragmentation between the content of thought and its function:

One of the main reasons why we actually find it very difficult to attend to our thought… is that our notions concerning the general nature of thought are themselves fragmentary and confused. The confusion begins very early in life. At a certain age (as observed by Piaget, that of development from relatively immediate and direct sensory motor thought to more abstract symbolization of thought, in terms of language) the child often tends to suppose the content of his thought (for instance, imaginary objects) to be as real as things that can be seen or touched. Eventually he discovers, of course, that such content is only “imaginary,” and thus he comes to regard it as “unreal.” A young child is, however, probably not yet ready to understand something much more subtle, which is crucially important in this regard. This is that, while the content of the thought may be either “real” or “unreal,” its function is nevertheless always real. This function is, first, to give meaning and shape to the perception by calling attention to what is regarded as relevant or essential in the context of interest and second, to give rise to feelings and urges that promote actions appropriate to the context, i.e. it contains what we may call motivation. (Emphasis added).

As an example, one may consider a table. One may think of it as a supporter of paper or as an obstacle in the way of where one wishes to go. Each of these ways of thinking leads one to see the table in a different form of perception, which calls attention to different aspects and in this way gives rise to different motivations as to what to do about the table (either to write on it or push it aside). We thus emphasize that thought and the perceptions that guide action, along with feelings and urges that constitute the motivation of such action, are inseparable aspects of one whole movement, and that to try to regard them as separately existent is a form of fragmentation between the content of thought and its overall function.

To fragment the content of thought from its overall function in the way described above leads to very serious confusion in action and in human relationships in general. For example, the thought of the inferiority of human beings belonging to different nations or ethnic groups and having different customs leads one to see such people as inferior beings and to feel the motivation to treat them in a manner that would be fitting their supposed inferiority. One tends to fall into this sort of confused response because one fails to see the content of thought and its function as an unbroken flow. Rather, one tends first to concentrate exclusively on the content (the notion of the inferiority of people who differ from oneself), which is seen as “merely a thought” and therefore unreal or perhaps “only a mental reality” and therefore not very important. Then, when one experiences the inbuilt function of his thought by “actually seeing” other people as inferior, and by “actually feeling” the urge or motive to treat them as such, he loses sight of the content in which this function originated, and thinks: “This is not just a mental image, but it is something real, something that I see and feel as an actual fact, which is very important and very urgent in its implications.” So, it seems that inferiority of these people has been proved and is not a “mere thought.”

Scarcity hides in the function of thought the world over and I believe this is the central, fundamental malady of our times. The human ego is always surveying the horizon assessing and projecting threats, and when the context if one of scarcity, “not enough,� “never enough,� “not good enough� (view of self and others) the result is a world of characterized by so much war, suffering, dissatisfaction, and sense of inadequacy. How could it be otherwise with the scarcity meaning being so pervasive? Since the U.S. “won� the Cold War and the demise of the counter-weight of the Soviet Union ideology to capitalist ideology, the world ego is running amuck in a socio-psychopathic orgy. It’s every man for himself so I’d better get mine – but quick – and the hell with tomorrow! Nothing else in nature exhibits such fear of scarcity sustained over time we call greed. Greed is manifested by a fear of scarcity.

To explode the scarcity belief, and show just how inauthentic and incoherent it is, let’s take a look at some objective measures as well as make some informed estimates of global wealth.

To be continued…