The Universal Oneness Blog

Free market Economics is considered the most efficient (fair) way to distribute scarce goods and services. But what if human innovation, technological development, and available natural resources have rendered scarcity unnecessary?

What if it is not necessary to compete to eat…to learn…to have shelter…to receive the care we need…to reach our full potential…to be contributing members of a global community? Would you still prefer to pursue your own happiness even at the expense of others?

Doubtful.

Technological developments are rapidly eliminating the jobs many people rely on to support themselves and their families. Sadly, many people view this fact as the tragic cost of modernity. But what if automation and AI are paving the way for humanity to free ourselves from the need to have a job to support our well-being?

We would be free to cultivate and apply the boundless, creative capabilities of human ingenuity to the areas of science, mathematics, the arts, philosophy, and so much more. Free to invest in every person so each of us can reach our full potential in the areas of our vocational passion, unconstrained by financial discrimination.

This is not Utopian mythology.

This is reality once we each accept that scarcity of the goods and services that support our well-being is no longer necessary.

If there really is enough for all of us, we no longer need to take as much for ourselves as possible.

The fact is free market Economic principles of advancing our own self-interest encourages us to take all we can, which creates the scarcity causing global human suffering.

Be the change. Life can be a global feast. Have some and pass it on.

Beyond the root of all evil, money is…

A lifeline to the resources that sustain us.

Often the difference between life and death.

The overseer on the modern plantation.

The sufficient condition for social interaction.

The great unequalizer.

The Midas touch of human relationships.

Our addictive undoing.

The culmination of the old paradigm.

The limit of our humanity.

The lowest denominator of infinity.

The zero sum of our abundance.

The price of our dignity.

The excuse for our disillusionment.

Our unfixable fix.

A stairway to nowhere…

The crass reduction of purpose into objectification.

The value of scarcity.

The $ign of the times.

The incentive for our extinction.

And yet the reality of our condition is we must seek money to survive another day.

By acknowledging the gilded shackles that bind us, we illuminate the path to our fulfillment.

Here we are immersed in the white noise of 24/7 news chatter…real news commingled with fake news. Who has time to suspend the grind of our own lives to tell the difference? So we turn to alternative sources…the internet blogs, more Truth Sayers immersed in relentless rants designed to undermine the last shred of faith we have in any mainstream news source, politician, or public institution. Is there no end to the noise? When did we forget how to talk about our challenges and concerns without yelling past each other?

Time for each of us to take a deep breath and pause for a moment. Repeat the deep breathing until the noise fades away. Now that you have created a moment of calm, allow one question to enter your consciousness:

How do we as a humanity evolve beyond our current dilemma?

I won’t waste time providing the historical detail of the dilemma because this problem is exactly what all the ranting is about…this is why life is now so unfulfilling, even for the fortunate.

The fundamental question is how do we get from here to a more humane place?

I acknowledge the enormity of the problem is paralyzing. The fact that any necessary change will take many years, and likely last beyond our lifetimes, only makes the problem intractable. But for the sake of our progeny and our sanity, we must do something.

Where do we begin? Root causes. The root cause of any problem strips the litany of false leads & convenient scapegoats and reveals how we find ourselves here.

Our problem is pervasive scarcity. Today, countless people are starving while we throw away millions of pounds of food. Millions suffer and die from treatable diseases while thousands of available hospital beds lay empty. Billions of people live a century behind modern knowledge and technology, denying most of them the opportunity to discover their full potential. Virtually every person spends most of their lives toiling away at jobs they would never do but for the need for money.

In a world of resource abundance, how did access to resources become so limited? A system of social organization and economics where access to resources is tied to how much money you have. Since only money guarantees access, each of us is encouraged to accumulate as much money as possible. The result is a world where most of the global wealth is consolidated in very few hands, and half the world’s population is resource deprived.

If scarcity is our problem, the solution is to maximize human productivity by guaranteeing access to all the resources each of us can use to reach and maintain our full potential. The keys here include limiting consumption to what we can use, reducing waste by maximizing the quality of all goods and services, allowing all people full access to the accumulation of human knowledge, and leveraging the use of automation to eliminate the need for mundane, repetitive tasks for human labor.

Is this solution possible? Yes, but only if we reconcile our defining values to the wisdom of our experience. Each of us rely on many people to produce the conditions that sustain us. As a result, our individual well-being is a function of the well-being of every person who contributes to our living conditions.

The farmer who grows our food and the truck driver who delivers it to market…the electrician who wires our home and the mechanic who installs our brake pads…the pilot who flies our plane and the engineers who designed it…the teacher who exposed us to our life’s chosen vocation and the every person who believed in us…Each and every one of these people and many more we may never know, contribute to the conditions that make our lives worth living. And when they are distracted, undernourished, ailing and denied access to the resources they need, we suffer with faulty goods and services that often alter the trajectory of our lives.

Once each of us acknowledge our interdependence on humanity, we realize we all must matter if we want to live in a sustainable, mutually fulfilling society.

How then do we get from here to there?

Helping each person we know to understand we can best advance our self-interest by supporting the well-being of all of us. Changing the dialogue of our public policy discussions from “how does policy affects me?” to “how does policy help us?” Supporting candidates and causes that favor global unity over nationalism and sectarianism. Doing the relentlessly hard work of building an emerging critical mass of values that elevate all of humanity.

This is the task at hand, which offers purpose amidst a cacophony of inhumanity.

Is it in you?

At the founding of America, the forefathers declared independence from British rule because King George III practiced tyranny over the American colonies. In organizing the new nation, the fundamental rights of free people were acknowledged in the Bill of Rights, which defined our individual autonomy with the principle of ordered liberty. In practice, the concept of ordered liberty, which empowers government to limit our freedom where it impermissibly limits the freedom of others, has translated to freedom to advance our self interest.  Each of these events occurred within the context of economic modernization.

As societies progressed from hunter-gatherers, to agrarian, to industrial, to post industrial, to information based models, we improved productivity and accelerated innovation through specialization. The sum effect of modernity is rapid improvement in life expectancy and many other quality of life measures in exchange for a growing, yet hardly acknowledged, interdependence on humanity.

Interdependence involves mutual dependence for mutual benefit. Each of us exchange the excess productivity of our specialized skills for the remainder of the goods and services that sustain us. Interdependence is distinguished from codependency, a condition involving the dependence of one party often for the benefit of an enabling party.

In our modern society, we use money as a medium of exchange for our specialized skills. As such, money is the necessary condition for accessing all goods and services including the development of specialized skills. By limiting access to skill development based on how much money we have, modern societies create a global caste of under skilled people who are codependent on wealthy benefactors. This condition is not sustainable because the benefits are not mutual.

The first step toward a sustainable, mutually fulfilling, interdependent society is acknowledging the benefit each of us receives is tied to the ability of all of us to contribute.

The quality of the food we eat is tied to the well being of the people who produce it.

The quality of the shelter we enjoy is tied to the well being of the people who built it.

The quality of love we receive is tied to the well being of the people who provide it.

My well being is tied to the well being of every person who contributes to the conditions that sustain me.

Therefore, I gladly declare my interdependence on humanity, and I commit to support policies that advance the well being of all of us.

How about you?