Artificially Creating Scarcity

The creation and perpetuation of scarcity is a prerequisite for dominator systems maintenance. It is largely through the production of scarcity that this system, which uses fear of pain as its major motivation for work, maintains itself.

Certainly, environmental or other circumstances can lead to real scarcities. But artificial scarcities are constantly created by dominator politics and economics through overconsumption, wastefulness, exploitation, war or preparation for war, environmental despoilation, and failure to invest in high quality human capital by not giving value to caring and caregiving.

Overconsumption and wastefulness by those on top is a perennial feature of dominator cultures. Whether it’s the opulent Roman feasts or the million-dollar parties of today’s super-rich; the grandiose palaces of kings, emperors, and dictators or the extravagant mansions of Enron and WorldCom CEOs; Imelda Marcos’s thousands of shoes or the immense bank accounts of the Sukarno and Suharto families, it comes to the same. Those on top waste resources and those on the bottom scramble for the scraps.

Competition for scraps often takes on racial, religious, and ethnic overtones. Smoldering prejudice is easily fanned into flames of hate and often violence. Jews are accused of evil economic conspiracies, and people of different races or religions are vilified as unfairly taking away resources from those entitled to them.

This scapegoating serves two functions. It divides those on bottom, pitting them against one another. And it channels frustration and rage away from those whose policies and habits are largely responsible for the scarcity of resources for those below them. All this maintains a system of domination and exploitation in which inadequate wages and lack of a social safety net further lead to the belief that there is not enough to go around.

A mentality of scarcity affects the wealthy as well as the poor. It discourages a more equitable distribution of wealth by those on top, out of fear that they too will find themselves having to do without. A mentality of fear and scarcity also leads to economic rules and policies that permit, even promote, predatory business practices as necessary for survival. This creates more scarcity of resources by eliminating competitors who, along with their employees, lose their livelihoods.

Chronic scarcity of resources that support life is caused by still another prototypical feature of the domination system: funneling resources into weapons and warfare. Today’s trillion-dollar-per-year financing of technologies of destruction and domination drains away funds that could be used to care for people’s health, education, and welfare. Warfare then compounds the problem, destroying resources as well as people, producing even more scarcity and misery.

• According to World Military & Social Expenditures, the cost of a U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile would feed 50 million children, build 160,000 schools, or open 340,000 health centers.
• According to a UNICEF report, the cost of one nuclear submarine would provide low-cost rural water and sanitation facilities for 48 million people, and the cost of 11 radar-evading bombers could provide four years of primary education for 135 million children.

In 2005, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) calculated that the cost to taxpayers of U.S. military operations in Iraq came to $5.6 billion per month. But the same Congress that authorized these astronomical military expenditures cut federal investments in health, education, and welfare on the grounds that there wasn’t enough money to fund them.

Dominator economics also chronically create scarcity through low investment in caring for children’s physical, mental, and emotional development. This, coupled with the system’s allocation of enormous sums to armaments – money that could be used to promote more general abundance through investment in a society’s human capital – prevents the creation of the “high quality human capital” we hear so much about. All this retards the economic development that can prevent scarcity, chronic hunger, and poverty.

But it’s not only material resources that are wasted in dominator systems; it’s also emotional resources. Rigid top-down rankings, whether in the family or state, are artificial barriers to trust, empathy, and caring. Control over possessions as well as over other humans becomes a substitute for meeting basic human needs.

Modern mass marketing has successfully capitalized on these unmet needs by manipulating people’s yearning for love, security, and trust. Ads for everything from deodorants to diamonds promise love. Sex with gorgeous women is implied in commercials for soft drinks, hamburgers, and cars. Security, trustworthiness, even emotional involvement, are pledged by insurance and stock brokerage advertising campaigns.

The not-so-subtle message of these kinds of promotions is that if we want to satisfy our yearning for love, fulfilment, security, and joy, what we have to do is to buy and consume. So the poor crowd the aisles of dollar-stores accumulating gadgets and trinkets, while the rich accumulate houses and yachts. And while all this wasteful accumulation clutters up our homes and our planet, those at the very bottom of the dominator hierarchy continue to die of hunger and disease.

This takes us to yet another way dominator economics lead to artificial scarcities: environmental despoilation. Critics often blame industrialization for our mounting environmental problems. But environmental problems are not unique to industrial economies. Environmental despoilation is characteristic of the domination system. It goes way back, beginning with prehistoric herders who depleted soils through overgrazing, creating scarcities that, in turn, fostered relations based on domination.

Excerpted from The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics by Riane Eisler