You may not know that economical system philosophers (like Hegel and Marx) were considering how to establish and maintain a society free from want. They thought about scarcity and abundance and economic systems in a society.
When one comes from scarcity, one wants abundance. The ”more”, the better. You know from your own life that you like chocolate and you want more. You keep wanting ‘more’ until you have had ‘enough’. When we are talking about individuals, the person that controls his/her wants is said to be self-disciplined. A person regulates his actions to have ‘more’ and determines when it is ‘enough’.
In society, there is a different level of operation. Some people ask the question: Is it possible for groups of individuals to respond to a stimulus so that they can be manipulated to act in a predictable fashion? If so, then society can be structured to solve the traditional wants of the individual (food , shelter, clothing, companionship, freedom, etc.) by creating and stimulating the appropriate conditions, behaviors, and markets.
American democracy and capitalism have solved many/most of the traditional wants of individuals in a society. They have done so thru a variety of stimuli, of institutional structures, and of social mores. Yet all of these things come down to the concept of an individual deciding to take action for ‘More’ and deciding to take action when he/she has had ‘Enough’.
Today’s financial mess is a result of people manipulated to want More. More money, more home, more pleasure, more cars, more respect, and more freedom. This may not be a complete list of what we want More of, but it is a start. When individuals want More goods, it is called Consumerism.
Our ‘More’-oriented society is collapsing. All of the societal manipulations to entice you to have More, buy More, see More, do More, and experience More is under stress. Today Society no longer possesses a financial system that can deliver More to a person because the system itself has pursued its own destruction. Like a drug addict, our financial system has been pursuing More wealth to the point it can no longer function. It has pursued More to the extreme, actually, to the point that it is no longer possible to have More because the banking system is saying Enough. They are concerned that the institutions that borrow money from them will not be able to pay them back. Why? Because the companies and people in general have too much debt. Risky debt. Bad debt.
Which brings us to the root of the problem. The inability to say ‘Enough’. I have Enough, thank you. Is it hard to say that? I have Enough cars, houses, and books. I have Enough money to live on and Enough money to meet my needs. I have vacationed Enough, thanks. I need no More.
We are now at a point where many of us have Enough of what we need. Society in America has Enough wealth and deep inside does not really want More. How do I know this? We expect More to be given to us without any effort on our part. As soon as we stop working for the Mores we want and we start saying that others should give us More, we already know that we have Enough because we are not willing to work for it. Today we want More without working for it. We want a More shapely body by paying for it, not working for it. We want More food without growing it, preparing it, and cooking it. We want More pleasure with drugs instead of working for our pleasures. We want our money to make More of itself in investments (work done by others) rather than using our money to create More work for ourselves for More money.
I know that truly poor people do not have Enough and that they want More. They are working for it, too. Working hard for it, I might add. But are they working to have More or to enjoy More? And how did the world conspire against them to prevent them from getting More?
The wealth of America is great. But our debt is also great and the debt is so great that it is Enough. It was the cheap credit that gave us More of everything that we wanted. The cheap credit permitted us to hock ourselves to our future instead of paying for our present as we go.
Banks do not want More loans or more bad debt. They have said Enough. We should, too.
And many of us are saying ‘no’ to More debt. We have had Enough, too.
Some of us are being forced to say ‘no’ as our lines of credit are cut off, our homes are in foreclosure, not because of anything we did but because cheap credit is no longer cheap. Interest rates rose and ARM’s adjusted to a level that the collective ‘we’ could no longer afford. Housing prices fell because of the glut of homes on the market. All of a sudden we were paying $250,000 for a house that had a market worth of $180,000. And some of us said ‘Enough’. We went bankrupt.
Enough is driving the market now, not More. We have deflation: falling prices because business is afraid they cannot sell to consumers who have said Enough. We all have Enough now. We are not afraid about tomorrow and scarcity. We have Enough. Not all of us, but many of us have Enough.
This will drive prices lower until businesses are fed up with losing money and ultimately they will say ‘Enough’. Then they will lay people off and close their doors. The laid off workers will not be able to find other work. They will look for a job for a while and then they will say ‘Enough’ and quit looking for work.
The economic death spiral will bring us all to a singularity of truth. Too much wealth is just as bad as too little wealth but for different reasons. Then we will all ponder what too much wealth is and choose new economic models to give us control over poverty and wealth.
More and Enough will still be the triggers for us individually but our systems will attempt to control that. Welcome to the world of manipulated urges: More and Enough.
