Abundance
The science of economics is predicated on scarcity and infinite individual desires. Our hyper-consumption, now temporarily halted by a crisis, comes from applying the old strategy of hoarding to a new situation of abundant material goods. And yet the natural world suffers from our rapacious and insatiable need for resources.
But the essence of human life is abundance, a surplus of energy working itself out in time. This means that the fundamental human problem is not how to make a living, but how to spend our lives. The economist John Maynard Keynes foresaw the end of the economic problem, and the need to endow our lives with meaning. According to the French thinker Georges Bataille, we can spend our surplus catastrophically, in war and destruction, or gloriously, in art and eroticism.
What are the consequences of a perspective of abundance and surplus, of expenditure instead of hoarding, for our lives and for our relationship to nature today?