4.3.17



Why bother?

To provide a satisfactory answer to that question, the English colonists chopped down the breadfruit trees, which seems like cheating to me, but does provide a clue to the current situation.

False Scarcity is the rock this church is built upon.

4 comments:

  1. Ah, once again you've hit upon one of my fascinations.

    I've been putting a lot of thought into false scarcity, from both psychological/magickal perspectives and a wider social context.

    Nietzche pointed out that the world is full. He believed scarcity to be a deeply held illusion.

    On the personal level, it seems if you believe something hard enough it has a habit of manifesting. Convictions create convicts and all that. It might go deeper - it might be that our scarcity belief actually generates more scarcity.

    On a wider scale, you can see why austerity is taken for granted. Austerity's challengers focus on its details and cruelty, or its focus. Few seem to consider that it's all psychologically manipulative bullshit based upon a false scarcity.

    Scarcity and competition go hand in hand. They seem the very basis of capital.













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  2. the breadfruit bit i nicked out of Karl Polanyi if you're interested.
    austerity is clearly ideologial. i quite enjoyed steve bells depiction of osbourne as a leather gimp cos i thought it articulated the sado masochistic psychology underlying the ideology...
    punitive discipline. daddy says no more ice cream.

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  3. its a theme that runs right through the cantos too. when i first started reading them i skipped the economics, it seemed pasted on, but much later i realised its right at the heart of the whole project. eg some historical figure or other buys up the entire stock of something or other to create an artifical scarcity, then sells it at sky high prices. the food riots of 2008 were more to do with commodity specualtion than actual scarcity. course it may be that climate change leads to actual real scarcity, but for now its all butter mountains and milk lakes

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    Replies
    1. I agree about famines. The potato famine comes to mind. It wasn't that there were just potatoes, it was that everything else was being exported by the British, and potatoes were what remained.

      I love Steve Bell too.



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