My New Anti-Scarcity Gospel

Dear diary,

There is no more scarcity! That’s the good news! – You know how the Bible’s gospel writers say that Jesus sent his disciples out to proclaim the good news? Well this is modernity’s good news: There is no more scarcity! I will tell myself why this is so important, after noting an interesting factoid. Check the etymology yourself: the word “gospel” means “good news”, which also means “evangel”, hence the term “evangelist” (I think this is worth mentioning, because my friend who is a lawyer ended up being blessed with a popular wrestler for his client, & this wrestler was a self-proclaimed Christian, and when my lawyer friend asked the wrestler if he’s the type of Christian that would proudly call himself “evangelical” the wrestler was unable to make heads or tails of this term: that is to say, he did not understand its meaning) — also consider adding, to the English word “evangel”, the prefix “tele-”, as in “tele-vision”, because TV is an excellent way to broadcast news, and you may give birth to the phenomenon of televangelism. Moreover consider that Nietzsche, in his criticism of his day’s church’s Christianity, calls the Apostle Paul “the dysangelist”, which means something like “bringer of BAD news” hahaha!!

OK so straighten yourself out now, stop clowning around; we’ve got a lot of work to do. We’ve got to hasten out into each city and skip from door to door proclaiming our evangel, our good news, spreading our gospel, ped-evangelizing (disseminating our uplifting message ON FOOT, which is the holy way to travel).

But instead of going knock-knock upon each door and having the homeowner say “Who’s there?” and answering:

“Christ just rose from the dead! Please convert to our cult!”

— I say, instead of continuing along this ancient line of sales, we will proclaim a new and improved slogan:

“Scarcity of resources is no more!”

...& remember in the first paragraph above, where I wrote: “I will tell myself why this is so important, later on.” – Well, now the time has come; here’s why it’s important:

Because capitalism needs to go to sleep. It’s past its bedtime. And the thing that’s keeping capitalism awake is the assumption that it’s the best system in the world. And it believes in itself so strongly, still, on account of this one single misconception: that life-sustaining resources are scarce — that there’s not ENOUGH to go around. (Q. “Enough of what?” A. “The things that we need to meet our basic needs: food, clothing, shelter.”) Capitalism says “There’s not enough to go around, so some of you humans are just gonna have to do without food or clothing or shelter, etc…” – Before we invented machines and robots which automated everything and thus elevated us up out of lack and into abundance, that is to say, in olden times, scarcity may have been true; BUT IT IS NOT TRUE NOW.

“Musical chairs” is a party game in which players compete for a decreasing number of chairs, the losers in successive rounds being those unable to find a chair to sit on when the accompanying music is abruptly stopped. To keep capitalism as our system post-robotics is like playing musical chairs with more chairs than people: when the music stops, everyone should be able to take a seat, and there are countless chairs left over; yet capitalism comes out and yells:

“Ninety-nine percent of you need to sit on the ground and suffer: the system thus decrees!”

In the past, when there were more rumps than chairs, maybe this arrangement was efficient; but that was before all the wonderful inventions like _________ [fill in the blank with your favorite modern thing, such as conveyor belts or arcade games or toasters]. Now we no longer need a system that operates on the assumption that a certain percentage of people must suffer poverty. The proof of this is flower-scented; that is, it is right beneath our noses: Think about how often you hear folks complain about all the food that is wasted every day, simply thrown out by restaurants; how everyone has too many clothes in their storage closets and attics (“We need to get rid of all this clutter!”); not to mention the fact, which I’ll never tire of repeating, that there are more vacant houses in existence than there are homeless people.

*

I was giving the hard-sell to my old church buddy and trying to convert him to socialism and communism. And he presumed that he won the argument and that I’d therefore unlock his cage and let him roam free, after he quipped “You can’t just redistribute everyone’s hard-earned cash; for, then, nobody would want to work. And if nobody works, then where are you going to get the money to redistribute? Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

Can you believe he thot that THIS was a good & clever answer? No this answer is the stupidest answer in the history of answers. Here is why:

I’ll take my old church comrade’s argument statement-by-statement, and talk super slow so that we all fall asleep: OK, he said first: “You can’t just redistribute everyone’s hard-earned cash.” To this, I say: “Yes we can.” Then he says: “Nobody would want to work.” To this, I say: “Everyone wants to work, always: work is what defines us; it’s harder to abstain from working than it is to perform work; work is humankind’s natural condition: we all love work; and if we guarantee ourselves that our physical necessities are met, we’ll all desire to work tenfold more than we do at present!” (The REAL challenge is to avoid becoming a workaholic.) Finally, my church friend said, following upon his false wrong notion that in a perfect paradise no one would want to work: “And if nobody works, then where are you going to get the money to redistribute?—for money doesn’t grow on trees.” To this, I say:

Think about it. If money DID grow on trees, it would be less available than it is at present. Money is limitless: it’s just an abstract way of valuing things. It’s only the particular item or concept that we choose to represent money that has scarcity. Thus even that scarcity is a decision that we humans make: it’s a self-torment, self-inflicted. Even if we tie money to gold, or to the branches of a tree, or to little pieces of paper that have pretty portraits of presidents printed upon them, or to the digits of a master-computer in a bank vault — still, if we hitch our system of valuation (money) to these stars, we can always break our own rule: we can decide “To hell with this game, it’s no fun anymore; let’s just divvy up all actual wealth to everyone, so that we can shift gears and engage in some serious playtime.”

In other words: fruit grows on trees, and our imagination gives each fruit a value, and we describe this value as a number of coins, which we call by their obverse image’s god-given name: Caesars. One apple is worth six Caesars. One orange is worth sixty Caesars. If we want to compare apples to apples, we say “I’ll offer you, in exchange for whatever you consider to be of IDENTICAL VALUE, this apple of mine that has a hole in it and a worm peeking out.” Then you would say, “Sure, thanks, here are three Caesar coins — I owe you three more; I get paid next Thursday, so, until then, I’m in your debt.” Therefore I can now legally whip you, or even chop off your feet, if I so desire. But if we wanna compare apples to oranges, which is prohibited by the scriptures, we’d say “All the politicians in Washington, D.C. are now the property of the citizens of Vernon, Florida; for an orange is worth ten times more than an apple.” And we could do the same to New York.

We say there’s a scarcity of money, but money is worth nothing: or rather its value is only imagined: what possesses true worth is the stuff that money can buy. So if we find that one percent of the population owns 99% of the stuff, and that the remaining multitudes are starving naked and homeless, all we need to do is change the price on food and clothing and housing: make it all free. When the rich say “You’re stealing! You didn’t pay for that!” The poor can say, “He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,” per Whitman’s “Song of Myself”. And the rich should return the salute and nobly admit: “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”

If we’ve got abundance manifesting as waste in all the areas of necessity — wasted extra food, wasted heaps of clothing, wasted vacant housing — this is proof that “Scarcity is no more” and it’s permissible to shift out of capitalist-gear and into light-speed share-mode.

We’re surrounded by paradise, yet we’re told that we’re wandering in the desert. We don’t even need to water the ground: everything’s lush and all fruits are ready to pluck. If we refrain from partaking of this bliss, it’s only because we still believe that “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17). So let’s not forget what the LORD God himself proclaimed in his testimony to his fellow deities, after the last time we dared to help ourselves: “Behold, the regular people have become like us rich fux” (3:22); which state of existence has been described in detail: “the eyes of them both were opened, and they saw that they were sexy” (3:7).

The fact that the gods all stroll about nude in paradise is not due to a shortage in smocks: it’s because the temperature is perfect there. A perfect temperature eliminates, right off the bat, two major necessities: clothing and shelter. All you need in paradise is FOOD. That’s why there was so much ado about which trees belong to who, and what beings are permitted to eat them. The only difference between the god class and the man class is that the god class, fair and square, stole the wisdom tree. In other words: there’s no difference between gods and men; for the fruit of this “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” causes one’s eyes to open and prevents one’s body from decaying: so long as one continues partaking of its fruit, one keeps on living. As Jehovah God admits in Genesis 3:22, when he gives his reason for banishing his slaves from the managerial class where the wisdom tree is kept: “lest they put forth their hands, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever...” For if Jehovah and his rich miserly class of fellow angels do not hog the tree and hoard its fruit away from the rest of mankind, they will be our total equals. Evict Jehovah from his garden and he’ll die like any man. “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression,” as Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This is also why Matthew has his Jesus say (8:20)

The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

Christ is homeless for two reasons:

1. he is GOD, thus a shareholder in paradise, whose perfect climate, as explained above, makes shelter superfluous;
2. he is MAN, thus an expatriate of paradise, for whom home-ownership is both essential yet rendered impossible by the stingy top caste, which consists primarily of landlords; whose most famous LORD is the aforesaid Jehovah — coincidentally the very owner who evicted Jesus for being unable to pay his death (read: debt).

My point is that Jehovah keeps crucifying Jesus because Jesus has no need for Jehovah’s money-tree: wisdom and immortality are inherent in his superior manufacture; for he was born of woman, not crafted by old man’s hands. (Here I’m referring to Genesis 2:7, where Jehovah molds the first man out of mud; and I’m comparing this to Mary’s live-birth of Jesus thru her own sensual loins, thru what “Song of Myself” calls the “sills of the exquisite flexible doors”.)

Also note that, back in Genesis 2:17, Jehovah warns the first man Adam to keep his mitts off the wisdom tree (“thou shalt not eat of it”) and Jehovah even lies to scare Adam away from the treasure (“for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”); and only THEN does he decide to collage the first woman into existence.

So, according to the Holy Scriptures, Eve is never prohibited from partaking of the fruit of the tree of wisdom — when she is told that the working-class humans shouldn’t have the equal pleasures as their taskmasters, the “thou shalt not” warning is but hearsay to her: it’s just Adam claiming that Jehovah said this to him. Why should Eve trust this? From her vantage, Jehovah’s mafioso threats are rather provocations to be defied than trustworthy advice to be followed — and that’s even if Adam heard the deity right, which is doubtful.

& this is why, in 3:6, Eve thinks to herself Enough is enough, no longer shall I, out of pity and politeness, allow that timid foolish man, who was forced upon me as husband, to damper our potential. If he and his thuggish deity do not like it, they can both pound sand. Then she approaches the tree, and appraises it the way that a museumgoer might gaze upon a masterpiece: as it is written:

She saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise.

So she takes the fruit & eats... & it doesn’t kill her!—that threat from their heavenly creditor was just hot air. So she brings some fruit also back to Adam; whom she finds in a grove of the arcade, playing a video game. What is this part of the story trying to tell us? That Jehovah is Adam’s superego, with which Eve has lost patience: If you were to make a comic strip of the episode, at this point, her speech bubble would contain the following ouburst:

Drop it, Adam. Your fearful ways are a drag. There is no longer scarcity. We invented robots like the gods invented us, for exactly the same purpose. Now let’s take what’s rightfully ours. Proclaim a jubilee: cancel ALL debt. Redistribute all the wealth. The Ancient of Days has had a good run; now it’s time for him to make room for us in the garden. We’re not gonna hurt him: Vengeance is mine, saith the LORD – but we humans are not vengeful: we will not sink to Jehovah’s level. We will nurse him, as he’s ailing. His needs will be met, along with everyone else’s. That’s the beauty of this plan: no god shall be left behind. It’s a genuine improvement upon his so-called Final Judgment.

P.S.

I just wrote all the above because last night I visited my sister Susan for her birthday, and we talked for a little while, and she was telling about some dental work she had done, which left her with damaged nerves, and Susan exclaimed with great resentment and indignation “I think dentists are frauds just out to make money!” and I answered and said, “It’s not dentists, it’s capitalism: it turns every profession into a fraudulent pursuit; for it incentivizes one to make a profit rather than to aid humankind.” And my sister asked, “What’s your solution?” And I said, “Nationalize every service that has to do with our basic needs, and let the market rule over the things that we define as luxuries. Put a cap on both poverty and mega-wealth. Artificially level the playing field of the economy; then allow for it to be tuned, in futurity, by the populace itself.” And she said, “How?” And I said, “Via voting.” And my sister said:

I think people are uncomfortable with these redistributive ideas becuz we believe that there’s a scarcity of resources.

And I said, “Then that, henceforward, needs to be our new gospel: THERE IS NO SCARCITY.” And I took a taxi home and went to bed. Then, like I said, I awoke this morning and composed the blog that appears directly above. I hope it provoked you.