This is the first newsletter of the new year, so I thought I would write on a subject that can support a positive tone for the coming year – abundance. Abundance seems like something most people want in their lives. There are certainly a lot of weekend seminars, books, videos, and training courses all focused on how to generate abundance in you life, or at least wealth. With all this support you would think we would all feel the tremendous flow of abundance around us all the time. I don’t see that happening in the folks I see every day. Most people are concerned about lack, even obsessed with lack. Why is that?
As with most of my philosophic musings, I tend to look at things from a slightly different perspective. I ask, “What creates abundance?” Looking at the long history of human kind we are able to see some really obvious determinants of abundance within human societies. Looking back about 50,000 years we find very little abundance. This was a time of hunter gatherers. Their entire day was spent looking for food. They might steal left over kill meat from a larger prey animal and eat well for a few days, but most of the time life was a constant struggle against starvation.
Fast forward to say 15,000 years ago and humans have developed better hunting tools like spears and bows. More importantly humans have started banding together into mutual support tribes to fight off predators and to work together to bring down larger game animals. By working together they were able to accomplish feats of food provision far greater than they could as individuals. Mutual cooperation created greater abundance. This is the key message.
As humans moved into an agrarian lifestyle, tribes turned into towns and then into cities. As people learned to cooperate to a greater and greater degree, greater abundance developed. People could specialize and develop skills that were impossible before when all their energy was spent on looking for food. Social structures were created, such as religion and government and laws. Because as people began to specialize, they became different. The needs and wants of a blacksmith are different than the needs and wants of a pig farmer or a squash grower. Think of our relatively recent history 150 years ago in our western states with the terrific wars between cattle ranchers and sheep herders. To most of us the two groups would look almost the same. But to each other they were mortal enemies. Their needs in how they handled range management conflicted, with one needing open range and the other needing fenced range land. Difference can create strife and conflict. Yet at the same time it is precisely the cooperative interaction of differences that creates abundance.
I am a DIY kind of guy. I make all kinds of things that most folks simply buy. I do this because I want things made in a way that I cannot find available in the marketplace. When I find something made in a way I want, I am so grateful for its availability. I don’t have the physical time to make everything I want or need. I have to depend on others to have the skills and inclination to make things I want. I appreciate their efforts to produce products I desire. For me, this is the essence of physical abundance. I produce a product or service that meets the needs of people and in exchange I am able to obtain products and services I want or need. On the surface it sounds simple. It’s not.
There is an evil in this garden of idyllic life. Everyone has needs and wants. Everyone has a limited amount of time and energy to expend toward getting those needs met. No one has an infinite abundance of time or work energy. Therefore, for the system to work there has to be fair exchange. Every time someone takes without giving back an equal exchange an imbalance is created. Gain without exchange creates lack. It does not matter if that gain is through theft, unfair business dealings, entitlements, taxation without representation, or inflation created by printing money without real value behind it. All produce a destruction of abundance.
An interesting side note about entitlements. Do you know where the word comes from and what it is really about? It comes from the concept of holding title to land or properties showing right of ownership or use. To be entitled means you are given title to said land or properties by some greater authority. This idea was created back in a time where the sole boss of any area of land would be some sort of king for that area. The king would entitle (give) ownership/use of pieces of land to various people who promised loyalty and to serve the needs of the king. It was the king’s way of delegating the work of managing the land and making the land profitable to his supporters in exchange for their promise to follow him and pay taxes to him. In no way were entitlements ever meant to be free. They were an exchange – goods, services, and taxes in exchange for land ownership and prestige.
So lets take this to a deeper level. The feeling of abundance seems to be intrinsic to feeling happy. Most people are unhappy when they are feeling they lack their needs being met. This stuff is actually tracked by the United Nations in their yearly World Happiness Report. One of the key metrics they track is called social capital. It is a measure of people’s perceptions of social support networks, corruption in government and business, and confidence in public institutions. Based on just financial data, the US should be the happiest place in the world to live, but it’s not. In fact it is rather a ways down on the list. Our feeling of social support is low, our trust in our government and business is even lower, and our trust in our public institutions is a joke. Once sacred cows like scientific research are now completely untrustworthy. The editor of the most prestigious medical journal in the world – the New England Journal of Medicine – recently said that at least half of the studies in the journal are fake. Most of the rest are biased to report meaningless results as important findings. The hallowed objectivity of our universities has turned into little more than marketing tools for big business.
Big picture – this all comes down to trust. Abundance flows from the cooperative participation of differences in people making mutually beneficial exchanges with each other. The lubricant that allows this to happen is trust. You have to feel that you will get good value for what you have to offer so that you can get your needs met equitably. If you do not believe you will get good value, then you have no motivation to produce good value. If you see others getting something for nothing, then you will want that as well. This type of thinking destroys abundance. This is looser consciousness. Trying to get more than your fair share based on equitable exchange of goods or services produces lack in the system. That lack produces instability and a rebound decline in participation with its natural decline in abundance as a result.
I know lots of people think they can get ahead by getting something for nothing or by getting more than their fairshare, and it looks like it works in the short run. But the reality is that this behavior angers people and they decline future participation with you. You end up without support and ultimately stuck in lack. Its like cheating at cards. People figure out you are cheating and you don’t get invited back to play anymore.
This all sounds rather heavy, and that is because it is. The simple version is “play fair or we all lose.” The upside version of this is the formula for building abundance – “play fair and be trustworthy to build abundance in your life.” Abundance is not about simply getting more money as demonstrated in the happiness report. We have doubled our GDP per capita over the last 40 years, yet our measures for happiness have dropped dramatically. Twenty years ago the average person had six close friends, now that number has dropped to between zero and one. Trust is at an all time low. This is not a good path to happiness and abundance.
The cool news in all this doom and gloom is that the remedy is simple and begins within each of us. It does not require any government programs or huge social changes. It does not need extra time or energy or anything. It just takes each of us playing fairly and making all our interactions based on mutually beneficial exchanges – no games, no trying to get the advantaged position where you get more than you put out. It is a very old idea. We even call it the Golden Rule – “Treat others as you would like them to treat you.” It works and it is doable. When you live a trustworthy life, you attract other trustworthy people to participate with you. This, to me, is the real abundance – to have quality people in your life that you get to outflow your love and participation to.
