The whole elephant

Abundance is my philosophical obsession. It's my idée fixe, it's what I've been thinking about for 30 years and writing about. When I was with friends recently, they told me after all these years, we still don't know what you mean by abundance. I was really shocked and defensive, and yet I thought they're right. It's not a simple term. There is no soundbite definition of what abundance is.

There are a few things that abundance is not. It's not just affluence. It's not just being rich. In fact, abundance is more like a relationship between what you need, what you need to live a great life, and what's available. If you have so much more than you need, not just now, but also in the future, if you have no worries about it, if you feel that you're living in a time of plenty, then that's abundance. If you're feeling that you're short, that you're in debt, that you're behind, if you're feeling that you have wants and needs, but the world doesn't provide them for you, if you have to struggle to attain them, then that's a world of scarcity. But I know plenty of rich people who are living in a world of scarcity. They're terrified somebody's going to take their money away from them. They think they need ever larger stockpiles just to feel safe. They need it for all these kinds of luxury products to feed their identity. And so abundance is only tangentially connected to how rich you are.

Abundance is not a magic word. It's not about manifesting abundance because we feel like it. It has real world consequences. It's a world historical shift. It is what's happening to the history of humanity. For a lot of humanity's history, we were fighting, we were struggling, there were constant wars. There was a sense of survival. There was a limited pie that we had to compete for, that we had to get the biggest share of.

The idea of a growing pie, of an unlimited pie with plenty for everybody wasn't realistic. But through technological development, through our economic system, through peace and cooperation and globalisation, we've created a world where we can build things incredibly cheaply at very high quality, and we can give everybody the means to live a wonderful life, to thrive, to make their own choices about how they want to live, who they want to live with, what kind of work they want to do, where they want to live. We've given that freedom, which was only available to the richest people in history, to larger and larger groups of people, billions of people on this planet, even if there's still a lot of work to be done for the billions who don't have access yet. And that should be our first priority: democratise this wealth. In a world of abundance, that's what we would be doing.

But we still have this mindset, this framework of scarcity, which is forcing us, which is driving us to compete, to invent luxury goods, which are insane, just so that we can keep our economic system going, to restrict the use of things through laws and intellectual property that don't make any sense. We can make people wealthy. We can give everybody the means to live a fantastic life, but we refuse to because we're terrified of what would happen if we do. And that's a scandal, and that's what we need to point out, but it's also something we need to understand and live through, and champion the people who get away from that, who have invented this new system, living in the 21st century.

That's the work of abundance. It's that shift. In order to do that, we must link everything. Perhaps you know the tale of the blindfolded men and the elephant. They all just touch a bit of it. The person touching the trunk thinks it's a snake. The person touching the leg thinks it's a tree. The person touching the side thinks it's a wall. Those are the experts. They understand everything about economics or about psychology, or about politics or about technology. I'm not an expert. I'm a generalist. I am interested in everything. I look at everything. I want to look at the whole elephant because everything is connected. Everything is intertwined. It's a system where our psychology affects our consumption, which affects our trade, which affects our laws. We need to see the interrelationship. But I can only look at it from one perspective. I can't look at the whole elephant from all possible perspectives. That's too much work.

The perspective that I've chosen, the glasses that I've chosen are these glasses of abundance: the shift from scarcity to abundance, the shift that humanity is making to a world of abundance. When I put on these glasses, I see how it's changing our world. I see that the economic rules that we invented for a world of scarcity don't make sense. The economic laws break down when there is more than we need. You can't sell stuff to people if they already have access to all the music in the world, all the writing in the world, all the learning in the world, and yet we find ways to restrict it. Our property laws, our patents and copyright where we restrict other people from using stuff that we are not using ourselves is a ridiculous and scandalous way to deal with our common heritage.

It means that our financial system is shifting. What do we tax? We used to tax work because work produced value, but now it's money that produces more money. It's profits that produce value, so we should be starting to tax those. We should be sharing the outcome of the work that is the work of the human race, the AI models which are trained on all of human knowledge. We should be stakeholders in them and have a right to their profits through a system of Universal Basic Dividend, or whatever you want to call it. These systems need to be invented and tested.

About our lives: what are we going to spend our lives on if we're not working all the time? We had a chance to reduce our work week through the computer revolution, through telecommunications and smartphones. And we didn't. We just kept inventing more work to keep ourselves busy because we have no positive concept of what it means to have leisure, to live a life of leisure. We only have a negative word called unemployment, so we need to investigate the future of work, especially when we have smart AI models, which are going to take over a lot of it, and soon enough, the smart robots. And that's a good thing. But it means reinventing, reimagining a completely new world.

And that's my task and my joy and what I'm going to be doing in the future. So to my friends and everybody else, there is not a single definition of abundance. There is no soundbite. It is a world historical movement. It is a shift that we're all engaged in, that sometimes we don't see because it's like water is to fish. We are inside it, and we need to be conscious of it, and we need to take charge of it, and we need to shape that future with all the possibilities that we have. That is the task of all of our lives, and it's the task of my lifetime. This is something I take great joy and great excitement in working on, even if I have to keep explaining what abundance is.