Want and abundance based societies

There are two types of society: those whose working principle is want (necessity, absence) and those whose working principle is abundance. In practice, there are all sorts of societies in between these extremes. Strictly speaking, the abundance based society is paradise.

It is important to note that “lack” and “abundance” here do not refer to richness or scarcity of natural resources. In a global scale, the world is rich for all people (which can be seen from the simple fact that it would be rich for all if humanity would be so self-restrained as to keep the world population constantly at 200 million people).

Instead, want and abundance are results of human attitudes. A society that mainly is about “rights” (including money as the licence / right to buy, and including the “state of law” concept) is one that either has a problem with aggressive or greedy attitued of its members. So that “rights” are introduced to deal with these, either to restrict them, or to provide tools so that greed and agressiveness can be more efficient (like greed in capitalistic “states of law”).

Now where these attitudes are eliminated and instead positive “abundance providing” attitudes are developed (as is the ultimate goal of Christian love), the transformation to an abundance-based society is performed. This can be done sector by sector; one example is the “free software” movement, where people wave their “right” to licence their work, and create abundance for people to use their software free of charge and free as in “free speech”.

In extension to these thoughts: it follows that companies are a very poor approach for managing the natural resources of this world. A company is notoriously “want centered”: it always lacks resources, because resources are expensive, and the money should come out as gain instead of being spent on resources. Also, a company has short-range monetary targets and is therefore unable to stick to long-term goals and stability. Just compare the naming and version numbering in the Java world to that of the Linux kernel, or the chaotic development of WIndows to the linear development of the Linux kernel.