Kimberly Steele

I have not gone hungry or faced any real threat of hunger in this lifetime.  In lives past, I believe I starved to death several times.  One of them was when I was an ugly, short, singing sailor from Portugal.  A couple of times, I starved by virtue of being an average peasant child.  The odd part of having starved to death in previous lifetimes is how it manifests in the present one.  In my case, I know that I could starve to death again.  I would not be happy about it but because it happened before, I believe I could handle it with slightly more grace.  

Scarcity is not just about food... not by a long shot.  Entire economic models are based on scarcity -- capitalism springs to mind. Fear of scarcity, otherwise known as FOMO or the Fear of Missing Out, is an extremely powerful force.  Since mankind began, it has been used as a lever to control human minds, both individual and en masse.  

Think about the ads you've seen or have been forced to view: GET IT NOW before it disappears!  WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!  Fear of scarcity convinces our feeble minds to be temporal.  That's not where it ends though: we aren't supposed to merely live in the moment.  We are supposed to exploit it for all it is worth.  Fear of scarcity tells you that you need to get what is yours NOW at the expense of everyone and everything, including your own body, mind, and soul.  

Dentists Suck

There are plenty of examples to choose from when looking for the exploitation of the temporal at the expense of all else.  One is the common dentist's office.  Dentist's offices are routinely housed in ugly buildings in what can be called disposable architecture.  Disposable architecture in the form of office buildings and strip malls puts function over form.  Huge parking lot deserts engulf blocky, brutalist buildings that squat on the landscape like protruding warts.  Car-centric infrastructure prioritizes greed and the ends justifying the means and is the tragedy of the commons writ large.  Once we are inside the door of the dentist office, we are bombarded by messages insisting they create smiles when in reality any given dentist office is an expensive torture chamber that attempts to create physical beauty.  Though dentists are technically doctors, much like other allopaths, actual human health is the last thing they promote or encourage: if the patient is not a returning customer, the gravy train grinds to a halt.  If dentistry was actually about health, the first sight upon entering a dentist's office would be media informing patients about nutrition and oral health.  Teeth are bones.  Like any other bones, they depend on what enters the body for their health.  A dentist may chide about sugar, but that is the tip of the iceberg.  Bones deteriorate because of acidosis, which is almost always the result of consuming too many refined/simple carbohydrates and animal products while not moving enough.  The bottom line is dentists don't care about your physical health because they are both greedy and willfully ignorant about the rather obvious connections mentioned above.  The traditional dentist's office model of business recurs with stunning regularity: a harem model of unhealthy, female, often obese "helpers" surrounding a man or group of men who own the practice.  The point of such an organization is the sale and in the dentist's case, the sale is about facial beauty, hence copious advertisements featuring models with Photoshopped chiclet teeth advertising proper brushing and flossing.

Idiocracy

In the satirical film Idiocracy, a film set in a dumbed-down future, Costco is depicted as a place to shop, go to law school, and to get various sexual services at inflated futuristic prices.  At the present moment, Costco and its competitor, Sam's Club house a bizarre array of services, including optometrist's offices and tire shops.  Like dentist offices, warehouse stores occupy the landscape with zero regard for aesthetics.  Costco is a tragedy of the commons that exists mainly to enrich a small handful of fortunate people at the top of the pyramid.  This tiny percentage, which has been called the one percent but is actually more like the top twenty percent, represents a class that does not understand conscious financial worry.

I had an ex-boyfriend who delighted in using scarcity to torture his female admirers.  I don't think he engaged in his odd form of sadism with any subtlety or introspection.  He operated by instinct.  His thing was openly admiring a girl's features, implying a lack or deficit in whomever he was trying to inflame with jealousy.  So not only did the target lack sex appeal, she also lacked him.  The It Girl would have him for a hot minute.  He soon moved onto the next one, or two, or three, destroying the previous girls' fragile egos in the same way.

Perceived scarcity raises the value of a person, place, or thing.  I believe my music will be appreciated far more after I die than while I am alive.  I guess I will have to be careful about figuring out how to make my Will.

Right now, money is scarce (and yes, I am cleaning my toilet daily with zero disregard for monetary ups and downs).  I keep having to spend money I don't have.  This gives money an inflated value and presence in my mind that it does not deserve.  As a child of the upper middle class with plenty of old connections there, I can confidently say the upper middle class does not share my problems.  They jet-set around, buy all sorts of crap, and take a great deal of it for granted.  Whether this changes their brains for better or worse remains to be seen.  There is no one size fits all.  It's complicated.  

The upper middle class does not like scarcity.  They are very bad at handling the emotions it dredges up, hence toilet paper hoarding from 2020-2023 and compliance with absurd orders and experimental shots during the Covid era.  The question is, to my mind, how to predict what they will do given a new confrontation with scarcity and how to avoid direct fallout when it drives them crazy as it did a few short years ago.

Scarcity and Prison

The worst way to die is in an oubliette.  For those unfamiliar with the concept, an oubliette is a dungeon made from a pit in the ground.  Oubliettes are usually found under old castles and fortresses.  The term oubliette comes from "to forget" and speaks of a place where no one can hear you scream.  

I think oubliettes are the worst way to die because death comes slowly and with no witnesses.  If you are pulled apart by four horses or stuck and bled in an iron maiden, you're at least aware of when it is going to end.  Immolation or drowning is similarly quick.  Even impalement can be sped up if you have the willpower to deliberately relax and get it over with.  In an oubliette, your pain is dependent upon the training and serenity of your mind.  Left alone and to their own devices in a place of forgetting, some minds disintegrate into the worst torture imaginable.

Prison is when the state uses scarcity via deprivation to torture its inmates into compliance.  Prison is society's oubliette used to sequester those who have done shameful and antisocial acts.  Prisoners inevitably compensate for what has been made scarce: normal relationships are supplanted by lliasons or outright rape by the same sex (or opposite sex if the prison allows transsexuals).  Deprived of good food and alcohol, prisoners find other ways of sustaining and intoxicating themselves.  Damien Echols was falsely accused of murdering three eight year olds when he was eighteen years old.  He was sentenced to death by legal injection.  During his long stint in prison, he was put into solitary confinement several times.  Deprived of sensory stimuli, he taught himself Western ritual magic from books, often working on magic day and night.  He credits the study of magic to his survival.  In Echol's rare and unusual case, he replaced his physical world with connection to spirit, kneecapping the efforts those who sought to punish him for crimes he did not commit.  

If mortality is a prison, and I believe it is, how is scarcity being used as a lever of control?  Though it is clear there is only one escape -- death -- how can we get around the forces who would seek to punish us?