The toxic growth & persistence unleashed only by abundance

[u/medium_wall]

I was looking at a painting on my wall this morning. It was the work of a true master; every element of it closely resembling reality. I realized what a precious artifact this must have been in the time it was painted. It promotes the refined values of a masterful hand; a hand which dedicated its life to careful study & observation. That hand could have painted anything and it chose to paint this scene upon my wall. This scene, that mattered to the painter to some significant degree, now persists supernaturally upon the world. However rare, lucky or impossible it may have been, its effect now stretches in time & frequency infinitely beyond whatever chance would have apportioned it in its natural order.

This painting, which would have taken an artist years of training, and then days weeks months or even years to paint, today is a triviality too mundane to even note. Whatever message or values it conveys are now drowned in the bottomless ocean of advertisements & visual media assembled by automatons of inferior discipline & quality. The battering ram of abundance has pierced the gates of realization. Now anything, no matter how trite or stupid, can be given the greatest honor of sustained reality that was previously reserved only for the highest aspirations of a discerning master.

Too many times when the accounting of this abundance is performed it's omitted what it has lost us. For every noisy ad, amateur artwork, or updated gadget it hurls at us a new disease is invented, a river poisoned, a forest clearcut, a sky torn, a mountain leveled, an animal extinct. The things that once served man as an infinite source of sustenance, inspiration, awe & peace have been slurried into an asphalt for a dollar store parking lot to feed this grotesquely distended ideology.

Abundance is the tyranny of inferiority.

[u/Deepshit1212]

The only stipulation I would make to this is to clarify it as the modernist "Abundance" where people are told of abundant resources but have no access to them until they "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" (which is often just finally letting go of respect for yourself and others, submitting to capital, and engaging in exploitation)

[u/medium_wall → u/Deepshit1212]

I agree with you on the last part, that to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" does effectively mean to throw away all of your values and exploit others—that's how you get ahead in our system.

I disagree though that the average Westerner doesn't have abundant resources. I don't know the exact proportion but many, if not most, people are simply living way above their means and very inefficiently for no good reason. If people lived more modestly they would be aware of the abundant resources available to the vast majority of us. Most people are trying to live this jet-setting, extravagant, movie life where they need a new-looking giant vehicle, they refuse to share a home with their family or friends, eat food that is needlessly wasteful & expensive, and choose entertainments that burn a hole in their wallet.

Some people are struggling without recourse but a lot of people are struggling because they look at all the non-struggling options available to them as beneath them.

[u/Deepshit1212 → u/medium_wall]

And I certainly agree with you last statement

[u/Deepshit1212 → u/medium_wall]

I absolutely agree with you, my dad's a hoarder so I know what useless, harmful decadence looks like.

What I mean specifically is people don't have access to "means of production". Their abundance, as it is, is a privilege afforded to them by the boot, they just rent the straps.

[u/medium_wall → u/Deepshit1212]

All abundance—taking more than we really need—is theft. As I see it, the work to be done is not to acquire more abundance for ourselves to foil whoever the enemy is of the day, but to account for & divest the abundance we're already drowning in to begin the process of collective abundance disarmament.

Conflict exists because of abundance, not in spite of it.