Listening to the political discourse of the last few years, it is clear why “abundance” has become a thing. Of course, the last thing I’d apply to the abundance discourse is actually that exact word.
When I think of abundance, I think of the Exodus 15-17, when the people grumble for water and God gives the people water; then they grumble for food and God gives them food; then water again and again, God gives them water. The story, built around a vision of abundance that fundamentally rejects the desire to hoard property or protect oneself. It is about common security and perpetual sufficiency.
I don’t hear this from abundance discourse. I hear scarcity. Complexity. Rejection. Protection of individual property.
I hear frustration with the speed of things and the rules that govern and order our lives. And I hear frustration with the people — both the people who govern and the people governed.
As David Sirota describes in a critique of Abundance politics and the public discourse of the moment, there is a central problem in US politics today with the way we continuously seek to protect power. Not just ours, though. We protect the powerful and the power they wield. And we avoid confronting the problem of power itself.
The hidden problem
In his brilliant book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas names the problem of power from the inside. That we keep looking at the problems around us and imagine how to fix them. Well, as long as we don’t imperil the power of the elites. The central problem of the present age is directly related to our relationship to power. Specifically, the avoidance of wrestling with power imbalance.
The most blatant example of this struggle Giridharadas argues starts from a mandatory “win-win.” That we must make everyone happy before we can move forward on a thing. But the thing is: everybody includes the wealthy and the powerful. And they tend to use this to protect their place in the hierarchy. Of course they don’t put it that way exactly, preferring to suggest that they need to be “won over” to the idea. Like, sure, let’s deal with global climate change, but I’ll only participate in the project if I make more money than if I didn’t.
The win-win requirement is how the wealthy ensure they never have to share: wealth or power. As Congress keeps passing tax cuts for the rich, each time, asking them to support a tax increase becomes a loss for them and they can say Sorry, just not interested. And then Oops, there goes your campaign donation, too! How’d that get in there?
This win-win doesn’t work both ways, mind you. It isn’t like inflation hit and people were like, Sorry, just not interested in buying groceries. But Kroger? They could pitch a fit if you said, Hey, how about we not gouge people with those prices?
The use of an existing power imbalance and a general unwillingness to confront it undermines the foundational argument of Abundance politics because it just doesn’t seem to acknowledge the one thing preventing abundance from being normalized in our common life. It isn’t red tape but people harvesting all of the Manna and selling it to us at prices we can’t afford — and then using the instruments of power to ensure we never name the hoarder’s role in the problem.
Solving the problem directly
The problem Abundance politics wants to tackle is complexity. That things are too complicated and that complications can lead to dysfunction or can be used to avoid the hard work. It is the political inertia, fear, and cowardice around addressing the needs of people that animates most of the discourse.
Abundance is dealing with the problem of complexity without dealing with the people who take advantage of that complexity. But it is also wrestling with a political landscape that is dealing with what a neoliberal economic consensus wrought. This includes a way of seeing the world that is fundamentally myopic, selfish, and pedantic. Like the powerful who demand a win-win, many are bound to a kind of pedantic legalism that doesn’t even try to make new consensus. It allows people to demand a kind of personal freedom that we all just have to live with. That wealthy guy can just build whatever he wants I guess. If only there were something we could do about it . . .
Sirota’s response is that this all would be obvious — if we put the power issue on the table. Complexity is the two-headed monster attacking New York — our problems are complex and our solutions are complex — which make normal people incapable of defeating it. This means experts, of course, who themselves make fat cash dealing with the complexity and ensuring complexity remains intact. This is why we need lawyers to read the legalese and why they insist on writing more of it. And why the Supreme Court will protect Google in light of the 7-page 8-point font end user agreement we have to agree to after we’ve bought the product.
In response to complexity, the only real option is simplicity. It isn’t simple to hire a lawyer. . . unless you have money. It isn’t simple to pay for college. . . unless you have money.
If Abundance politics cared about the problem, it would deal with it more directly. It would engage in a big-tent call to simplicity.
Here’s my take on simplicity.
Complexity is a worldview. It’s a way of assuming everything must be complicated and solutions require complicated systems. And from this framing, simplicity is a pipe dream, fanciful, utopian.
But for many people, complexity is just bullshit. It is an excuse to do nothing or to accept unacceptable conditions. And this frame is just as essential to our moment.
To illustrate, I want to remind us of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the US Constitution. If you haven’t looked at them in awhile, they deal with :
- Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, Petition
- Right to Bear Arms
- Quartering of Troops
- Search and Seizure
- Grand Jury, Double Jeopardy, Self-Incrimination, Due Process
- Criminal Prosecutions – Jury Trial, Right to Confront and to Counsel
- Common Law Suits – Jury Trial
- Excess Bail or Fines, Cruel and Unusual Punishment
- Non-Enumerated Rights
- Rights Reserved to States or People
What we notice is how specific they are, how supportive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness they are, and also how much they restrict what police and agents of the state can do to you.
We focus a lot of attention on the first and second amendments. But the third says that the government can’t force you to open your home to soldiers. The Fourth says the police can’t just search your property and take it. [Hmm. . . somebody should remind the Supreme Court]. The fifth outlines our rights to a fair process and what we can expect from the law — and again, what the law is not allowed to do to us.
So much of this law has been filtered through two really extreme lenses: a libertarian literalism that preserves extreme rights for individuals or a pedantic legalism which justifies the protection of property to certain persons.
Simplicity reveals another way.
I want to highlight the sixth amendment. Take particular note of the first part:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
I’ve highlighted the part I want to talk about, but I first want to point out what is not in this amendment: the rights of the state or the accuser. The focus of this amendment is about fair, just, equitable, and decent approach to the law. And it assumes people are going to try to take these rights away.
When you read this, do you think the word speedy implies, say two years? Six months? Times totally undetermined or thrust onto a person at the last minute? Or, on the flip side, does this amendment give off “sham trial” vibes? Like, ram these things through, one after another?
Similarly, do these words attached to the US Constitution seem like an inconvenience to some people’s preference to cut funds from the government so we can shrink it and strangle it in the bathtub? Doesn’t this imply that every person deserves their due process, that process is actually timely, and that we do a good job of the thing? Hell, the framers gave all of their time to protecting the rights of the accused because they know where the power resides.
Here’s another way this matters.
If you are of a certain age, you have memories of one of the most disturbing tragedies of the late 20th Century: an oil tanker called the Exxon Valdez ruptured off the coast of Alaska in 1989 and spilled over ten million gallons of crude oil into the ocean. Cleanup was excruciating, laborious, and, well, mishandled.
Exxon was tried in a court of law and found culpable, and the people and institutions directly affected by the spill, who got sick, lost jobs, lost loved ones to this tragedy were awarded $2.5 billion in damages. Over nearly twenty years, they still hadn’t received a penny. Then in 2008, the Supreme Court reduced the damages. Now, after nearly four decades of stalling, much of the damages are still unpaid.
Exxon was allowed to appeal over and over again. And then, apparently, keep their lawyers busy long enough to simply not pay it out. And because a corporation is not a person, it can outlast the people who are owed restitution. They can just wait it out.
Does this sound like it matches the intention of the Bill of Rights? Some rules lawyers might say, sorry, it doesn’t say anything about multinational corporations and the appeals process being speedy. But I suspect most of us think that’s pretty bullshitty. What the sixth amendment clearly enumerates is a right to a speedy trial. Not something that goes at the pace of corporations or bureaucrats. And especially not at a pace of delay and avoidance. It is a right to something proactively ours.
When the law is at its best, it is smashing these things together and saying damn it, above everything we have to live here, people! It doesn’t say, for example, everyone for themselves, good luck out there! In fact, the constitution seems far more geared toward ensuring we can live here together than it does giving cover to corporations or the well-funded.
What makes sense
This is why I think simplicity matters more than the current framing of “abundance”. Because it brings both an emotional peace to a mind that is frazzled by complexity and it ensures a value that is being squashed by modern politics: a right to understand.
There are certainly going to be issues with declaring a right to understand. And we’ll have to flesh that out with more specifics, but let’s offer the sniff test to certain parts of our world:
- A right for corporations to trick you with legalese?
- Expecting a speedy immigration process of 12+ years?
- It is currently legal for police to lie?
- Rich people get cheaper credit?
- Right-wing Christians have a right to discriminate?
None of these sounds right in the moral sense. But they also don’t sound right in the constitutional sense, either. Not when you read the Bill of Rights. This collection of constitutional provisions is written to protect people, not just their guns and property.
The common description among many of the constitution as a “living document” has been treated like new age frivolity. But what we’re talking about is common sense and comprehension. It makes far more sense when we consider these laws are written to be understood by us, not just nine unelected judges.
I contend that the problem isn’t with our laws, it’s with our refusal to consider them more simply. And what this exposes is just how invested the powers are in making it all more complex.