How deep does Abundance vs. Scarcity go?

So why does Abundance vs. Scarcity have to be either or? Couldn’t you just determine, in each situation, what pattern is fit and apply the right assumptions for that pattern? There are a couple different reasons why I think these specializations are best implemented as fundamental dispositions, as attitudes that are at the very core of personalities. The first has to do with Relevance Realization and the second with consistent, habitual action.

I’m using Relevance Realization to reference the concept John Vervaeke has developed. He has a whole lecture series developing this and related ideas, but the aspects I find important to the sequence of posts is how Relevance Realization is the answer to the problem that in real life, there are generally too many possibilities to consider all of them. If someone has to explicitly consider every possible consequence of an action to see if it is relevant, then, even if you are very very quick at making that consideration, it will take you practically forever, since the number of possible consequences is so large it might as well be infinite.

So humans need some way to narrow the field of things to consider that isn’t dependent on logical elimination. You need to just see it. You need to just Realize, in a way that is prior to your conscious rumination, what possibilities are Relevant. There’s no simple process to go back, after you’ve made a considered categorization of the situation, and re-do your Relevance Realization. You’ve already set your frame. Your automatic processes have already picked the things you are going to use in your conscious analysis.

People who haven't specialized are likely to miss important things about an abundance situation that scarcity specialists would see and things about a scarcity situation that a scarcity specialist would see. It will take a big breakthrough, something that shakes up their whole way of thinking and scrambles their assumptions, to let them pick up those details as relevant after they have rationally evaluated the situation as abundant or scarce. The only sure way to pick out the urgent, prominent characteristics of an abundant situation is for an abundance specialist to look at it, and likewise for a scarcity situation. Because those prominent characteristics just won’t be prominent to a non-specialist, they won’t stick-out and seem salient to weigh heavily in decision making.

  Izium Salient in 1942  The Ypres Salient at Night

The basic meaning of ‘salient’ is something that sticks outward so it is noticeable. In the military it is used of a situation where soldiers’ positions stick out towards the enemy relative to the rest of the battle line. It is a focus of both opportunity and danger. The perspective you take on them can make a lot of difference.

All this has assumed that we have a long time to consider and evaluate and consider again. But the other reason why an abundance or scarcity specialization needs to be deep set and long lasting, is that we can’t take that amount of time for most decisions. There are so many small routine decisions we make each day that most of them are made in seconds. We do this by having the basic frame and context of such decisions largely made beforehand. Stop to chat with the neighbor this morning? Put some extra tomatoes in the shopping basket? Empty the garbage now or wait til later? We make so many decisions each day that we don’t even think of as decisions. Having a set of orientations and pre-set assumptions not only allows these many decisions to be made in a reasonable amount of time, it creates a coherent strategy where the decisions support each other in a general direction toward a coherent set of goals. It creates a personality of how you approach socializing, resource management and schedule organization.

These are habits of thought that take time to develop and time to break. You can’t switch personalities and relational styles based on what sort of resource you are dealing with today. If you want to reap the long-term benefits of consistent specialized strategy you’ve got to let the disposition settle in for the long term and sink roots deep into your fundamental assumptions. So while there can be non-specialists who think about abundance and scarcity in a post Relevance Realization way and make use of understanding them on the surface layers, there will still be advantages to those who build a specialization into the base layers of their personalities.