D/G, desire and scarcity

Here's two related Posts I found on the theme of desire and scarcity that we spoke about last time - going into some more philosophical depth...

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/scarcity/

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/how-revolutionary-is-desire-anway/

As I mentioned last time I think it would be really cool to try and author a text collectively - perhaps the theme of scarcity would be a good place to start?.. I will try to write some initial thoughts/notes on this and put them up on the blog and then other can add their thought and change / edit what we have?...

"We might mention that the dialogue of scarcity is something we really see beginning in the early modern social contract theorists (most importantly Hobbes and Locke). But scarcity wasn’t the dominant paradigm previously. Most medievals and ancient Greeks emphasize that nature provides humans with the necessary goods in a great deal of abundance – as long as humans, as part of good political regimes, take steps to ensure that the human population is supportable by nature and that the desires of the citizens do not become uncontrollable.

The argument that nature produces abundance rather than scarcity (or that nature is friendly as opposed to hostile) is a plausible one: humans are quite omnivorous, able to eat numerous types of food and find many different kinds of food delicious – from meat and fish to fruits to vegetables to nuts to grains to sea plants. Humans can reside in a wide array of environments. A properly small number of humans can easily find abundant resources for commodious and moderate living."