Blackberries Can Change the World

Did you miss part one of this topic? You can find it here.

Confession: I hate the phrase “scarcity mindset.” I do a fair amount of work in lefty education advocacy circles and if there’s two things that are guaranteed at any such gathering, it will be a.) some weird ice breaker involving coloring and b.) the phrase “scarcity mindset.”

Is there a $100 million dollar budget deficit in our school district? That’s just a scarcity mindset. Our afterschool program is being cut? Seek abundance! This was especially egregious during pandemic school closures. I was stunned to hear many respected educational advocates suddenly saying that kids were learning plenty while schools were closed.

Too often this phrase feels like a way to dodge the problem before us and gesture vaguely at “the system” while paying lip service to some far-off day when taxes will be fair and we won’t need prisons, and all children will attend free, full-day anti-racist Montessori outdoor school, complete with organic, vegan lunch.

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But it’s August now, and the Pacific Northwest is abundant with wild blackberries. When I first moved to Seattle and began foraging them, I always made sure to be clearly on public property and not to pick a bush clean. Always I was anxious that some property owner would appear and accuse me of stealing.

Of course, no one has ever cared. We are overflowing with blackberries. We have more than any person could ever eat. That’s abundance.

In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer delineates between gift economies and capitalism. Gift economies operate on a principal of abundance, while capitalism requires scarcity—you can’t price and sell something that’s freely available.

Unless you can manipulate people into buying it.

Capitalism creates scarcity. Marketing fools us into thinking that bottled water is better than tap, that blackberries from the store are superior to the ones growing on our street.

Hierarchies create scarcity. Having food, clothing, and shelter isn’t enough, we have to have trendy and fashionable items. It’s not enough that college has become widely accessible, it’s Ivy League or bust for our kids.

It’s as if we distrust abundance. Is this the scarcity mindset everyone is always telling me about? Is it possible to break free of this mentality?

The authors of The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism would say so. In this paper, the authors posit that there are four categories of reaction to neoliberal capitalism:

* Strivers: these folks believe they can make it; they just need to try a little harder, find the right productivity hacks, align their chakras, or maybe go back to school? The authors also put those interested in Wellness and Self-Help (WASH) culture into this category, and talk about how wellness can become a pipeline to more dangerous ideologies (*cough* RFK Jr. *cough*)

* Innovators: these people see the problems in the system and look for alternative arrangements. We’ll come back to them in a sec.

* Dropouts: these people have lost hope. They don’t see a path towards getting what they want in life and often leave the workforce or are extremely dissatisfied/burnt out by work. The authors attribute many “deaths of despair” to this category.

* Rebels: this group embraces political solutions to their problems. The authors spend a lot of time talking about the MAGA movement and conspiracy theories like Q-Anon, but I also wonder if leftist populist movements fit into this category.

All of these reactions have pros and cons. Is it better to strive all your life against a system you can’t beat, or to accept that your ambitions will never be satisfied? Is it better to organize politically? If so, to what end?

I confess, I’ve been a striver most of my life. I’ve read every habit hacking and productivity book you can get your hands on and spent hours taking seminars to help my business and make me a more efficient cog in the machine. Sunk cost fallacy makes this worldview an especially hard habit to break: once you’re so deeply invested, how do you admit that maybe you were wrong?

But the more I butt up against the system, the more I find innovation appealing. Where and when is it possible to opt out of competition and exploitation and into cooperation? What can we organize for that will help the whole instead of pitting us against each other?

And here I think orienting towards abundance is helpful: I can’t control the system—I can’t self-help my way into being richer or more successful, but I can strive to be happy with what I have. As long as our work is honest, there’s honor in it. It might not be prestigious or well-paid, but we can take pride in doing our best at it. Work doesn’t have to define who we are.

Yes, budget holes and program cuts are reality. We can’t wish our way out of these problems, that is all true. Also true: we often overlook the abundant things in our communities, the blackberries of it all. What overlooked resources can we draw upon?

I don’t have it all figured out, by any means, but I’m starting to notice abundance and value it. And that feels like a step in the right direction.

Where do you see abundance in your life? Do you forage for wild foods? And what do you think of this 4 archetypes chart? As always, I love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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