Axiom About Insatiability

As soon as he died, Juan found himself in a gorgeous place, surrounded by all the comfort and beauty he had dreamed of.
A fellow dressed in white approached him and said, “You have the right to have whatever you want; any food, pleasure or amusement.”
Charmed, Juan did everything he dreamed of doing during his life. After many years of pleasures, he sought the fellow in white and asked, “I have already experienced everything I wanted. Now I need to work in order to feel useful.”
“I am sorry,” said the fellow in white, “but that is the only thing I am unable to give you. There is no work here.”
“How terrible,” Juan said annoyed, “I will spend eternity dying of boredom! I’d much rather be in hell!”
The man in white approached him and said in a low voice:
“And where do you think you are?”

Paulo Coelho

In my post about basic concepts of the theory of society I listed eight statements about human feelings—eight axioms—that should be taken into account by anyone, who debates about economics, politics, law, social philosophy or life itself:

About Humanism: Only humans feel; collectives do not feel.
About Isolation: Feelings of other people can be judged only by their acts.
About Insatiability: It is impossible to overcome all needs.
About Tastes: People value powers differently.
About Egoism: Strangers' needs are not important.
About Love: Loved ones are only few.
About Justice: The worse the offense, the more offender is hated.
About Envy: The richer the person, the more he is hated.

Today it is turn of the axiom about insatiability: it is impossible to overcome all needs. Ilsebill—a fisherman’s wife from fairytale The Fisherman and His Wife by Brothers Grimm—acts quite natural. Her behavior is not fairytale-like, not magical, as well as the one of her husband, whose main wish is to satisfy his insatiable wife so that she wouldn’t yell at him and just let him be.

Unsatisfied needs prompt to act. Satisfying the need brings joy, but you quickly find another concern, another need demanding satisfaction. As soon as you satisfy this another need, the next one occurs. And so on for the rest of your life.

Scarcity. Wishes can be fulfilled only by the means of powers. There are not enough powers to satisfy all of the endless needs. Powers that we feel short on called scarce. They are also called deficit, rare or economic.

Scarcity of alienable powers. All axioms are based on experience. Experience tells us that our insatiability extends not only to unalienable powers—such as life, health, beauty, intellect or skills—but on alienable powers as well, the most popular of which is money. Only valued alienable powers—assets or property—prompt us to communicate: trade, ask, steal or rob. Should we become absolutely satisfied with alienable powers, we would not need anything from other people and stop communicating, keeping ourselves busy only with increasing our unalienable powers, our unalienable wealth—long, lonely and even sexless life.

Karl Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program proposed a slogan of total communism—very rash from scientific point of view, though attractive for masses: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. However all needs cannot be satisfied.

Scarcity cannot be overcome totally. We can imagine overcoming scarcity of primitive needs. For example, we can imagine surplus in simple food and clothes, simple houses, when everyone gets some. Having a good imagination one can even imagine surplus of all material things, like Harry Harrison did, when described a device called copying machine or duplicator in his series of novels about Stainless Steel Rat. This device could easily copy anything in any amounts.

But even in fantastic world of abundance of familiar things it is impossible to satisfy all needs. One would wish for new, unseen things, which need to be created before copying, and most importantly—for attention of other people. For example John would like Mary to pay attention to him, but not to Bill or any other man. But Bill could also want exceptional Mary’s attention to himself. Such wishes of John and Bill regarding Mary are incompatible. Mary’s favor to one person is a scarce alienable power, an asset that can belong to either John or Bill. But Mary in her own turn may dispose this asset disregarding John or Bill’s wishes. She might choose someone different or not limit herself with only one man at all. She might dispense her favor amongst many men if she has a generous soul.

Scarcity is a consequence of human insatiability, which inevitably faces shortage of some powers—their rarity or scarcity. I should stress that when we talking about scarcity of powers, we always mean alienable powers. It means that human insatiability will inevitably make some of the alienable powers valuable and thus scarce, i.e. turn them into assets or property. In the light of axiom about humanism we should remember that only humans experience scarcity, not collectives. Thus statements that not only people but also the whole nations feel shortage or scarcity of resources should be treated as false statements, as the case of dangerous illusion of collectivism.

In summary, assets—i.e. scarce alienable powers—exist and will exist forever as long as humans exist. In other words, it is impossible to overcome scarcity of all alienable powers.