Post-Scarcity Ethics | Beyond the Transactional Society

The Mass Delusion of “Deserving” Survival

Peter Joseph is a filmmaker & author; host of the podcast Revolution Now! and one can support his work through Patreon.

It is perhaps the most pervasive and powerful theme in market propaganda—serving elite interests at the expense of humanity itself: the idea that the only moral justification for your existence is to receive only what you “work for.”

If you listen closely to the way most people talk about “work,” you’ll notice this reflex buried in the conversation—the assumption that if someone gets something without “earning” it through a transaction, they must be lazy, dependent, or taking from those who actually “produce.” That reflex is so deep in our cultural DNA that even people barely surviving within market capitalism often defend it.

The truth is that no one alive today “earns” their way into modern civilization. You didn’t invent language, mathematics, agriculture, antibiotics, or the power grid. You didn’t build the satellites that beam your phone signal or design the microchip that runs your car. You were born into a world already constructed by centuries of indisputably collective labor, science, and infrastructure—an inheritance so vast that any notion of “self-made” effort dissolves instantly on inspection, sustained only by a persuasive mythology that ultimately serves one class: the economic elite.

This essay unpacks why the transactional ethic—the belief that everything of value must be bought, sold, or individually “earned”—is both historically false and systemically destructive. It then explores what a more intelligent, cooperative view of entitlement would mean in a world that is already, in material terms, post-scarcity but psychologically addicted to the illusion of endless want.

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The Collective Inheritance

Every time you use a GPS app, send an email, or take a medication, you’re drawing on centuries of accumulated public knowledge, much of it developed through government grants, open science, and unpaid caregiving. Your paycheck, in this sense, is a remix of social inheritance. Without the accumulated discoveries of the past, private enterprise could not exist.

Electricity, for example, was never a corporate invention—it was built from Faraday’s and Maxwell’s experiments, through public utilities and state-funded grids. The internet began as a government research project. Modern medicine rests on public research universities, not private patents. Even the notion of a functioning market depends on public law, standardized currency, and social stability.

Every productive act today is nested in a system of inherited cooperation. To speak of a “self-made” entrepreneur is like speaking of a “self-made language.” When we discuss universal healthcare, education, or income guarantees, we are not talking about charity; we are talking about dividends on civilization itself. Productivity today is a team sport played across generations.

The notion that one “deserves” more because they “worked harder” ignores this entire cooperative architecture. It reduces civilization to a scoreboard, as though value can be fairly measured in wages detached from social context. The wealthy, meanwhile, benefit most from this inherited order—public infrastructure, legal protections, global labor mobility—while claiming moral ownership of what the collective built.

The moral paradox is profound: those who rely most on collective systems are often those most opposed to sharing their returns.

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The Transactional Ethic

The mythology of “earning” through individual labor crystallized during the Industrial Age, when markets were elevated as moral arbiters of worth. If you could sell your time or product, you had value; if not, you were a burden. This ethic grew alongside capitalism’s obsession with scarcity—a worldview in which every loaf of bread had to be fought over and every right to survive had to be purchased.

The result was a new theology of work. Suffering became proof of virtue, while comfort without toil was framed as corruption. The system taught that life itself must be earned through struggle—and that struggle legitimized inequality.

But this ethic never matched material reality. Today, automation, digital production, and global logistics have made it technically possible for all people to live well within ecological limits. The problem is not scarcity but artificial scarcity—of money, access, and ownership. These are design choices, not natural laws.

The transactional model insists that you must first contribute through market labor to deserve consumption. Yet market labor is rationed by business cycles and profit margins, not by social need. When technology replaces workers, output rises—but access to that output still depends on jobs that no longer exist. People are excluded not because they are idle, but because the system measures worth by payroll instead of participation.

Capitalism, in other words, cannot reward efficiency without erasing its own justification. The more productive it becomes, the less it can morally defend its demand that everyone “earn” a living.

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Competition and the Culture of Deservedness

Competition is often presented as the engine of progress, the natural order. Yet hidden within this mythology is an expectation—and even a need—for losers. Without losers, there can be no demonstration of merit. The result is a moral inversion: fairness is redefined not as everyone having enough, but as everyone having to struggle.

Suffering becomes sanctified. Hardship is reframed as proof of virtue. But if technology reduces the need for human labor, the entire moral foundation of that ethic collapses. We end up sabotaging the tools of abundance to preserve the illusion that struggle gives life meaning.

This explains why automation is often viewed with dread rather than relief. Machines that could free us from drudgery are seen as threats to employment. Comfort without toil feels suspect, as though convenience were sin. We internalize the idea that effort itself—not outcome, not creativity, not care—is the measure of value.

That anxiety runs deep. When people complain that others “get free stuff,” what they often mean is, “They’re not suffering the way I had to.” The resentment is real, but misplaced. The cruelty isn’t that someone receives; it’s that anyone had to suffer to receive in the first place.

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The Economics of Enough

Post-scarcity is often imagined as a distant technological utopia—robots churning out endless goods, AI coordinating perfect efficiency. But the real frontier is not technological; it’s cultural.

A society grounded in infinite growth will never reach abundance, no matter how advanced its machinery. As long as we define progress through expansion—more production, more consumption, more novelty—we remain psychologically scarce. Markets depend on that scarcity. They manufacture dissatisfaction to perpetuate demand.

This is what economists call “infinite wants,” but it is less a reflection of human nature than a form of cultural neurosis. Hedonic adaptation ensures that as material comfort rises, satisfaction does not. Each gain becomes the new baseline; each novelty fades into necessity. The result is a treadmill of permanent discontent—an economy of craving that must grow or die.

Such a culture is unsustainable by definition. To argue that human wants are infinite is to admit that civilization, left to its current logic, is terminal. A post-scarcity society, therefore, is not one of limitless abundance but of redefined sufficiency. It is a culture that matures out of its compulsions, that learns to value balance over accumulation.

Minimalism, in this sense, is not aesthetic restraint—it is ecological sanity. To know what is “enough” is not a personal virtue but a survival requirement for civilization. A culture that cannot recognize enough will destroy itself trying to fill a void that does not exist.

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Reciprocity Without Transaction

This deeper shift also redefines what it means to contribute. One of the loudest objections to universal provision is the fear of “free riders.” If everyone receives without earning, won’t people stop working? But reciprocity does not require symmetry. Healthy societies operate through asynchronous exchange: people give and receive at different times in life—during childhood, illness, education, or caregiving.

Hunter-gatherer cultures practiced generalized reciprocity: give when you can, take when you need, without ledgers or guilt. The health of the group was the metric of value, not individual tally sheets. We already live this way in families and communities. You don’t invoice your child for dinner or bill your friend for listening. Mutual dependence is what makes us human.

Extending that logic to society is not utopian—it’s simply rational. The richest economies in history still struggle with preventable poverty precisely because they treat compassion as a transaction rather than a design principle. Yet when survival is guaranteed, people don’t stop contributing; they start contributing meaningfully. Creativity, caregiving, and curiosity flourish when they’re no longer chained to fear.

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Efficiency, Not Charity

Beyond morality, unconditional provision is the most efficient way to run a complex society. Every dollar spent preventing poverty saves several in downstream costs—healthcare, crime, homelessness, bureaucratic policing of scarcity. It is cheaper to guarantee sufficiency than to enforce desperation.

The same logic applies at the planetary scale. Economies built on competition for survival waste immense creative potential. They divert human energy into zero-sum struggles over access, rather than collaborative problem-solving. Universal floors and shared services are not moral luxuries—they are system optimizations.

Cooperation, not competition, is the architecture of stable systems. Nature, cybernetics, and human evolution all converge on the same truth: resilience comes from reciprocity, feedback, and shared balance. A society designed around fear of laziness will spend its existence proving its own cynicism.

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Automation and the Self-Defeating Logic of Capitalism

This brings us to the final, inescapable contradiction. The more capitalism succeeds in increasing efficiency, the less it can justify its moral premise. Automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence are fulfilling the old capitalist dream: doing more with less labor. But rather than celebrate liberation from toil, the system treats it as catastrophe.

Consider a simple illustration. Ten people work a farm and share its harvest. Then automation arrives. The machines do all the work, yield doubles, and yet those ten are laid off. To eat, they must now find new jobs or go hungry, even though food is abundant. The technology meant to free them becomes the reason for their exclusion.

That is not an economic oversight—it’s the design logic of the system. Ownership, not productivity, determines access. The profit motive demands scarcity, even if it must fabricate it. Capitalism thus devours its own premise: its pursuit of efficiency destroys the moral fiction that people must “earn” survival through work.

The irony is almost poetic. The same ingenuity that made abundance possible reveals the bankruptcy of the ideology that birthed it. The market’s moral code—“You deserve only what you work for”—collapses the moment work becomes technologically optional.

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A Culture Grown Up

A mature civilization does not test its members with deprivation. It creates conditions where everyone can thrive and where contribution is voluntary, not coerced. We already practice this ethic with children and the elderly; extending it universally is not radical, it’s consistency.

To view survival as a public guarantee is not to abolish responsibility but to redefine it. True responsibility lies in sustaining the collective organism we all depend on—the planet, the commons, the social fabric. In cybernetic terms, this is homeostasis: the feedback balance that keeps a system alive.

The next moral revolution, then, is not about left or right. It is about realism. The transactional ethic made sense in a world of scarcity; it becomes cruelty in a world of potential abundance. Clinging to it is like demanding people chop wood to power an electric heater—ritual for its own sake.

A society that guarantees survival for all is not spoiling its citizens; it is optimizing itself. We have perfected production. Now we must perfect distribution—and the psychology that accompanies it.

Imagine a civilization where every person has access to housing, healthcare, education, food, and the tools of creation. Work still exists, but as choice, not coercion. Innovation continues, but for the joy of improvement, not the fear of hunger. Competition may remain, but only where it inspires excellence, not exclusion.

That is not utopia; it is the logical outcome of our own progress, if we stop mistaking market worth for moral worth.

The idea that life must be earned was the final superstition of the scarcity era.

The question now is whether we can outgrow it. Because when survival is guaranteed, contribution becomes authentic. And that, perhaps, is the first sign of a truly civilized world.