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<DIV>I'm on the right track with a lot of bolstering from your Life Strategies and from Bill Tillier, who managed to snag a copy of your very hard to get classic and xerox the whole thing for me.</DIV>
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<DIV>Another element helped cement the thought--Robert Cialdini's Scarcity Principle. Cialdini corraled a mass of social psychology studies indicating that we all hanker after what everyone else wants but can't have. We lust for things that will make us the center of admiration and attention. Those things--those status symbols--are usually rarities. And guess who manages to display his or her wealth by showing the rarest things of all? The rich.</DIV>
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<DIV>And where do the rarest things come from? Usually from very far away or from some process of manufacturing that is still so new that only a few of whatever it is have been made--digital watches in the early 1970s--space flights today. So what does that make the rich? Synapses between distant cultures. Feelers toward the future. Pathmakers to new empowerments and new possibilities.</DIV>
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<DIV>That's what the rich are in Western Culture--a mass-production and mass-marketing culture that takes scarcities to the masses very fast. Digital watches made it from rarities in 1972 to everyday items in the early 1980s and to commodities so common they seemed trashy and were replaced by analog watch dials again in the 1990s.</DIV>
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<DIV>That doesn't happen in the societies we idealize--indigenous cultures. There the rare stays rare and the masses don't undergo vast leaps of capability in five years or less. So should we really be knocking consumer culture, mass production, and mass-marketing? Only when those who consume spend more than they have. Or when we can prove that we're carving vast cavities in the ecosystem the provides us oxygen, food, and weather we can live with...weather that shields us from ice ages, ultraviolet rays, and continent-covering floods. Howard</DIV>
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<DIV>In a message dated 7/28/2004 8:27:16 PM Eastern Standard Time, kendulf@shaw.ca writes:</DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>This is a quick one, Howard. Here you are on the same trail I was when I first saw that the rich in human society are the usually the biological dispersal phenotype. Indeed, the rich are notoriously our pioneers! And they are BIOLOGICALLY! structured to be that way thanks to luxurious nutrition beginning with conception. See my old <EM>Life Strategies</EM>...(1978) book on this issue, chapter 6 entitled "<U>How genes communicate with the environment - the biology of inequity</U>" . Yes, yes and yes again to your musings. You are on track. Cheers, Val Geist</FONT></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century<BR>Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.<BR>For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>