Since time immemorial wealth has been a catalyst for human behavior. Humans would amass wealth for survival purposes which is of course still the case in our contemporary history. After having their basic needs fulfilled, humans sought wealth as a means to become independent and to end the everyday struggle to survive. Having obtained or regained independence humans run after wealth in order for them to have more wealth, in other words to fulfill their greedy needs. Without realizing most people were trapped or even imprisoned in their so called quest for independence. Their intentions were perhaps pure and sincere at the very beginning of their search for independence but along the way they got imprisoned by their own greed. Greed is a natural human instinct that obviously looks to collect goods which are considered to be scarce.
The industrial revolution accelerated the process of wealth creation. People would work or invest in order to get more wealth faster and easier. Work or investments have been always the classical sources of income. Although, truth be told, most of the people were employees and not investors and needed that work to survive and live a decent life. And by that I mean spending hours a day, days a week, weeks a month, months a year, years a lifetime working for a wage that keeps them bound to a life of servitude. For these working class people, the quest for independence ended up trapping them in an office in the best case for the rest of their lives or in a job that doesn't really allow them to be free or independent.
Now, the observation I make of all the above mentioned is that employees or investors need a source or several sources in order to collect the wealth they need. The employee will therefor work for an employer, the investor will look for investors. The sources of income were and still are scarce. The employee on the one hand could potentially work in two or three companies. It would of course allow him to gain more wealth but at the same time his independence and freedom would be compromised. The investor on the other hand would potentially be limited by the requests investors demand in return for their investments, trapping the investor in a narrow window, again limiting his independence.
As history repeats itself, so will this cycle repeat itself until the end of times, at least that's what I thought. Nowaday technology, especially Steem could alter or even break that cycle. Allow me to elaborate. First of all, as I've mentioned greed looks to collect goods which are scarce or considered to be scarce. I want to emphasize the fact that some goods aren't really scarce but are considered to be scarce. So in order for the greed to be fulfilled and as a consequence disappear it should consider something to be abundant. Secondly, in our quest for independence today, we all look for jobs or investments. Sometimes the jobs we do are really what we love to do, often it's just a source of income. Investors on the other hand, who already are wealthy, are often hard to find or hard to convince. And if they're convinced, they overload you with requests which must be complied with. Banks provide loans, and we take the loans with interest, because we feel like we'll be more wealthy or independent yet forgetting the next 30 years we'll be giving half or more of our net income to the bank. We all know that yet we persevere and pursue these actors to reach their money. Why is that? Because we consider these actors (companies, investors, banks) to be the only sources which can provide us with the wealth and thus subsequently the independence that we seek. So these sources are considered to be scarce, we think that we need a central actor who provides or distributes wealth to private people. That's not an irrational or wrong thought. Individuals or companies with a lot of money are of course best suited to pay money to private people who work for them. They've centralized their position and money and we go to these central piles of money to take some of it in return for a big chunk of our daily lives. And here I believe Steem can be revolutionary.
First of all Steem provides a network which brings also money together. The difference is, there's no centre, no centralized actor but rather a decentralized network. Companies and wealthy people have tons of money(1). To get to their money you'll have to go to each one of them. Nevertheless - in an ideal and perfect world - all other people (individuals or/and families) of the world have also tons of money. The difficulty in reaching these sources lies in the fact that it's practically not possible to go knock on each door and ask for money. So Steem, as every social media platform, resolves that problem. Secondly where we considered money and wealth to be scarce because they piled up with companies or wealthy people, now we have an abundance of money spread over lots of people on this platform. That would mean that in the near future, people could provide to each other the money they need without having to go to a centralized party (bank, company, investor). Everybody takes and gives money when needed. Everybody becomes the investor, bank, employer of the needy. Everybody becomes the key to the independence everyone of us seeks. And if everybody gives money when someone needs it, the cost for one person to give that money would be much lesser than if it were one or a handful of persons. So the cost of providing 100.000$ to someone who needs it would be just 100$ for 1000 people willing to give or 10$ for 10.000 people willing to give or 1$ for 100.000 people willing to give. That makes it clear that money would no longer be considered a scarcity but rather an abundance. And that could subsequently bring an end to greed.
Just imagine what the world would look like if people didn't have to focus or care about wealth and money no more. They'd do what human beings, I believe, were meant to do, namely look for each other, search for the meaning of life, explore sees, earth and the universe and do so much more.
This utopia, which could be a reality, is what Thomas More referred to when he said: "It's wrong to deprive someone else of a pleasure so that you can enjoy one yourself, but to deprive yourself of a pleasure so that you can add to someone else's enjoyment is an act of humanity by which you always gain more than you lose."
Mohamed Omar