Coming to Terms with Scarcity to Escape the Capitalist Paradigm

Buying a house has become the ultimate symbol of security in the modern age—at least for those who can afford it. In cities like Berlin, even rental apartments are fiercely protected. Tenants sublet their flats for years while living abroad, driven by the fear that they’ll never find another place upon returning. But what fuels this fear of losing one’s place? And what are its consequences when we look at the bigger picture?

Gandhi once said: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”

And he was certainly right. But when we look at our friends and family members buying houses, there seems to be more about it than greed. Rather, it is about making sure to have a secure place while all other types of security — pensions, job stability, even environmental conditions — gradually fade away. With all the world-ending-scenarios, holding on to what seems to provide certainty is just a logical consequence. At least you can always return home.

Buying one home to live in is certainly not a problem. However, holding on to one’s rental apartment while not living in the city or buying up additional apartments whenever an opportunity arises points to a mind-set with two troubling implications:

First, it traps us in the belief that there’s not enough for everyone. And second, this belief turns into a vicious cycle because it makes us desperately grasp at every little (material) security available. By doing so, those who have the means end up taking more than they need, and those without end up with nothing. As the German proverb says: Ihnen wird der Boden unter den Füßen weggezogen (Engl.: the ground is being pulled out from under their feet).

For many young, upper-middle-class Europeans, buying a home may be out of reach, but investing in ETFs (exchange-traded funds) is a viable alternative. ETFs minimize financial risk through diversification, but this very feature disconnects investors from the real-world impact of their money. The problem is that investments are not just money floating around, they in fact have some very real impacts on the places we inhabit. As political geographer David Harvey notes:

“Capital necessarily creates a physical landscape in its own image at one point in time to have to destroy it at some later point in time as it pursues geographical expansions and temporal displacements as solutions to the crises of overaccumulation to which it is regularly prone.”

(David Harvey, 2004: The “New” Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.)

What does that mean? This means that the 100 EUR your grandpa invested in an ETF might very well contribute to the displacement of a young Congolese boy by co-financing the construction of a new factory. It means that the increasing private investment in real estate turns housing into a commodity, where the owner of your rental flat might very well be a global investment firm based in New York City.[1] It means that the disposable income of the higher socioeconomic classes literally builds on the land and extracts the resources that the lower socioeconomic classes need to live.

My security is someone else’s displacement.

On a small scale, this seems meaningless, but if we think of it in a global context, our fear of scarcity in the future leads to the world becoming ever more uninhabitable. Carleheden and Schultz predict that this will lead to an increase and intensification of “brutalized geo-social conflicts” that are “inseparably linked to the habitable earthly conditions that are becoming scarce in this epoch.”(Carleheden & Schultz, 2022)[2] Those conflicts revolve around land, territory and the earthly conditions for life and subsistence. While it may seem like a stretch to connect territorial conflicts in the Anthropocene with individual fear of scarcity, questioning the very concepts of ownership and property brings us to precisely this point.

Imagine a world where we didn’t own our houses, land, or even clothes, but instead borrowed them temporarily. A world where flats were inhabited for a time and then passed on to others after our departure. In such a system, no one would need to fear being left out. Existential worries—securing food and housing—would no longer drive competition. We’d face less mental stress and would consider environmental cycles and sustainability more. The degradation of the earth, similarly to social oppression, is intrinsically connected to the illusory concept of ownership, in the words of Karl Marx:

“From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias.”[3]

(Karl Marx, Capital Vol 1)

Does this mean that we should not buy houses, invest in ETFs, and safeguard our pension? Who should make the first move? Why should I take the leap if no one else does?

There are two ways to overcome the scarcity paradigm. One is an individual and to some extent spiritual way. It is the way of discernment between what we own and what we are. In fact, there’s nothing that we truly own. We are born naked, and we die naked and even our bodies are subject to change. Relying on external objects as a means of identification creates existential insecurity, because external objects are impermanent.

Identities that are built on changeable objects are insecure identities.

Billionaires keep accumulating money because even the richest people fear losing their wealth and status. This race cannot be won. Instead, it distracts us from seeing that we need nothing to be complete. We attain the most peaceful state while we are asleep, while we lose touch with our bodies, minds and the material world. We continue to exist despite not doing, thinking or owning anything while asleep. Recognizing that our actions, thoughts and belongings are therefore not essential to who or what we are, allows us to build a more secure foundation. Whether or not you believe in the existence of a soul or a higher power, you can cultivate an understanding that you’re already whole and that this wholeness essentially is your security.

Secondly, we can explore other means of security. Means that don’t rely on individual enrichment, competition and collective oppression. It is the means of mutuality. In many countries, this means is still very much alive. It is the favor you do for a friend without expecting anything in return. It is paying for your parents’ new fridge, not because you owe them, but because they are an inherent part of your existence.

It is about understanding that my well-being is inherently connected to and dependent on yours. Do you really think that you can just look away when someone in need asks you for help? You can rationalize not helping them, but eventually, the impression of your own non-compassion will stay with you and create internal dissonance.

Essentially, both ways are one. Because once you understand that you’re not what you own, that none of the changeable objects you once considered essential to your identity (your money, your home, your body, your mind) are you, you’ll ask yourself: Then what else am I? And eventually, this inquiry will lead to the insight that “I” and “you” are one, and that mutuality is not a matter of altruism but essentially Self-serving.

Individual and collective liberation are two sides of the same coin. Freedom cannot be about independence, once you realize that independence is a myth. On the contrary, acknowledging our dependence, not on material goods but on each other, can set us free from a system that has made us believe that we’re never truly safe. Let us un-chain our minds from our fear of scarcity and our identification with ownership, obstacles that keep us small and divided. Let us take a leap and depend more, so that we can deconstruct our fences together with our fear of each other and reconstruct a world that is habitable and safe for all.

[1] To better understand the relationship between global finance and the housing crisis, I recommend the documentary “PUSH – On the Right to Adequate Housing”.

[2] Carleheden, M., & Schultz, N. C. B. (2022). The ideal of freedom in the Anthropocene: A new crisis of legitimation and the brutalization of geo-social conflicts. Thesis Eleven, 170(1), 99–116.

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, vol 1 (New York, 1976), p. 911.