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A Grand Unified Theory of Everything (except physics)
[I like that Medium “stories” can be edited after they are published. This article is an experiment in backfilling. I find that most non-fiction books are too long. The author has about seven words to say, but needs 100,000 to get paid. I first published this article on October 16. I consisted entirely of the seven bold, italicized headings below. Over time, I hope to flesh out these seven “words” (i.e., words or phrases). Readers can judge whether I have actually added anything by doing so.]
Scarcity
It’s right there in Genesis. God placed the First Couple in a garden of abundance. When it turned out that they couldn’t handle abundance, He “created” scarcity:
And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
To the ancients, God had some explaining to do. Scarcity didn’t seem to have to be. Yet there it was, the defining fact of the human condition. The universe was a competitive space. Man screwed up, and God said to him, channeling…