02 Cosmic surplus

The surplus - all the energy we have in excess of what we require to stay alive - is the driving force of human progress and civilisations, of all life on this planet, and of our vast universe. How can we understand and use the surplus?

Transcript

Welcome to Cornucopia, the podcast where we examine the shift to abundance. My name is Karim Benammar, and on today's walk I want to look at the surplus. The  surplus is a key notion to understand why we are living in an age of abundance, why we can have a shift to abundance. The surplus is really the energy that powers all life, and that makes living abundantly possible. 

So let's look at what the surplus is. What does the word surplus mean? Surplus is a synonym for excess. What we have too much, much more than we need. It's a French term: surplus. Sur means over and plusmeans more. So it's what you have over and above of what you need. In that sense, it's what is excessive, what is more than you need.

And the term surplus is used in economics a lot. When you have a surplus on the balance, you sell more than you buy, or you have more coming in than going out. Your bank balance can have a surplus; it can have a deficit. A deficit, again, is less than you need, or less than zero, and a surplus is more than you need, or more than zero, or more than the balance point that you need. And so this idea of a surplus is that we go over and above this balancing point.

Now for me, the surplus is not just a technical concept or an economic concept or a mathematical concept about a balance. It's a force, it's an energy. I actually think that we could call the surplus, the fundamental energy of life, and as such, it's this driver of progress and growth and civilization. I think it's important that we understand why there is a surplus in the first place, where it comes from, and how it affects our lives, and how we can make use of it,  and why we can think in terms of a surplus. 

This idea of the surplus, which may be an obvious one, is not one that is generally accepted. I would say that today there are a lot of people that argue that there is not enough to go around, that we're running out of things, that the planet itself cannot support human beings, that the general structure of life is one of deficit, is one of lack ,is one where we need to do as little as possible. And so this idea of a fundamental surplus driving our abundance really goes against that fundamental argument. 

Now, where should we start? Well, you could start anywhere really, because every aspect of life partake of this surplus. We could start with a really large cosmological picture of the universe or solar energy hitting our planet.  We could start with life, how life on Earth grows, with solar energy powering plants, powering animals, powering human beings. We could talk about the history of humanity. We could talk about how a community or a group grows and achieves things, builds things, leaves behind more than it takes. You can look at your own individual energy and see what you do in your life. And I think that's pretty cool: You can link the surplus, which is the structure of the cosmos of the universe t o the kind of surplus that powers history, that powers civilization, that powers communities, and that powers your own life. Across all these scales, there is a constant surplus. 

Now, why am I so certain of this? I think there is a very simple reason. If there wasn't a surplus, the system could not have kept going. If there wasn't a surplus, we would have died out long ago. If there wasn't a surplus, there wouldn't exist a planet or a universe. Everything from your life to human history, to the history of the planet, to solar exuberance, to the universe itself comes from this surplus, and it depends for its existence on this continued surplus.

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So the surplus is everywhere, but let's start with our lives. We human beings are capable of generating more energy than we require in order to survive. If we generated less energy, if we had this deficit, if we couldn't eat enough calories, for example, if we didn't have enough energy, we would starve. Our bodies would stop functioning. We would cease to exist. And if we were to break even in terms of energy, We couldn't really change. We would spend all our time trying to feed ourselves, trying to warm ourselves, trying to protect ourselves. We would go around spending all the energy that we had just for survival. There would really never be any excess, any surplus.

And of course, for almost every one of us, that's not the case. The amount of time and energy that we spend to get the calories that we need to survive come to just a fraction of our day. And on some level, this has always been the case. When we were hunter gatherers, we didn't spend all day hunting or gathering. We had time to make shelters. We had time to cook food. We had time for stories, for art,  for games, for play, for love, for war. Our life has never really been, except in some very extraordinary circumstances, an experience of a continuing deficit or even of breaking even in terms of energy. It's always been an experience of surplus.

Now, of course there have been global famines in history where for one reason or another, we couldn't produce a surplus. Sometimes because there wasn't enough food. But famines usually happen because of a drought or another weather event, or because of war. And there are individuals who, because of age or because of physical or mental limitations, can't produce the surplus for themselves. They depend on the surplus energy produced by others, or by the community. And in the case of famines, it's also the surplus of the neighbors, of the community, or of the global community, which can help with food aid.

We don't need to go step by step through the history of human beings since we were hunter gatherers, through the rise and fall of great civilizations and the industrial revolution and the great acceleration of the 20th century. We did that in the first podcast, but you can see that the amount of surplus is growing b history, and that it keeps accelerating.

We only need to work a few hours a week to produce enough food to survive. There is a tiny percentage of the population that works in farming, whereas a century ago, more than half the population was engaged in farming. So only a small percentage of the population can feed us and all the rest is surplus.

Now again, we don't just survive on food. Some of the surplus goes to housing, it goes to utility bills, it goes to healthcare, to transport, to all our other needs. And it's also true that today, whether you're talking about rich countries or poor countries, there are a lot of people who struggle to make ends meet. And so you may not feel that there is a surplus, especially if you're short of money or if you have debts.

But I'm not really talking about a financial surplus. I'm talking about a surplus of energy. I'm talking about a surplus of life. Even people who are struggling financially - and certainly people who are not struggling financially - have an immense surplus in terms of energy.The surplus is also all the food and drink that we have and that we choose from, the clothes that we wear, the access to education, to the I nternet, to music, to entertainment. Even if you're not well off, you're still technically not spending all your time to survive. 

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that everyone is well off financially. We saw in the last episode that half the world's population still lives on less than ten dollars a day. I still think that we could all be well off. That's something that we could strive for. That's something that we could make possible - but we're not there yet. I think it will depend on our creativity, on our technology, on our sense of distribution, and our politics. It will depend on our generosity, on our feeling that we have more than we need. We'll talk in the coming episode about what it means to be rich, to be truly rich. 

In the past, life was a struggle. A struggle to survive. It is still a struggle for a large part of the human population, and it is still a struggle for people even in well off countries. But the other half of the global population, the half that is doing increasingly well, proves that it doesn't have to be a struggle. They have enormous surpluses, surpluses of foods, surpluses of goods, surpluses of experiences, surpluses of possibilities, financial surpluses. The fact that humans create surpluses is natural. The creation and the experience of this surplus is really the fundamental human condition.

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We have this fundamental surplus, but the surplus itself is also threatened, is also challenged. First, of course, by natural disasters: you can have floods, you can have droughts, you can have earthquakes, you can have volcanic eruptions. These natural disasters from the point of human beings don't add to the surplus. They subtract from it. Natural disasters set back humanity. And sometimes, for example in the case of the dinosaurs, it can actually be terminal.

Then there are diseases: viruses and bacteria. They are not consciously out to get us, but they have an enormous impact on our survival, on our joy in life. And that's something that's not very difficult to explain in the middle of a global pandemic. We now all understand what havoc  this small virus, which crosses the species barrier, can create in the human population. We all have to live through this pandemic. We can see the enormous cost in human lives, the economic cost, the level of global disruption caused by the coronavirus.

And then there's war. Human beings need to organize this surplus, so they need to decide what belongs to whom, what piece of land, what possessions, what rights, and they don't always agree on this, to put it mildly. So a lot of us, surplus energy, a lot of our spare energy, has traditionally been used for war. Young men are trained to use their excess energy to fight. Sometimes it's a competition, sometimes it's a game, but sometimes it's for conquest. And you also need a significant surplus in order to have a war in the first place. If you need all your energy to produce enough food to survive, you don't have the strength to fight, you don't have the spare energy. A society has to organize itself to support an army, to spend money on all kinds of weapons. Wars have always been incredibly expensive. In today's terms, wars cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

And wars, of course, are extremely destructive. They destroy human lives, they destroy infrastructure, t hey destroy the economy, they destroy society. Once you've had a war, you need to start from scratch, you need to rebuild, and you've been pushed back in your natural progress for a few decades. Wars have been omnipresent in human history. If you look back at the last three thousand years on some accounts, we've been at war for 90% of that time. So imagine how much we've pushed ourselves back, again and again, with this surplus that we have. We've used the surplus that we have to fight wars to push our progress back. 

Think of it as a balance sheet. There is the surplus, the energy that makes all life grow. And then there are other things that stop that growth, that reduce that growth, that set that growth back. Natural disasters, disease, war. And that leaves a final one, literally the final one: death. The structure of biological life itself is that it has a beginning, it has a flourishing, a living, and it has an end. And part of the biological surplus is that there is a surplus of life, of beings which are born, which live, which die, which are rotated through time as it were. 

And one mystical way to put it is to say that life itself is this energy expanding itself in time. Energy expends itself in time, and that is what we call life. And experiencing this surplus energy is our life. It might be a little bit strange to put it like this,  and we'll get back to it on another walk, but for the moment I wanted to bring it up. Life is energy expending itself in time. Our experience of life is as energy expending itself in time.

So we can start with the energy that we have in our lives, with this surplus that we have, which allows us to survive and to thrive and to have progress, b ut we can also start at the other side, if you will. We could start with the universe itself. The universe is also fundamentally energy expanding itself in time.

Now, we believe that the universe started with a big bang, that all the energy that is now present in the universe was concentrated in something that was not much larger than the head of a pin. And to call it a head of a pin itself is a little bit strange, because there wasn't really space and time - at that time. But anyway, our understanding now is that there was some initial event, and then a very rapid expansion, and then space and matter were created.

And we think that happened about 14 billion years ago. People are still tweaking that number. So 14 billion years is a long time. And to get a sense of how enormously vast the universe is, we believe that there are a hundred billion stars in a galaxy, so 15 times as many stars as there are people on earth in one galaxy, and we believe there may be a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. And we adjusted that number recently, actually. We think now there's three times as many. Whatever it is, it's an enormously large number. The universe is very, very big. And our place in this is that we are living on a planet that is orbiting one of the small stars. Not a very important star, not even a very important galaxy. We're not really at the center of anything. 

So let's zoom in from the whole universe to our solar system. Our star, the sun exists because of this cosmological surplus of the universe, because of that initial energy expanded in time. And we exist because of the surplus of the sun. The sun is a star that has a constant nuclear fusion reaction, and that is sending out photons - light - into the universe. And that energy dissipates in all directions, but some of that energy hits planet Earth. And with the right combination of chemical elements and protective atmosphere, this has led to the emergence of life: single celled life, and then more complex life, and then plant life, and animal life in the seas and on land, and culminating from our perspective, then, in this monkey that came down from the trees, developed this massive brain, gained consciousness, and then self-consciousness of its own existence. 

And then we move  from pre-history to history. The monkey got organized in tribes and nations, started agriculture, science, technology, industrial and communication revolutions. And here we are. And so you can link this Big Bang, or you can link the story of the universe and our solar system to our existence today. This is what we call Big History, and there's a wonderful TED Talk by David Christian, which I highly recommend. In twelve minutes, he will take you through his whole history of life itself in a masterful way.

But I'm telling you this story because I want to focus on the surplus energy in all of this. None of this would've been possible without a constant surplus of energy. And yes, there are upheavals on a tremendous scale. Stars will die out. They will turn into what we call white dwarfs or black holes or supernovae. There is a gamma ray burst, which we just detected, which lasted only a few minutes and had as much energy in it as our sun will emit in the course of 10 billion years. The universe has a lot of energy. It's an enormous place with a lot of energy. The universe is a place of constant change, and it's still expanding.

On the time scale of the solar system, there will be enormous shifts. On the geological timescale of Earth, there are enormous shifts. Hundreds of millions of years ago, there was only one supercontinent on Earth, and we know that the continents themselves move - very slowly from our perspective. Our very existence in a way has been caused by one of these upheavals, by this media that we talked about that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and it created an opportunity for the small mammals to grow and to evolve into apes and humans. And at some point there were different kinds of hominids, or human apes. And homo sapiens, we are just one of the ones that became dominant. And then when we move from the pre-history to history, there's all the upheavals with civilizations rising and flourishing and decaying and disappearing, and new players coming on the scene. And so this process, which we discussed last time, was given an enormous boost by scientific inventions and technological development.

And so at whatever scale we look, we see this upheaval and change. But all of this, this upheaval, this change is powered by this enormous energy. And within this  sense of energy, the surplus is growing because of our capacity to master technology, to master science, to master life on the level of code.

And I'm bringing up this enormous cosmological description of the history of the universe and the solar system and the planet Earth and our human civilization to point out that the surplus was the key element in all of this. We need to understand that the surplus is natural. That is, if by natural we mean that it is at the core of our very existence. This is what the universe, and the solar system, and the world, and our civilization, and human life,  is. The surplus is really what our life and our experience of life is all about.

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So, when we ask: why would human life be abundant? Why are we undergoing a shift to abundance? Well, the overwhelming reason for abundance is the surplus. And this is not just my opinion. This is not some strange belief that I have about existence or human beings. The surplus, as we've seen, is what life itself is. The surplus is a fundamental characteristic of our existence. The surplus is literally what we are as human beings, 

And so I think we should actually turn the question around. Instead of questioning abundance and the possibility of abundance, we should ask: why is there scarcity in the world? How is it possible if life itself is surplus, iIf the universe and the solar system and our planet continues to generate an abundance of energy, of solarradiance, of life, how come that we experience scarcity? How do we have a sense of a lack? How can we feel that there is never enough and that we can never have enough? 

Now we've seen that there are setbacks to the surplus. Some are natural, like natural disasters. We've seen that there are wars and conflicts and famines, artificial disasters caused by human beings, and all the remaining struggles that we still have today. But I believe that we must understand that it's not because of a lack of energy, of a lack of surplus, of a lack of opportunity, of a lack of potential. It's because we haven't found a way to channel that surplus energy in a productive way, in a way which would give us all an opportunity to thrive, to live an interesting life. And, I think, also deep down, it is because we don't believe in this abundance, we don't believe it is possible to challenge this surplus energy in that way.

Now, of course, our challenges, at time, seem overwhelming. We are surrounded by crises. We have the climate crisis, we have the economic crisis, we have the conflict crisis, we have the human crisis, we have the current pandemic. And sometimes it may seem that there is no way out, but here again, I think we should turn the question around. The obvious path, the natural path, the path of life is a path of surplus, of abundance, of possibility, and a crisis and an upheaval, whatever shape it takes, whatever reason, whatever scale is just one of these temporary setbacks.  It's what pushes back the surplus.

When we talk about these setbacks,  they can happen on different scales. They can happen on a global level, on a national level. Countries go to war, countries are experiencing an economic recession. There can be hardship in different countries because of natural or because of societal reasons. Life can be difficult for many. Sometimes the challenges are global, such as the current pandemic or the global climate crisis. And we can experience this crisis and upheaval on an individual level, in our own lives. We can become sick, we can have an accident. There are all kinds of setbacks in the things that we want to do in our lives.

All of these are really the temporary setbacks in a continuing story of expanding energy, of expanding surplus, of expanding life - and that is the story of abundance. And so, I believe that we should start asking different questions. Not: how are we going to survive, but how are we going to thrive if we have all this surplus? How are we going to use this surplus of human energy, of human possibility, of human creativity to invent, to build the kind of society that we want to live in, the kind of world that we want to thrive in? What do we want to explore? 

How are we gonna do this in our own individual life? Each one of us? Because at the end of the day - and it is again literally the end of the day as I'm walking here - the only direct experience of life that we have is our own life. We also individually are energy expending itself in time, and I think on some level our life consists of trying to make sense of what that expenditure of energy is. 

And so, as I'm walking in the dusk here among these trees looking up at the sky. W  hen you look up at the stars, when you wonder about this unfathomable vastness of the universe and this undescribable energy that it represents, a nd you link that to your own brain, which is perceiving this vastness at this very moment, and the fact that you are aware of it, I think you are experiencing coming full circle with a surplus that is the basis of our existence, which is the basis of our life.

 Enjoy that experience. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode of Cornucopia. 

[Now as a bibliographical footnote, many of the ideas I talked about today are based on the work of the French thinker and writer Georges Bataille, and we will talk more about him in a subsequent episode.]