Scarcity -> Conflict

I believe it was Geoff Lawton who said the next war would be fought over water. A liter of clean water is already more valuable on the market than a liter of crude oil…and in the systems we’ve created, scarcity always leads to conflict.

In ecology, scarcity is feedback. Hunger pushes foraging…drought pushes migration. And in small-scale human societies, conflict over scarcity was usually managed by mobility, sharing, or groups splitting. But once we settled, scarcity became inescapable. Fixed fields…stored food…property…nobody wants to leave those things behind. We became “invested” and conflict became largely unavoidable.

To prevent collapse from the inside, human coalitions developed ways to suppress reactivity. Strong reactivity (aggression, dissent, or any kind of stubborn autonomy) is dangerous in a sedentary groups subsisting on scarce resources. So selection shifted toward compliance and conformity…enforced first by gossip and ostracism (see Wrangham), then law, ideology, and force.

It’s dangerously tempting to read civilization as a suite of conflict management “technologies.” But they’re not technologies…they’re stories. They’re descriptions of what is.

Religion frames inequality and misfortune as God’s will. The doctrine of free will reframes poverty or failure as your own fault. Markets channel conflict into competition, but “solve” scarcity by creating…(artificial) scarcity. States monopolize violence to keep conflict from fracturing the states themselves. And AI is already talked about as a promise…a promise of an environment managed so perfectly that conflict never arises…where error signals are resolved (i.e. smoothed) even before they appear.

These are stories. Post-hoc rationalizations and buffers. Each of them suppressing the conflict signals they themselves generate.

What do I mean by that? Think of scarcity as resulting in prediction errors…unmet needs…violated expectations. Conflicts are behavioral responses to those errors. And civilization is the inflation of social priors (shared fictions, ideologies, gods) so that individuals suppress their error-driven responses in favor of compliance. This produces short-term stability…but it also severs feedback. And where feedback is severed, ecological and social errors accumulate.

In other words, you should never see civilization as a solution to scarcity. It’s never been that. At best, at the smallest scale, it’s a short-term solution to conflict. By suppressing reactivity, it buys stability at the cost of accumulating and unregistered error. Like everything else civilization touches, it makes conflict less surprising…by smoothing, scripting, or relocating it.