At one point in the past, the best outcome of your day would have been to secure enough food to cover you and your family for a couple of days. I don’t know how prehistoric tribal dynamics worked and how food was divided up, but one thing is sure: you had to spend a lot of effort to get the nutrition you needed. When times were hard, they were survival-level hard. There was no entity on earth to jump in and provide food to thousands of our starving ancestors.
Fast forward to today. Most of us spend very little thought on how to secure the next meal. For most of us living in developed countries, the worst-case scenario means we have to swing by the grocery store on the way home. Humanity as a whole never produced as much food surplus in history. Yet, we still have people starving and dying of malnutrition across the globe.
Most of today’s problems are no longer a resource but rather a distribution problem. The issue transcends political systems because hunger exists in all government forms. In some more than in others, though.
We are seemingly unable to solve hunger in the world because of the same trait that helped us rise to the top of the food chain in the fashion we did: We are selfish jerks.
If only one mammoth is left, we won’t share it with the next tribe. We’ll try to kill it first. Either by running faster or by making better spears. If none of us gets the mammoth, these better spears will help take the food stash from the other guys by force. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Quite literally. That’s how it worked throughout history until today.
The means that have changed the principle is the same. Even when we no longer compete for food, we still want to be better than our neighbors. That is who we are. This sentiment is the very driver that has advanced humanity and kept our economy running.
It’s pretty sad.
We advanced into a society for which it is not weird that two concepts co-exist:
1) Millions of people lack basic needs
2) It’s essential to develop smarter refrigerators