I’ve been thinking lately about scarcity – not so much the literal absence of resources, but the way the sense of scarcity spreads. You can sense it right now – a kind of social tightness to things, a protectiveness creeping into everyday life. People behave as though something essential is running out – space, belonging, safety, recognition – almost regardless of whether anything concrete has actually changed. It’s an atmosphere as much as a reality.
To borrow a concept from philosophy for a moment, I’m reminded of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein – ‘being-in-the-world’. Heidegger’s point wasn’t mystical; he was trying to describe the basic fact that we never meet the world as a set of objective facts. We meet it already interpreted – shaped by our histories, moods, fears, hopes, and the social worlds we’re thrown into. We live inside meanings long before we analyse them. And once people start interpreting the world as a place where there ‘isn’t enough’, that interpretation spreads fast. It colours judgement, heightens vigilance, and alters behaviour long before any actual shortage arrives.
With all this playing on my mind, a line in my current Adrian Tchaikovsky novel – The Doors of Eden – leapt out at me:
“Evolution is inevitable once you have an imperfectly self-replicating system in an environment of limited resources.”
In the book, Tchaikovsky is describing biology: the slow, blind Monte Carlo simulation of Darwinian evolution – random mutations thrown into a world of limited resources, tested by scarcity, filtered by survival, amplified over millennia. Some become competitive advantages, some fizzle out.
And I found myself wondering if societies worked the same way. Whether small acts – a flag on a lamppost, a rainbow sticker on a laptop, a phrase that catches on, a shift in what feels acceptable to say out loud – act as social mutations.
These new political stories, new identity symbols, new norms about who belongs or doesn’t, new ways of coordinating, excluding, or signalling – all these variations introduced into the zeitgeist. And just like Darwinian evolution, most of these variations lose traction. They appear and vanish without leaving a trace. But in periods of felt scarcity – economic, cultural, emotional – maybe certain stories develop a selective advantage:
- us-versus-them framing
- simplifying explanations that reduce complexity
- narratives that justify hoarding or hostility
- strong-leader fantasies
- comforting nostalgia for imagined pasts
These stories are cognitively cheap and emotionally reassuring, and scarcity (real or perceived) helps them fit naturally.
But this is where the biological analogy breaks – and where something important emerges.
Darwinian evolution is blind. It doesn’t care about coherence or consequence. It can’t ask: Is this the organism we want to become? It simply selects whatever happens to survive under pressure.
Societal evolution is different. Our ‘mutations’ are self-made narratives – deliberate or at least interpretable. They spread through meaning, not mechanics.
Back to Dasein: because we interpret the world, we don’t have to be trapped inside whatever story happens to be most contagious this week. Humans can notice the stories we’re inhabiting. We can ask whether the behaviours gaining traction make sense, or whether they’re just comforting reflexes in tight times. We can choose which narratives to amplify, and which to let die out.
So the question isn’t whether scarcity will shape us. It always does. The question is whether we allow fear-based stories to set the terms of our evolution, or whether we pay attention to the small variations we’re propagating.
If evolution – biological or social – is inevitable under pressure, then the responsibility falls on us to decide which pressures we respond to, which narratives we sustain, and what kind of culture we want to evolve into.
Perhaps the real scarcity isn’t resources at all, but perspective – the prevalence of willingness to stop and notice the stories shaping us before they calcify.
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