ABUNDANCE: Beyond Scarcity and Self-Devouring Cycles

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

Why do powerful institutions make decisions that produce less security, not more? Why do we keep systems that cost more and work worse than alternatives we already know?


For forty years, psychiatrist Ravinder Bhalla has watched people and institutions repeat self-defeating patterns despite the evidence. ABUNDANCE traces our major crises—climate, mass incarceration, perpetual war, extreme inequality, AI—to one pattern: scarcity thinking creating self-devouring cycles.


THE EVIDENCE: Punishment breeds crime—the U.S. incarcerates 2.2 million and 60% return; Norway's rehabilitation cuts recidivism to 20% at lower cost. Extraction accelerates the climate instability it profits from. Accumulation concentrates wealth until demand collapses. Walls manufacture threats—75 years of control culminated in October 7, 2023.


THE ALTERNATIVE WORKS: The Marshall Plan turned enemies into partners. Portugal's decriminalization reduced addiction. The Montreal Protocol healed the ozone layer. Root causes cost less than managing symptoms.


A NOTE ON 'ABUNDANCE': Not prosperity gospel, manifestation, or positive thinking. This is evolutionary biology (cooperation outcompetes pure competition), Nietzsche (creating from overflow, not hoarding from fear), psychiatric observation, and historical precedent—measurable outcomes, not wishful thinking.


THE CORE ARGUMENT: Leaders who have not faced their own mortality cannot think in generations. Scarcity thinking is not realism—it creates the scarcity it fears. Abundance thinking is not idealism—it is arithmetic backed by evidence.


THE AI DECISION: Deploy AI from scarcity (unemployment, surveillance, autonomous weapons) or abundance (shared dividend, augmented capacity, stronger democracy)? Tested against the hardest case, where every objection applies with maximum force.


For readers of Harari, Kahneman, Gawande, Taleb, and Lewis.


'Whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world.' —The Talmud