Fake Abundance vs. Real Abundance: The One Logic the Status Quo Doesn’t Want You to Understand

We live in a society that overvalues capital, accumulation, and external power. Our Western culture teaches us that success is measured by the capacity to dominate and accumulate. However, this doctrine fails to answer the most fundamental question: What truly lasts? History offers us a simple memory test that exposes the fragility of material supremacy.

The Memory Test: The Forgotten Emperor vs. The Remembered Carpenter

Consider the paradox of two men who lived in the same era: When Jesus was born, the most powerful man on Earth was the Roman Emperor. He was the ruler of an empire that dominated the region where Jesus lived. Materially, he was the strongest and most influential figure in the world. But if you ask today: What was the Emperor’s name (not the title Caesar, but the name of the man)? You’ll likely need to do a search (the name was Augustus, Caesar’s successor). Very few people remember him. In contrast, can you remember the name of a carpenter who was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth? Billions remember the name of Jesus.

The same pattern repeats in other wisdom traditions, such as Buddhism. Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was born into a noble family, surrounded by everything materially good and wonderful. Yet, despite all the wealth, he felt a great emptiness. Because of this, he went out in search of the true meaning of life. Once again, few people know the names of the Buddha's father and mother, but Siddhartha Gautama’s name is remembered by many and endures.

The lesson is clear: if Buddha or Jesus had decided to remain in their circle of material power (the palace, the carpentry shop), they would have had the same destiny of forgetfulness as the Emperor and Siddhartha’s noble family. What makes their remembrance permanent was not power, but the fact that they chose to seek and live a spiritual path, a truth.

The Permanence of Truth and the Fight Against the Status Quo

The Truth, when it is truth, never dies; it can be transformed to lead us to a deeper understanding, but its essence endures. The ideas brought by these great sages—to love your enemies, to have compassion, to seek detachment—were profoundly revolutionary and dangerous to the status quo of the time. Theoretically, society should have extinguished these ideas. However, the system only managed to distort and manipulate the message, but it couldn't remove it from circulation, because the core of the message remains alive.

False Abundance: Scarcity Disguised

The Ego seeks to be filled and constantly feels lack (want), because it believes its security depends on what is external. The logic is perverse: the more you try to fill the internal emptiness with external things, the deeper the emptiness gets, forcing a search for more accumulation. This compulsion to accumulate, accumulate, and accumulate until death is not an act of intelligence, but proof that you are being controlled by the fear that enough will never be enough. Fear: The Instrument of the Ego and Manipulation The system, which operates under the "cult of the ego" (egoism), uses fear to indoctrinate and manipulate us. It makes us look outward, toward things, in search of an abundance that already exists within us.

The problem is not having things; it is letting things have you (attachment). When you depend on things, fear becomes notorious in your life. If the imbalance is within you (the emptiness generated by internal scarcity), you will accept the imbalance outside (injustice and system manipulation). But if you balance yourself internally, you work toward balance externally, because your external reality becomes an expression of your internal truth.

💡 The Dual Tool Against Egoistic Indoctrination: Empathy and Critical Thinking

Herein lies the greatest trap of our time: the belief that material accumulation is synonymous with abundance. In reality, this relentless pursuit of more money, more goods, and more power is a disguised scarcity mindset.

To break this cycle of egoistic indoctrination, it is necessary to activate two human capacities that the culture of accumulation tries to suppress:

1. Critical Thinking as an Antidote to Submission: Egoistic indoctrination depends on the uncritical acceptance of the premise that your worth is measured by your possessions. Critical thinking demands that we question the system’s logic: Who benefits from my fear of 'not having enough'? Where is the flaw in the logic that internal peace will come from external gain? By deconstructing these fundamental beliefs, we reveal that the social order based on accumulation is a construction, not a natural law, and that true abundance is the autonomy of judgment.

   
   

2. Empathy as an Inversion of the Scarcity Logic: Egoistic accumulation is the denial of connection. It only works if the individual believes that the gain of another represents their loss (the zero sum). Empathy—the ability to feel the reality of the other—destroys this logic. It forces us to recognize that we cannot be at peace while our neighbor suffers scarcity. By shifting the focus from “what I can have” to “what we can build together,” empathy transforms the scarcity mindset (fear of loss) into an abundance mindset (joy in sharing). It is the engine of compassion that moved Jesus and Buddha to transcend their privileges for the sake of a universal truth.

The Challenge for Your Growth:

What is your true priority? To accumulate and die, or to use material gain to help others, creating a connection of fraternity and a legacy that, like that of Jesus and Buddha, transcends time? Remember: The opposite of dying is being born. Life has no opposite. Your challenge is not to fight against death, but to fight against a life spent in empty accumulation, which is an act that your most intelligent self knows is not intelligent.