Competition for Resources in the Age of Social Revolution

Marshall, J.

Author correspondence: healthequityimagined@gmail.com

Cite this article: Marshall, J. (2025). Competition for Resources in the Age of Social Revolution, Family Stability and Insecure Attachment to Wealth among Black American Men and Women. Diverse Perspectives on Wellness, 3(2), 1-5.

Abstract

Sometimes, enough retribution in response to cultural slights drives newcomers towards an acknowledgement that some things have just been the way they are for thousands of years and probably won’t be changing in their lifetime. Oddly enough, cultural evolution rockets forward when there’s enough acknowledgment of each country’s way of life as longstanding, distinct and full of changeable and unchangeable things.

Keywords: social evolution, tribalism, disaster capitalism

Social Energy & Money

Money is an expression of sociocultural value, and the exchange of money depends on the sociocultural energy whose flow and direction are cultivated and controlled to help create the state’s preferred environment for its businesses, neighborhoods and marketplaces, and thus costs are an expression of sociocultural value. Whether a siloed, state-supported think tank helps keep the country a healthy competitor or has next year’s funding limited depends on whether its research has a high sociocultural value and whether its own sociocultural energy is complementary to the network of funders it depends on for success.

However, in the case of a global health emergency, social energy slows while the world waits to once again understand itself economically, strategically and then again socially. Every new head of state attaches an extra engine or two to certain industries and changes the trajectory of a few hundred thousand businesses. Although money typically exchanges hands to the extent that a community’s sociocultural energy facilitates it flowing from one hand to the other, if the politics of a new head of state are different enough from their predecessor, the threat of uncertainty regarding the state’s upcoming reallocation of economic power and influence creates about as much inaction in an industry as that industry’s level of dependence on trade winds. While everyone waits on the dust to settle, spending slows along with hiring and investing, and our behavior and even the way we express our personalities becomes more conservative. Phones get quieter, innovation loses priority to information security, and joint initiatives that depended on collaboration are stalled to understand if the economic forces that were driving them will be pushing in the same direction.

However, in progressive circles, running a simulation to understand and then programming for each and every possibility has become the evolution of waiting, somehow supplanting what was once a play-it-safe social culture. Given that the global distribution of economic power and social influence is a reflection of each country’s politics and culture to some degree, the early beginnings of a social evolution are often rooted in a practical cultural dynamic where norms practiced by a few become the social expectation for a wide majority in a relatively short amount of time. As of today, 31% of the U.N. member states have had a woman serve as head of state, beginning with Sri Lanka (1960), India (1966) and Israel (1969). Reinforcing culture on a daily basis can pull over a billion people towards a standard of functional behavior. Interracial marriage is now considered acceptable by 93% of American White people since many no longer perceive it as a political or economic risk for themselves, something to consider when understanding how racism is significantly energized by class competition as much as (if not more than) being socialized against an outgroup. Without cultural reinforcements, over time, communities revert to tribalism where after too much time apart, groups of strangers in a community don’t support each other anymore beyond professional obligations and intuitive and competitive inclinations. Arguably, the social insecurity bestowed upon us by the pandemic made power acquisition the leading theme in everyday interactions shortly thereafter and created a more tribal America, temporarily undoing some of the progress made from decades of increased contact. Limited money flowing between tribes was perhaps one of the worst outcomes and has become an interesting measure against which to understand the wealth gap.

Violence & Social Evolution

Evolution is a nightmare for comfort. We could also say that evolution and discomfort go hand in hand. A future ideal exists in the present in relative obscurity. Once its advantages and disadvantages relative to the modern standard are realized, it’s either killed to reduce competition or nurtured. Contrary to popular belief, finding that something has inevitably evolved doesn’t always necessitate that we strike the delicate balance of nurturing its growth to avoid undermining evolution.

The mindset of fewer wells in town and not enough mouths to feed is contagious enough to be its own political party, as is the cultural propensity for welcoming outsiders, understanding them and understanding your own community against their advantages and disadvantages. A violent understanding arising from men and women who risk everything they have to challenge newcomers in exchange for personal or political advancement is not to be taken for granted.

While violence borne from retribution has in some cases a higher degree of sensitivity and specificity, violence borne from opportunity is measured. When a way of thinking that once cultivated a reliable energy is slowly being understood as outdated in favor of a future ideal, that future ideal may find itself and its value starved energetically for a time. Oddly, this starvation is not always a violent denial of utility as it appears on its face; rather an overwhelming acknowledgement of its utility and a desire to control this ideal and weave it into the fabric of society on one’s own terms.

Violence borne from hunger is often so irrational that it makes more sense to avoid compromising the quality of life of the middle class by never risking starvation among the working poor in the first place. Hunger and violence reinforce each other. Hungry attitudes and behavior are outside of what we culturally and sometimes legally perceive to be normal, and over time, those attitudes and behaviors lead to a loss of resources with which to remain functionally fed for the foreseeable future.

Regardless, nature has its own evolution trials to determine who thrives, survives, eats the most or dies off. History has become an ad nauseam display of intertribal sex and money as the minimum qualifications for functional tribalism in a community of one or more groups. This concept is just the foundation, and also the vehicle through which both evolved social ideals and new species are welcomed to exist among us. The degree to which the established tribes have sex with and facilitate employment for an outsider could be considered the most transparent seal of approval. The degree to which violence and starvation are used to facilitate a social ejection of both newcomers and ideals is the sign of a society that either senses a chemical imbalance from too much mixing or has had their culture and influence threatened one too many times.

The monetization of one’s own culture is represented on every economic pie chart. However, with the exception of multiethnic communities, tourism becomes less profitable when community development isn’t tribally led. There’s a doorframe angle that invites a certain energy on that particular piece of land, but even the locals who install it never discuss it. Every doorframe has that angle relative to the land, and the angle of the doorframe is somehow a part of that community’s power and part of why outsiders couldn’t buy a building there because they kept insisting on building it themselves without having been on a local construction crew long enough to understand how that would’ve been the source of both a permanent community disruption and perhaps their own shortened life expectancy.

Sometimes, enough retribution in response to cultural slights drives newcomers towards an acknowledgement that some things have just been the way they are for thousands of years and probably won’t be changing in their lifetime. Oddly enough, cultural evolution rockets forward when there’s enough acknowledgment of each country’s way of life as longstanding, distinct and full of changeable and unchangeable things.

Disaster Economics

During an era of power insecurity among the ranking social class, property finds itself removed from one’s possession and redistributed or destroyed in order to either reinforce a political ideal or salute against one, and groups with fewer remaining resources must cope with using what’s left of their physical energy to restore their agency and leverage. Disaster loans are hard to come by given the elevated risk for both consumers and companies. Climate shocks have been the source of a thousand phenomena and micro-phenomena whose biological impacts (e.g., food disease epidemics) are difficult to account for comprehensively and whose financial consequences (e.g., interrupted trade, high food prices, etc.) have loan companies weary of excess emergency lending to protect themselves from insolvency in the event that predictions of a normal economic recovery are thrown off by unforeseen circumstances. Given the distribution of responsibility among the people in any given region as an indicator of capability, capacity and trust, it’s those who in turn manage and allocate resources and energy in a way that creates a community of complementary parts who are positioned for stability during times of scarcity. To be fair, they are sometimes already affiliated with the groups who own the disaster relief, humanitarian aid and emergency preparedness programs, whose functionality during a crisis as an emergency health and human service provider is akin to health governance.

Either way, for those who were either financially secured against inevitable interruptions to everyday living or were simply “missed” by the tornado that wiped out half of town, the disaster itself becomes an opportunity. At the individual level, there’s often a late reaction to added power and influence since it takes a while to recognize a transference in opportunities at the expense of those whose support systems are slowly become less structurally sound and enabling. In more assertive communities, power insecurity is a great facilitator of power redistribution, even if the insecurity is simply due to wanting to retain a significant advantage over the competition. In the future, businesses significantly powered by communities specializing in disaster labor or disaster-era labor with services and products cultivated against ever being at the mercy of market forces are expected to acquire a larger market share from those whose prospects would wilt during a global health event.

As usual, our social evolution is wrapped around our economic transition and the climatological one that underlies it. Pivot ability that relies on understanding all potential opportunities and threats as a network of interconnected nodes and having the awareness and agility to choose the most suitable and cost effective path from A to G at least every other time is the necessary future given unrealized economic and sociopolitical conditions with newcomers arriving continuously over the next few decades from communities driven towards higher ground. Paying attention to moments in history when world leaders stockpile relationships while heavily focused on the strategic advancement of economic intelligence and interests, there’s always clarity in the acknowledgement of too many unfortunate possibilities and too many sociocultural unknowns to go it alone.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Health Analytics & Visualizations.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest or financial incentive. The authors’ relationships with the stakeholders and subject matter did not lead to unreasonable bias or compromise the objectivity of the research.

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