Abundance Fantasies: Corn Cult

Mexican protesters against the high tortilla prices in 2007 rallied around an oversized corn. Their public display of the desire for an abundant food supply ressembles cargo cults in which the visualisation of desired abundance, or the context in which the abundance is believed to exist, is reproduced in order to attain it. But obviously they don’t. Contemporary society functions in a similar fashion in that it believes any scarcity can be solved by artificially stimulating the ingredients of growth while the fundamental reasons for scarcity are largely ignored. The pressure on our resources can only decrease if demand decreases. Shrinking the average human body would lower demand considerably. It would also make our corn bigger without the corn actually growing in size.

Hopefully in the future we won’t be looking at angry and hungry people carrying around a very large representation of a corn but at small people celebrating their incredible abundance.