"You can't always get what you want..."

The phrase “you want what you can’t have” seems to pop up often in everyday life. Who wouldn’t want what they know is impossible to have? That expensive car, the brand new dress from Alexander McQueen, the perfect partner that is dating your most hated enemy. These are all things that people can seem to want but think they will never have. Whether they can attain these things or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that they believe that these things are scarce.

The scarcity principle states that we, as human beings, want what we’re afraid we will never be able to obtain. As things truly become scarce, we really fight for what we want. Sometimes, as this drive to attain these scarce items increases, death becomes inevitable, as one side must completely dominate to win.

In the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Native Americans made a stand to protect their sacred lands. The United States Army, however, had other ideas. Not only those sacred lands were at stake, as the United States in general had been trying to take Native American land for themselves. The United States fought the Native Americans over this land, because land was scarce and the Native Americans “owned” (I use the word loosely here, because Native Americans believed the land was free, not owned by anyone) many portions of land that the United States wanted. This battle, however, did not leave the United States in a winning position. The Native Americans, fearing the loss of their scarce, sacred land, fought and massacred a large amount of the United States military fighting against them.

The Native Americans having scarce, sacred land is not based only on the idea that the land was just sacred, but any land they had was scarce, as the people of the United States were attempting to expand. The fact that the land was sacred just pushed the Native Americans even harder to fight for this land. As it so happens though, this scarcity principle pushed the people of the United States to fight harder to take the land and claim it as their own. The scarcity principle works on both sides.

One of the reasons why this happens, according to Robert Cialdini in his book, Influence: Science and Practice, is because of a secondary power of the scarcity principle. This power is that we hate to lose freedoms, and the freedom to own something in this case is what prompts the attacks. (Cialdini, 208).

This happens over and over again throughout history, where some leader or some country wants what they can’t have, so they attempt to take it with as much force as necessary. If people could realize that the fear of losing these scarce items is often somewhat irrational, many lives would be saved, because this brute force wouldn’t need to be used.

To fix this issue, I propose that people become educated about this need, perhaps in high school classes, when the brain is developed enough to understand the problem and what can be done to fix it. If people could understand this problem, they could prevent themselves from committing some horrible act to attain certain goals.

Works Cited

"The Battle of the Little Big Horn, 1876." Eyewitness To History. Ibis Communications. Web. 9 Nov. 2009. <http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/custer.htm>.

Cialdii, and Brehm. "Scarcity Principle." Changing Minds. Web. 9 Nov. 2009. <http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/scarcity_principle.htm>.

Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: Science and Practice. 4th ed. Needham Heights: Allyn & Bacon A Pearson Education Company, 2001. Print.