Scarcity morality is the belief, formed under real scarcity, that a person must pay for their existence — that legitimacy is earned through productive struggle, and that receiving without producing is a kind of cheating. Its grip is not mainly greed; it is that the belief becomes constitutive of identity. Decades of sacrifice, early mornings, and work through pain come to mean something because everyone had to pay — so someone receiving freely seems to escape a condition others were forced to accept, and to threaten the meaning of that sacrifice.
The consequence for the transition is sharp: if the belief has become constitutive, material abundance does not dissolve it — it provokes an identity crisis, and the demand to prove your worth outlives the necessity that once justified it. This is why AI displacement is so dangerous culturally: labor can become economically unnecessary long before a culture makes it ontologically unnecessary, and that gap is where a society newly capable of carrying everyone may still refuse to — the deepest reason the standing project treats the cultural work as urgent rather than optional.