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An Inquiry Into Greed
August 2, 2009
The past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about greed. How does it originate? Why are people greedy? What drives a man to greed?
Say you’re stranded on an island by yourself. What is life like for you? I’m guessing you’ll spend the majority of your day struggling to stay alive. You’ll have to avoid the wild animals. Mosquitos will be gnawing away at you. You’ll be struggling to grow food, and find nourishment. If you do survive, it’s going to be a miserable struggle for existence.
I believe this is the reason for greed. Unlike a lot of animals, we’re not in harmony with nature. Some of this may have to do with social conditioning, but not all. Most of us prefer modern society to living in the remote jungle.
It’s hot in the jungle, and we don’t like the heat. Unless the temperature is around 70~75 F, our bodies find it either too hot out, or too cold. We begin to miss our heaters and air-conditioners. Sure we can EXIST in those temperatures, but that doesn’t mean we enjoy it.
And think about a world without a shower or a bath. Slimy oily skin. Body odor. Teeth rotting out. Not too pleasant.
And what about sickness? Out in the jungle you’re only able to find enough food for each day. There’s no surplus. What happens when you get sick? Your nose fills with snot, and you can’t breathe.  All of that junk gets in your lungs, and you’re hacking it up, while trying to catch food.  And you’re running a fever, which has zapped all your strength.
No medicine. No warm bed. No hot soup. Just struggle.  You’d do anything to just lie down and try to get better, but no relief for you!
Along these same lines, there’s a question I’ve always found very interesting. If we as humans evolved on planet Earth, down in the swamps and oceans, and in the dirt, then why do we have such a general hatred for our natural conditions? If we evolved, wouldn’t it be more advantageous for us to enjoy our own body odor, instead of continually wasting time and energy cleaning ourselves? If we’re surrounded by dirt everywhere, and it’s so easy to get dirty, then why don’t we enjoy dirty bodies and skin? Why don’t we love oily hair?
But for whatever reason, we don’t. Most of us don’t like the outside world at all. We like spacious environments, but we don’t like how things are outside. We like trees, but we don’t like the dirt they grow in. We like grass, but we don’t like getting itchy.
This desire for a more “suitable” environment is the desire for a large mansion. After all, what is a “mansion” other than a big artificial environment, which you like a lot better than the outdoors?
Early men were meat eating hunters. If it wasn’t for seeing remote peoples around the worlds living just like the ancient tribes did way back when, I’d almost find what anthropologists tell us unbelievable. Having watched my Dad skin deer when I was young, I find it all absolutely disgusting, and we’re talking about fresh meat.
If like many philosophers, all my reflections were my own inner thoughts and feelings, I surely would’ve found these conclusions wrong. I’d think to myself, “If that’s true, then why would I find a deer’s corpse so disgusting?” But with me, I suppose it’s social conditioning, and my own personal idiosyncrasies.
Either way, I mention all of this to make one point: greed comes from this imbalance with nature. What greed really is is the desire to escape the natural conditions of this world. We want to be free from the “cares of this world”.
Imagine that the Earth’s environment completely changed. Imagine if food was abundant and plentiful. Imagine a world where we could eat tree leaves, and other plants, like a herbivore. Imagine if the temperature was always nice outdoors, and the weather was never harsh. Imagine if there was no dirt on the ground, and the grass all over was like fluffy clean carpet.
Would any of us work jobs? Would we have to? Would we care? Most wouldn’t work. Those who enjoyed their work, like physicists and other researchers, would continue to work. But people in general wouldn’t work. They’d just exist, run around, and have fun.
The desire for wealth is the desire to be free from the imbalance.
For example, we want to travel and see the world, but there’s so many natural worries. How will you pack all the food for yourself for the journey? How will you keep the food from spoiling? How will you carry it? In practical cases, you can’t carry the food. This completely inhibits travel.
Once we learned about money society reaped many benefits. But with it, men also learned this system could be used enslave other men.
Take the problem of travel. If you live in the United States and wish to visit France, without money this is a big journey. Almost impossible. You’d have to bring so many supplies along, and that’s such a burden. So much so that it makes travel almost impossible.
But with the system of money, such as gold coins, they’re easy to carry, and you can then go to France, and hand this same money to them there, and they’ll feed you. Problem solved. Unfortunately that’s not the only problem. Trading these coins for luxuries is so inviting we all end up fighting for it. We all want money because it allows us to buy our way out of many of the bothers nature imposes on us. It allows us to pass those burdens onto someone else, as long as they’ll accept the money.
Those working the farms in France hate toiling in the fields just as much as we do here. So who slaves away in the heat to grow our food? Nobody wants to, and they’ll do anything to get out of it. It’s not any different than procrastination.
Procrastination is very interesting to study, and has heavy ties to greed. I’ve had software work in the past which I needed to work on.   Since I really didn’t want to work on it, I did everything in my power to avoid working on it. I made every possible excuse. Even unconsciously, I’d make excuses why doing something else was more important, and why I could put off working on the project until the next day.
Similarly, the people in power create mindsets which relieve them of these troubles in the world. Sure the world and our political policies are messed up. We all know sending one group of people to do all the hard work is “wrong”, but we do it anyway. That’s why a lot of people, especially powerful rich people, always like to talk about who “deserves” this or that, and hard work, and all of that.
Some guy works all day long paving the roads out in the heat. At the end of the day, when he’s tired and hungry, those in power tell him, “Well you’re not educated like I am, and have never developed your mind. Therefore I ‘deserve’ this high lifestyle, and all this money, whereas you don’t.” All of this “deserve” talk is nothing but that imbalance of nature talking. An unconscious attempt to justify getting out of the work we don’t want to do.
I remember seeing something pretty interesting on Jon Stewart’s program. The guest for the day was some sort of Secret Service manager, or had studied them, or something. He started talking about the Clinton administration, and stories of Secret Service guards watching the then vice president Al Gore.
This guest told how one of Gore’s children was studying, and the vice president entered the room with a secret service agent. His child didn’t want to study, and then Gore said, “You better study, or you’ll end up like one of them.” Then he pointed to the secret service man.
As you can see, the megalomaniacs in power think their education somehow makes them superior to the working man – even those defending them, and would take a bullet for them. But who is cooking their food? Who’s paving their roads? Who built that limo he drives around in? Who flies that helicopter which takes him all over the world? Who flies the airplane? Who built the airplane? Did he? No.
But for some reason he feels he’s so much better than the working man. Infinitely superior in some imagined respect. But drop him off on a deserted island somewhere, or out in the middle of the rain forest. Leave him by himself. We’ll see how “great” he is, and how he doesn’t need any of us. God forbid someone do the hard work in our society.
But the economic system is purposely engineered to work this way. Somebody has to do all the work, and the ‘clever’ ones, either consciously or unconsciously, scheme their way out of it.
All this “deserve” business is unfounded. Ever since Adam Smith wrote the Wealth Of Nations, economists have known that our productivity as a society is based upon the division of labor. If we break life and the things we do into different specialties, we become thousands of times more productive than if we had to do each individual task ourselves.
But considering that we each do something different for society, and our function ties into a web-like whole which is our economy, it becomes difficult to ascertain who “deserves” what.  Back in the old days when everyone was a farmer you could talk like that. It made sense to talk about “deserves”, and working hard, and everyone deserves what they produce with their own hands.
Everyone had a field, a plow, water buckets, and more. If you’re willing to work out in the fields and grow it, it should be yours to keep. I agree, if we have such a simple economy like that.
But once the entire economy is broken down into thousands and thousands of different functions and specialties, which all tie together in complex ways, we all depend on one another.  It becomes very difficult to define this “deserve” concept. Defining in what respect one function is superior to another is near impossible.
Cars are built by an assembly line of workers, designed by engineers, and marketed by sales teams, but who gets to drive the cars, and who gets the profits from the car sales? What jobs are the most important? How do you define this “importance” when each and every job is necessary?
But still, to this day, we the “sheeple” of the United States, and those around the world, keep telling ourselves that those who are wealthy have earned it due to their own merit, and those who are poor deserve their unfortunate outcome.   And how does this mindset play out in the end?  Somehow the conclusion we must all come to is that all the cars, land, and homes all rightfully belong to the financial magnates. Apparently they’ve done some almost undefinable thing for all of society considering they control most all the money. Their shining brilliance entitles them to everything.
You’d be amazed at how many people will tell you that everyone in life has what they deserve. Their own decisions have brought them where they are in life, and how successful they are financially. You’ll also be surprised at how quickly people will rail on when a government program is instituted which taxes one class, and gives the money to another in the form of some benefit. “There’s no justice!”
That’s what my grandpa told me the other day while we were eating dinner. Where everyone ends up in life is based solely on their own decisions. I silently thought to myself, “That’s only partially true.” But I didn’t say anything.
The history of humanity is a history of greed. In the earliest times early civilizations were raided by barbarians.  Theft was the simplest way to save labor. You can steal someone’s crops, or go chase the herd of wild animals. They went with theft.
Later civilization advanced, and certain classes always seemed to end up on top. At one point we had the priests. They were elites who told the masses they were Gods, and deserved to rule, for various reasons. They wore fancy clothes, people brought them the best food to eat, and they lived a life of ease.  They ruled because they had some sort of divine right and connections with the Gods which could bring about prosperity.
Later we had the monarchs, the nobles, and the rich merchants. Somehow wealth and riches always concentrated to them, whereas the vast majority of people were peasants struggling to make it through the day.
Really not much has changed since those times. The vast majority of all wealth and production of the society is controlled by a very small percentage of the population.  Back then they had monarchs, nobles, and merchants. Today we have corporate CEOs, bankers, and the politicians.
The problem of the redistribution of the society’s wealthy has been attempted by everything from capitalism, to socialism, to communism. Somehow, no matter the system, class distinctions remain. We just can’t come up with a set of rules which we can follow which will lead to a proper distribution of the money, and the stuff we produce as a society. The wealth, power, and influence all seem to concentrate to a small minority of people, no matter what we do.
I think finances is the most important subject for a person to study, though it’s never taught whatsoever in schools. And I think this is for good reason.
Financial news on the television is always presented with unnecessary complexity, people always seemed to end up buried in a bunch of debts, and a small handful of people end up controlling all the money.
Science and technology seems to always be fighting for the little guy, giving him more efficient cars, nicer appliances, and other luxuries. But the economic system always seems to get worse. In the 1950s the husband working could provide for his entire family. Now, with better technology, both parents work and still can’t pay the bills. When science begins to free the working man, it seems the monetary policies become more and more corrupt, putting burdens on the normal man’s back, making sure they’re forced to continue working full-time.
This makes money and economics the main subject to study these days. Science can make life wonderful, but that doesn’t matter if no one has “money” to afford any of it. This “money”… “currency”… is how all business takes place, and if you study money and banking closely, you’ll see that the powerful special interests are always out to control the money. If they can control that, then you control who works what jobs and who gets what. Banking and finance is a major cornerstone or our world.
In the past monarchs just taxed and took the money. This oftentimes lead to revolt, so the monarch depended on military might to scare the people into paying their taxes. Today it works similar, but it’s more subtle. Today, if you don’t pay your taxes, first the police come after you. Then if you can evade them, they’ll send the FBI on you, and if they have to, they’ll get the entire might of the military on you. Whether you like taxes or not, you’re going to pay them.
I said it’s more subtle these days. What did I mean by that? Today we face indirect forms of taxation, but few understand the mechanism behind it. It’s done by bankers in collusion with the politicians and corporate CEOs. They’ve learned how to covertly screw with the money supply to their own benefit. They can live their lives of luxury, and few understand their scheme.
If the politicians need money, the bankers can increase the money supply and through a complex system of purchasing treasury securities through the central bank, politicians can always get the money for the programs they need. Them and their buddies, and their districts, get what they want. Whether it be money for a war, a bridge built in their district, whatever. If they don’t have tax money for it, the central bank can supply the money for any budget, even if they have to cook it up out of thin air.
But why doesn’t the government just create their own money out of thin air? Why go through a central bank? Excellent question. Because then they couldn’t use taxation as yet another tool to control society. This allows governments to spend fake money, yet run up a “debt”, which forces certain levels of taxation upon the people, to control how much money they have in their pockets, and how much control and freedom they have.
The law may say every citizen is “free”, but if their economy depends on money, and they don’t have any of it in their pocket or bank account, they’re not free to do anything.
And the Fortune 500 CEOs like this system as well. Bankers can create money out of thin air, then loan it to them at a cheap interest rate. This gives them cheap capital to expand their empires. And as for the normal man, the banks can refuse to supply this same luxury to them because they lack a credit score.
All of this depends on these three groups working together: Big business, banking, and government. The politicians have to give bankers the right to control the money. Politicians are purchased by big business for their own interest. In return, the bankers give special low interest rate loans to corporations, giving them an edge over their competition, and fellow men. All of them are working together.
With these corporations, banks, and politicians, I think it’s a big battle. It’s a lot of big corporations and rich people, all fighting for power, yet at the same time working together on things which work to their common benefit.
How does this system play out for the normal working family? Prices keep rising faster than wages (due to inflation), yet very few understand why. Everyone seems to accept it as a fact of life. It’s “way it is”. You ask the factory worker on the street about it and they’ll tell you, “Nobody understands it. It’s sad though. Gallon of milk used to be a dollar not too long back. Now it’s $3 or more. Getting harder to live everyday.”
Turn on the television and the corporate owned news media then tells them, “The recent financial crisis just happened out of nowhere. Nobody saw it coming.” But this is very far from the truth.
In the past the news networks would have on Peter Schiff, an Austrian economist. Basically he was invited to offer the counter “doomsday” view, whereas their mainstream commentators presented us with bright rosy futures. What did Schiff say about this economy?   Too much debt. Too much spending. It’s unsustainable. We don’t have money for this war. Our trade deficit with China is too high. We need to cut back. There’s not enough saving going on. The banking institutions are corrupt. There’s shady dealings going on in the financial world, and everything is over-leveraged.
Back in 2003, 2004, 2005 Ron Paul (another expert in Austrian economics, and author of HR 1207 – the audit the Federal Reserve bill) was given interviews, and he was saying the same thing Schiff was.
Back before anyone cared about the Federal Reserve, and before the bail-outs even happened, Ron Paul was warning us about them. This video was made years before any of the bail-outs happened.
I’d like to show you guys some clips of Peter Schiff. It’s a lot of fun to watch. Here he is with his “doomsday” message, commentators mocking him. He tells them about the housing bubble, and more. It’s amazing how mainstream economists mocked him, but he everything he said was right on target.
“Save money? Produce things? Stop borrowing money from foreigners? Bwahahaha, what an idiot!” Everyone was caught up in this debt-financed boom, which drove house prices through the roof.  Even though most of our spending came from people refinancing their new found home equity (which came into existence due to loose the Federal Reserve’s credit policies), these mainstream economists saw nothing nothing but rosy skies, and economic booms. Sadly, not soon afterward, like truck driving in thick fog on a mountain road, we drove right off the edge. Our economy tanked and constricted to a degree greater than the Great Depression. And supposedly “Nobody saw this coming.”
But let’s not focus on minute details, like the money system. The actual means of greed change with each society and time. Once we catch on to money and the banking empires, “they” will be working on something new. Greed is bigger than money. What’s important to greed is not hoarding money, or even using religion and other things to control people. We need to understand why people try to control others, and are greedy. Let’s list out some of our problems, and why greed and wealth solves them:
1) Our human bodies are not in good harmony with the world outdoors
Solution: People desire big mansions for an artificial environment which is spacious. They want luxurious, spacious limousines to escort them around.
2) Our bodies run down, and require constant injections of energy to continue operation. Nature produces food for us to eat, but it requires work to farm, and process.
Solution: People want to eat food which they did not have to work to prepare, and which tastes good. They want serfs and other slaves to grow the crops, and toil in the fields, clean their dishes after they’re done eating, etc.
3) Our bodies are subject to disease and deterioration over time.
Solution:Â People want access to physicians to keep them healthy and stop the rapid aging process.
4) Evolution knew we wouldn’t survive long, so endowed our bodies with a strong sex drive to reproduce quickly, to spread the genes before passing on.
Solution: People want to find a lover. They want attractive members of the opposite sex around to satisfy their reproductive drives.
5) We desire to accomplish things we could never do alone, and need others to help us with our dreams.
Solution: We seek ways to control others by any means in order to help us achieve our personal goals. Finding others who will work with us willingly on our dreams rarely happens, but we look for ways to manipulate others into helping with our personal ambitions.
6) We want to see the world, travel all over, and journey out into the stars and beyond. Unfortunately, the ‘cares of this world’ keeps us grounded to this rather toilsome Earth.
Solution: We want smooth roads to drive cars on, so we can easily and comfortably travel all across the world. We want airplanes, and boats. Anything that can get us from point A to point B quickly, easily, and comfortably. We find our natural legs very limited in respect to mobility.
Unfortunately, nobody wants to pave the roads. Nobody wants to assemble the cars in the factories. Nobody wants to service the vehicles when they break down. So who gets stuck with these jobs? (When I say “nobody”, I mean VERY few people. Most people you come across in jobs like this hate work. They do it, but they would MUCH rather be doing something else.)
This brings us to anti-depressant pills. This may sound like a crazy conspiracy, but I personally think the people in power have worked tirelessly with the big pharmaceutical companies to create anti-depressant pills, which alter the firing off of reward chemicals, and control emotions of anger and frustration. To the greedy CEOs, Wall-Street goons, and politicians, these magic pills are their every wish come true.
The happy-pill. A way to numb the human mind. An indirect way to make slaves which never rebel. To be intelligent enough to work, but living in a sort of zombie-like, docile state which never complains, nor even cares about their own exploitation, and miserable existence. An army of zombie workers.
The drug companies keep pumping us with more and more medications. Every little thing in life which gets you a little down becomes a medical disorder of some kind, and they want to put you on anti-depressants. Any kid showing energy, and asks questions, they try to put on medications like Ritalin.
Maybe it’s simply corporate greed and their lust for profit. Or maybe it’s from lazy psychologists who find it easier to zone you out on happy pills than help you deal with your problems. Or maybe it’s people down about life, believe it’s due to a chemical imbalance, and find it easier to take those pills than accept responsibility and take control of their life. Regardless, this anti-depressant pill mania is bad news. There’s only a small minority of people out there who truly need the pills, but their usage has doubled over the past few years, and I expect it to keep growing.
I have some members in my own family who take them. Over the years I’ve watched what those pills have done to them. Their eyes are glazed over. They’re not as alert. They’re talking to you, but it seems every year they’re less and less “there”.
There’s a pill for everything. A pill to wake up, a pill to go to bed, a pill to be happy, a pill for blood pressure, and on and on and on. The drug companies want you taking pills for everything. I’m sure the profit motive has a lot to do with it, but I think there’s even more to it. There’s some interesting articles to look at. Take this one for instance:
http://airamerica.com/blog/2009/apr/20/pharmaceutical-factories-dumping-drugs-water-supply
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=7376941
“New federal studies show that water tested at waste treatment plants near drug companies contains a wide range of pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, muscle relaxers and tranquilizers. The specific treatment plants with these chemical pollutants are not being publicly named by the reports, for obvious and shameful reasons. The Associated Press reports that 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals have been legally dumped into US water supplies. And these can have a devastating effect on generations of both people and wildlife”
That was originally reported by the Associated Press. 271 million pounds into our water. I even heard Jay Leno joke about it, which is when I first heard about it. These drugs are harming the wildlife, and causing birth defects and other problems with fish, frogs, etc. Half-male, half-female bass. Crazy! But look at what drugs happen to be “flushed” into the water. “…antibiotics, muscle relaxers and tranquilizers…“ Many of those drugs zone you out, and make you docile. If you don’t own one already, you really need a water purifier. Our drinking water is becoming toxic.
Some of these drugs come from nursing homes flushing old meds down the toilet. Others comes from people’s excrement, which contains traces of all the meds they’re on. There’s other causes as well, which you can read about in the links I supplied.
However, regardless of the cause, you need to be purifying your water. Pesticides and every other form of pollution is making its way into our water supplies, and our government is doing very little about it.
One of my friends speculates that the big corporations may well be working toward polluting our water so badly we have to buy all our water in the stores. He thinks that to our politicians are being paid to “look the other way”.
The corporations win from this scenario on a lot of counts. They don’t want to stop the use of pesticides, as this would ruin their crops. They don’t want to stop pumping the cows with hormones, or that would hurt their beef and milk sales. They don’t want to find a way to properly dispose of their waste, as it’s easier to dump it in some lake or the ocean. In other words, it’s all profit related. And once they pollute the water so bad it’s undrinkable, they’ll make even more money selling us bottled water for drinking and cooking.
Whether this evolved naturally on its own, or loosely planned in some way, is of little consequence to me. Either way it leads to corporations controlling us more and more, and less freedom.
People are always trying to control one another, and take their money.
But to get back to anti-depressants, biologically we could have evolved to love hard work and slaving away outdoors, doing things like farming, paving the streets, and mowing lawns. But for whatever reason, that’s not the way it is. That balance with our state in this world doesn’t exist.
I sometimes wonder if the people of this world are so greedy that they’ll actually resort to using anti-depressants for these sorts of ends. They hope they can artifically create contentment through drugging us up through these pills, and possibly through our water as well. Get us all on happy pills and drugged up water, which zones us out. Then they’ll come and exploit us, over-work us, and take everything we have, and we’ll sit there medically stoned, not caring one way or another what’s going on. I entertain the idea.
In the first chapter of one of my economics textbooks it talks about labor, and natural resources. I found this blurb particularly interesting. It’s taken from the first chapter of Principles of Economics, by Fred Gottheil:
“Suppose we had an infinite supply of natural resources. We would still have an insurmountable economic problem. There simply are not enough hours in a day to allow us to transform these resources into all the goods and services we want. That is, the problem ultimately may not be the limited quanity of resources available to us, but rather our limitless, or insatiable, wants.
Lets go back to the biblical story to illustrate the point. Adam and Eve were happy in the Garden of Eden, not because the garden had so much but because they wanted so little. Their problem was eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge: One bite and they suddenly realized they had no clothes, no air-conditioning, no videocassettes, no quartz watches, no phones, and no Buick. It was a quick trip from the state of ignorant bliss to paradise lost. Their wants became insatiable.
We inherited their genes. Our tastes for goods and services are virtually limitless. There is always something else we want. And once these wants are satisfied, our minds are just as capable of conceiving new wants as they are of conceiving ways of satisfying them. In this respect, we differ from lions and tigers who, after a kill, are prepared to rest until hungry again. We instead are perpetually in a state of hunger. Even if we had a never-ending supply of natural resources require to satisfy our limitless wants, it would take more than 24 hours a day to transform them into all the goods and services we want.”
It’s amazing how far that inner hunger of ours can take us. We tend to completely change the entire world around us until we find more fitting, only to demand it all be redone a short while later. We live in homes, which are nothing but artificial environments. We paint the walls in some unnatural color, cover the floors in colored carpeting, and scrub the place head to toe with cleaning agents to remove the natural bacterias, natural smells, and other things which are outside. We even mask our own smells with cologne, deoderant, and perfume. Why? Why are we in such an imbalance with nature? It’s like we don’t belong here at all.
Then a few years later we buy all new furniture, repaint all the walls in a different color, and transform it all to something new. We repeat this cycle over and over.
In one respect this drive for new experiences leads to rapid progress in our species, but it also leads to massive waste and many of the complications we experience when forming a society. Our flippant desires vary so greatly one person to the next, that coming to a common consensus on what to do is near impossible.
Even something as simple as our appearance is made complicated. Most species walk around nude. Not us. We’re never satisfied with our own appearance.  We constantly need new hair styles. New styles of clothing. New trendy gadgets.
Women cover themselves with make-up. Some of us dye our hair color. We wear clothing, and cover most of our entire body, besides our arms, hands, and face. I read somewhere that women spend some considerable portion of their lives just deciding what to wear. It was like an entire year or two of their lives. That’s just deciding clothing. We’re not even considering make-up, hair styling, and all of that.
I’ve been studying biology over the past year. I’ve been hoping to find good reasons for our general dissatisfaction with nature as it is, but I still have a lot of studying to do in this area.
When I see my cat, I don’t think she’s praying to go to heaven, or looking for some escape. I think sometimes she’s bored, but I think that’s the extent of it. As for that, she’s probably bored because she’s living in this unnatural house, and doesn’t have to hunt. I don’t think she dislikes her calico fur, or how her ears pop out of her head when she sees herself in the mirror. Some pet owners slip clothing on their animals, but from what I’ve seen, most dogs and other animals prefer to walk around in the nude. Other animals seem the same way.
Then again, I guess I’ve never lived life as any of these animals. Maybe squirrels are dissatisfied all the time. Maybe they sit up in the tree and think, “I’m tired of this. Why do I have to climb up and down these stupid trees. I’m sick of eating these nuts. I want something else.” They see us walking around clothed, and are envious. Could be, but I doubt it.
A long time ago I watched a documentary film by an internet conspiracy theorist. (As we all know, the best kind!) I was bored, and needed something to entertain myself one evening. He said that aliens created us a long time ago because they needed slave labor. They combined their mental faculties with an ape-like creature living on the planet, and that’s our origin. Then he said that if you examine the Sumerian tablets and other ancient texts, such as the Vedas, they tell this story about aliens coming to Earth and doing just that. I sat back staring at the screen thinking, “As crazy at that may sound to most people, that may be true.” I say that, not because I’m taking him seriously, but because we so often feel like aliens in this world. We’re definitely not in harmony with the Earth.
In America, the typical person believes God created all of the species on Earth in one big swath. Our inner discontent is an ingrained drive to find God, which only It (God) can satisfy. They believe something similar to what’s found in the book of Genesis. Unfortunately this cannot possibly be true, and goes against scientific evidence. Saying all species were created male and female is just flat out wrong. A lot of species don’t even work like that. Also, the fossil record clearly shows evolution over billions of years. All species didn’t come into existence at once. The fossils record shows periods of gradual change in lifeforms over time, adapting to the environment. You can’t deny it.
There’s been several mass extinctions, then life comes back, showing creation could never have happened all at once. There would have had to have been several creations. The Earth has been slammed with meteors which made our entire atmosphere a flaming nightmare for over a thousand years. All the oceans evaporated, the land was scorched, and everything living on the surface was wiped out. At other times the Earth has frozen into a giant snowball (I think twice), only to be thawed out by volcanic activity releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Life survived as bacterial slime way down under the Earth’s surface. If you find it all unbelievable, you’re not alone. But truth is oftentimes stranger than fiction.
Anyways, since greed is rooted in an embedded human hatred for his native environment, no economic theory, or political plan will ever rid the world of it. Socialism, capitalism, communism, fascism… whatever. None of them will make men happy. And even if they do manage to distribute the workload more fairly for a time, there will always, by necessity, be those who will work to weasel their way out of the system. That insatiable hunger will burn on inside of us all, and we’ll do anything we can to try to satisfy our desires — even at the expense of those around us.
I think most every well thought out economic system would work great if it wasn’t for man’s insatiable greed. Our own greed is what screws them all up. We continually search for ways to exploit the system, and of course, there’s always a way.
I think the consequences of greed can be illustrated with a simple tale from my childhood. From time to time I would spend the night at my cousin’s house. He used to complain and bicker to his mother about taking out the trash. They’d fight and argue for 30 minutes. He’d waste more time and energy arguing with his mom about the trash than if he’d just gone and did what he needed to do. Would’ve been done in 3 minutes, and could’ve got back to whatever he was doing. I think the same thing applies to corruption. People will live a life trying to scheme their way out of work, and we as a species waste more time and energy fighting off the corruption than if we’d just done what we need to do.
But that’s the rational brain talking. It’s easy for me to talk like this, telling how we all need to be honest, and take care of one another. But when it comes down to actually having to help someone else, when I have something else I want to do, and taking my money to help someone else, I admit I’m as reluctant about it all as anyone else.
Celebrities like to act all humanitarian, and like they care so much about the world, but they have so much money it doesn’t matter. They’ll give a lot of money away, but it doesn’t really change their lifestyle, which is the real sacrifice. They live in huge mansions, and drive the best cars, and have the best of everything. If they really believed what they preach, they’d try to redistribute the wealth, and give their own money away. But they don’t do that. They stand for causes, which basically is just them asking someone else give their money away to help some cause. Then after the fundraiser they go back to their $20 million dollar mansion in Hollywood, and lay in their huge private swimming pool. In the end, they’re not much different. Also a lot of it is about social status, and wanting to appear a philanthropist.
I hate to sound so cynical, but it’s simply what I see. In fact, this world has a way of making a man neurotic, which is another reason I think greed exists. Everything is so wrong, we just want to go fly somewhere else. Like my grandpa last Sunday at dinner. I mentioned some political things going on, and he said, “Well, the world’s a mess.” Then he started singing, “I’ve got a home in glory land, that outshines the sun. I’ve got a home in glory land, that outshines the sun. I’ve got a home in glory land, that outshines the sun. WAaaaayyyy beeyyooonnnnddd the blllueeeee.” If you don’t know, that is a very popular gospel hymn.
I just can’t picture my cat singing that to me. Home is here in the house. There’s no “glory land”. I think my cat’s just fine walking around the back yard. Same with the neighbor’s dog. Or that squirrel in the tree. But us, we’re different.
Most religion is a projection of this inner dissatisfaction with our environment. Greed and religion have the same cause. This might be oversimplifying things, but Buddhists tell us all the world is suffering. Desiring a better world will only make your suffering worse, so give up on everything, and just enjoy things the best you can without putting out too much wasted effort. Christians and other religions promise satisfaction in the afterlife. They know life sucks here, but in the next life a deity of some sort is going to fix it. Then there’s the fringe religions, like Satanism. Indulge yourself in sensual pleasures, quit letting your conscience bother you, and forget about the messed up world.
All of these religions, and others too, are just manifestations of the same inner discontent for this world. Those who are greedy have just chosen one way to deal with the same problem: acquire enough money to buy your way out of as many things as possible. If you can have access to the best toys, best home, prettiest girls, and everything else money can buy, that’s better than nothing.
I think of the root causes of greed I mentioned, the worst is the fifth point.  “We desire to accomplish things we could never do alone, and need others to help us with our dreams.”  The power of man’s collective enterprise can bring about amazing things, and considering our insatiable inner hunger, there’s always someone trying to manipulate the world so they can control mankind’s affairs and destiny. I find this one the worst because it drags other people into the fray.
There’s always someone with their ideal which they’d like to impress on the world. They envision some world in their mind, and think if only things worked the way they think it should, everything would magically fix itself. Or at least, be a lot better.
Or maybe they envision some invention but are unable to build it themselves. They hope to raise the capital, and form a team of scientists and engineers to bring it into existence.
Or maybe they’re the artsy type, and would love to make their own blockbuster movie. They dream of huge a budget where they could hire the camera crews, the special effects teams, top acting talent, and more.
But all these things require huge sums of money, and everyone complains about not making enough money, or not being able to raise enough capital. But what does that really mean? It means you’re too weak to accomplish this goal on your own, so you want money so you can pay others to do the work you’re unable to do yourself.
The problem is, a lot of people have desires, and there’s only so much talent, and so many resources to go around. Higher costs in big budget productions reflect this. Take a blockbuster movie for example. It takes a lot of society’s resources to feed that huge team of people. Give them equipment. Give the actors big houses and huge pay-offs. Build all the movie theaters. Build the sets. Design and build the computers used to generate the special effects, and more.
It’s sad not every director, and everyone who writes a script, has the chance to do a big blockbuster movie in their lifetime. But it’s also sad for all the people who have to grow the food this team of people eat. And it’s sad for all the carpenters building the homes we all live in. And it’s sad for all the engineers who have to work for some company and design cameras. But these people are forced to go to work everyday, and most of them don’t like it.
I saw an engineer the other day. His job was to analyze soil, and see if it’s fit for a building’s foundation. He said the job was very boring. Girls weren’t very interested in him and his boring job. Sad though. His job is very necessary to society. That’s how life goes though.
Before I end this, I’d like to mention one other interesting thing I came across recently. Conspiracy theorists often talk about world leaders being involved in crazy religious rituals. Kings, priests, and other leaders in past ages were known to take place in some strange rites and things. One such ritual is the “cremation of care” which still takes place in Bohemian grove. I’m told that it’s well documented that world leaders go to Bohemian grove, in northern California, and have some sort of private outing. Conspiracy theorists claim they take part in these rituals while they’re there.
Back in 2000, Alex Jones (a popular conspiracy theorist) snuck in while the members of the Bohemian club were meeting and filmed them doing their ritual. It’s definitely interesting to watch, and since some of the themes it displays tie in with what I’ve been talking about, I figured I’d show it as an added bonus to this journal entry 
 Though it’s hard to see, they do a strange ritual in front of a giant owl statue. Take a look for yourself:
It was kind of hard to see the owl statue they were doing the ritual beside, so here’s a photograph.
Notice they talk about ridding themselves of “care”. Basically, turn off your conscience, and don’t worry about how you’re mistreating the world and how you’re living off their backs. Don’t worry about the cares of this world, and everything that is wrong with. The cares of working, and toiling — BE GONE. Then they burn that effigy (a symbol of “care”) in flames and say, “Enjoy this beautiful grove and take it easy.”
I don’t think our leaders actually worship some stone owl of Molech, but I do find the ritual’s concern over the cares of this world, and their burning of it in a fictitious effigy quite interesting.
Apparently this owl (Owl of Bohemia) is the same little owl that’s on our one dollar bill, in the top-right corner.
I doubt this “owl” on the dollar is the same owl in that ritual, but I would certainly say the elites of this world use corrupt monetary systems to get what they desire.
Speaking of owls, probably the most interesting thing I’ve seen in some time is the fact that an owl surrounds the the U.S. capitol building in Washington D.C. At first I thought it was a picture these conspiracy theorists had doctored up, but really I saw these images directly for myself from Google Earth. The first one highlights the owl. The second is an actual, unedited satellite photo.
This owl also stands on top of a pyramid. Some other conspiracy theorists show pentagrams, masonic logos, and other “satanic” things in the street plans of Washington DC. They’re a little far-fetched to me, but this definitely resembles an owl.  If any of you know the story as to how this “owl” street-layout came to surround the capitol, please comment below. I’d be interested to hear about it.
That was a fun diversion, wasn’t it? Haha.
I used to consider myself a philosopher, and believed that there was some magic mindset which I could teach others. It’d somehow make us all happy, and capable of doing anything we set our minds to. Over the years I’ve begun to doubt that such a thing exists. When I study the biological wiring, our bodies are made to survive and reproduce. Happiness is reward chemicals firing off in our brains, and those only fire off at set times, such as when we’re eating, using the bathroom, moving about, keeping busy with our hands, and other things like that.
We have to have a form of work which we enjoy. You have to be constantly improving, and keeping your hands busy. It’s almost like evolution is forcing us to progress further, with a cattle-prod. Those who refuse to go along with the flow, it makes sure you’re depressed and miserable, hoping it can motivate you to get up and move. (There are a few exceptions)
On one last note, do any of you remember Paul’s letter to Timothy in the Bible? I was raised in a Christian home, and I used to always hear this verse: “The love of money is the root of all evil”. It’s found in 1 Timothy 6:10.  I always wondered what it meant.
I actually find this verse instructive, but back then I didn’t know what it meant. Being the young little Jason, I tried to follow everything that my parents and the Bible told me to do. This verse confused me more than any other, I think. And considering Christians today like to preach prosperity and getting rich, instead of Jesus’ original message of giving to the poor, and serving the world, I think this is worth discussing.
So what’s evil about loving money? Don’t think about money as a piece of paper, or a coin. Think of what you do with money. Money is this object which you can hand to someone else, and they will do something for you. When Paul said the love of money is evil, he means the love of having others serve you, is what’s evil.
Funny how you can turn on TBN, and every so-called preacher of the gospel of Jesus tells you, “God wants you rich! Send money to my ministry and God will make you prosperous!” This is probably a money ploy, but I think a lot of people actually believe God wants them to be rich monetarily.
It all comes down to this: Money is all about receiving goods and services from others. If you love money, and pursue wealth, you love the idea of people serving you.
Oftentimes our desires can be so great we can never achieve them on our own. So Paul seems to be warning us that hoping to get enough money to pay others to help us with our dreams and throw the burdens of this life onto others will cause more harm than good. We’ll all end up fighting each other instead, and waste our energy in conflict and scheming, instead of figuring out how we can work together to solve our problems. It’s worth thinking about.
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