by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
This love of wealth is not, however, new. It has been with us ever since gold, silver, jewels and pearls we declared to be valuable, and then money was created. It is not only money but property, real estate and other property, and other wealth too and always has been since this trait emerged. We can even find this in nomadic peoples and cultures where a person's standing was and is determined and judged on the amount of cattle, goats, etc. he owns.
Today everyone almost wishes to participate in this stupidity of laying up treasures in the form of material wealth. It has also caused and wars and is still doing so to this very moment in time and “property crime”, that is to say theft, fraud, and such like, in its various forms.
It is one thing to steal, especially food and such like essentials because someone is hungry and needy and too poor but a totally different thing when this is in order to gain and advantage and to enrich oneself to the detriment of others.
The capitalists system appear almost though it is set up in such a way that theft, by other names, is the way that corporations make their profits. Whether that theft is from its workers by not paying them a proper wage or by fraud and by withholding taxes. Not forgotten also must be the theft of natural resources and the plunder of Mother Earth.
There are even some that believe that taxes is theft by the state from the people and corporations and, maybe, they are right but that is neither here nor there in this context.
Fact is that the capitalist system sees the accumulation of wealth as something to be aimed for regardless of what the cost to others and the environment and this accumulation is a love of wealth and everyone apparently wishes to partake in this illogical game. It has almost become a disease where no one even considers the consequences and everyone wants more and more and still more, never satisfied with what they already have and own.
People have come to believe that the more money and other wealth they own the happier they will be and every time that they think they have accumulated “enough” it still does not make them happy. So they pursue the next million and then the next. The next large care and the next. And on it goes. The accumulation of money and other wealth has become a cult with mammon the god and it does not for happiness make; rather the opposite and that for the “owner” of such wealth as well as for every other person.
And, in order to satisfy their desire for happiness through wealth, which is not attainable, many will go over dead bodies, literally and not just metaphorically. Wars are the cause of it as are many famines that are not caused by natural calamities and exploitation of man by man and exploitation of the Earth and all living things by man. All in the service of this god called mammon.
When we understand that wealth, that riches, do not actually make for happiness and that they only cause problems maybe, just maybe, things may change.
© 2014
