The road to perdition

For those of you who have been paying attention, you will have noticed that the theme of the last few posts was about selfishness. Many of the problems with which we are confronted, either as an economy or a society (should we still have one), are because of what some think they should have and who we believe should be able to have what. It's all about having, nothing more.

It's so simple when you get right down to it, but it's having that is going to be our undoing. When we are born, we have nothing. We hope we have at least a mother, because if we don't, we're not capable of living on our own, but we have absolutely nothing. When we die, we take nothing with us; nothing physical that is. We may have amassed a huge fortune, but we can't take it with us. We just go. We have nothing at the start and nothing at the end, and that makes me wonder why having plays such an important role between those two points. Does what we have say anything at all about who we are? I don't think so.

As long as we buy into the illusion that having is more important than anything else, we're going to continue having the problems that are plaguing us right now. By making having the be-all and end-all of existence, we have created this illusion, however. We feed it every time we think we have to buy something and that buying things will make us happy. But they don't. I saw a statistic yesterday about how many things the average person (and we're talking about people here in the industrialized West) has/owns: 60,000. Yes, I was amazed, too, but we have all these things and we're as unhappy as we've ever been, so we're going to go out and buy some more ... but for what?

What you have says absolutely nothing about who you are. This applies whether you are just a single person or whether you are a company, a community, a society, an economy, or a country. What is important is who you are, and who you are is determined by what you do.

So, what are you doing to stop us all from going to Hell in a handbasket? Consuming? Talking? Complaining? Or are you really doing something?