Might As Well Face It, You're Addicted to Money

I have come to the conclusion after several decades of watching humanity and democracy get flushed down the toilet that the only way to stop the flood that has gone in to the sewer system is to take away the money. The people who have amassed great fortunes are using it to insulate themselves from having to bear any responsibility for how badly their actions are crushing anything that stands in the way of their accumulating more, and those of us who stand below them are finding out that we have little or no power to stop them because they intend to destroy us if we try. If their true power is money then it is a fact that their money has to be taken away from them. If someone is beating people to death with a hammer you would take the hammer away from them. It isn’t quite as likely that you would take their gun away from them if that was the weapon that they were using, not in America anyway, but that is another story, and taking away the weapon of money, if that is what they are wielding will be even more difficult but very necessary. The only people that I see with enough power to do that is our government. Since our government is unwilling to do it, we can only sit and watch as the destruction worsens if we don’t get up and find another way.

There is a scene in the Disney film Candleshoe where the children who live at the Candleshoe estate are trying to sell eggs at a village market to make enough money to keep from losing their home. The character, Casey, is doing her best American-style sales pitch to entice customers into buying. Another character, Cluny, begins trying her hand at selling with the intent of outdoing Casey by making outlandish claims about how the eggs will cure a multitude of health issues. She is told by the eldest boy that she cannot make claims like that, to which she responds, “Who cares as long as we sell more eggs!” Sounds like a true capitalist to me. Who cares as long as we make more money? So tell me, who does care that deadly fires, floods, poverty, hunger, crime, homelessness, gun violence, and lack of healthcare is killing thousands of people every day? You might hear some lip service about it from government representatives but it is a fact that they aren’t doing a damn thing to stop it. Who cares as long as we sell eggs?

Whether you live or die now depends on whether or not you can pay someone else for the privilege. I would really like to meet the person who decided that this was a good idea. Even more so I would like to meet the citizenry who decided that this was a good idea and never once sat down and wondered if it wasn’t a ridiculous thing to support. Once actual slavery was abolished in this country we were duped into accepting a modified form of it which looked better for us on the surface. Physical brutality was removed from the equation but fear was attached to employment then that our ability to make a living could be taken away from us at any time based on a whim. This system still exists more than 150 years later except in the case of unionized jobs. Servitude and wage slavery is a bargain that people struck with the aggressive and elitist thinking people who sold us the idea that they would take care of the problems that many of us feel inadequate at doing in exchange for it. Too many people have been willing to accept this rather than give up their perceived freedom from having to make the tough decisions that are required of a society that sees to the welfare of all. It was actually almost inevitable that those who were willing to put forth some creativity and muscle to make this an easier world to live in might get big headed and believe that “because of their highly superior brain” they should rule the world. We let them adopt that mentality and rarely, if ever, stood in the way of that kind of thinking.

In Astrology it is understood that some signs in the zodiac tend to be leader types while others make better organizers and so on. We aren’t meant to assume that any particular sign is superior to any other. What we actually need to assume is that it takes all kinds of people to create a civilization that is balanced. It is a belief in the superiority of a few that creates a tiered system of entitlement in most every aspect of life but especially in the workplace. That point of view is the main culprit in what has given us this warped way of living. More and more people are realizing how badly out of control that system is now but it has gone on so long and is so ingrained in our belief system that it will take a great deal of force and determination to wrestle the hammer away from those who wield it. In the legend of the Nordic God, Thor,  (if you believe the Marvel Studio’s version of it in the movie Thor) he loses his hammer, the symbol of his power, through arrogance, immaturity, and irresponsibility. Those who wield the economic hammer here are hundreds of years overdue for losing theirs. They have misused and abused their authority with respect to their responsibility to the people who have stepped aside to let them do what they are assumed to do best which is contribute their knowledge and abilities to the welfare and benefit of all. It is a very commendable thing to have had the foresight and resources to start a business to manufacture the necessities of life but it is only that.  The actual production is done by others, and to believe that as a CEO you deserve 300 times as much salary for having and implementing the idea is preposterous when you cannot produce 300 times the amount of work product that your employees do by yourself.

A great many people have finally gotten it through their heads that this is the major cause of why we have so much inequality in this world but they are at a loss as to how to stop it. People who have unionized jobs are attempting to right this wrong now but the vast majority of the people are not so lucky as to have a unionized job. It will take a government that actually sees and understands the needs of its people to change this. Without that, it will take brute force from the people to ever eliminate poverty. Will the people do it? Many decades ago, Governor Jerry Brown, of California was running for President and a national magazine put out a headline for a story about it saying, “Jerry Brown wants to give power to the people. But do the people want it?”. I guess that they didn’t because he did not win. We will have to collectively decide that we do want the power to live without poverty and stop the multitude of problems that have been created by greed and rampant inequality. Getting people to understand that this cannot be achieved without taking responsibility for how they have been complicit in supporting a system that allows corporate greed to remain and flourish has to be a top priority.  We will not be able to eliminate inequality in the workplace or anywhere else as long as we keep inequality in our individual belief systems. As long as we use money to buy ourselves a hierarchy in every facet of life as we do now, the ones who have the most money will see to it that we are never able to achieve it. The money is a drug that we are addicted to. Instead of taking it out of the equation we keep believing that we just need to have more to keep up with the higher level addicts who never believe that they have enough. They have already shown us that we will just have to deal with withdrawal because they are not about to share more of their drug. If we do not keep the buck from stopping at their house we will have to show them non-participation in their drug deals. We can do the work but we have to prove to them that they will not receive 300 times the income for what they do versus what we do for them. When there is no money there is no more leverage. Will they all shut down their businesses in protest? If they do, they will starve like the rest of us, or the people with the actual work skills will get up and do it differently and invite others to come with them if they want to live. Yes, it has come to that.