The modern religion
Who profited from maintaining and magnifying
selfishness and greed, and at the same time
allowing love, friendship, respect for man and
nature to fade away and eventually to be forgotten?
Why, since the first communities till yesterday
in
all healthy societies was modesty
and self-restraint recognized as a virtue,
and why today are we all engaged in the
race for luxury and rampant consumerism?
How could mankind have existed until now
by condemning and isolating the greedy,
and today be in the verge of collapse
having declared money to be the sole
and absolute value, for the sake of
which everything is permitted?
This promotion of money
as today's
religion is, I think, the
reason for all the ills
that we are suffering and
the much
greater ones that are
coming.
And I think you'll agree with me that for such
a serious issue it is worth asking why and how,
or even who is to blame for such a development.
And let no one say again that this
has happened on its own, simply
because mankind is getting old
and silly and is returning to primitive
and infantile behaviour.
Today, mankind is facing an unprecedented reality
and, in my opinion, an unprecedented threat.
We have the global, single, complete and
unquestioned dominance of an economic,
social and political system based on a
unique value:
Money,
which has replaced all other values
in which we believed up to now.
The foundations of our civilization
(concepts such as: Love, Ethics, Logic, Freedom),
which we considered unshakeable, because we
needed centuries if not millennia to form them,
have been overthrown and in their place there
is a single teaching:
"Money is the measure
of all things".
I will make no comments regarding the
moral and cultural value of this system.
I'm sure you have made these
comments already by yourself.
I would claim however that the system is not
just dangerous for humanity,
for the environment
and for the planet.
It is catastrophic.
It includes in its core
the seed of destruction.
Of its own destruction first,
and of our own afterwards,
because we linked our destiny with it.
It leads us to this disaster with ever increasing speed
and we may have already reached the
point where even if we wake up we
cannot avoid the complete ruin.
The basic principle of the current way of
thinking is that capital by driving economic
development "creates" new capital.
The capital's owner has no need to work for it.
Capital multiplies by itself.
The logical explanation of this concept,
and also its ideological and moral
justification is based on the concept
of growth.
Without growth our system is unthinkable.
The invested capital enables growth,
increased production and increased profits.
A part of the profits logically is collected by
the capital's owner, the investor so that he,
without having worked of course, possesses
more capital than before.
I will leave it to you to judge the moral side of this argument.
I will confine myself to ask a question
on the future of such a system by making
a simple fun mathematical game.