It is the time of doers.
It’s gonna take a while for the age of thinkers to come again.
Every success story today is more about accomplishing what we call “wealth creation”, and less about what we call “good creation”.
Sure, maybe you are one who thinks that today is everything, that we are at some peak, unable to fall, or one who dwells passively in the sweet illusion of future prosperity, prosperity brought about by the fresh new princes of the world, or hey, maybe you are one who believes in basic income — to any of which I say, maybe.
I know that wealth creation has been here before.
I also know that the antithesis of wealth versus good is not immediately apparent. It can actually be shocking.
One is inclined to think that wealth is good. Of course, you take the cautionary steps and mention that wealth must be used for good, that wealth is not good by itself, that wealth should be shared to be good, but with all these safety nets on, we generally conclude that wealth is good.
But it ain’t.
Actually, in a social sense wealth is the opposite of good, wealth is evil.
First, wealth is not money! Precisely, wealth is physically fenced matter. Here is a way to explain:
wealth — the last stage of owning, which breaks matter from the universe for the single use of a person.
Like this:
1) free — keep from none
2) worthy— keep from one
3) earned — keep from some
4) property — keep from many
5) wealth — keep from all
Unlike property, wealth just sits and does nothing much.
Wealth is as useless as a pedestal. Think about it. All that matter below a human only so that one is higher than another …
Wealth is when property becomes used as bricks in a wall. Wealth is like the tomb competition in Egypt, where, for no logical reason, work, time, effort, planning, all got sucked into fencing matter to make a huge pyramid of stone.
Property is productive, property advances humans, but wealth is a force of stagnation.
Usually wealth is not real. It resides in illusory beliefs in the value of some things. This is different from property. But for this very specific reason wealth is fenced matter: we keep property out of production so we don’t suddenly see it lose its illusory evaluation.
Not only people act poorly on wealth. Entire countries do too. “Our land”, “our country”, “war” is about preserving unchanged an illusory drawing on a map for fencing matter.
The world has seen times like this before, times of doer’s revolutions. We are, it seems, bound to make the same mistakes, not ideologically, not conceptually, but emotionally.
We suck at evolving beyond the immediate.
But, if wealth is evil, how to still satisfy our innate greed?
Greed. You have it.
Greed masquerades as hunger, but, in reality, we sublimate the primal greed of eating for future hunger, into fine and abstract forms of greed, around the end of childhood.
That moment when greed defined you, it was the loss of your innocence.
Why are we so shy in acknowledging greed? It is not a flaw, it is a survival mechanism and it doesn’t work right in times of abundance.
Greed is so basic that it defines an entire palette of emotions and sentiments.
Pride, the greed for love. Lust, the greed for safety. Vanity, the greed for embraces. Gluttony, the greed for touch.
Why do we shame greed, instead of cultivating it?
It is the same thing we do to our poor ego. Fighting against our ego since Vedic times, with no results.
If “ego fighting” would be a company, it should be Yahoo. When it was a highly valued behemoth, all it did was to suffocate promising businesses, in our case, the “ego fighting”, promising paths for spiritual achievement, gulping on them with teleological arguments, constantly capitalizing on the touted purposelessness of the ego. Do you know why it worked? Because, we are all our egos, we are the purpose, so of course we don’t see it in our subjective damnation of it.
Sickly Ego + Primitive Greed = Hoarding
Back to our revolution. When doers get a revolution you get great things like electricity, mining enterprises, steel mills, mobile work forces, cars, lots of cars and machinery, items made of other items, lots of stagnating progress.
Stagnating progress is the progress that produces wealth.
There are huge opportunities in the times of the revolutions made by doers. But, as opportunity is when luck meets preparation, only a few get to experience the fruits born out of innovation. Then a larger group will enjoy the fruits of access. Then an even larger group will enjoy the fruits of disruption.
Do you know there is no such thing as “industry disruption”? Yes, there is only economic and social disruption, caused by winding down old industries and ramping up new ones.
The disassembly line for whole industries is not disruption, it is leverage.
But the world as a whole, during the revolutions of the doers, halts.
Doers need to sell. To sell, you shout louder than the other doers. To be heard, you make a clearer message. To make the message clearer you make all communication static. Advertising copy becomes political discourse. Nobody wants to “complicate things” and you rise drivel to intellectual achievement.
We have a problem.
The problem is that people cater to stupidity when they lose sight of stupidity.
Take the UK’s vote. Brexit was a bad idea and the people who chose a bad idea clearly are not smart enough to see it was a bad idea. There is no reason to pamper this and cater to stupidity by overarching histories of class inequality in the UK or about the shortcomings of bureaucracy in the EU. The British could have done many other things better than the stupid one they voted for. People who defend the “brexit” voters cater to stupidity.
Why does this matter?
It’s the damn drivel. Drivel as intellectual achievement is when we lose sight of the fact that we’re not bright anymore. And we start to defend stupidity, we start to elevate it to higher levels of awareness, we start to draw lessons from randomness, forgetting our order maker natures.
In my opinion, the Eurosceptic movement or the ascension of nationalist extremism in the US are perfect examples of the sustained sun setting of the mind.
Why do we become chained to stupidity? Because during times of doer revolutions we rejoice practical novelty and in doing so we stifle intellectual novelty. Sure, no one will ever admit to it. Everyone is afraid of being labeled an Intellectual Yet Idiot. During times of doer revolutions we rejoice positive news.
Thinking of problems should be done with a mandatory perma-smile.