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Tuesday, 29 March 2011

Greed and Growth at War With Each Other, Ctd

Posted on 12:03 by hony
I feel I should go on, because one paragraph from the previous entry is almost certainly going to catch me some flak:
The problem, dear readers, isn't the brain vacuum being swept across the carpet by the financial sector. No the problem is the culture of greed in this country where people say to each other "I'd like to make a lot of money in life." When did that become a serious goal? Was it always?

I'm not so naive as to imagine that a world can exist where people actively don't want to be rich. In fact that is not at all what I am suggesting is a solution to corporate and individual greed in this country. Rather, what I am suggesting is the following, and I'll bold and break it so it's easy for you to read:
Making money should not be the primary goal in life, but in America, it is.

The culture of prosperity in itself is no problem. America was built on a foundation that wanted the freedom to prosper. But "prosperity" is changing, as the culture of this country becomes increasingly focused on the tiny few who have exorbitant amounts of wealth (while gaining no happiness) and insistently suggesting that prosperity means being filthy stinking rich, and more importantly: "If you are not filthy stinking rich THEN YOU ARE NOT SUCCESSFUL."

So an avenue for smart kids to be "successful" opens up in the form of developing complex financial products that harvest huge profits from less-intelligent people. Lacking a "higher purpose" than to seek wealth and from it derive happiness, the smart kids are doing the most logical thing, really.

So where's the higher purpose? Where's the need to "do good"? Something is failing America's kids so that they aren't growing up with enough of a sense of altruism, and that something is us. I don't have a fix, unfortunately. I feel the urge to get rich along with everyone else. Maybe we need to teach kids "goal setting" at an earlier age, and actively cultivate altruistic/beneficent goals that will also allow their prosperity, and attempt to weed out "get rich" and the like. I don't know. I just don't know.


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