Misplaced desire

June 19th, 2023

Among the widespread devaluation of values and needs, only one drive — the greedy and aggressive drive for power and money and possessions remains strong, and it seems that it is the only metric to judge the usefulness of things. The desire for money and possessions that lead to power takes the place of all genuinely human needs.

It seems as though the accumulation of wealth and power is in few hands, with crumbs falling to the middle class and then specks of crumbs falling even lower to the vast majority of people in the world, leads to the deep impoverishment of human nature. Most instincts that remain strong in people in every society connect only to material greed.

The totality of human nature is reduced to pitiful abstraction and weak substitution of what it means to be human, and this dehumanization of human nature is so deeply ingrained in all of us that this unsatiable greed cannot be questioned without ad-hominem attacks — commie, lefty, liberal, Marxist, socialist or worse — an economical naive loser.

In this dehumanizing behavior, we lose our connection with our body — the body that we need to use (or abuse) or sell to a higher bidder — or gentler than most, in which case, we can count ourselves lucky. That means working ourselves half to death and forgoing the search and appreciation for sensuality and pleasure. And happiness.

What counts is a cold, calculating, prosaic, rational, industrious, shrewd mind. We are so brainwashed and one-sided that all and any objects exist for us only if we can possess them, assign them a specific value, and if they have utility. And I am just as guilty of that myself. I think to last time I did something with a lasting effect that had no value and was done just for the sake of doing it — like a walk in the rain, or a helping hand to a stranger. I cannot come up with any recent example…