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The Power of Envy

Envy is as much an engine of Capitalism as it is of Christianity, only it works as a virtue for one and a vice for the other. Capitalism largely runs on getting people to compete with the Jones's, as they say, driving people to forever upgrade to remain 'fashionable.' Christianity runs largely on condemning in people this desire, which not only ultimately never satisfies, but which is such a source of unhappiness as well.

Hence, from Monday til Saturday, a person lives in an incubator of advertising that lures them everywhere to consume, like the cleverest serpent that ever lived selling salvation, and then on Sunday, people pile into their church pews to enjoy buying into a baloney sandwich about God and an afterlife, while being castigated for being gullible enough to buy into the baloney sandwich Capitalism has been selling them all week in the first place.    

Envy, like God himself, builds our entire world 6 days of the week as the virtue at the heart of the "profit motive," only to be castigated on Sunday as the greatest vice there is, and the root of all evil called "the love of money."

Or, to put it another way, envy is Verbal Kint for 6 days of the week, and Keyser Söze on the seventh. Or if you buy into Joel Osteen's "prosperity gospel," it is always  Keyser Söze and Verbal Kint is simply a godless Communist. 

 

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