The internet and virtual reality technology, indeed even drugs, are not the first things we created that allowed us to live in a "virtual world," far removed from reality and all of the suffering and hardships it contains. The first devices humans ever created that allowed people to escape into such a virtual reality was religion, and then money. Money, in other words, provides the wealthiest of all with the miracle of living in heaven on earth, even when doing so requires putting everyone else in hell.
Money, as such, allows us to purchase an escape from the real world, and the worst that life has to offer. Hence, money does to reality itself what drugs do to our mind. Where heroin hides from us the hell we have fallen into in the real world, by hoking us on our euphoria, money pays to insulate a person from how much the world is going to hell around them, and affords the richest of all the luxury to deny that they are the ones responsible for sending it there.
The wealthiest live on their own “fantasy island” in their heads, in this sense, which rests in reality on the broken backs of all those who must suffer to maintain the pretense that money allows us to buy. "The comforts of the rich," as Voltaire put it, "depend upon an abundant supply of the poor." To the rich, those poor are worth less than mere livestock, beasts of burden, which is why the former pass laws designed to sweep the poorest of all off of the streets, while making money in the process.
Wealth is an estate of the mind, and the more wealth one has, which gives them a right to enjoy a larger portion of the resources over everyone else (thanks only to the laws they drafted and the religions they created to justify so inequitable an arrangement), the further they can insulate themselves from the suffering their accumulation of wealth necessarily rises in tandem with. And it rises in tandem with that suffering necessarily, because it is the cause of it.
This then, is the true "intelligent design" of our, and all, economic religions.
It’s interesting how often we think we are better or smarter than others, simply because they don’t see things the same way we do. Without money, there would be no way to affirm or "reward" one way of thinking over another. And nothing convinces us that we must indeed be "smarter" than others, than how much money we have.
Money validates the “right” way of thinking in a given society, enriching people to the degree they agree with and work to propagate that system as right, benevolent and virtuous, even if such people are quite critical of that system sometimes along the way. No institution rewards those who dare to question the power or authority or benevolence of that institution. But all those who glorify, fight and defend that system, or who's opposition to it can later be refashioned as support of it, are hailed as its saints. That's why Jesus is now the prophet as much of the Catholic Church as the profit making money changers, and why we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday in a country engaged in a race war using the pretext of a War on Drugs.
Capitalism simply rewards those who defend its secrets and its lies, while at the same time singing its praises, and money is simply the reward, given to us like Pavlov giving food to his dog, of how much the "system" approves of our thinking, obedience, and behavior. This approval is then sold to that person as simply being "God's" approval, which is how religions for every empire have always been used to yoke a person's spirituality and fear of death, to the powers that be.
Those powers change only in their methods, names, and configurations, while their desire to rule over others remains always the same. And money is the greatest means they have of doing so, and hiding the latter by always changing the former.
Money, in other words, turns reality itself into a chameleon, allowing us to live in whatever version of "virtual reality" that we can afford, while always hiding from us the ever present lust for power, in an every growing array of guises.
Money, as such, allows us to purchase an escape from the real world, and the worst that life has to offer. Hence, money does to reality itself what drugs do to our mind. Where heroin hides from us the hell we have fallen into in the real world, by hoking us on our euphoria, money pays to insulate a person from how much the world is going to hell around them, and affords the richest of all the luxury to deny that they are the ones responsible for sending it there.
The wealthiest live on their own “fantasy island” in their heads, in this sense, which rests in reality on the broken backs of all those who must suffer to maintain the pretense that money allows us to buy. "The comforts of the rich," as Voltaire put it, "depend upon an abundant supply of the poor." To the rich, those poor are worth less than mere livestock, beasts of burden, which is why the former pass laws designed to sweep the poorest of all off of the streets, while making money in the process.
Wealth is an estate of the mind, and the more wealth one has, which gives them a right to enjoy a larger portion of the resources over everyone else (thanks only to the laws they drafted and the religions they created to justify so inequitable an arrangement), the further they can insulate themselves from the suffering their accumulation of wealth necessarily rises in tandem with. And it rises in tandem with that suffering necessarily, because it is the cause of it.
This then, is the true "intelligent design" of our, and all, economic religions.
It’s interesting how often we think we are better or smarter than others, simply because they don’t see things the same way we do. Without money, there would be no way to affirm or "reward" one way of thinking over another. And nothing convinces us that we must indeed be "smarter" than others, than how much money we have.
Money validates the “right” way of thinking in a given society, enriching people to the degree they agree with and work to propagate that system as right, benevolent and virtuous, even if such people are quite critical of that system sometimes along the way. No institution rewards those who dare to question the power or authority or benevolence of that institution. But all those who glorify, fight and defend that system, or who's opposition to it can later be refashioned as support of it, are hailed as its saints. That's why Jesus is now the prophet as much of the Catholic Church as the profit making money changers, and why we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday in a country engaged in a race war using the pretext of a War on Drugs.
Capitalism simply rewards those who defend its secrets and its lies, while at the same time singing its praises, and money is simply the reward, given to us like Pavlov giving food to his dog, of how much the "system" approves of our thinking, obedience, and behavior. This approval is then sold to that person as simply being "God's" approval, which is how religions for every empire have always been used to yoke a person's spirituality and fear of death, to the powers that be.
Those powers change only in their methods, names, and configurations, while their desire to rule over others remains always the same. And money is the greatest means they have of doing so, and hiding the latter by always changing the former.
Money, in other words, turns reality itself into a chameleon, allowing us to live in whatever version of "virtual reality" that we can afford, while always hiding from us the ever present lust for power, in an every growing array of guises.
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