Wealthier people feel exempt
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The freedom that comes with wealth is presented by society as the peak experience for humans in the current age. Of course, this isn’t unique to our time.
Financial freedom allows you to rise above discomfort, struggle and inconvenience.
Floods. Fires. Droughts. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Poverty. These are all things that happen to someone else.
Slavery. Oppression. Sexual abuse. Exploitation. These are things we don’t even want to talk about, but they are regularly used to create financial freedom for someone.
But things don’t happen to us, and they don’t impact our lifestyles in noticeable ways, they’re just words that have definitions, but don’t have any pain associated with them.
They are barbaric acts done to others. But we don’t know people like that. It’s probably the primitive savages among the uneducated masses. The masses who are kept uneducated so they can be exploited like primitive savages.
But if you could follow the money you spend as it rolls up into the pockets of someone wealthy, you would quickly see it mixing with money made from exploitation of our planet and our own species.
Heck, you and I participate in exploitation every time we fill up our gas tanks or flip a light switch on.
And we’re wealthy enough that we can feel insulated from the exploitation. It doesn’t even merit thought.
Still, we willingly benefit from the exploitation having been done.
By someone else.
That’s what we have to do to be wealthy in this age. We benefit from someone else being oppressed, exploited, abused, enslaved, driven mad, depressed, repressed.
We benefit from our planet being oppressed, exploited, abused, enslaved, driven mad, depressed, repressed.
This is the ideal to which we all aspire as we yearn for the freedom that comes with wealth.
By pursuing wealth, we’re endorsing the darkness and deception, the illusion, that serves as the foundation for the very concept that a person’s worth, or even value, can be measured with money.
Everyone dances this dance these days. Some of us dance this dance enthusiastically. Others dance because they must. We’ve structured society so that no one can say they don’t exploit.
Who else but humans could conceive of a system like that?
If we continue as we have been, it isn’t hard at all to imagine a day when our atmosphere and streams are all so polluted that we’ll have to pay for clean air and water. You can bet your ass someone will be becoming wealthier when that happens.
We’ve got to change our thinking.
We’ve got to change the way we do things. We must learn new ways to define wealth and success for all of us.
All of us have to change if we want to give our species the opportunity to achieve its potential. If we don’t change our thinking, we’re on a fast track to snuffing ourselves out like burned-out addicts no one will remember.
If we can’t change our thinking, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
It really is up to us. You and me. No one is coming to save us.
Originally published @ steverigell.com
