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Mammon, God of Greed, Stupidity and Ignorance - here now!

I know a person, who is a fan of just about every conspiracy theory going. One of them talks about "Reptiloids", i.e. not human beings who look like humans but are actually demons or come from another planet. I'm not clear on that, but there is something that is pointed towards in that theory. There definitely are people around who have forgotten their humanity, and what have they given it up for? Money and apparent power.

Why do I say they have forgotten their humanity? Simple, a human being has empathy and a heart which wishes to do good. If that stops being the case, i.e. when empathy vanishes and doing good for others is irrelevant, then that essential aspect of a person, their humanity, has been forgotten. Not irretrievably, but definitely forgotten.
I look at the Senior Executives and Board Members of some major companies, who have caused an unbelievable amount of damage to both the planet and the people they employ or who live near the places of employment. These companies include pretty much all of those listed in the commodities markets, covering metal, energy, livestock and meat. I've said this before, but I have no idea how the people at Glencore, BHP or Rio Tinto, Jiangxi Copper and Vale (all mining companies) or those at Saudi Aramco, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Chevron, Gazprom and Marathon (all Oil Companies) besides countless others can sleep at night, knowing the levels of pollution, the ruining of land with poison, the miserable conditions their employees have to work in, while they lie in their beds in their mansions, full fed and safe.
Of course this is the same with all the lunatics in the world who, for reasons unfathomable to me, get elected to high office where they then proceed to ruin the lives of their electorate. That makes the electorate very, very stupid. Why? Because they keep doing it. Look at the crazy people in the USA, who claim to do God's will, although they clearly don't give a Damm about their own souls. If they really believed in God, then the highest adage they should follow is "let him who is without sin cast the first stone", meaning (for those too stupid to understand) that only those who are faultless have the right to pass judgment upon others (implying that no one is faultless and that, therefore, no one has such a right to pass judgment). But blame is the basic tool of the stupid.

What is the driving force behind it all? Mammon. Or to be clear: Greed. Everyone recognises the word as a negative and yet, so many bow down before this God. There is no person on the Planet who has more than 24 hours in the day. If I am cook cooking for others for 18 hours a day in the Kitchen, am I doing more or less that if work in an office and spend 18 hours a day hitting a keyboard or using a phone? I'd say in the kitchen is tougher than in an office. I've done both. I got paid more in the office. Why? There is a lot of crap talked about levels of responsibility. When I see how today Senior Staff are paid bonuses even when their area of responsibility is failing, then I don't want to hear about levels of responsibility. Those at the top bear a responsibility for all their subordinates. If they don't give a toss about them, then they shouldn't be paid for ignoring that. I have worked in a variety of companies and held both senior positions and none at all. I was surprised every time, when I discovered that my senior managers didn't even give a shit about the company paying them - it was all about personal advantage. Skill-set is the other big thing used to justify huge pay. There are skilled managers - they are the ones who know that it's not about them, but about a team, a joint effort and success or failure. These managers share with their employees, they nurture them, they make sure integration is happening and with a happy team, everything can be achieved. The stupid managers - and dear Lord how many there are of those - are those who only care about themselves, who are so ignorant that they actually fear their team in case they are better than him - I say "him", because it is almost always a man. These types are the ones who put you down, who won't promote you, who just make sure they are the ones getting any benefits going.

Ignorance plays a big part. I don't know everything, and I know that I don't know everything. I know some things, and I am ignorant of the rest. When Greed comes along, ignorance is an asset, not a liability. Combine it with stupidity, and you have the person who has forgotten their humanity. A classic example is ex-President Trump, whose ignorance is truly vast and combined with stupidity and greed enables him to do the huge damage he has done. The USA has been broken for a long time, but it is now completely broken and splintered thanks to that Person's ego and inability to change - a deadly characteristic for survival, and here we get to the core of it all. There are many President Trump's currently in the world, and each of them is trying to be greedier than the other. Look at President Putin's land grab right now.

Is there a formula here? D= Damage, s= success factor, G=Greed, S=Stupidity and I= Ignorance So D= (Gxs)x(SxI) i.e. the amount of damage caused can be calculated by the level of Greed multiplied by the success so far and then multiplied by the level of ignorance multiplied by the stupidity factor. A little game for the mathematicians.

What I see - which isn't the least bit amusing - is the effect on the world currently. Nobody is prepared to do with less. Enough is never enough. We, all of us, are currently in a very tricky situation. The planet is running out of good stuff and warming up with catastrophic effects, we desperately need to reduce everything. With the stupid war that egomaniac Putin has started, we are confronted with less fuel for our energy needs. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to reduce our usage, we fight to keep it all at the same level. With all the grain not being shipped from Ukraine especially to Africa, all we worry about is that we have enough in the West, that area which chucks thousands of tons of food away every day. Instead of seeing this opportunity to reduce travel and transport, we fight to maintain everything as it was. Pathetic. Of course, it's going to go badly - everybody with half a brain knows that, but we all just focus on our little patch and watch as our grandchildren slide down the tube to a disastrous future on planet Earth.

This is the reason I practice Knowledge and do my best to become a better human being, because not just I need the benefits, we all need the benefits. We need to get away from Mammon - you can't take it with you, after all - and find our way back to the heart of the human being. Will all those who have forgotten their humanity join in? I doubt it. Will these idiots get voted out? I doubt it. There is only one thing I don't doubt, and that is that I want to make my effort to be a better human being and that I want to remind people of the opportunity we have to be a better human being. I might not succeed, but that isn't the point. The point is to try and not give up.

Here are some great quotes on this theme:

 “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.”
― Socrates

Human Education - are we focussing on the right bits?

Looking at the state of the crazy world we live in, it seems to me clear that whatever we have been teaching our children and ourselves doesn't work.
Oh, we are great at understanding and using technologies, but we are really crap at living together. Which one is more important to you?
Basically, we don't learn what it means to be an individual human being. Have a look at some of the definitions of the term "Human" offered over the internet - everything I came across is basically a circular definition or along the lines of "not an animal". So if we don't know what a human being is, what are we going to teach these creatures?

One of the most fundamental facts about us, is that we humans can learn from experience. That may well be true, although what exactly we learn and from whom is something that needs to be carefully considered. An experience which humans have had for Millennia is war. What has that experience taught us? To make better weapons and to be constantly vigilant - trust no one. We have a lot of history lessons but all we learn about war is the dates, the number of dead and the weapons used. Is that education? Not to me. If we haven't learnt to live without war, we haven't progressed at all.

Another fundamental fact that isn't clearly taught, is that we have a limited lifespan, and we don't know what that span is, but we definitely know that there is an end for each being on the planet. Of course, many religions offer an insurance contract: keep supporting us, and you'll be alright when you're dead. That is not a deal to inspire confidence. Those telling us that, are alive, so they certainly don't speak from experience. The best case a religion offers is that Jesus was resurrected after three days dead. Well, if He really showed up, then He wasn't dead. There are plenty of documented cases where people were assumed to be dead, but suddenly woke up, occasionally in the Morgue! If He was dead, then he stayed that way. The only person who absolutely claims he saw him was /Saul/Paul. Mary wasn't sure and thought He was the Gardner! Saul/Paul was totally against him, but saw his opportunity to take the gang over, by claiming he actually chatted to Jesus on a road somewhere with nobody present. Again, there are a lot of people who have since claimed to have seen Him. Well, I haven't and nobody I know has. The world is full of religious crazies, all of whom claim to have the real Truth. My view: prove it so everybody has the same experience, but without drugs! Why this little rant? Because knowing, really knowing you have a very limited time - and for that there's plenty of proof - fundamentally affects how you perceive your life. Ask anyone who has come very close to the exit door. They all tend to say something similar about realising how valuable life is.

On top of that, there's Maya, the illusion. Again, nobody wants to look the facts in the face, but how can we progress if we ignore the facts. Of course, it's all illusion! Every creature on the planet is in a different location and therefore has a different perspective. Everyone has a view, and nobody agrees 100% on who, or what is The Truth or The Right Thing? We use language which is an abstraction of individual and personal experiences, so almost nobody means the same thing when using the same words. Now enhance that with the fact that there are countless numbers of objects from the size of a particle to the accumulation of particles which make up all the objects in the universe, all of which are in constant change and movement. How can anyone not see that they are not in control of anything or have any kind of complete perspective of anything at all. We pretend to know what we are doing and that we have stuff under control, and that is as good a definition of Maya as you can get. The reality is that we have no idea what reality really is. We have learnt to manipulate bits of our world to produce certain effects, but it always goes wrong at some point. Nothing stays the same forever.

Here's a quote from a professional educational institution looking at child development:

"Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and education of children from birth through age 8 bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8, a 2015 report from the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, explores the implications of the science of child development for the professionals who work with these children.

Young children thrive when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning. The science of child development and early learning makes clear the importance and complexity of working with young children from infancy through the early elementary years. Research during the past decade has revealed much about how children learn and develop. Studies have shown that early childhood is a time when developmental changes are happening that can have profound and lasting consequences for a child’s future. While people have long debated whether “nature” or “nurture” plays the stronger role in child development, recent studies reveal the importance of how the two influence each other as a child develops: what a child experiences and is exposed to interacts with his or her underlying biological makeup. Research has also shown that much more is going on cognitively, socially, and emotionally in young children – including infants – than scientists or care and education professionals previously knew. Even in their earliest years, children are starting to learn about their world in sophisticated ways that are not always reflected in their outward behaviour. Learning and development for young children is both rapid and cumulative, continuously laying a foundation for later learning. These and related insights emerging from research have strong implications for settings where young children are cared for and educated. This booklet provides an overview of this research and its implications for what educators and other adults who work with children need to know and be able to do in order to best support children’s healthy development."

Given that learning process starts so early, we need to help our children, not by ignoring reality and only thinking of people as work fodder, but by being conscious ourselves as adults and realise that there is very little we can teach, other than fundamental truths, such as: the gift of Life is a fantastic opportunity to experience life in this environment and that it doesn't last. Realising that life is a gift one did nothing to get, should make us aware of just how fantastically precious it is. With it, you have everything, without it, nothing. Thems the facts, kiddo. I often think about birth and how suddenly you arrive. Not even that makes sense. A total overload of impressions and experiences, and somehow we have oriented ourselves. That seems to be instinctive. But it's quite a staggering though what those first moments of life contain.
My hope is that if we truly understand the value of our personal life, life as a one-time opportunity, then we automatically realise that each human has the same value and requires the same loving conscious care. So far, I'm not impressed by what we refer to as the educational process. It needs to be rethought and, in particular, set totally different priorities for that learning. Teach children the wonder of it all, teach them to strive to be a better, more conscious Human Being. Don't teach them to be better than others, but better at being their own, completely unique self.