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kimberlysteeleOne of my big issues with modern Christianity is its bad habit of oversimplifying solutions to problems as binaries. This, unfortunately, is the legacy of thinking of sin as binary: good versus evil, angel versus demon, God versus Satan. When I came up with my own system of Ogham divination, I decided to frame each tree letter outside of the Forfedha as three possibilities: two potential modes of imbalance for every single state of balance. In other words, I apply the phrase "the opposite of one bad thing is reliably another equally bad thing" and treat each tree letter as a spectrum. Out the outsides of the spectrum are the extremes and in the middle lies a state of balance. If you're saying, "Hey wait, that sounds like an Aristotlean approach to divination," you would be exactly correct. Aristotle argued that all of the good stuff in life is achieved by finding a Golden Mean or a balance. This striving for balance is what I believe Christianity threw away over the centuries. In the construction of arch-evil as a scapegoat, Christians resorted to a "if you're not with us, you're against us" philosophy that saturates modern political zeitgeists as well as the narrative of Progress. For this reason, I seek to turn the old Christian standys, the Seven Deadly Sins, on their ear and reframe them as Seven Ternaries in which the Seven Virtues are states of balance.
I'm sure you've guessed that this will be a seven part series, one essay for each sin. I'll be starting with my thoughts on Greed.
Here is a chart I have made to get your mental wheels running:
My Definition of Greed
The definition of Greed varies with everyone who encounters it: Greed, along with all the other Deadly Sins, is subjective. For instance, when I commute to work, I pass through a neighborhood of McMansions. In my opinion, McMansions are an unwitting symbol of greed. They are huge, inefficient, showy wastes of resources that cause harm directly and indirectly. On the more obvious side, they squander water, building materials, and electricity. On the less obvious side, every McMansion dweller drives up the price of housing in his/her immediate area, making it financially impossible for anyone of modest means to live close to their jobs or to amenities like shopping. In the US, zoning laws are designed to prevent the live-work housing situations of old, segregating shopping and business districts from housing subdivisions, and the McMansion lifestyle is instrumental in making that happen. So yeah, anyone who chooses to live in a McMansion is greedy, in my opinion.
I think Greed is potentially the worst Sin, which is why I am starting out with it. Greed is the horrible force that motivates a country's leadership to starve its constituents because all the grain is sold to other countries for profit. Greed is amorphous: it combines other Deadly Sins such as Gluttony and Envy into its own sodden snowball. Greed is the preference of living and dying a miserable death in a decrepit, Collier Brothers style hoard when presented with a nearly infinite array of other choices in one's incarnation, including the path of altruism. But altruism would involve the idea of giving one's toys away... and therein lies the rub. It's entirely possible to be poor and greedy, don't get me wrong -- does anyone else remember the Sarah and the Junk Lady scene from Jim Henson's Labyrinth, where protagonist Sarah realizes all of the toys proffered to her is junk distracting her from the goal of finding her kidnapped baby brother? I have known many older women (and a few men) who were the living personifications of Junk Lady, and none of them were outside of the lower middle class. The junk monger, whether entombed in her cluttered McMansion or scraping out a meager shopping cart bag lady existence, cannot let go of their material mounds for fear of deprivation. Hoarding doesn't always manifest in a disheveled space, either. Greed may frequently show itself in ostentatious housing or piles of unused detritus, but there are strict minimalists who are just as greedy as the most seasoned hoarder. Greed is the state of grasping onto things you can't take with you when you die. It is a state of parsimony and unwillingness to share. The greedy live with the background hum of constant anxiety that somebody, somewhere is going to take all of their goodies away. They are not wrong; that somebody is Death and he apparently does not accept credit cards.
Liberality: The Opposite and Equally Bad Counterpart of Greed
Liberality is called a Virtue -- I disagree. If Greed is the damming up of resources and wealth flows, Liberality is the city destroying flood that happens when we obliterate the dam. In other words, Liberality is Socialism. Socialism idealizes the equity of outcomes. It's not enough to avoid amassing hoards of wealth for oneself -- no, socialism would have the McMansion dweller disenfranchised and forced into a labor reeducation camp, his children spirited away to a brutal foster care system. The McMansionite's material riches are then mostly wasted out of spite. Anything left after the predictably violent Revolution is siphoned off to various ass-kissers who virtue signaled the hardest in the initial throes of communist victory. Liberality represents an inability to discriminate: "You're for us or against us" bellow the Twitterati, making lists of Trump supporters and anti-maskers like myself in hopes of interrogating and torturing them at a later, post-Revolutionary date. The fear of deprivation that drives McMansion greed is within the same genus as the one driving Liberality, except Socialists go one step further in thinking they know what is best to rectify the situation. They seek to remove the limits to (allegedly) spread wealth around whereas Gordon Gecko walls himself off in his luxury apartment, stopping all of the leaks that would allow plebians into his exclusive building. Socialists see themselves as little Jesuses enforcing the divine will of the God-State, flushing the hard-earned possessions of others down the memory hole along with freedom of speech and the ability to make an honest living via hard work. It's one thing to choose to give away your worldly possessions as Christ the Lord did and quite another to force others to live out your vision of aesthetic holiness. There is never the consideration that poverty is not necessarily the McMansion dweller's lesson to learn in this incarnation, nor is it the Socialist's job to teach it.
Generosity: The Balance
Of course there is a state of balance between Socialist equity of outcomes and Capitalist greed, and that is Generosity. Generosity sublimates, which is to say it transforms the everyday and mundane into the divine. The simple act of sharing food with someone you love sublimates that food and makes it more nutritious and beneficial to the person or people you share it with. Can we prove the food is more nutritious via scientific, meat plane, double blind studies? I doubt it; there are too many variables. As usual, there is no proof, there is only the long, slow, personal process of figuring out whether generosity sublimates or whether it does not. There is only one way to find out, and that involves being generous. Plus the value of the shared food is far more intense on the more subtle planes, such as the astral, mental, and above all, the spiritual plane, and we dumb humans don't have tools for measuring those plane's phenomena as most of us don't believe they exist.
There is no wealth threshold in order to be generous: the poorest of the poor are often more magnanimous with what scrapings they have then the richest of the rich, but not necessarily. In the documentary Happy, the interviewees include the members of a family literally living in a shack on the side of a garbage dump. They are poor, yet they are happy because they have each other.
Generosity is an act of grace. It requires a letting go of one's fear of deprivation and attachment. Generosity reinforces the idea that you cannot take it with you. Generosity is also an act of bravery. Being generous is risky: the imbalanced Greedy types and the imbalanced Liberalists are black holes. Consider the greedy adult child (we all know one, I think) whose parents bail her out time and time again, giving her the best of everything until they themselves are exhausted, impoverished, or both. Or maybe the adult child is an aspiring Socialist, funding her next disaster with parental money, taxpayer money, and donated money that disappears into a gaping void of grift and mismanagement.
If one is the recipient of generosity, and I believe we all are whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, the best strategy is to say "Thank you" instead of the wasteful Socialist's or Greedster's response of "F*** you." The ultimate repayment of generosity is to become a more generous person. Generosity, when paid forward, creates a chain of sublimation which provides a foundation for learning. Generosity nurtures and lays the foundation for creativity and beauty in oneself and others, a beauty that shines outward and serves to lift the foul enchantments currently plaguing the world.
Socialism is not what you think
Date: 2020-11-13 02:01 pm (UTC)Socialism is, simply put, having the means of production as property of the workers. Back in the days it meant taking the factories and the land from their owners and lending them to the workers. Violently. But there are other less violent ways of achieving the same in democracy.
Workers owning their factories is not as bad as it sounds. Think of a shoe shop. There are four people working there, one is the manager, three are employees.
In capitalism, the owner of the shop might not even work there, and is entitled to say how much every worker is going to receive in wages in order for the company to achieve the best revenues, and theory (the theory that all the shop owners are enforcing everywhere) says that the outcome is the best for society. The company tries to pay the lowest wages possible, only paying better when the worker's abilities are scarce, or when the wage is so low that the worker can't make a living.
In socialism, the shop is shared between the four workers, and they get to decide how to set wages among themselves and how much money is left for investment. In this case, since they are very few people it could work, and the manager might get a better wage than the other employees, and if this shoe shop fares better than the competency, their wages might be higher than the employees of other shops, these workers would have a higher living standard (socialism is not equalitarism!).
In the Communist regime of the URSS, Socialism was never truly implemented. They just played with State Capitalism, which is the same as capitalism, but managed by the people of the party in the government.
In Europe we had this so called Welfare State, which tries to be a mix of capitalism and socialism living together. Most companies are private, a few strategic sectors are directly controlled by the State (security, healthcare and education), and cooperativism is encouraged (though it has only worked in the farming sector). You see, the real problem with socialism (I am not talking about the communist Russia), is that the workers are usually bad investors, they prefer to set their wages very high and leave very little for investment. So it kind of works in sectors were investment is not critical.
The opposite of Greedy is, if I have translated it correctly, Spendthrift. If the Greedy spends no money on the behalf of others (consciously), the spendthrift can't produce wealth since he has already given everything he had, nothing is left for investment so the outcome is even worse. At least the greedy produces some wealth for himself, which increases the wealth for society, and may expend some of his wealth in products and services that give some of this wealth back to the others.
The middle ground would be the person that, while producing wealth for himself, voluntarily shares this wealth with others, yes that would be Generosity. If it is done just because you paid your due taxes then it is Good Citizenship, not generosity.
However, this is a materialistic point of view. If you see this from a more spiritual point of view then the greed person is hurting himself since his behaviour hurts his relationship with others that come to dislike his ways (unless they are neoliberal believers). And the spendthrift is also hurting himself since his excessive generosity provokes that he has nothing left to offer, making people around to dislike him, especially if they must provide for him. The generous person, on the other hand, is loved by the people around, since he can provide help when needed and he is willing to do so.
Now, there can be implications if this generosity is real, coming from the heart, or it is faked or forced, but that would deal with the inner planes, I suspect.
Re: Socialism is not what you think
Date: 2020-11-13 06:50 pm (UTC)I have tried other arrangements with other teachers working in my Studio and I must say I vastly prefer the current mini-Socialism one.
Yes, the spendthrift example makes sense. When somebody spends money in a desperate bid to get others to like him/her or just because it feels like it burns a hole in their pocket, it doesn't trickle down, it just creates waste. Of course generosity isn't just a money or a possessions thing -- I think I barely scraped the surface with this essay/meditation.
Re: Socialism is not what you think
Date: 2020-11-14 11:36 am (UTC)Your post made me think about the etheric implications of generosity, which was great since I didn't put much thought about it before. I hope my comment will inspire you to meditate on the implications of balanced/unbalanced generosity in higher planes. Seems like a worthy endeavor. :)
Re: Socialism is not what you think
Date: 2020-11-14 05:05 pm (UTC)I have been meditating about the spendthrift trait and how it sits on the far end of the generosity spectrum. I don't know if you've ever watched the television show Hoarders, but it has special relevance here. Many of the hoarders featured on the show are misers and spendthrifts at the same time. They stuff their overlarge homes with junk, maintain multiple storage lockers for their collections of crap, and in some cases own several properties, all of which are neglected. So they obviously spend with abandon as if money burned a hole in their pockets, but they also greedily dam up resources so that nobody else can use them or repurpose them. They constantly do the mundane equivalent of magical workings to enrich themselves with ill-gotten gains and the price at one of the levels is degradation: nobody can maintain that much stuff, and as someone once said, "your stuff owns you." The real mystery, I think, is what kind of routine karmic implications this has on their future lives if they don't walk away from hoarding in this one.
Re: Socialism is not what you think
Date: 2020-11-14 06:49 pm (UTC)Keep at it. I am a little skeptic about the reality shows as they look like made up stories to me, not what we really find in reality. But you might be onto something, pathological behaviours are extremes that can be used to analyse unbalanced virtues. If you knew first hand someone with such problems, that would help. Not my case, sorry.